You may soon be called upon to donate to ensure sufficient emergency "new blood" supplies are available for The Liberal Party, because plenty of blood will spill, as surreal discussions break out over in Canberra about whether it should be Christopher Pyne or Joe Hockey who will replace Malcolm Turnbull as opposition leader.
It may be time for Brendan "I've Never Voted Liberal In My Life!!?!" Nelson to rise phoenix-like, hell, make that Howard-like, from the ashes of the Old Liberals and reclaim the big chair so Rudd can giggle up to and right through a federal election.
Gerard Henderson can't deny three appalling polls for the Liberals, all published on the same day, all but declaring that The Greens could become the 'two', in a two-party political system, if the Liberals don't get it together and finish cleaning house of the remaining old geezers the Liberals major donors wanted to fuck off last year.
Gerard, probably still shattered that Elizabeth Murdoch was right when she said John Howard destroyed the Liberal Party, cannot muster much enthusiasm to froth about Turnbull and dumps his usual dreary analysis, designed to lull all readers into believing that politics is mostly boring, and cuts loose, for the intro at least :
To suffer a significant downturn in one opinion poll might be due to chance, a statistical discrepancy or whatever.
Yes, Gerard Henderson really did just toss off "or whatever".
He should have gone for "or, like, whatever."
Gerard must be reading blogs. He must have noticed that bloggers who can't be arsed going too deep into the details can easily throw out "whatever" when they run out things to say about the subject under analysis, and nobody usually complains. Maybe Gerard thought, 'Well, why can't I get away with that, too?'
Howard failed as prime minister to do what he said he would do - oversee an orderly transition of leadership in the way the Liberal Party founder, Robert Menzies, did in 1966.
If Howard had stepped down in early 2006 he would have been succeeded by Costello, when Labor was led by Kim Beazley. The ALP may or may not have replaced Beazley with Rudd. If Costello happened to win in 2007, there would be no problem now.
Except for the Global Financial Crisis.
Monday, June 29, 2009
A surreal and nightmarish illustration from Michael Mucci for a Paul Sheehan story in the Sydney Morning Herald :
Forget the story, look at the demonic apparation that is Anthony Albanese finishing off Turnbull's throat. That'll take a few days to wipe from the memory.
See That Shark? Watch Me Jump It
Meanwhile, The Great 'Rudd Shields Swan Over Fake Email (GRSFEC)' Conspiracy Theory Takes Shape
By Darryl Mason
After a consistently entertaining and dramatic week in politics in which utes and emails came to feature together for the first time in newspaper headlines. The Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman straps on his water skis and submits his claim for monumental irrelevancy,
The last weeks of the winter session have been more damaging to the Rudd Labor Government than the Coalition, no matter how you slice it.
The first polls after the solid week of Utegate headlines, hysteria and claims of snarky conspiracy, show the opposite of what Akerman effervescently claims, and the damage inside the Liberal true believer ranks seems intense :
A Galaxy poll taken at the weekend has revealed the Opposition Leader's integrity has taken a hammering, revealing a rump of only 7 per cent of voters who think he was "open and honest" during the affair.
If it turns out that Turnbull was speaking, mostly, honestly throughout his dozens of interviews last week, something else will be needed to explain why so many Australians looked at Turnbull being interviewed on TV and thought, 'Oh, this guy is so full of shit.'
Malcolm Turnbull was interviewed by the AFP ("The Feds" for American readers) on Sunday, and Labor keeps hammering that Turnbull has something to hide. Something big. Maybe even a little dark, sinister.
Those kinds of vague claims crack deep into our culture's love-hate mistrust of politicians. We love corrupt politicians in novels and TV shows, the bastards, but we hate them in real life, those bastards.
And A Politician Who Has Something To Hide From The Feds feeds our political thriller fiction-fuelled desire to see corrupt politicians flayed publicly and prosecuted rigorously, regardless of who they are.
So Lindsay Tanner goes for a gushing head wound :
"Clearly, he's not going to provide his computer records to the federal police," Mr Tanner told the Nine Network.
"Given the nature of the potential crimes we're dealing with here, that is appalling. He should be making all assistance available to the federal police in order that they can determine whether any serious crimes have been committed and pursue them accordingly if they have been."
Brutal. And damn hard to shake off, even if the AFP interrupted Masterchef for ten minutes to announce that Malcolm Turnbull was in the clear and there was no reason to doubt his honesty on anything ute or e-mail related anymore. Even then, there would be plenty of Australians wandering around muttering, "Malcolm Turnbull? Dodgy prick."
Piers Akerman asked his readers the following question :
....did anyone really believe someone within Treasury would be sending faked emails?
Commenters responded to his call for exploration of a larger conspiracy involving Rudd & Swan and reasonably high-tech fakery and so was crafted a conspiracy theory swollen with potentially thrilling drama, tech-treachery and possible falls from power that makes you want to shout "I Want To See This Movie! (or at least read the book)', even if the theory doesn't turn out, in the end, to be actual reality. Some of these comments from Akerman's blog have been slightly edited :
Michael A replied to lethal Sun 28 Jun 09 (06:26am)
It is very interesting that the AFP were able to tell everyone the email was a fake almost immediately but have still not enlightened us as to the origins of the email. Was this all a Labor setup?
Angry God replied to lethal Sun 28 Jun 09 (12:06pm)
As far as I understand computers and managed networks such as government systems, they facts are that the original email would contain data known as the MAC addreess. This is a unique number (that can be spoofed if you know what you are doing). The managed network locks these MAC addresses to the network switch.
A resonable investigator would have been able to identify the originating computer in a few seconds if they were competant. We assume that they are competant and as such we know that the AFP knows which computer initiated the modified (read fake) email.
In a managed network the spoofing of a MAC address within an email will be highlighted as a security breach. So either no spoofing of the MAC address occured or the email was sent from an outside of government network computer.
The AFP will know this info. It will be interesting where the fake comes from as it will be identified by this method.
Ann replied to lethal Sun 28 Jun 09 (12:24pm)
The cursory search of PMO and Treasury computers by Rudd lackeys found no evidence of email so Rudd shrieks “It’s a fake”. Yet AFP take five minutes to find it was generated on a Treasury computer, sent to Grech home computer then deleted from Treasury computer.
samantha replied to lethal Sun 28 Jun 09 (02:41pm)
For me, there are two really big questions that need to be answered. WHO in Treasury devised the email, and for what purpose?
Sammi replied to lethal Sun 28 Jun 09 (03:03pm)
The Treasury generated email was created to catch their leak and it was made as juicy as possible to make sure it would be passed on to the Opposition and used, hence Rudd knew about it before it re-emerged. It also served the double purpose of covering up the copious email trail created by Swan and Co while attempting to secure a loan for Rudd’s mate.
It's a very interesting theory. And no-one showed up to try and dispel it, for many hours on Sunday.
Unlike the Liberal Party staffers who haunt News Limited blogs, do the Labor Party staffers who zip around online, posting anonymous comments on blogs as they run interference, dispensing disinformation, countering accusations, get the whole the weekend off?
Piers Akerman, for what's it worth, is convinced the Great Rudd & Swan Fake Email Scandal still has plenty of drama to be played out :
...the hard evidence still shows that Swan did more in his attempt to assist Rudd’s car-dealer mate, John Grant, than he did for any other car dealer in the nation.
That is indisputable.
Treasury officials, operating on clear instructions from Swan’s office, went to extraordinary lengths on Grant’s behalf.
We'll see. But it would be no great surprise if Rudd and Swan produce something that gets them off the hook. Rudd promised to "mess with their heads" when he became Labor Party leader, and it doesn't look like he has given that strategy even a week off since.
Being the mind-bogglingly biased Liberal Party flunkie and junkie that he is, Akerman wants his readers to believe that whatever happens, it's Not Yet Over for Malcolm Turnbull. Akerman has to rally the team for the man who said that John Howard broke Australia's heart. Akerman knows Turnbull is shedding support faster than Brendan Nelson railing against whatever, but he has to pump for Turnbull. And throw in something conspiratorial about the Greens as well.
This is what Akerman does for a living.
But I'm not convinced that even if Wayne Swan was seized by the AFP and sent in chains to the SuperMax for a solid water-boarding session to finally get him to answer e-mail and ute related questions that happen to be those very "Not The Right Questions" he has refused to answer so far, that Malcolm Turnbull would still be able to effectively change the clearly very real belief amongst so many voters that he is brimming with bullshit and a craptastic liar as well.
Australians love great liars.
It was long part of our oral storytelling tradition to try and spin the wildest yarns, and any brave and bold attempt to pass off a story mostly comprised of obvious fiction was always admired, even if the teller couldn't carry the tale convincingly.
But we can't respect nor tolerate bad liars. And Malcolm Turnbull, like Swan, is a bottom shelf liar.
Turnbull thinks he is a rare brandy, but he is a harsh house spirit scotch when it comes to effectively bullshitting the Australian public. His face is a billboard screaming, "Don't listen to my words, look at my eyes, see? even I don't believe what I'm saying, why should you?"
Joe Hockey loometh.
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Sunday, June 28, 2009
Bigger Than Jesus, Iran And Michael Jackson
By Darryl Mason
For a few hours tonight, tens of millions of Twitter users in dozens of countries looked at the Trending Topics sidebar and, in a global moment of mass questioning, thought "Who The Fuck Is Rove?"
Whoever he is, for a few hours on Twitter he was bigger than the Iran Election and Michael Jackson. Quite an accomplishment, for an Australian TV show.
Rove McManus of Rove Live became one of only a few TV hosts from anywhere in the world to land in the Trending Topics, and perhaps only Jon Stewart has only also ever reached the top spot. Which is sort of like having a number one worldwide hit single that all but nobody has heard on the radio, for just an hour or two, before quickly fading into general global obscurity.
How did Rove become a topic of even greater discussion amongst Twitter users than the Iran Election and Michael Jackson?
There was a certain amount of manipulation from Rove, urging the viewers of his TV show to get onto Twitter and use the term 'Twitter Time'. Plus, Rove McManus already has 50,000 people following him on Twitter. If a good slab of them are watching his show, already discussing what he's up to as he broadcasts his show, who he's interviewing, and they tag their Twitter posts with #rove, then Rove is clearly a subject of much discussion and comment volume, so into the Trending Topics list he goes.
The fact that he also interviewed Sasha-Borat Cohen, in the guise of Bruno, helped enormously. Viewers twooting along while they watched Rove do the interview discussed Bruno's fantastically obscene knitted fashion choices. Mentioning 'Bruno' in their Twitter comments meant that a few million somewhere else in the world who were searching Twitter for news about the Bruno movie found comments by Rove twooters mentioning the interview. It would seem a few tens of thousands of them then commented that there is a fantastic Bruno interview on some Australian TV show called Rove. Some of the comments echoed a refrain : Why Can't I Watch This Now On YouTube?
So Rove started being mentioned in probably a few hundred thousand Twitter comments, in just one hour, because of the Bruno association.
I'm not quite sure if this actually means that more people were twalking about Rove at the same time then they were about Michael Jackson, but Rove's name appeared in more posts on Twitter, for an hour or two, including all those who picked up on the phrase 'Twitter Time' and asked, What Is Twitter Time? and Who The Fuck Is Rove?
Rove's name became word associated with Bruno and Twitter and Twitter Time. Bruno was already in the Trending Topics on Twitter before the Rove interview aired tonight, and so as Rove viewers twooted about how fucking insane Bruno was, or how funny his knitted penis was, Twitter users interested in Bruno who weren't watching the interview as it was being broadcast (because they weren't near a TV or lived in a country other than Australia) passed on the news about Bruno to all the people who followed them. A chain reaction of interest spreads, and Rove's name is carried along. Rove then becomes known as a name to the millions who were already twooting about Bruno and what his new movie will be like, and as soon as Rove reached the Trending Topics, because of the volume of twoots containing the word 'Rove'. And so, having reached the bottom of the Trending Topics list, the volume increased when people began asking 'Who The Fuck Is Rove?' as many tend to do when they see a name or word in the Trending Topics they are unfamiliar with. They don't go for a Google, they just ask the people who follow them, 'Who Is This? What Does This Mean?'
If that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, I've been using Twitter for a few months and I'm still trying to get my head around it. There's not a whole lot to learn, you read comments, you post your own, you follow people, people follow you, but there's a gigatlantic-sized mountain to think about, particularly how Twitter is beginning to become the sort of actual real-time globally shared conversation that many pre-internet visionaries imagined would one day become a part of our digital reality.
While Rove may be hitting sixes using Twitter to promote the name 'Rove', he failed to capitalise on a brief worldwide interest in who he was, and what had happened on his show tonight that furnaced up so much discussion.
The interview with Borat's distant relative Bruno was not available anywhere online, hours after the show aired. In this age of Instant Online Everything, this ranks as something close to criminal. Why not share it all but immediately with those who missed it, or lived in the many countries where Rove is not screened, but where people were asking 'Who The Fuck Is Rove?'
The Bruno interview may be up today, or tomorrow, on YouTube, but that all so brief moment of worldwide Twitter interest passes quickly. I'm sure the interview will become extremely popular on YouTube and will rack up a few hundred thousand hits in four or five days. But here was an opportunity for someone from Rove to whip that clip onto YouTube as soon as it aired, get the link onto Twitter, and watch as five million around the world in just a few hours flooded in to watch the Rove & Bruno YouTube, thanks to the Twitter heads-up.
They didn't do it, so the above is just speculation. But it certainly seems like a scenario that could have happened, had the clip gone up straight away.
Because Kevin Rudd also appeared on Rove tonight, straight after the Bruno interview, and joined the Rove and Bruno and Twitter Time related discussions, our prime minister leapt into the Trending Topics as well. I didn't move fast enough to screengrab that.
Again, by midnight, hours after the show aired, the Rove interview of Kevin Rudd is still not up on YouTube, or any site that can be linked to. The international Twitterfolk who saw 'Kevin Rudd' in the Trending Topics and no longer bother with Googling, were asking their followers 'Who The Fuck Is Kevin Rudd?'
In these days of Instant Everything, not being able to immediately watch something that aired on TV but was missed, feels like you've been slighted.
Cheated.
What the fuck do you mean I can't watch this thing I heard about on Twitter right now online? Why is there no link? And what is this word 'Wait' word you keep using?
It just feels so very 20th century.
Correction : I know the estimates of overall Twitter users is too high. About eight million online at any one time, across the world is probably closer, but I'll go look for some detailed estimates of Twitter traffic.
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Warning, Generation X Nostalgia Equals Maximum Hype
By Darryl Mason
"Generation X grew up the day Michael Jackson died."
Expect to hear that line a lot in the coming weeks and months, as a new Generation X meme takes hold in the mainstream media. Next Sundays mind-misting newspapers with likely be filled with columnists waffling on about the nostalgia trip Jackson has inspired in Generation Xers.
So let me get in first.
Michael Jackson is dead and millions of people in their 30s and early 40s who grew up with Michael Jackson filling the charts year in and year out with massive hits, are now now hearing some of his best songs again for the first time in a decade or more, and the songs are acting as memory triggers. Powerful ones.
Seeing 'Dont Stop Till You Get Enough' at 1am on Rage was like briefly time-travelling back to the room I was in when I first saw it. Vivid. Not just remembering the TV I watched it on, but the whole room, the people in it, the events of those days and how it felt as a kid to hear a song like that for the first time.
For thousands of others who caught that clip on Rage, or one of the dozen other Jackson clips, it propelled them back into memories of jumping around with incomprehensible, now, energy and excitement, or reminded them of the chidhood bedroom they had almost forgotten they once lived in for years, or some totally forgotten high school disco, or a more memorable first disco with actual bar.
If you were a kid in the 1970s and early 1980s, and you were addicted to Countdown, or Sounds, of if you listened to any of the big radio stations, you heard and saw a lot of Michael Jackson.
Every new single, and every new 'Wow, how'd they do that?!' video, was an event. With sometimes excruitiatingly long periods of Hype before you finally got to see feast your eyes on what Jackson had come up with next. It was extremely easy to get suckered into believing that whatever was coming from Michael Jackson was going to change your life and you had to be right there to see it when it was first screened on TV.
A generation becoming suddenly nostalgic is like a pipeline opening up. A lot of other memories start spraying around once that gateway to childhood has been cracked open. And a lot of other mostly forgotten music from the late 70s and early 80s will leap into your mind on the back of hearing Jackson singing Rock With You on the radio for the first time in two decades.
And with those musical memories come the mini-memory vids of the friends you shared that music with, the people around you then, the clothes you wore, the things you believed, the dreams you wanted to turn into bright and shining realities.
We will soon be told by every media entity with a heartbeat that Generation X Is Becoming Nostalgic.
It's about fucking time.
The Baby Boomers have dominated us for too long with their mostly shudder-awful musical nostalgia. Seriously, the fucking Eagles are still being played on Australian commercial radio stations. What else can you say but WTF?
For Generation Xers, The Eagles were the shit our parents listened to. The Eagles fucking pissed us off three and a half decades ago, and just the fact The Eagles are still getting played on morning, afternoon and evening radio, is enough to make most of us want to scream, "Oh fuck no, not again!"
I have little doubt that much of the current road rage can be linked to the number of times Hotel California and Take It Easy get played during morning and evening commutes. Hotel fucking California anathesises Baby Boomers, but it fill Generation Xers with fury.
And why is that up until a few days ago, all but none of the commercial radio stations played any Michael Jackson at all?
The Boomers are laughing at us, you know that, don't you?
John Farnham will never fucking retire, and will eventually be replaced by a robot or clone, or both. The Baby Boomers are going to live into their 120s, the ones that can afford it anyway. Boomer music, movies, TV and cultural memories and icons will clutter commerical TV and radio for decades more to come. This is why so many of us under 50s go online, where the influence and interests of Boomers is less suffocating, far less constant.
Generation X needs its own Nostalgia takeover of the mass media.
How many more times must any person hear so much plap and flappily crap Boomer generation songs that weren't even hits when they were first releasd, on mind-screamingly constant rotation, on so many fucking stations, all at the same time.
Take It Easy....for fuck's sake. What kind of message is that for a generation?
Only the idiots of the Boomer generation embraced the mass-media branded idiom of 'Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out,' though plenty in their ranks used it as excuse to bail on society, or hit cruise control into the next decade or three.
Ray Manzareck, of The Doors, had a better philosophy, 'Turn On, Tune In, TAKE OVER'.
Few Boomers thought that was a good idea.
And they grew to find The Eagles far more pleasing, less challenging, than the raucousness of The Doors. Boomers love that commercial radio anathetises then with Hotel California on a daily basis, when they should be getting blitzed by The Doors and The Ramones and Iggy Pop and The Sex Pistols.
This has to end.
Generation X must remove the horror of Baby Boomer Easy Listening Light Rock from all commercial radio stations.
It must become a crime to broadcast The Eagles and John Farnham to the public, outside of sound spill from nursing homes.
At least when we go into the nursing homes, we'll be listening to Nirvana.
Maybe some Michael Jackson.
Don't Stop Till You Get Enough, maybe Rock With You. Eat It and Bad are out, because it's impossible to watch the Jackson videos now without seeing Weird Al Yankovich's versions layered over the top.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Miranda Devine Embraces "The New Niceness" After Rallying For Greenies To Be Hung In Public
By Darry Mason
Yes, Miranda Devine is going to be Nice now.
Big viewerships for mostly fictional reality TV shows tell her that Australians, those who watch MasterChef anyway, don't want Nasty anymore. They want Nice.
This change for Miranda Devine comes only a couple of months after she decided, while the charred corpses and ash-only remains of more than 170 Australians still lay amongst the devastation of the Victoria Fires, that "It is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies."
Television programmers have discovered the public flicked the switch to "nice" about six months ago, favouring shows which are full of sweetness and light - such as MasterChef,Random Acts Of Kindness and Packed To The Rafters - and rejecting mean, vicious shows, such as Gordon Ramsay's surprise flop Hell's Kitchen or the Chaser's "Make A Realistic Wish" shtick.
The Chaser pulled more than one million viewers last week, up against the State of Origin, for fuck's sake.
And if you think there is any way in the world to link Gordon fucking Ramsay and The Chaser, well, you may as well be wearing a t-shirt declaring "I Am Full Of Shit".
Miranda Devine thinks Kevin Rudd is Nice. So is Wayne Swann. Julia Gillard, too, is Nice.
Malcolm Turnbull isn't Nice, she says, and she'd know, having said the following about Australian survivors of the appalling Cyclone Larry in Far North Queensland, in 2006 :
"...much as we will miss their avocados and bananas on our supermarket shelves, we can live without their whingeing."
The "whingers" who she was referring to were mostly young mothers who had been standing in the wind and rain for three days trying to get food and nappies for their babies. They dared to yell at a few journalists and complained that John Howard wasn't doing enough to help them. John Howard understood. Miranda Devine did not :
Five minutes after the cyclone hit, locals were whingeing that "they" haven't come and fixed it for them. Do they not have their own arms and legs?
Parliamentarians would be wise to follow the next political trend just launched by the US President, Barack Obama - a low-key Prince of Nice - not to follow the 24-hour news cycle. It is a revolutionary concept, and only Obama, with his authority and iconic status, could dare try.
Interrogated by reporters this week about why he waited several days to condemn the violence in Iran he replied: "I know everybody here is on a 24-hour news cycle. I'm not, OK?"
Wow! What a liberating idea for a political leader, not to be enslaved by an endless circus of TV and radio appearances, punctuated by jabbering doorstops. No more treadmill of Radio National Breakfast, Sunrise, 2GB, 3AW, AM, Sky News, The World Today, PM, network evening news programs, The 7.30 Report, Lateline, with and media-monitoring services and the internet's perpetual deadline breathing down your neck all day and night.
She has also started to quote politicians in Alan Ramsay-sized chunks, to pad out the space between the meaningless guff in her column.
This from Miranda "Nice Now" Devine to finish :
How liberating to have time free, instead, to actually think about the important business of running a country, rather than delegating it to unelected public servants. Why didn't someone think of that before?
That's not an ender for a newspaper column, that's not even a bad Letter To Editor. Hell, it's not even shitty blog post quality. It's the kind of pap someone mutters to you late at night at a party that causes you to wander away, if only to stare at a fish tank.
The problem is if people really do want Nice now, and there sure are plenty of Baby Boomer-focused stories trying to be reassuring that Generation Y are actually quite nice, Miranda "Nice Now" Devine has trouble doing Nice.
But maybe she has no choice but to try.
On Friday, she had to suffer the indignity of having the following published in the Sydney Morning Herald, despite the Press Council deciding that her advice to hang greenies from lamposts in revenge for the Victoria Fires was not any kind of hate speech they'd ever heard of :
The article presented, in strong terms, Ms Devine's view that poor forest management practices resulting from "the power of green ideology" were a key driver in the scale and ferocity of the Victorian bushfires that devastated a number of communities and caused large-scale loss of life.
The complainants asserted that the article breached a number of Press Council principles. They described the piece, which was headlined "Green ideas must take blame for deaths", as a highly derogatory polemic capable of inciting some people "to threaten, or even commit, acts of hatred or violence". They took particular exception to the hyperbolic suggestion that politicians seeking to divert attention from themselves could offer a new target for a lynch mob: "It is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies."
The Herald acknowledged concerns about some of the language in Ms Devine's column and expressed regret at any offence taken.
In its defence the newspaper claimed that the hyperbole employed by Ms Devine was part of her "robust, lively and sometimes provocative" writing style.
"Lively and sometimes provocative."
And yet, and so, Miranda "Nice Now" Devine was born.
Probably.
Flashbackery : Miranda Devine's column where she raged against the people of the cyclone-shattered people of Innisfail for daring to tell John Howard to Fuck Off when he came to pay a visit, stirred up the local papers of Far North Queensland, and she was poignantly corrected, along with being relentlessly lampooned as a rich Sydney sider, sitting around sippiing Moet while immigrant gardeners worked on the hedges, who had no idea of what they lived through, and what they were trying to rebuild from.
Miranda Devine became, and remains, to the readers of the Townsville Bulletin 'Moet' Miranda.
But, if they wanted to complain, so what? They'd just been through hell. They were despairing. They were in varying degrees of shock, but not one of them played the blame game. They were just glad to be alive. Maybe if Miranda had gone to Innisfail and spoken to some of the people who had been 'Larried' she might have taken a different view.
But, gee, why would you leave Cremorne (Miranda's hometown) where you can sip on Moet and watch it on the telly?"
"Your poor excuse for a journalist, John Andersen, has invented facts and verballed me in his column, `Low blow from Sydney'. I do not live in Cremorne. Nor do I have a maid. I did not use the word `hillbilly' to refer to North Queenslanders. And Laotians in Sydney are not consigned to`trimming the hedges and washing the socks of the rich'.
"He has concocted a bizarre fantasy that Sydney is peopled exclusively by wealthy people and their immigrant servants, and that I sit around drinking Moet for a living. This fiction appears to have been accepted as truth by some of your more gullible readers. I don't think inventing facts is any more acceptable for journalists in Townsville than it is in Sydney so I expect a correction."
The Townsville Bulletin never published a correction, and editor John Andersen was still laughing about the whole thing months later.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Don't Try And Justify It, Just Admit You Fell Hook, Line And Sinker For A Prank Precisely Aimed At Twitter-Sourcing Media Exactly Like You
Richard Wilkins says it himself, "I haven't had time to check it out."
Well, why in fuck did you report it as fact?
They read about Jeff Goldblum's supposed death a few minutes before on the same place I read about it : Twitter.
The reason why this hoax worked, for an embarrassingly large amount of media around the world, is because the hoaxer had the sense to make the short fake report read like something off Reuters, and included the phrase "New Zealand police have confirmed"....
That was good enough for the producers of the Today Show, and Richard Wilkins.
The backtrack and retraction about ten minutes later was even more humiliating.
Conroy's Net Filter Will Block Access To E-Bay And Amazon
By Darryl Mason
If That Net Censor Guy, Stephen Conroy, wants to stop all Australians from visiting websites that sell games that are not allowed by law to be sold in Australian shops, Stephen Conroy will have no choice but to block web access to both Amazon and E-Bay, which ship thousands of R18+ games to Australian gamers every month.
The Federal Government has now set its sights on gamers, promising to use its internet censorship regime to block websites hosting and selling video games that are not suitable for 15 year olds.
Australia is the only developed country without an R18+ classification for games, meaning any titles that do not meet the MA15+ standard - such as those with excessive violence or sexual content - are simply banned from sale by the Classification Board, unless they are modified to remove the offending content.
So far, this has only applied to local bricks-and-mortar stores selling physical copies of games, but a spokesman for Senator Conroy confirmed that under the filtering plan, it will be extended to downloadable games, flash-based web games and sites which sell physical copies of games that do not meet the MA15+ standard.
Sites like Amazon and E-Bay.
That should go down well.
The average age of an Australian gamer is 30 years old.
Conroy should be careful. He doesn't want to get millions of Australian gamers and daily internet users offside anymore than he already has, particularly if an election is drawing near.
If the Rudd government doesn't already know this, they should, but they don't want to make internet censorship and the way they constantly fuck with gamers into election issues, because they can easily be made into Big Election Issues, particularly for Labor voters in their 30s and 40s.
The Greens already know this.
Likewise, Labor has to be careful in their plans to crack down on so-called online piracy and peer to peer file sharing. Cutting off the internet access of, or pursuing prosecutions against, some 40 year old single mother who downloads a digital copy of an album she has already brought on vinyl and/or CD will be the kind of Big Ugly that no-one in Labor wants to find themselves associated with.
They won't even have to go that far. There's a few hundred thousand Australians who regularly use file-sharing sites like The Pirate Bay, and they will be extremely displeased if there comes a day when they visit those sites (to download games that they're not allowed to buy in Australia) and they find that Stephen Conroy has blocked their access. Everyone will know very, very quickly that the Rudd government is responsible.
An independent running in the early 2010 federal election fighting against internet censorship and for the rights of gamers and file sharers, might find themselves a particularly large and surprising number of former Labor voters giving them the big tick.
That's if The Greens, by then, aren't already all over those fundamental issues of digital reality rights. And they probably will be.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Wallabies Love Tasmanian Opium, So Do The Deer And Sheep
By Darryl Mason
Across Australia today, many thousands of illegal and legal opiate admirers and junkies will read this story and mutter "lucky wallabies" :
Wallabies are breaking into Tasmania's poppy fields and getting high.
The strange occurrence that was revealed in a State Government Budget Estimates hearing, has also solved what some growers say has spurred a campfire legend about mysterious crop circles that appear in northern Tasmania's poppy paddocks.
In true X-Files-style, Attorney-General Lara Giddings said the drugged out wallabies had been found hopping around in circles squashing the poppies, creating the formations – and hence solving the mystery.
Don't be distracted by this talk of crop circles. They've got a serious smack wallaby problem on their hands, and word of the free supply of very magic flowers is spreading amongst other animal communities :
Tasmanian Alkaloids field operations manager Rick Rockliff said wildlife and livestock that ate the poppies were known to "act weird" including deer in the state's highlands and sheep.
"...as growers we try our best to try and stop this sort of consumption particularly by livestock due to concerns about the contamination of the meat.
Wait a second, there might be a decent new market ready to open up for opium-marinated lamb. Somebody call the Agriculture Minister.
"....there has been a steady increase in the number of wild animals and that is where we are having difficulty keeping them off our land."
Uh Oh. They have got a serious problem.
How do you protect thousands of acres of opium crops from wave after wave of wallaby, sheep and deer, driven mad by nerve-stripping opium withdrawals, purely fixated on the irresistible pods they know they must immediately consume. How do you stop that?
They're going to need bigger fences.
Tasmanians should be aware of crazed cold turkeying fauna leaping through the bedroom window and heading for the jewelry collection.
Has The Chaser team gone soft? That's the burning question after last night's edition of The War on Everything.
The Chaser boys - Andrew Hansen, Chas Licciardello, Julian Morrow, Craig Reucassel and Chris Taylor - looked tentative after being thrown off air by the ABC for two weeks.
He wasn't watching too closely, perhaps distracted by the State Of Origin :
A much-publicised dig at the Moran family didn’t make it to air.
The Moran family dig did air, it was fast and close to the start.
So where does The Chaser go from here? The world has changed a lot in the two years since the team’s last series. Reliable Chaser targets John Howard and George Bush are long gone.
Fear and cynicism have been replaced by a renewed sense of hope and positivity.
Masterchef Australia is held up by Vickery as an example of Australia's "renewed sense of hope and positivity", in the mostly fictional lands of reality TV at least.
A clearly chastened Chaser took aim at some easy targets in last night’s show in an obvious attempt to ensure there was no repeat of the firestorm of protest that came after their Make A Realistic Wish Foundation sketch.
The Herald Sun, and all the online Murdoch tabloids, including The Australia, quite profitably whipped up much of that "Firestorm Of Protest" with a series of Colin Vickery stories that delivered hundreds of thousands of extra page views and thousands of comments over the three or four days they managed to keep the Chaser Makes Fun Of Dying Children sensation alive.
The Murdoch media, like Fairfax, don't just forget about The Chaser because they're not doing anything controversial when stories about them pull so many readers to the news sites. Chaser stories can be almost constantly counted on to feature in the Top Ten Most Read Today lists.
All through the past few years, controversies whipped up, sometimes furiously, by the Murdoch media has resulted in literally hundreds of Chaser stories being published across the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph, The Australian, the Adelaide Advertiser and the Courier Mail, in print and online. This list of stories from the past two years or so would have generated many millions of page views and tens of thousands of comments. Massive traffic, monumental. And profitable.
You usually need to fake stories about Pauline Hanson getting her tits out to pull those numbers.
The Chaser delivers bigger profit as free content to the Murdoch online media than it delivers to the show's creators and producers through DVD sales.
When you're onto a good thing, Rupert Murdoch would expect you to milk the fucker for everything you can get.
So Colin Vickery had no choice, he had to come up with something Chaser-related.
Even as something as damp and 'aaaahh, whatever' as asking if The Chaser has "finally gone soft".
UPDATE : Herald Sun readers notice the obvious schizophrenia, 95% of commenters point out the blinding hypocrisy.
The Chasers' Wingdings message from last night's very fast, very tight, very fit show has been decoded :
If you actually bothered to translate this you are :
a) clearly unemployed
b) clearly a nerd
c) clearly disappointed by now that it's nothing controversial.
It was familiar of The Simpsons episode where a fast-scrolling list of official apologies from the producers of Kent Brockman's Eye On Springfield whips by. It required hitting slo-mo on the non-digital video recorder when it was originally aired back in the non-YouTube 1990s to catch all the apologies, such as these :
The nerds on the Internet are not geeks.
Our universities are not "hotbeds" of anything.
Cats do not eventually turn into dogs.
The "Bug" on your TV screen can see into your home.
Our viewers are not pathetic sexless food tubes.
In amongst those apologies was this line :
If You're Reading This, You Have No Life
Last night The Chaser dared to air another skit videod on location outside The Vatican. This, like the messasge blimp, featured controversial material.
However, you won't hear representatives of The Catholic Church trying to tear in The Chaser this time. Because to do so means critics and the professionally outraged will have to acknowledge what the piece was about.
The Catholic Church has added 'Excessive Wealth' to its expanded list of The Seven Deadly Sins. So The Chaser asked passing Vatican priests to pray for those suffering from Excessive Wealth, like The Catholic Church, which we learned through the prayers pulls an astounding $15 billion in revenue from Australia each year and $4 trillion from around the world.
You can catch the latest Chaser episode here, including the highlight Ray Martin's Small Talk, where Tim Flannery and Phillip Ruddock convene to discuss, well, not very much at all. I wanted to see more of this small talk, I think I could take about fifteen minutes of it, just before bed.
Who knew Ray Martin could parody himself so effortlessly?
The Chaser's bit about the 'Rudd Safe House', where shattered, trembling ex-staffers of the prime minister can recover and heal safely was good, but they still have a long way to go in getting at Kevin Rudd in the sometimes near hallucinatory ways they got at John Howard in 2006 and 2007 :
....the Chasers, a constant thorn in the then prime minister's side as the election approached. Some of their ambushes of his early morning power walks rose to the level of performance art - one involved a silver Delorean sports car, a mad professor and the promise to take Mr Howard "back to the future" so that he could retire gracefully rather than be forced out by the voters.
The BBC has picked The Chaser to air before the well-matched and already popular Flight Of The Conchords. Getting picked up by the BBC is still a kind of comedy nirvana :
The BBC signed a deal to screen a special six-episode compilation of highlights from The Chaser's War On Everything 2006 and 2007 seasons.
The show is already screening in America, Japan, New Zealand, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Poland, Israel and even Mongolia...
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
ASIO : You Can Find All Of Us Right Here, Now Check Out Our Trippy Ad
By Darryl Mason
While Australia's most public spy agency, ASIO, advertises for new recruits ...
....the ground is about to be broken in Canberra for ASIO's spiffy new headquarters, or 'Central Office'. Here's the exact location of our chief spy agency's new HQ :
I wonder if you get a special prize from ASIO for deciphering, or re-arranging, the sentences spread across those three ads?
You Can Tell A Lot About A Man By The Size Of His Palm Tree
By Darryl Mason
Sniggling, giggling Murdoch journalists "expose the private life" of Australia's most nervous public servant, Godwin Grech....well, if by expose they mean quoting neighbours talking about what a really nice, hard working, generous guy he is, then yes, consider Grech's private life exposed.
We could all do with having our private lives "exposed" in such flattering terms.
...known for living in a house with a big and amusing palm tree in the front garden...
...the palm tree was planted before he moved in.
Are they trying to tell us something they're not legally, or ethically, allowed to say about Godwin Grech's private life?
And if Godwin Grech was attracted to his Canberra home because there's a massive phallic-shaped palm tree dominating the front yard, what the hell does that have to do with his possible involvement in e-mail fakery and a supposed mole leaking to Turnbull & Friends from inside the Treasury?
Well, nothing.
Neither Malcolm Turnbull, Wayne Swan or Kevin Rudd are likely to step down over this Ute & Emails related scandal now consuming five or six hours a day of sitting time in the Parliament, but somebody will have to pay.
The Treasury official at the centre of the OzCar affair, Godwin Grech, has supplied unofficial information to the Coalition, dating back to its days in government, the ABC has learned.
The revelation lifts already intense pressure on Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull to explain how much he knew, and when, about the email forgery that has backfired so spectacularly.
Several Liberals have told the ABC they believe Mr Grech has been supplying information to Mr Turnbull, and one says he knows it to be the case. However, the nature of that information is not known.
***********
The Australian Federal Police yesterday raided Mr Grech's home, uncovered the email and declared it a fake. They suspect Mr Grech was involved in creating it.
The ABC understands that Mr Grech will also be questioned about other leaks from Treasury.
The AFP has been "quietly watching Treasury for a while" and senior Government ministers are convinced there is at least one mole in the department.
If you think this Ute & Email related scandal has been nasty so far, you haven't seen anything yet.
Political careers are on the line, and the hysteria in Parliament will be even worse today, particularly after Joe Hockey's woeful, sweaty-lipped interview with Tony Jones on Lateline last night, where he demanded that journalists should reveal their sources if politicians like himself are expected to reveal theirs.
Tony Jones sliced up Hockey like sashimi, and it was only halfway during the interview, when the sweat began to concentrate on his upper lip and he had trouble swallowing, that Joe Hockey apparently realised that AFP officers would be watching Lateline and noting down his reaction to everything Jones hit him with about Liberal-friendly leakers inside the Treasury and his decade old association with Godwin Grech. And Jones hit with a lot (I'll come back to this when the transcript is up), but probably not everything Jones already knows. Why blow tonight's lead story on Lateline on an interview with Hockey?
Godwin Grech will not be sleeping easy.
Unlike prime minister Kevin Rudd, who is no doubt keeping his wife and neighbours awake with his endless, howling laughter at just how spectacularly, hilariously, this whole scandal has blown up in the face of Malcolm Turnbull. Media Watch has a very short, but detailed, round up of the scandal so far, focusing it as should on the one element most of the media has shied away from so far : the role of the media in this scandal, and in particular, Sydney's Daily Telegraph.
Correction : an earlier version of this story said Malcolm Farr was responsible for the Daily Telegraph piece about Godwin Grech's "amusing palm tree". He wasn't. The story's byline now reads 'By Janet Fife-Yeomans and Alison Rehn'.
We have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan that democracy cannot be imposed by force, however strongly its proponents believe in its ideals.
Instead, the rule of law and the rights of conscience and free participation must emerge, guided and shaped by leadership, by exchange in all its forms and by institutions built to be fit for purpose.
The Australian government won't be backing any military action against Iran, and Gillard appears to have told Israel's leaders this is the Australian government's position, as another 'colour revolution' heads towards inevitably greater violence and death in the streets of Tehran.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
When Police Beating Protesters Is Funny, Right And Entertaining
Paco of Occupied Northern Virginia - "It looks like that policeman gave the fellow a juicy one, right on his ugly map. And he seems to have enjoyed doing it. Bit of all right, I say "
Sonny Fabich - "Giving them PLENTY OF TRUNCHEON! Good to see - it’s a pity our gutless coppers won’t do the same"
Winston Smith of VRWC Pty Ltd - "Excellent stuff, sir! These protesting idiots are behaving as if they are above the law. Right up until they cross the line and meet the cold hard wall of reality. Then some w***er says they have the right to behave in this fashion. I know a fifth columnist and their supporter when I see one, jail the bloody lot"
Daniel Lewis - "Yep. And when arrested, they will always scream at the top of their lungs, 'Ow, you are breaking my arm, stop it, stop it please' for the later benefit of Youtube. Naturally what happened before the arrest is missed. You know, because the camera wasn’t on yet. It’s straight out of the Indymedia playbook and pretty pathetic. If you are going to get into a punchup, you should at least be hard enough to cop it."
Ann J. - "The presence of the media, particularly the photographers, did a lot to encourage the mayhem."
Mitch of Massachusetts, USA - "I believe the euphemism for this type of police work is “informal sanctions.” In other words, it is not worth anyone’s time or trouble to cuff and book the clown, so the police find a way of discouraging any repetition of the behavior without creating a lot of paperwork. It all happens off the books, so to speak, so the recreant is properly admonished but does not have a permanent criminal record. Assuming the procedure leaves him with as many teeth as he started with, he should be grateful. It works wonders when administered wisely."
Carpe Jugulum - "....hope he followed up with a suitable bodyshot.....just to be sure. It’s always good to see a fellow enjoying his work."
They must be really getting off on all those scenes of women being beaten by truncheon-wielding police and security forces in the streets of Tehran.
If Only Kevin Rudd Was Carrying A Plastic Turkey
No journo at the Daily Telegraph was willing to put their name in the byline of this asinine fluff :
The sideways glance can speak a thousand words.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has had a trying few days as he and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull have engaged in an ugly political scrap resulting in both calling for the other's resignation.
Therese Rein is a woman clearly committed to her husband's long-term success. But did her composure slip for a few seconds on Sunday as she left her Canberra church? Did we glimpse an expression that said she was stressed, weary and unimpressed? Is Utegate - the issue of whether or not her husband helped out an Ipswich car dealer - wearing a little thin on her?
The Daily Telegraph 'story' doesn't bother to answer any of those questions.
Here's a couple of more pertinent questions :
Was that absurd guff from the Daily Telegraph some kind of hopeless attempt to ferment speculation that 'Utegate'-related pressure is causing problems in the prime minister's marriage?
Is the Telegraph really that desperate to try and distract from the fact that its promotion of fake e-mailery has helped to further destabilise and will probably, ultimately, lead to the destruction of Malcolm Turnbull's leadership of the Opposition?
A sideways glance may "speak a thousand words", but even with copious fluffing, Therese Rein's bored look at her husband was only worth 165 words to the Daily Telegraph.
We're Not As Stoned As We Thought We Were
Even Media Watch has noticed that stories about cannabis, and cannabis users, pull the eyeballs - half-closed, slightly bloodshot, reality-redefining eyeballs.
They take a look at the statistics behind these extraordinary claims from a recent story in the Sydney Morning Herald :
"One in three people have used marijuana and about one in six are addicted..."
"...up to a quarter of people aged over 30 were smoking cannabis weekly and one in five were smoking it daily."
Media Watch rewrites the lead, based on a more accurate interpretation of the 2004 National Drug Strategy Household Survey statistics the Herald used for its story :
"The 2004 National Drug Strategy Household Survey found that one in 25 people aged between 30 and 39 were smoking cannabis weekly and one in 30 were smoking it daily."
Well, that reality check isn't going to help the daily commuting, daily stoned paranoidians to mellow out now, is it?
When they thought One In Six Australians Were Addicted To Cannabis, and were smoking it daily, they knew could relax on the bus or the train, even when they were forced to sit facing the rest of the commuters, because, well hell, the odds were that out of the 30 or 40 people sharing the train carriage or bus, there had to be at least six or seven pot junkies struggling not to giggle or become overwhelmed with brain-freaking revelations just like they were.
But now they know, thanks to Media Watch, that their original paranoia was in fact correct. They really might be the only one in that bus or train carriage, after all, who is blasted to the Kuiper Belt, and everyone really is staring at them, and knows, yeah they all know, just what kind of 'special cookie' accompanied the morning coffee. More From Media Watch
Monday, June 22, 2009
There Might Not Be Enough Terrorists To Go Round, But There Will Always Be Plenty Of 'Extremists'
By Darryl Mason
Animal right extremists, anti-coal extremists, green extremists, anti-war extremists, Islamic extremists, anti-abortion extremists, the list of Extremists popping up in our media is growing long.
Anti-Flouride extremists have threatened to kill a Victorian Government minister and blow up a regional water authority.
A death threat was left with a bottle of water on the verandah of Ms Neville's house on Saturday night, a Government spokeswoman said.
Anti-fluoride activists have also threatened to blow up Barwon Water's treatment plants as the authority today begins adding fluoride to the water supply in Geelong, 70km southwest of Melbourne.
There is always the possibility, one that you'd expect police to be also pursuing, that a legitimate campaign against the flouridation of Geelong's drinking water is being discredited and sabotaged by provocateurs and infiltrators trying to associate those opposed with violence and death threats.
It certainly wouldn't be the first time.
It's Like The Start Of A Great Horror Movie....
From the news.com.au front page :
That headline might lead you to believe that a crocodile leapt up and grabbed hold of a helicopter's skid and dragged it to the ground.
But no.
The pilot messed up trying to give his sight-seeing passenger a better look at a crocodile they spotted on mudflats 60kms from Darwin.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
The War On Iraq : We Won....Wait, They Won...Someone Won....Did Anybody Win?
By Darryl Mason
In November 2007, The Professional Idiot declared :
Now, finally, Iraq MP Nuri al-Maliki agrees with The Professional Idiot :
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said Saturday that the U.S. troops' withdrawal from Iraqi cities and towns by the end of this month would be a "great victory" for Iraqis.
"It is a great victory for Iraqis as we are going to take our first step toward ending the foreign presence in Iraq," Maliki said during a conference in Baghdad for leaders of ethnic Turkmen minority.
Hmm, probably not exactly the kind of victory declaration The Professional Idiot was counting on al-Maliki to announce. But then, The Professional Idiot was always living an absurd NeoCon fantasy when it came to Iraq.
This from The Idiot when it seemed, briefly, so many years ago, that President Bush was right, and the War On Iraq had been won almost as soon as it began :
"The war happened, all right, yet there were no refugees, and no huge casualties."
John Hawkins: If and when do you see the United States hitting Iraq? How do you think it'll work out?
Tim Blair: It all depends on Iraq’s fearsome Elite Republican Guard. Why, those feisty desert warriors could hold out for minutes. Dozens of US troops will be required. Perhaps they’ll even need their weapons.
Wouldn’t expect it to last long once it happens.
No. not long at all.
Six years, a couple of trillion dollars, 4500 dead CoW troops and a few hundred thousand dead Iraqis.
At least they got rid of Iran's main enemy in the region.
Perhaps one day Tim Blair will get the chance to talk to some of the hundreds of young Australian soldiers who had their minds and emotions fucked by what they saw and experienced in Iraq. I'm sure they'll love to hear his explanation for why it was all worth it, and why he was so keen, all those years ago, to perpetuate the myth that the people of Iraq would cave in so quickly to foreign occupation.
"...those feisty desert warriors could hold out for minutes."
Or more than 3.2 million minutes, and counting.
Oh well, at least Blair got a job at the Daily Telegraph out of it.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Aaaaaaaaangeeeeelsssss
This is more of a Monday morning song, but it can equally apply to a Saturday, if the Friday night is ugly drunk and long enough and family commitments and stupid early rising pets guarantee no sleep in :
And this, I've never seen :
The Angels are back on the road, hitting most states through mid-July to mid-August. All the dates are here.
Friday, June 19, 2009
It May Never Be Fashionable, But It May Save Your Life
When I was a kid, a $5 flanno from Woolies was all you needed to stay warm through an average Western Sydney winter's night of generally running amok. Scarves? Wimp. Gloves? Nancy. Jumpers? Pah.
Search crews say they are "thrilled" and amazed that a 71-year-old man wearing just track pants and a flannelette shirt has been found safe and well after three cold, wet nights lost in the bush.
Bruce "Dick" Ludbrook, 71, who suffers mild dementia, got lost in dense scrub north of Wollongong during his regular afternoon bushwalk on Tuesday.
The fit former coal miner - who was used to walking long distances - endured pouring rain and bitterly cold weather before being found today by a group of motorcyclists near Mt Ousley.
Dr Giordian Fulde, St Vincent's Hospital emergency director, said Mr Ludbrook was "very, very lucky" to have survived his ordeal and risks like hypothermia.
"Somebody being out in flannelete shirt and trackdacks should get into trouble," he said.
The risks for Mr Ludbrook were even higher because maintaining body warmth was even more difficult for the elderly, he said.
Dr Fulde believed Mr Ludbrook's regular long walks would have been crucial to his survival.
Okay, maybe it wasn't just the flanno that saved him from hypothermia. Some credit must go to his fitness level. Ironically, the same wet weather that could have killed through a heart attack brought on by hypothermia supplied the water that stopped the also very dangerous risk of dehydration.
Dr Fulde believed that in order to survive, Mr Ludbrook must also have sought shelter from the rain to keep warm and drunk water from sources in the bush, such as rainwater puddles.
"I think he must have done something sensible," he said. "The most important thing to human beings is water - you can go quite a few days without food but you can't go a long time without water."
A pretty remarkable survival story. It could have easily had a tragic ending.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
I've written a bunch of new stories recently over at Your New Reality :
Senator Brown's so-called Wielangta forest fund had already raised $739,000....
Bob Brown announced, after losing a legal battle against a logging corporation, that if he was unable to pay more than $240,000 in court costs he could face being expelled from the Senate. In less than a week, Brown raised more than three times that figure through thousands of donors.
The Liberals couldn't raise $739,000 through donors that fast, even with a series of dinners starring John Howard and Peter Costello
Liberal senator Eric Abetz has accused Greens leader Bob Brown of misleading the public over claims he was approaching bankruptcy and could have been expelled from the Senate.
Senator Brown was more likely to be "ethically bankrupt'' than genuinely bankrupt, Senator Abetz said.
"Clearly the senator does not abide by the same accountability rules he so self-righteously insists being imposed on everybody else.''
The Greens leader must now disclose all amounts he has received, when he received them, to whom they were paid and how much money was involved, Senator Abetz told the upper house.
"Be accountable. Immediately disclose to the Senate ... exactly how much your fund raised prior to last week's appeal and disclose and substantiate your progressive and personal legal costs.''
And Bob Brown will do it. They've got nothing on him. It's one of the reasons why Liberals like Abetz hate him so much.
Brown is too clean, too honest, with too little, or nothing at all, to hide.
The Liberals have spent a lot of money over the years trying to get dirt on Brown that they can use against him in the media, or behind the scenes. And they found fuck all.
Abetz is making himself look like a jealous, petty arsehole, while providing Bob Brown with yet another opportunity to show why he is one of the most honest, respected, and quietly admired, politicians in the country.
Monday, June 15, 2009
The Harsh Online Reality For The Corporate Media Is That There Simply Isn't Enough Commenters To Go Round
By Darryl Mason
As I've said here before, probably a bit too rudely, this blog doesn't exist for the sake of comments. It doesn't matter to me whether there's 0 comments or 26, the posts will still be written and published.
But what if your online media business model, your basic plan for profitability, relied deathly on having dozens or hundreds of commenters spilling their thoughts and opinions on every story or opinion piece posted on your website?
The Murdoch Online Experience has already launched The Punch, and now, as Mumbrella reports, Fairfax are going to have their shot at creating an online aggregator site for its stable of digital newspapers, with a steady stream of commenters being seen as essential to push those daily hits into the five and six digit page view counts that advertisers like to see.
Unlike The Punch, however, who've made the effort to recruit writers who aren't already writing for other Murdoch media, The National Times is expected to fill itself out with opinion pieces already published elsewhere in Fairfax's digital newspapers.
As usual, I found it easier to put my thoughts together on this while commenting at another blog. So here's the comment I left at Mumbrella :
The Punch has had some interesting columns so far, but nothing that has set fire to the comments boards. It seems overall quite safe and pedestrian. For now at least. Nothing controversial, nothing that you don't already see in mainstream newspaper columns and op-eds. If the aim is too have a "national conversation", the convo has been damn quite with most posts in the past week pulling 0 to 6 but rarely 10 or more comments.If people who visit can't be arsed to comment, why will they want to eventually pay for it?
A huge turnover in comments, in the hundreds for each or most posts, is what The Punch needs to ramp up the hits, obviously. But how are they going to do that? Where is that hardcore crowd of a few hundred who will burn up the boards like they do at Piers Akerman's or Andrew Bolt's blog going to come from? .
The problem, as Fairfax will soon find out, is that there are a limited number of Australians who bother to comment on any story or column or blog post anywhere online, particularly when the content is centred around politics or culture or news events.
Even if you do like to comment on what you're reading, there are so many places to do so elsewhere, from Facebook to YouTube to Twitter to ten thousand more fun to read and riotous blogs elsewhere in the world.
The Punch has discovered that regular commenters for blogs and news sites that aren't stirring up racism and xenophobia and general hate, or raging about Israel and Palestinians, are pretty thin on the ground in Australia.
There might even be as few as three or four thousand in Australia who will write comments on local political/cultural blogs and news sites most days, as a habitt, not including those who are paid to professionally comment by PR companies and political parties.
There's no shortage of places to Have Your Say on Australian blogs and news sites now, but there is most definitely a shortage of normal everyday Australian commenters. The Punch now knows this, the National Times will most likely learn that too, very soon.
There are a few good free ways for corporate media sites like The Punch and National Times to pull quality and volume-high comments to their sites, but why give away good ideas like that?
Australian Troops Have Shot, Killed Dozens Of Civilians In Iraq & Afghanistan
According to this story, more than $350,000 has been paid out by the Australian government to Iraqi and Afghan families who've had family members killed or wounded by soldiers :
Dozens of non-combatants have been shot by Diggers since the Iraq campaign began in April 2003.
Rapid "act of grace" payments can prevent revenge attacks. Defence refuses to divulge how much is paid to each family but has told The Daily Telegraph $126,442 had so far been paid out to Afghani families.
The amount covers more than 20 individuals for an average of about $6000 each. The overall figure for Iraq is $216,417 for about 10 incidents and could climb before Australia's combat involvement in Iraq finally ceases next month.
The president of the Australian Medical Association Victoria, Harry Hemley, said doctors had been overwhelmed with people suffering respiratory infections in recent weeks.
"I would say about one-third of the population has some sort of upper respiratory infection right now, but I can't say how many of those have swine flu," he said.
So if it's not swine flu, and pollution levels in Australian cities are not causing this, then what is responsible?
The Australian government likes to boast about its 'one of the best in the world' stockpile of anti-virals, gloves and facemasks, but it seems reluctant to let them go to the front line Australians who need them the most :
Dr Hemley said many GPs had been exposed to the virus while caring for patients because protective equipment released from the Federal Government's stockpile had not yet arrived.
More than 1500 Australians are officially categorised as having been infected with Influenza A H1N1 by Monday morning, but the real figure is expected to be many thousands more.
The New Flu has already spread so far and wide across Australia that Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, has announced they're bailing on widespread testing and hardcore quarantine measures. They're not going to stop the spread, they know it, as the American Centre For Disease Control knew and admitted more than a month ago. Quarantining rugby league players and cruise ships was just "buying some more time", no time at all as it turns out.
The Great Hope that the Rudd government will sell this week instead is the August release of a supposed vaccine against swine flu. Well, a vaccine against the swine flu virus that is rapidly spreading now, and it may well mutate further by the time August rolls around, which would render the prepared vaccine not so effective, or downright useless.
Those with pre-existing health conditions, children and the elderly are expected to be the more likely to suffer seriously from the New Flu, though many of the deaths already reported from the virus in the US and Mexico seem to centre around people aged between 5 and 30 years old.
Nicola Roxon said that infected Australians who were now in intensive care were mostly those who were already suffering "respiratory illnesses."
And doctors are reportedly overwhelmed with "people suffering respiratory infections".
So, you have all these people apparently already suffering from respiratory problems while a fast-spreading previously unknown influenza virus seems to be hitting the hardest those already having trouble breathing normally.
It's a hell of a way for a country to head into Winter, and its peak flu months.
We are now only entering the second week of a new pandemic reality, one that may take 18 months to two years or more to unfold.
While the Rudd government will try to be seen as doing Everything It Can, the curious new influenza strain will do whatever it's going to do, mostly unhindered, for the next few months at least, by vaccines and containment measures.
How do you go to war against something that can spawn three generations of itself in under 60 seconds?
If you can't get your hands on pharmaceutical anti-virals, star aniseed is better than nothing, and some would argue far better in fact than the side-effect addled Tamiflu.
Who Can We Ban Next?
You can imagine the NSW government will be very happy with the first headline from this Daily Telegraph graphic. The bottom line? Not so much.
If the NSW government, as this story claims, really does end up spending $4 billion or so on local businesses for government contracts that would have previously ended up overseas, then it's obviously good news.
But do you think they really had a choice?
The NSW Liberals and independents, along with the unions, would have been hammering Labor all the way to the next election if they still allowed police and fireys uniforms to be made overseas while local clothing manufacturing is hitting the skids.
As for NSW Bans China, well, what a surprise, the story itself says no such thing at all. Not even close.
But the Daily Telegraph gets to serve up its daily dose of xenophobia, along with a nice big Fuck You to China on behalf of the boss, who is still smarting over his failed efforts to grab a major slice of Chinese media action, a business experiment that cost him more than $1.4 billion.
He's Right, Suede Desert Boots Do Need Little Pendulums
Liam Gallagher, just about the best thing that happened to British rock in the 1990s, fashion designer and president of The International 'Sideburns Are Still Fookin Cool Innit?' Movement :
This story about Liam's love for Spinal Tap, from his brother Noel, is classic :
Liam thought Spinal Tap were real people.
We went to see them play in Carnegie Hall. Before they played, they came on as three folk singers from the film A Mighty Wind. We were laughing and he said, 'This is shit'.
We said: 'No, those three are in Spinal Tap. You do know they are American actors?'
'They're not even a real band?'
'They're not even English! One of them is married to Jamie Lee Curtis.'
'I'm not fuckin' 'avin that,' he says, and walks off right up the middle of Carnegie Hall.
He's never watched Spinal Tap since.
How much more Tap can you be? The answer is none, none more Tap.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Just clouds, in the skies above Sydney on Friday and Saturday. We don't look up anywhere near often enough.
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Saturday, June 13, 2009
It's Not A Wonder Drug, Merv, It's A Wonder Vaccine
Joel Fitzgibbon's resignation is just another curious example of Ruddlife imitating The Hollow Men, instead of the other way around. The episode where the PM's staff battled to decide whether it looked better for the prime minister to sack his defence minister, or accept his resignation, was only repeated on the ABC a couple of weeks ago.
The Budget episode of The Hollow Men, aired a week before treasurer Wayne Swann delivered the real one, was also full of key phrases and words that were put to good use when Swann and Rudd and Julia Gillard stepped in front of the media to sell it.
You'll know some sort of Evil Lefty ABC conspiracy is afoot if the Wonder Drug episode of The Hollow Men airs a week or two before the Rudd government begins seriously trying to sell the swine flu Wonder Vaccine
The instant classic 'Wonder Drug' episode of The Hollow Men aired again last Friday.
Next week begins the hardcore Big Sell by the Rudd government of a claimed swine flu vaccine.
RuddLife imitates The Hollow Men again.
The Rudd government has already committed to buy some 10 million doses of swine flu vaccine, even one that only has had, maximum, ten weeks of clinical trials :
Novartis, which has its Australian headquarters in Sydney, announced it had successfully completed cell-based production of the first batch of A(H1N1) vaccine.
Australian pharmaceutical company CSL said it would continue to develop a vaccine in Australia. Spokeswoman Dr Rachel David said CSL was conducting clinical trials of vaccines to determine the ideal dosage.
Nothing yet on possible side effects, and how the side effects compare to actually enduring and getting over a bout with swine flu.
No Australian deaths related to swine flu yet but the first fatalities blamed on the virus must only be a few days or a week away at the most. If not, Australia will be a curious anomaly as it will have some of the highest infection rates per capita but the lowest death rate.
The following numbers are of confirmed cases of infection, but the true numbers are probably far higher.
The government has confirmed 1441 cases of swine flu, including 1011 cases in Victoria, 160 in NSW, 90 in Queensland, 59 in Western Australia, 47 in South Australia, 41 in ACT, 17 in the Northern Territory and 16 in Tasmania.
I've been out of it for a few days with some kind of nasty bastard flu. That's why it's been quite around here. First time in a couple of years I've had anything that shut down the mini-writing factory for more than a day, or two. Don't like that. Forced to stop because the brain is too fogged out to function properly makes me very angry.
I went to the local medical centre to get checked out on Thursday, but it was standing room only. and they were only seeing "emergency cases", outside of those already booked in. First free appointment is Monday, 11pm. The only other two doctors within walking distance are likewise booked solid.
Either there are a lot of people around here feeling as utterly crap as I am, or a lot of locals have simply decided to exercise caution and headed to the doctor's when symptoms manifested they felt uneasy about.
There must be many other towns across Australia this weekend where it is next to impossible to find a doctor or medical centre that isn't fully booked.
Not much about swamped medical centres in the news yet. Maybe my neighbourhood is filled with hypochondriacs.
I knuckled last Monday, in spare hours, to finally finish the long overdue rewrite of the ED Day : Dead Sydney novel I published online in 2007 and 2008. It's a strange thing indeed to be working on a novel about life in Sydney after a flu pandemic at the same time a real pandemic is declared and then coming down with a flu that is fairly debilitating, heading for the local medical centre, finding it all but over-run with other flu patients....
I thought I became slightly obsessive with the hand-washing over the past few weeks. Didn't stop me from catching whatever this flu is.
I'd have to be feeling a hell of a lot sicker than this, however, before I volunteered to take a vaccine only a couple of weeks old, and fresh out of very brief clinical trials.
Obviously, there will be more on all this when the old energy levels return, and if I learn anything interesting from the doctor visit on Monday, I'll write it up here.
The second story about the near empty sauce bottle is equally brilliant.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Live And Learn, Don't Mess With Australian Women
By Darryl Mason
Gordon Ramsay doesn't get a lot of lip back from the women he insults in the British media, or the women he rains torrents of verbal abuse down on in his TV shows. You don't often, or ever, see women he's insulted get in his face and tell him to fuck off.
While Tracey Grimshaw and A Current Affair have been quick to capitalise on Ramsay's dickheaded attempt to be a stand-up comedian while in Australia, turning it into a ratings and profile bonanza for Grimshaw, it's been curious to see Ramsay's reaction to having a media shitstorm explode around him.
He's not in control of this, he's not in the bully domain of his kitchen, his kingdom, he's not in charge, and female journalists are now chasing him into hotel foyers shouting, "What do you want to call me, HUH?"
He needed a security guard to step in and stop the women who challenged him yesterday. He looked panicked. Worried. Uneasy.
Ramsay knows what his audience, and potential future audiences, across the world are seeing about him blasted across headlines and leading evening news bulletins. It's not tough Ramsay, or Sweary Ramsay, it's Weird & Creepy Ramsay :
...he showed an audience of several thousand at the Melbourne Good Food and Wine show a doctored photograph of a woman naked on all fours, with multiple breasts and a pig's face, announcing that it depicted Grimshaw, who had interviewed him on the previous night.
Yeah, that's not what anyone could call a whole load of good publicity.
Today, Tracey Grimshaw is soaking up the banner headlines and column inches of UK tabloids with her mostly impressive Go Hardback at Ramsay :
"Obviously Gordon thinks that any woman who doesn't find him attractive must be gay. For the record, I don't. And I'm not."
"Gordon Ramsay made me promise not to ask on Friday about his private life. He then got on stage on Saturday and made some very clear and uninformed insinuations about mine."
"We all know that bullies thrive when no one takes them on, and I'm not going to sit meekly and let some arrogant narcissist bully me."
"The guy's sort of on the ropes in many ways … his marriage must have been put under enormous pressure at the end of last year, his business has clearly been under enormous pressure, and his shows don't rate as well as they used to."
As Ramsay would put it, Fucking Ouch.
Tracey Grimshaw, thanks to Ramsay and A Current Affair quickly moving to make this minor news event into one hell of a big deal, is now enjoying spectacular ratings, and a sudden international profile.
So Kevin Rudd is not going to miss out on this action :
"All I could describe his remarks as reflecting is a new form of low life...'
New form of low life isn't bad, a bit over the top, but then that's Rudd, when he wants to hand over some instant headlines, and it sort of sounds like something a detective might have said on Underbelly.
But deputy PM Julia Gillard absolutely nails the moment :
"I think what he should do is confine himself to the kitchen and make nice things for people to eat..."
In other words, get back in the kitchen, food man. It's good advice.
Ramsay can learn a lot about delivering a killer funny line, with true sting and wit, from Julia Gillard.
While the publicity might seem to be a good thing, as in no publicity is bad publicity, for Ramsay's news series on Channel Nine, we may see Channel Nine actually use this opportunity to dump the expensive Ramsay now his ratings are heading for the toilet. Will all this media attention make more people tune into his show? Probably not. And when Channel Nine bails on his show, they will make it look like they smacked down this Jock git in the process.
It's not always a surprise to hear in the media that some famously aggressive man has punched a woman in the face, there has been plenty of that lately. But what Ramsay did in making that huge photo of multi-titted pig woman a part of his show was just downright bizarre, weird and plenty creepy. Forget Grimshaw. Why would he want to expose his audience to that?
And ulimatey it might prove harder for Ramsay to live down. Does he think the pig woman photo is funny? Or does he think it's erotic?
Maybe he should just call the whole bizarre episode A Piece Of Performance Art, instead of trying to make it sound like he has been treated unfairly, and done over.
It must cause Ramsay at least some grief that, yet again, women have again exposed him for the fuckwit that he is.
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Too Much Of A Coward To Have His Own Words Quoted Back To Him
....will Channel Nine do the same and cancel future shows with Ramsay or will it reward him for attacking its star?
I submitted the following comment to The Professional Idiot's blog, where the freedom to debate on any subject is supposedly written in stone, and open to all comers, at 10.27am, Tuesday.
This is Andrew Bolt on Gordon Ramsay (April, 2008) :
"...I've fallen for the bloke. My kind of guy completely. More of him and civilisation is safe."
"I like particularly the standards Ramsay upholds...."
"He thinks reason beats irrational sentiment."
"Here's Ramsay coaching millions of Australians into Liberal values and making them seem contemporary."
"Ramsay...is an artist who uses them as tools to create something beautiful from nothing..."
"Make something of yourself, is his message. Test yourself. Find passion. Make a life and, in Ramsay's own passion, his values and his art, he has."
"(Gordon Ramsay) creates a noble calling from a job, and a life from a collection of days."
So, is civilisation still safer?
Is he still coaching Australians in "Liberal values"?
Is Ramsay still "my kind of guy completely."?
My comment quoting The Professional Idiot's own words in an earlier column on Gordon Ramsay hadn't made it into the comments when I checked at 11.37am, though other comments submitted by people not writing under their own names went up on a few minutes earlier, at 11.23am.
I resubmitted the exact same comment at 11.34am. No dice.
I tried one more time, at 3.56pm, thinking surely he isn't so ashamed and embarrassed of his enthusiastic praise of Ramsay's "Liberal values" that he'd censor his own words from his own blog comments?
It still didn't show up.
I sent him an e-mail asking if he still stands by his claims about Ramsay keeping civilisation safe.
Nothing.
So at 4.38pm, I sent this short comment, with a direct link back to The Professional Idiot's own column, archived at the Herald Sun, on Ramsay :
Do you stand by your April 2008 column where you claimed, amongst many other words of praise, that Gordon Ramsay personifies "Liberal values", that is, conservative values?
Your column, where you called Ramsay an "artist" also had you saying, "...I've fallen for the bloke. My kind of guy completely. More of him and civilisation is safe".
Now surely The Professional Idiot wouldn't censor a non-abusive comment that included only his own quotes about Gordon Ramsay, and a link back to his own column from which those quotes were pulled?
Surely The Professional Idiot can't be that precious?
Let's see.
UPDATE : The Professional Idiot really is that precious, none of my comments quoting his enthusiastic praise for Gordon Ramsay passed his censor.
So much for standing by what you say.
Interestingly, this Herald Sun columnist will not allow his own words to be republished on his blog when the quotes are attributed to him, but when Toaf put some of that big sigh Gordon Ramsay infatuation and praise in a comment under his name, and not The Professional Idiot's, well, up it went :
(click to enlarge)
"I Know I Left It Somewhere In The Shed About Five Years Ago..."
By Darryl Mason
The Murdoch media's The Punch is worth checking out, and it will be (to media watchers anyway) fascinating to see how it evolves in the months ahead. It seems to have gotten off to a pretty decent start.
Eventually, if it survives and thrives, The Punch will become a test site for Rupert Murdoch's hilariously ill-fated fantasy to try and get people to pay to read what he hasn't paid anyone to write.
But is there something more suspect going on over there?
A conspiracy-minded friend, now living in England, thinks yes.
"Hey, I checked out that website you sent me the link for." "Rate My Bourbon Vomit Wall Paintings?" I asked. "No, the other one." "The Punch." "Yeah, The Punch." "Yeah? What did you reckon?" "S'Alright. It's a Murdoch thing, isn't it?" "Yeah," I said. "So where's all the tits?" "........what?" "There's no tits. It's Murdoch, and no tits." "This is Australia," I sad. "Rupert's mum doesn't let him run photos of some 18 year old girl's tits in his Australian media." "Oh." "So did you read any of it?" "Yeah, a bit. If it's not going to have tits on it, it needs more sports and movies stuff, somewhere I can say how much fucking arse Terminator 4 sucked." "I think The Punch is supposed to become like the Blog Discussion Of The Nation or something like that.I think they have higher aspirations than running an open thread on 'Terminator 4 : How Much Does This Movie Suck Arse?" "Yeah? Well, good luck to them....There's something else, though. It's weird." "What's that?" I asked. "It made me want to go back to smoking pot." "What the fuck are you talking about?" "The Punch. That website. I looked at it, and I thought, 'Fuck me, I'm suddenly hanging to punch down some brekkie cones'." "I don't think you can blame some website for those thoughts, can you?" "Yeah, I can. Maybe it's subliminal or something, but just after I looked at it, I'm thinking about which geezer at my local might be good to score some hash off and if I still had my old bong kicking around in the shed somewhere."
Ridiculous you say? Perhaps. But what about these screenshots from The Punch?
I put the following question to The Punch editor David Penberthy at Twitter :
I'll update on any replies from 'Penbo'.
"You're Mad, You Bastard"
The first 8 1/2 minutes of the rarely seen 1971 Australian classic Wake In Fright :
The above video is obviously pretty crap quality, but a fully-restored uncut version of Wake In Fright will be screened this month at the Sydney Film Festival, and will hit DVD later in the year.
It's a brutal movie. Beautiful, and ugly as hell as well. For many Australians born in cities in the 1980s, Wake In Fright shows an Australia they are probably not familiar with, probably didn't even know existed. The 7.30 Report has a great story on Wake In Fright and its remarkable restoration. It's a vital piece of Australian cinema history, and it was almost lost forever.
A short vid of claimed UFO footage shot on the weekend in Australia, featured on the front page of YouTube :
Less Kids Killing Themselves? Media Not Interested
This is probably the best piece of Australian news you'll hear today, or this month, and you can think the internet for at least of this good news :
During the past decade the suicide rate among young Australians has almost halved.
It is an extraordinary public health achievement, but one which has received little publicity.
Experts say a massive public education campaign and improvement in the treatment of depression are the key reasons for the success.
Here's how the rise of internet usage amongst teenagers added to the suicides averted :
The Reach Out website now gets 130,000 visits per month from young people.
The website's managers say being online is a big advantage.
"For a young person who suspects things are not OK, they might not know who to turn to or be afraid to talk to someone about it because they are afraid they will be judged," project manager Anna McKenzie said.
"So to be able to simply go online, Google something and have a look without anyone needing to know, that's really invaluable and that's what a lot of young people are doing at Reachout."
The Reach Out website was set up 10 years ago when Australia had one of the highest rates of youth suicide in the western world.
John Howard's decision to tighten gun laws in 1996 is also getting some of the credit, along with better methods of treating depression :
"After the new gun laws were introduced, the rate of gun suicide dropped twice as fast," Sydney University's associate professor Philip Alpers said.
"If you reduce the availability of firearms, especially to impulsive young men, then the number of people dying by gunshot reduces."
Less kids are killing themselves, for a variety of reasons, but the desire to end your life before you end high school appears to still be widespread, with less follow through, however :
"We've just had a national survey of mental health in Australia, rates of illness are as high as they ever were," Professor Hickie said.
"The good thing is that rates of suicide have gone down so we haven't yet dealt with the underlying problem, but we have got better at dealing with one of the worst outcomes."
Here's a damn good piece of news about Australian youth that should hit all the front pages and lead every evening news broadcast. It won't.
What an opportunity for the crumbling Australian mainstream media to put to death the gruesome lie that if "If It Bleeds, It Must Lead" that has so orientated so many journalists to believe that Nobody Wants To Hear Good News.
Turn the fact that the Australian youth suicide rate has HALVED in only ten years into the same kind of surreally hyped headline grabber as the average celebrity-related non-event and see what happens. See how the readers react.
The media may be surprised at just how many people want to hear good news, these days.
How To Kill A Lively Conservative Blog Comments Thread - Speak Too Much Truth
By Darryl Mason
Blogs heavy on serious, not satirical, politics need opposing views and opinions in their comments if they want to really rack up those comment numbers. Apparently, this is important.
Groupthink in comments usually mean the threads go cold quickly. If everyone agrees with everyone else, there's not much to discuss, and nobody to insult, smear or defame.
This is why some of the most popular politically-charged blogs in Australia, for example, cannot do without a rabid Obamist Ruddian Green Lefty to pop his/her head up if most of those commenting there think John Howard should have a statue honouring him in every town square and that, one day, a generation of children will grow up believing that George W. Bush is right up there with Washington and Lincoln.
Conservative blogs need stupid Lefties in the comments so the groupthinkers gathered there will have a target to attack and vilify, to make themselves feel better.
This is why the most popular conservative blog in Australia often has Stupid Lefty Comments either written by the blogger, or the moderators, or both, under fake names.
An Allegedly Stupid Lefty stating something as simple as "War Is The Very Definition Of Immaturity"on a War On Iraq related post really fires up those conservative comment threads. For a while anyway. But then if that Allegedly Stupid Lefty starts stating undeniable facts, the groupthink comments quickly die away.
This comment thread at JF Beck's was getting into the 60s, one of the biggest comment counts ever seen on that blog, until I posted the following comment, number 69, which none of the usual suspects over there attempted to counter or even deny. It remains the last comment in the thread (as of this posting) :
"Did you get that theory from the fact that Bush was bragging to journalists in 1999 that he was going to go War On Iraq and finish what his daddy wouldn't, or couldn't?
"If you don't think The Bush administration totally capitalised on the tragedy of 9/11 to sell the Iraq War, you have some reading to do.
"Condi Rice, Bush and Cheney all called 9/11 an "opportunity" after the War On Iraq began."
You also get the feeling from reading all those Anonymous comments at Beck's that nearly all were written by the same, at most, two or three people.
If they stand so firmly by their beliefs and claims, why don't they post their thoughts under their real names?
It's not like they're leaking secret government reports or anything, it's just opinion. But not opinion they believe in enough to put their real names to.
"The Application Of A Questioning Mind Is The Best Way To Wisdom And Insight"
In our society, certainty has more cachet than doubt and that is making our public debate shallower than it ought to be. Some of Australia's highest profile commentators act, in public at least, as if they have never experienced a second of self-doubt or ever entertained the thought: "What if I am wrong?" Our age of cable television, talkback radio and blogs seems to have been accompanied by a growing number of people who think their opinions are always right and that anyone who disagrees is not only wrong but worthy of contempt and public ridicule.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
It is a shame that, in today's politics, expressing doubt is taboo. Consider the great thinkers throughout history. Many have been branded heretics for publicly voicing scepticism. Those who have sought truth, whether philosophers or scientists, artists or writers, revolutionaries or explorers, have always begun their quests from a premise of doubt, not certainty. Their questions most often ran counter to the prevailing wisdom or authorities of the day.
Copernicus asked whether the Earth really was at the centre of the universe. Martin Luther asked whether the Catholic Church was the only route to salvation. Thomas Jefferson asked why Americans couldn't govern themselves. Mary Wollstonecraft asked why women shouldn't have equal rights. Nelson Mandela asked why blacks weren't entitled to the same privileges as whites. To elevate certainty over doubt as a mark of intellectual strength flies in the face of historical experience, which has repeatedly shown that the application of a questioning mind is the best way to wisdom and insight.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
...climate change is an area in which we should allow room for doubt. The weight of scientific and political opinion backs the existence of human-induced climate change. When there is such universal agreement, doubters have an important role to play, both in terms of the science and the policy responses. Constructive sceptics (as opposed to ideological zealots) will be able to force our politicians and scientists to keep testing the evidence and exploring the options. That should lead to better outcomes for all of us.
Why? Because Gordon Ramsay personifies "conservative values".
It's not simply admiration, it's also infatuation :
"...I've fallen for the bloke. My kind of guy completely. More of him and civilisation is safe."
"I like particularly the standards Ramsay upholds...."
"He thinks reason beats irrational sentiment."
"Here's Ramsay coaching millions of Australians into Liberal values and making them seem contemporary."
"Ramsay...is an artist who uses them as tools to create something beautiful from nothing..."
"Make something of yourself, is his message. Test yourself. Find passion. Make a life and, in Ramsay's own passion, his values and his art, he has."
Good God, and then there's this :
"(Gordon Ramsay) creates a noble calling from a job, and a life from a collection of days."
Ramsay also shouts at a lot of women on TV, tries to humiliates them, hurls abuse and invective at women because he doesn't like the way they cook (how very 20th century of him), or more importantly, he doesn't like the way they look at him with eyes that say 'You are a fucking weak, weak man.'
Foul-mouthed chef Gordon Ramsay has shocked a public audience by vilifying high profile Australian journalist Tracy Grimshaw in an obscene, sexist rant.
The putrid tirade, which included references to Grimshaw's looks, sexuality and depictions of her as a pig, shocked audiences who went to see the celebrity chef at the Good Food and Wine Show in Melbourne.
Ramsay told an audience of several thousand people that Grimshaw was "a lesbian"...
When the crowd reacted with gasps, he said: "What? I'm not saying she's a ..."
The phrase that Ramsay used was a highly derogatory term often used to describe lesbians.
Ramsay also showed a picture of a woman - who appeared to be naked - on her hands and knees with the features of a pig and multiple breasts.
"That's Tracy Grimshaw," he told the audience. "I had an interview with her yesterday - holy crap.
"She needs to see Simon Cowell's Botox doctor."
Ramsay even showed his 'art' to children walking by.
Mandy Saunders was at the food expo with her two children and elderly mother.
"I couldn't believe what I was seeing and hearing - it was disgusting," Ms Saunders said.
"The show is meant for families. That was way out of order."
If Channel Nine valued Tracey Grimshaw as a journalist, a quality interviewer, and respected her as the host of their flagship current affairs program, they'd tell Gordon Ramsay to go and fuck himself, forever.
They won't of course.
The honour of Tracey Grimshaw, as a journalist, as a woman, means nothing to this kind of media.
Gordon Ramsay must be absolutely plowing through bags and bags of methamphetamine these days.
Still.
Presumably, that's what he'll end up blaming.
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This Is Why Supermarkets Don't Put The Eggs With The Milk With The Bacon
This is what supermarkets do. They fuck with your mind and keep moving things so you go in to buy bacon and eggs and while negotiating a maze to find them you end up with a trolley full of shit you had no intention of buying. Indeed as I traipsed through Coles looking for the fucking eggs I did see things that I needed, but through fuck you Coles you’re not getting an extra cent out of me today – though I did grab some orange juice when I went that way in search of eggs.
By the time I was asked at the check out “do you want Flybuys?” and then “would you like to join FlyBuys?” I had given up on life.
Wah did enjoy the eventual breakfast, however.
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What Is This 'The Left" You Speak So Often Of?
I'm glad you asked.
There has been a lot of talk at The Orstrahyun, over the years, about The Left. Or The Evil Pagan Left. Or The Evil Lefty Green Pagan Nazi CommoObamaist Lefty Lefty Left.
And there has been little, if any, explanation of what this clearly dangerous and volatile entity actually is.
I could write a couple of thousand words on it, that would not be a problem, I could piss on absolute crap to such a gagging word count that when you're reading this on Sunday afternoon (or Monday morning) you will look at "I'm glad you asked" and then scroll down and down and down and see thick paragraph after thick paragraph of twaddle n' glut and think, 'For Fuck's Sake! Get to the fucking point you verbose bastard!'
But I and you don't have to go through any of that now because Grods has done all that for me, and you, so I can just link to this instead.
At 2.45am on a Sunday morning, Wah, of Club Wah, has come up with the best tirade of a definition so far :
"The Left is anyone who is not a fucktard, racist, xenophobic, climate change-denying, homophobic, “pro-life”, ultra-capitalist, neo-conservative, hate-mongering cunt!"
Close and good enough for me.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
The Chaser Is Not "The Media", You Morons
By Darryl Mason
Australia's most boring columnist, Gerard Henderson, has long thought satirical ABC show The Chaser is not comedy television but "The Media".
Incredibly, the editor of The Australian now also thinks The Chaser is "the media". No, really. He does. The editor of The Australian newspaper can't tell the difference between A Current Affair and a comedy show full of made-up nonsense and occasionally cutting social and political satire. He thinks The Chaser, like 2GB or the Sydney Morning Herald or The Australian is part of "The Media"and so therefore must be hammered by the ABC's Media Watch :
For weeks, Media Watch, the in-house organ of the ABC's opinion makers, has bagged management over a broadcast computer system that is slow to settle in. But now presenter Jonathan Holmes and his team have a superior scandal they can chase hard next Monday night - The Chaser's dour and disgraceful sketch that mocked the wishes of dying children and the people who love them.
Then again, maybe it's easy for the editor of The Australian to confuse The Chaser with real "media". After all, The Chaser has covered the Iraq War, and the 'War on Terror', over the years, with a savage honesty that The Australian shied completely away from.
Plus, The Chaser did once have a newspaper.
And so The Chaser caved in, or were likely forced to, and just like The Glass House and The Gruen Transfer before it, the show will now fall under a new regime of increased censorship because people were upset by their reaction to a show that implicitly aims to provoke a reaction in a television era filled with the drab, the unchallenging, the politically correct, the grindingly bland.
The Chaser are clearly not happy about what's happened :
We want to make an apology for a sketch we created called “The Make a Realistic Wish Foundation”.
We’ve just heard from the ABC that they’re suspending the show for 2 weeks. We were keen to keep making the show, so we’re disappointed by the decision, and we don’t agree with it.
But that aside, we’d like to apologise. The piece was a very black sketch. Obviously too black. And we’re really sorry for the significant pain and anger we have caused.
Many people have asked how could we possibly think a sketch like that should go to air. We realize in hindsight that we shouldn’t have done it. We never imagined that the sketch would be taken literally.
We don’t think sick kids are greedy and we don’t think the Make a Wish Foundation deserves anything other than praise. It was meant to be so over-the-top that no one would ever take it seriously.
But we now understand the sketch didn’t come across as intended, and we take full responsibility for that. Now we’ve seen the impact of the piece we wish we’d thought it through better. There was no value in it that justifies the impact it’s clearly had on people whose grief or trauma is so great already. We should have considered that. We got it wrong. We’re sorry.
We'll be making no further comment at this time.
What else is there to say?
The Chaser's audience wanted 'The Boys' to keep pushing the limits of what they may or may not find funny, just how far 'The Boys' would be willing to go, for a laugh or a reaction, or something beyond the reaction most watch television with, a nonchalant 'Eh.'
Now The Chaser has most definitely found out what that limit is.
Dying Children.
Well, at least actors playing dying children.
Not so long ago, Australians could tell the difference.
"We Were Confronted With The Iron Fist Of Middle Class Taste"
The all but lost, extremely loose, 1975 movie 'Pure Shit' gets a long overdue re-release.
Here's the trailer :
For its time, this was a wild movie, raw and dangerous and challenging, unlike most Australian movies today. Even the trailer rings a hell of a lot more true of junkie outlaw reality than anything we saw in two whole series of glammed-up Underbelly.
In an interview with Cinetology, Pure Shit director Bert Deling goes hard on the safe and non-offensive Australian film industry :
"It opens up a couple of interesting questions. It opens up the question of how it is that we have had a film funding organisation in Australia that for last 25 years has continued to make films no one wants to see.
"They are the same 12 or so people who made all this crap in the past that no one wants to see. They get hold of a hundred percent of all the governments’ money. In any other country, that would be considered to be a scandal!
"And you can see what the aim is - these f***ers who may have made two or three features, bland sort of things which get two weeks at some art house cinema here and never sell overseas, they want a big kill. They want to get a big budget film, and they’ll make that and then they’ll disappear, leaving the Australian film industry in a smoking ruin. I just don’t get it. They are going to smash it to pieces."
But Deling holds out hope that the low-budget digital movie revolution will deliver on its promise and potential :
"There’s gotta be something soon, like Pure Shit, where somebody wants to go out and make a film and doesn’t give a flying f*** what the middle class say. And they can do it. You could almost do it on a halfway decent credit card."
"Right across the board we were confronted with the iron fist of middle class taste, and they’re the men and women who’ve been running the film industry. That’s why we get the sorts of films that we do – because they know what they’re gonna get. They’ve read the script, they know the director, they know the actors who’ve been cast. The film that they get is the film they wanted. And so they and their friends get to see a film they think is perfect, but nobody else does and no one wants to go!"
Go Hard Gerard Busts Another Evil Big Lefty Media Conspiracy
Or Not
By Darryl Mason
Australia's most boring columnist, Gerard Henderson, sniffs out yet another Big Left media conspiracy, one that has unfolded in suspicious silence, up until now.
For Gerard Henderson, a journalist with The Australian, Amanda Meade, initially appears to be in cahoots with God knows who else in the Big Left media ranks to conceal from Gerard Henderson the exact age of the 7.30 Report's Kerry O'Brien.
Gerard Henderson doesn't think birthdates published on Wikipedia or printed in those new-fangled print newspapers, are to be trusted. Google? Don't make Gerard laugh. For him, the only volume of biographical record is one that most people would be surprised to hear is still actually being published.
It's time for Go Hard Gerard to confront this awful Big Lefty conspiracy. It's time for his infamously bland and whiney e-mails to start flowing :
Email From Gerard Henderson To Amanda Meade - 3 June 2009
Amanda
I would be grateful if you would advise precisely where Mr O’Brien’s date of birth is on the public record.
Kerry O’Brien does not cite a date of birth in his entry in Who’s Who in Australia. Moreover, the biographical details about Kerry O’Brien on the 7.30 Report’s website do not record either his age or the fact that he once worked for Gough Whitlam. So I ask: Where on the “public record” is there reference to Mr O’Brien’s age? Here’s hoping for a prompt response.
Best wishes
Gerard Henderson
* * * * *
Email From Amanda Meade To Gerard Henderson - 3 June 2009
Article attached: “Milestones for the host we trust the most” - by Amanda Meade in The Australian 15 June 2006.
* * * * *
Email From Gerard Henderson To Amanda Meade - 3 June 2009
For someone who lectures others about journalistic standards, I am genuinely surprised that you regard Wikipedia as an authoritative source on the public record. It is nothing of the kind.
If Mr O’Brien wanted others to know his age he would put it in his Who’s Who entry (which he prepares) or arrange to have this material placed on the 7.30 Report website.
Gerard Henderson
* * * * *
Email From Amanda Meade To Gerard Henderson - 3 June 2009
Gerard
I did not rely on Wikipeda for my information, I simply point it out to you as one source. O’Brien told me his birth date in the interview, and I [sic] it is certainly not a state secret. By the way, you [sic] age is not in your bio either.
* * * * *
Email From Gerard Henderson To Amanda Meade - 3 June 2009
Amanda
You are shifting ground. In “The Diary” on Monday you wrote that Kerry O’Brien’s age is on the public record. When I asked you where this information could be located on the public record, your only reference was to Wikipedia.
You should be aware that the principal source of biographical data in Australia is Who’s Who in Australia. If you bothered to check this, you would know that my date of birth is published in Who’s Who.
So basically Go Hard Gerard's beef is that he thought he had to reveal his age in Who's Who Of Australia, and included, but Kerry O'Brien realised a date-of-birth wasn't mandatory, so he didn't include it.
So what does this have to do with journalist Amanda Meade? Absolutely sweet fuck-all.
Amanda Meade puts it more succcinctly.
Email From Amanda Meade To Gerard Henderson - 3 June 2009
This is so boring and tedious.
I will say only this: Kerry O’Brien is 63 and I know this because he told me wen [sic] he was born in a profile interview. That fact was published in the Oz, which makes it on the public record.
* * * * *
Email From Gerard Henderson To Amanda Meade - 3 June 2009
I don’t intend to continue the correspondence. But I would recommend that in future you have a glance at Who’s Who which does provide birth dates, where they are submitted, on the public record. If Kerry O’Brien did this he would not need you as his apologist.
Best wishes
Gerard Henderson
What a silly old bastard he is.
Go Hard Gerard is not put off at all by being told he's boring and tedious. He's used to that.
This is how the boss of supposedly Australia's (at least once) most influential think-tank, The Sydney Institute, passes his days.
And this is yet another example of why old people should be given free video games. Immediately. They keep the mind busy, while reducing the amount of annoyance the bored elderly, like Gerard, cause to people with better things to do than to be drawn into nonsensical e-mail arguments about absolutely nothing of any consequence.
18th Century Celebrity Outlaw Traded For Five Gallons Of Rum
A great piece from Michael Stutchbury on why Australians love gangster television (because an admiration for bushrangers is hardwired into Australian culture) at Crikey (excerpts) :
John Caesar (or “Black Caesar” as he came to be known) was the first to take to the bush in search of a life of crime. A huge, hulking man built like the entire front row of the All Blacks, Caesar was a former Negro servant who was transported for theft. Arriving at Botany Bay in 1790, driven by hunger he stole an Aboriginal canoe and escaped into the surrounding bushland. Following a brief period raiding homesteads and Aboriginal camps, he was captured and returned to authorities, yet was not severely punished.
This set forth of a pattern that was to repeat itself over the next few years — Caesar would escape, wander the bush for a time, receiving food and ammunition from sympathetic settlers who had heard of his exploits breathlessly recounted in the newspapers, before he was sent back to prison.
Unfortunately for Caesar, his exploits eventually went too far and provoked the authorities into appealing to that other great love of Australians — drinking. Five gallons of rum, a liquid damn near worth its weight in gold to thirsty Sydneysiders, was the bounty placed on his head. A month later, in February, 1796 he was shot dead at Strathfield by a settler, who promptly claimed the reward.
Blair's blogger mate JF Beck, on whose comment boards Blairians now say what they're not allowed to say on a "family" Daily Telegraph blog, also likes to spread anti-Jewish propaganda, through his headlines :
They'll tell you they're being ironic or something.
.
Thursday, June 04, 2009
"We're Going To Need Another White Board...."
By Darryl Mason
I wasn't kidding when I said that Kevin Rudd doesn't see a biting comedy when he watches ABC's The Hollow Men, he sees a tense, real-life drama, filled with the kinds of challenging events and burning bureaucratic tensions he already knows all too well.
Occasional reader Kerry contrasts the episode of The Hollow Men where the prime minister's staff must decide if the PM's good mate, and defence minister, should quit or be sacked with yesterday's big non-Chaser related news event, the resignation of Kevin Rudd's good mate, and defence minister, Joel Fitzgibbon :
How Hallowmen is this? It ticks all the boxes:
Ministry – defence
Reason – breach of ministerial conduct (very close to undisclosed investments)
Friend of PM – PM gave full support to his mate the defence minister until the announcement.
Resignation – Was it genuine or did the Hollow Men's Tony/Murph real life equivalents in PM's office argue whether it needed to be a resignation or sacking?
The only thing missing is that it’s not close to Remembrance day.
It's very annoying that I can't search through permanently-online episodes of The Hollow Men and link to the right moments in the TV show to make these 'coincidences' clearer. But searching video like we can now search song lyrics is still two or four years away.
Joel Fitzgibbon's resignation is just another curious example of Ruddlife imitating The Hollow Men, instead of the other way around. The episode where the PM's staff battled to decide whether it looked better for the prime minister to sack his defence minister, or accept his resignation, was only repeated on ABC 1 a couple of weeks ago.
Rudd's key staff have seen The Hollow Men. How could they resist watching it? So they'd know this episode, and would have been aware of its interesting parallels to how they had to sell this major fuckup in Rudd's considerably smooth sailing of recent.
The Budget episode of The Hollow Men, aired a week before the Wayne Swann delivered the real one, was also full of key phrases and words that were put to good use when Swann and Rudd and Julia Gillard stepped in front of the media to sell it.
You'll know some sort of Evil Lefty ABC conspiracy is afoot if the Wonder Drug episode of The Hollow Men airs a week or two before the Rudd government begins seriously trying to sell the swine flu Wonder Vaccine.
The details of why Fitzgibbon had to quit are here, in short he failed to "fully comply with the ministerial code of conduct", but when you read the following quotes from Rudd, you can easily imagine the Hollow Men-like scenes inside the PM's HQ as his staffers battled to come up with just the right wording, the all important phrasing, to get the prime minister over this credibility-degrading crisis :
"The minister's decision was to extend his letter of resignation at his initiative," Mr Rudd said.
"I accepted that resignation, it was the right thing to do."
Mr Rudd described Mr Fitzgibbon as a "first-class Defence Minister".
"The Government expects high standards of accountability on the part of ministers," he said.
"I feel very sad about this," Mr Rudd told a press conference in Canberra....
Mr Rudd said Mr Fitzgibbon had made "mistakes in terms of accountability and paid a high price".
He said Mr Fitzgibbon's resignation goes to the "probability of the process engaged in".
Finding agreement on the "probability of the process engaged in" could have taken hours, and at least one completely filled up white board.
No Matter How Far They Go, The Mainstream Media Will Never Campaign To Have The Chaser Taken Off The Air
By Darryl Mason
The Chaser's Julian Morrow made a promise on May 28, after the first episode of the new series of the mainstream media's reliable 'Public Outrage!' content provider, and comments generator, went to air :
"We care about complaint numbers far more than ratings. We were disappointed there were so few complaints this week, so we'll try to make it worse next week,'' Morrow said.
The Chaser kept its promise :
The complaints are pouring into the ABC, but more importantly, so are the comments to mainstream media blogs, your says and discussion boards. There must be 3000 comments already across a dozen or so Murdoch media blogs and news stories.
The Chaser made fun of dying children, or at least made fun of the way dying children are marketed by charities and top rating commercial television shows. Who the fuck doesn't have an opinion on that?
The Chaser's 'Make A Realistic Wish' Outrage! will soar to the top of Most Read stories across all the mainstream media online news sites, generating hundreds of thousands of extra page views, and by the time the Public Outrage! dies down, a few million in total page views that never would have existed had not The Chaser asked what's the point of helping dying children? "They're only going to die anyway."
A one minute skit from The Chaser produces a free video story, and copious online news stories mostly built out of comments made online by parents of dying children and furious others demanding the ABC cancel The Chaser by dinner time. This is not a costly piece of investigative journalism. It's all free. But it's exactly the kind of free Public Outrage! news story the mainstream media, tabloid and 'serious', are quickly becoming addicted to.
A few million extra page views, thanks to The Chaser, for online mainstream media new sites, translates into, at least, thousands of dollars worth of extra ad revenue.
The figures get bigger when you take it to the commercial television networks who will fill a few minutes of the evening news with this story, which will also soak up a solid five to eight minutes of the evening current affairs shows. Again, free Public Outrage! content.
It will be interesting to see who actually interviews dying children first to see what they think of The Chaser's demand they be more realistic about their dying wishes. Maybe A Current Affair can follow Julian Morrow around with a couple of cancer kids until he breaks down and weeps an apology.
If The Chaser can be relied upon to keep delivering totally free Public Outrage! stories every week for the rest of their last series, and no doubt they can (and if they don't, there will be enough material for some confected Public Outrage! anyway), mainstream media news sites, and blogs, can expect increased ad revenue because advertisers know The Chaser-related stories will pull the online eyeballs that they want to reach. It's not often a newspaper or news site can count on a popular story being served up to them for free, every Wednesday night.
Interestingly, if say the Daily Telegraph, an obvious online ad revenue beneficiary from The Chasers's totally free Public Outrage! stories, decided to go hard and stop at nothing until The Chaser was pulled off air, and got the rest of the series canned, they would be kissing goodbye to thousands of dollars worth of extra page view/ad revenue, plus all those stories that feed the endless demand for new semi-news related content. (Note : I'm basing those very loose ad revenue estimates on what those kind of page view numbers would generate for the average independent blog carrying Google ads. I'd expect the money generated by The Chaser's free Public Outrage! stories to be substantially greater).
Clearly it would not be in the interest of any of the mainstream media online news sites, or the evening news or current affairs shows, to actually have The Chaser pulled off the air, no matter how far they go.
So in the time they have left, eight to ten weeks, in this final series, The Chaser can do anything they want, within legal restrictions. They could do some of the most dark and demented satire Australian TV viewers have ever seen. They could really break out of their own worn-out format and do something utterly unhinged.
The Chaser is clearly invaluable to all the Australian media. What they do generates public discussion and debate, filling newspaper pages, dreary day empty evening news spots, comment boards, and all those hours of talkback radio.
The first episode of the new series of The Chaser also provided hundreds of thousands of extra page views and free Public Outrage! content and online comment for the commercial TV networks and the Fairfax and Murodch media :
The public broadcaster received complaints about almost every segment of the satirical ABC show, which set its sights on making fun of the Cronulla Sharks group sex scandal.
The Chaser's War On Everything spokesman said complaint words used included: ``Disgusting, cruel, offensive, pathetic, revolting and disgraceful''.
It also showed the incident in which the boys flew a blimp into protected airspace above the Vatican, a cameo by TV talk show host Kerri-Anne Kennerley in a romantic tryst with Morrow.
Morrow also featured in a skit where a mannequin dressed as Governor General Quentin Bryce was thrown over a wall of the all-male Melbourne Club.
Some said a Footprints sketch was offensive to Christians, while a Wipeout Palestine segment and Billy Connolly sketch were also complained about.
Many more took to websites to express their disappointment with the show which has been off-air for 18 months.
While I don't doubt that many, many people were seriously offended and upset by the 'Make A Realistic Wish Foundation' bit, you also have to wonder, in these remaining days of anonymous commenting, just how busy the PR units of rival networks are in creating or at least adding to the avalanche of comments demanding The Chaser be taken off the air, immediately. Consider this :
An average national audience of 1.54 million watched the show last night.
It smashed its commercial rivalsCriminal Minds, The Mentalist and Law and Order: SVU.
It's not just that The Chaser completely dominates its prime time position, advertisers are reluctant to pay what they once did for 30 seconds in Law & Order because they know nearly all of their key target audience of 16 to 35 year olds are watching The Chaser.
The commercial networks, however, could go hard against The Chaser and air something that would pull away probably half of The Chaser's audience. The latest episode of The Daily Show for example. Or The Trailer Park Boys. But to air those shows in prime time, the commercial networks would have to become as subversive as The Chaser, and they won't be doing that anytime soon.
According to Mumbrella, Channel Nine morning news chose not to report on the Air France mid-air explosion because the same news bulletin was going to be shown on Qantas flights :
A spokesman for Nine sent a brief email to Mumbrella saying: “We never report news involving plane incidents on Qantas inflight news bulletins.”
And yet they have no problem showing terrifying footage of house fires on the evening news to an audience primarily sitting around in houses.
"So The Fat Four Eyes Says To Skinny Four Eyes..."
By Darryl Mason
Are we a racist nation?
That depends. Are you a wog?
Do you eat weird foreign food that dickhead bogans haven't yet realised tastes pretty fucking good?
Do you tend to work harder and longer than most white people of your age group in jobs most of them think are beneath them?
Do you have family traditions of language, song, art and story that go back dozens or even hundreds of generations?
Do you think Australia is the best country on Earth but populated by white people who have no idea just how incredibly lucky they are to live in such a land of opportunity?
Do you see cartoons in newspapers, or catch moments on The Footy Show, or read comments on blogs, or hear bitter old people bitching on talkback radio about what's wrong with "people like them", that debase your ancient racial heritage and think, 'What the fuck? These people have shit for brains. Fuck this for a joke.'
Then yes, Australia probably is a racist nation.
It was a weird juxtaposition to hear Sol Formerly Of Telstra talk about how racist and backward we are as a nation, to be met with widespread shouts of indignant outrage about how very unracist we are, just before 'Chk Chk Clare' got instantly famous for her "There Were These Two Wogs Fighting" tale which, of course was, yeah, maybe racist but that's okay because it was funny, so.... David Penberthy at The Punch thinks Australia is most definitely a racist nation.
The Professional Idiot, naturally, reacts with all the hilarious petulance we've come to expect of those of Dutch descent, and shouts, "No We're Not!"
But the old Australian attitudes towards people who don't look like they'd give up their life to fight in a war because The Queen demanded they do so are changing. You remove most of the bullying from society and most of the racism goes along with it.
As Scott at Grods points out in an excellent essay, 'On Racism', anti-bullying education in Australian schools is making a fundamental difference to how young Australians now view casual racism.
I've noticed Scott doesn't look he's copped much racial abuse in his life, but he does wear glasses, so I wrote this comment :
As a member of the bespectacled, Scott, how would you feel today in the following circumstances :
- A taxi driver asks you to show him on the map where you want to go, but it’s a bit dark, hard to see, you hear the taxi driver mumble under his breath, “Fucking Four Eyes are blind as bats.”
- You exit a building, slip on the stairs, two women nearby laugh to each other, “Those Four Eyes are always so clumsy.”
- You walk into a library, a passer-by shouts derisively, “Hey Four Eyes! You want a wheelbarrow for all your books?”
- You run through the rain, get in a lift, someone cackles, “You really need little wipers on those Coke bottle bottoms, don’t you?”
- You go a fancy dinner for work, the obnoxious office joker keeps coming up to you all night long, holding up three fingers, then two, then four, always asking the same question, “How many fingers am I holding up?” then laughing like a fuckwit while the people you were talking to slink away.
- You go to a restaurant, the waiter sets up the specials board six feet back from your table, he looks at you squinting through your glasses, the waiter says, “Oh, you’re one of them….I’ll bring it closer to you.”
Racism, like bullying, like picking on people who look different to most other people around them, is something most people grow out of, particularly when they're not witnessing it or hearing it from their parents, and the most prominent people in their culture.
I do find it fascinating, though, that those who are the fastest to shout "We Are Not Racist!" are usually those who also thought, still think, going to war and laying waste to races of people is a good, practical idea.
Racism, like bullying, like a belief in war, is immaturity at its most basic.
When the vast majority of Australians give up all three of those beliefs and attitudes, we become a mature nation.
.
Please Give Generously
If only it was the Rudd government filling headlines for throttling the throats of each other, The Professional Idiot could have got 10 or 20 blog posts and thousands of comments out of it, but alas, it was Liberal Vs Liberal biffo and violence and so, he's got nothing :
Journalism : It's This Close To Being Totally Gay
David Penberthy, editor of The Punch, the new Rupert Murdoch media aggregator site, describes a working day at the coalface of modern journalism :
The working day in journalism has so many pockets of variety and reflection that it’s almost too effeminate to describe - coffee runs with colleagues, flicking through magazines, clicking away on websites from here and abroad, going to the roof with a cuppa and a red pen to work on a draft.
Flicking through magazines and having cuppas in the sun is the hardcore pace of modern Murdoch tabloid journalism?
Sounds more like professional blogging.
And this even more frank admission :
Journalists have a saying which is actually more of a truism - that the job is so much fun you would do it for free.
I wouldn't say that truism too loud around Rupert, he's looking for all the free journalists he can get right now.
Rupert Murdoch thinks free journalists and free writers will save his worldwide media empire. Free writers and charging people to read them.
That's the new business model.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Despite The Liberal Party Fight Club, The Left Still Have A Lot To Answer For
By Darryl Mason
Whale-fancying, tree-fondling, raw nut loaf enjoying(-ing) Lefties cannot hide behind their soy carob lattes and hemp curtains any longer. Many important questions have been posed, there must be answers :
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?
And the biggie :
What is it with the left and their total lack of compassion for people and their self centred destructive tendencies that ignore basic principles in relationships, economics, physics, climate etc?
Indeed.
If Rupert Murdoch's hilarious delusions about reader-must-pay content actually becomes reality, one day soon you may have to cough up a few C(arbon)s to read such important political discourse.
To clear up the important differences between whatever the fuck is supposed to constitute being of The Left or The Right in Australia today, if you don't know what a true Leftie is, you're probably one of them.
Monday, June 01, 2009
A Poultry Kind Of Psychopathy
Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce is now the politician most likely to supply Canberra's press gallery with something highly quotable, and funny. He struck gold this morning when commenting on Kevin Rudd :
"The guy's a psycho chook.
"Who in their right mind gets onto a plane and because he doesn't get the right colour birdseed has a spack attack?''
I don't think I've heard 'spack attack' used by an adult since Kylie Mole went off the air, and Barnaby Joyce totally owns 'Psycho Chook' as far as Google is concerned.
"People who know him have always thought that the Milky Bar Kid image was a bit confected," he said.
Get it? Oh, come on! That's genius. Milky Bar, confected, confectionery....nothing?
Ah, forget it. Abbott's multi-layered humour is obviously too deep for the average Ostrahyun.
"Seriously Dude, They Gave Me A Freaking Grant To Watch All 400 Episodes Of The Simpsons!"
By Darryl Mason
It took more than 120 hours of valuable research time to come up with the data for this headline grabbing study but the researchers could have found all the exact same data in half a second by simply searching the words 'The Simpsons smoking' :
One of the most popular television shows in history contains a "large number" of tobacco-related scenes, say researchers who watched 400 episodes of the cartoon for science.
"We recorded 795 instances of smoking or references to smoking," says Dr Guy Eslick, a fellow of the International Union Against Cancer and honorary associate of the University of Sydney's School of Public Health.
"The most notable characters who smoked were Marge Simpson's sisters Patty and Selma, Krusty the Clown and Bart's school teacher Mrs Krabappel."
Actually, according to this list, the first result when you Google 'The Simpsons smoking', Homer Simpson is seen smoking or referring to smoking 25 times, while Mrs Krabapple and cigarettes appear only 23 times.
"Even instances of smoking being reflected in a negative way, particularly among young characters, could have an impact on promoting children to smoke cigarettes," Dr Eslick said.
The study concludes: "Viewing The Simpsons characters smoking may prompt children to consider smoking at an early age".
Interestingly, "795 instances of smoking or references to smoking," is almost exactly the same number you get if you count every mention, reference or allusion to smoking and tobacco in this list.
But this news story claims the researchers only watched the first 18 seasons for their project, yet they came up with almost the same number of smoking references as this recently updated archive, which includes smoking references in seasons 19, 20 and 21.
Did the researchers find that archive and then decide to go ahead and watch 400 episodes of The Simpsons anyway?
400 episodes of The Simpsons, running at about 21 minutes each, works out to be about 120 solid hours. Which is the equivalent of getting one researcher to do nothing but watch The Simpsons seven hours a day, five days a week, for almost three solid weeks.
I'd like to take this opportunity to offer my value-price services to any researchers needing to know how many unhealthy meals Tony Soprano grunts his way through in The Sopranos, or how many times made up swear words are used in all seasons of Battlestar Galactica.
I think the more interesting research results would have come from studying what happens to someone who does nothing but watch The Simpsons all day, five days a week, for three weeks.
I know from personal experience back in the early '90s, that even two or three days of solid Simpsons marathon viewing sessions can seriously distort your perceptions of the non-cartoon reality. It's certainly not as colourful.
.
Is There A YoLib MC In The House?
What will save the Australian Young Liberals from sliding further into irrelevancy?
PG-friendly, swears-free hip hop of course.
Learn from your American brothers, snap that mike and bust some young conservative rhymes, err...Yo!
Junkie Depopulation Looms
Drug traffickers love war, and recession.
Local illegal drug production usually increases in countries where war and major conflicts close down peacetime economies, and new markets for those drugs open up in countries where recession has stripped away wealth and assets and dignity.
Just as Australia grinds into recession, Afghanistan heroin appears, cheap, potent and about to flood the streets of Sydney and Melbourne, for starters.
This is the end product of Afghanistan's record opium crops of 2007, Even in the midst of war, or because of it, Afghanistan produces more than 90% of the world's opium supply.
There are 157,000 hectares (100 metres squared) of opium fields in Afghanistan producing 7,700 tonnes...of opium and the export value of opium, morphine and heroin at border prices in neighbouring countries for Afghan traffickers was worth $3.4bn last year.
Heroin is back on the streets of Sydney, sparking fears society will soon have to brace itself for the return of daily overdoses.
The Daily Telegraph can reveal the deadly and highly addictive drug is re-emerging and its use increasing after almost a 10-year drought.
Paramedics and emergency department doctors are beginning to treat an increasing number of addicts who have overdosed on heroin.
Unfortunately, high potency Afghan heroin is already finding a fresh market amongst the newly jobless, and homeless. Drug use and abuse booms during hard times. Apparently, some Sydney junkies are now taking to mixing ice with their smack, and hospital staff are finding overdose victims hard to deal with, some needing three times the normal dose of the anti-opioid Narcan to come down, or back.
Sun 28 Jun 09 (06:26am)
It is very interesting that the AFP were able to tell everyone the email was a fake almost immediately but have still not enlightened us as to the origins of the email. Was this all a Labor setup?