"The Economy Is Bad, But I Would Not Ask An Elf To Do For Me What I Am Not Prepared To Do For Myself"

The getaway vehicle should be easy to spot, on radar :

Brandishing a large knife and carrying an empty green shopping bag, two men wearing Santa disguises threatened the female attendant at the Cutheringa Bowls Club about 8:20pm.

They demanded she clear out the till and put the cash in the bag.

She did as she was told before running out a back entrance.

Yes, it's more New Zealand :












All photos by Darryl Mason

The Ak Attack

Piers Akerman of the Daily Telegraph says British born Muslims were involved in the Mumbai terror attacks, despite official denials by the governments of Britain and India, and so Australians who think Australian citizens should not be held without charge in the jails of our allies are EVIL. Or something. It doesn't matter. His readers get the message, they understand, and issue yet more Murdoch-media hosted calls for massacres of Australians citizens :

...lawyers, civil rights groups, civil libertarians and refugee advocates... they should all be shot as traitors.

More New Zealand :

How Does He Do It?

Many readers of The Professional Idiot have wondered and asked this very same question of TPI's valuable, comment and hit generating nemesis, 'Barry Bones' :



How indeed? 'Barry Bones' is the dim, Evil Pagan Lefty all red-blooded conservatives love, and sometimes live, to hate. Some of TPI's true believers will be driven to reply in CAPS, so very angry has 'Barry Bones' made them. When 'Bones' is gone, he/she is very much missed by the locals. A few dozen TPI commenters with time to kill can only agree with each other for so long, and wrack up only so many comments, before they need the fresh meat spill of a cliche-spangled Evil Pagan Lefty word-farting his mind. When 'Barry' is kind enough to make an appearance, dozens of comments mocking and correcting and abusing him/her follow. Traffic at TPI's must surely surge (perhaps 10 or 20%) when 'Barry Bones' has delivered another reliable, coffee-spraying, fist-clenching, spurl of expected yet still shocking Lefty ignorance and vapidity.

It must be hard for TPI not to look forward to 'Barry Bones' deciding to sprinkle some of his/her traffic generating brain snot into the comments. Times are tough, even at Murdoch's empire of digital white noise, and those paid the most have to deliver the audience numbers. So TPI can breathe a little snorf of relief that 'Barry Bones' has dropped by to help out.



Barry gets in the first comment :



'Barry Bones' gets in the first comment early, real early, this time. How does he/she do it? Maybe 'Barry Bones' should have been snipped for time travelling instead.

"We Can Give Their Parents A Carbon Credit Bonus, But Only If They Volunteer"

It seems a bit of a harsh solution to overcrowding issues at child care centres, but these are dark days we're living in. From the Sydney Morning Herald :

"This Car Ad Needs More Shots Of Fat Bearded Blokes Wolfing Down Sloppy Pies And Chiko Rolls"

It's a weird feeling coming across such an iconic mid-70s ad, particularly one you remember so well, loaded as it is with hairy blokes, Holdens, tits, Holdens, kangaroos, Holdens and a damn catchy theme song, which taught you, apparently, all you needed to know about what it meant to be an Australian, back then.



That song....a memory bomb detonates. Suddenly remember the full names and faces of friends from back then, barely remembered in three decades, that used to sing that song walking home from school, every afternoon, before getting chased by the Ford-loving sixth graders, every afternoon. Kids used to brawl over whether Fords or Holdens were the better cars, at least they did where I grew up. I once saw a seven year old mate take three big hits in the guts by a trio of Ford freaks, "Say Ford is better and we'll let you go," he refused to speak such blasphemy, he took his punches like a man. And they talk about brand-loyalty as if it's something new.

Has there been any car ad since that dared to use images of hairy blokes scoffing down their lunches while they walked along the street to brand their product?

There's a lot of sheep in New Zealand, we know this, but there are also a lot of ducks, particularly at caravan parks and camp sites. Lots of ducks.

Auckland, New Zealand.

I spent ten days in New Zealand, most of it travelling through the Northland, but the first few days were in Auckland. These images are from the blindingly green, 140 year old graveyard in Grafton Gully, right in the heart of the city. A spectacle place to stumble upon, a steep walk into a lush world of bird life, graves and history.

You step down from a busy city street, and the deeper you walk into the gully, the more wild and overgrown the foliage storms of trees, palms, vines and fern fronds become. And the deeper you go, the older the graves turn out to be, many all but totally consumed by the growth, forgotten, cracked and shattered headstones from the 1880s and 1890s, thigh thick roots splitting tombs, wrought iron twisted and warped.

The graves that mark the lives that helped build a city, slumping and tumbling down into a light-dabbled mini-wilderness.

A truly amazing place to lose an hour or three.

So, sorry for the lack of updates, but I'm on assignment at the moment, for a few days more. And to the fuckers who think this is the opportune time to 'raid' my house, be warned, my housesitters are extremely violent and easily spooked.

Christ it's horrible being away from your own computer. Right now, a middle aged German couple at the next computer are actually staring straight at my screen as I type this, while they wait for whatever 'places to be freely nude' site loads on their puter. Can they read English? I don't know. Let's find out. FUCK OFF YOU GERMAN BASTARDS!...

No, they can't read English, they're still smiling at me, nodding, yes, yes, yes, thank God they didn't win World War II and take over the world, eh? Hell, imagine what the United States would be like if a bunch of Nazis and their sympathisers and generations-on business associates seized the White House in 2001?

Clearly, I've already said enough.

Back to normal sparodic and/or five-times-a-day postings soon.

Rock onwards.

The Unfiltered No Option Filtered Internet No Access Blacklist Unoption

By Darryl Mason

Ominous, impractical and very listy :

The Government plans to have two streams of filtered (internet) content.

The mandatory portion will adhere to a blacklist of thousands of illegal web pages managed by ACMA and an optional clean feed of URLs that would automatically censor content, mostly adult material.

You can "plan" all you like, it's not going to happen. Unless the United States, Europe and the UK also come on board with almost identical and compatible net filtering systems and that would be far too Global Government-like and New World Order-ish to ever become a reality.

Probably.

Until it's hacked and released, we won't get to see the full "Blacklist" of sites that your government deems you should never be able to see, but it will include political, alternative news and so-called 'hate' sites. You won't hear much or anything about those news and political sites, but you will surely hear about a few of the other websites that will make The Blacklist, and they will be shocking and disgusting and tabloidia like The Daily Telegraph will leap all over the horrific Snuff and live suicide and Watch Me Torture This Kitten websites held as Examples Of Shame and will help pump the need for The Blacklist to be expanded even more and 'Do You Know Of A SickSite That Should Be On The Blacklist? Vote Now!'

The Rupe, however, will make sure that the Daily Telegraph and the rest of his online media, and even his more gruesome columnists, will never make it onto even the suggestion list for the Blacklist.

And none of The Rupe's newspapers or columnists should be on The Blacklist, but then neither should a pile of already very popular international and alternative news websites and blogs that tell Australians about a world of news and opinion that rarely if ever even makes the letters pages of The Australian or The Herald Sun or the Sydney Morning Herald.

The Blacklist will be a majestically powerful way for established mainstream media to block and crush the rising online competition, or at least limit its accessibility, which of course is its lifeblood. Not that ex-Australian media giants like The Rupe would ever stoop to such anti-competition tactics like that.

You get the feeling that the Rudd Government doesn't really know as much as it thinks it does about what Australians want from the internet, and what they want to read and hear and watch.

Shutting down access to The Pirate Bay, for starters, will incite raw fury in the hundreds of thousands of Australians who use it every day. They Will Not Be Pleased, and they will be motivated to find ways around the Government Internet Gateway Censors, of which there are many.

Anything that slows down net speeds, as all total filtering systems must do, will make every online gamer in the country (and there are many tens of thousands of them as well) shout "Fuck Rudd!"

The scope and scale of Australians who will be annoyed, inconvenienced and disrupted by Total Net Filtering will be massive, and the political fallout will be hard to estimate, and plan for.

You'll know just how much freedom of speech and free media the Rudd government believes in when the filters go live, for all major ISPs, towards the middle and end of 2009. Curiously, about the same time that very similar Total Net Filtering systems are expected, or hoped, to be up and running in the United States, the UK and across Europe.

Hell of a coincidence...

UPDATE : Sorry, I should have mentioned this at the start of the story, but this is all about stopping child porn. Of course.

Bullets For The Bombs

This is why "Imam Samudra and brothers Amrozi and Mukhlas" were tied to pieces of wood and shot through the heart yesterday. This is what they did to 202 people, from more than a dozen countries around the world, including 88, mostly young, Australians. This is what bombs and missiles and artillery do to human beings all over this war of and against terror.









Photos are from here

Revenge for the revenge for the revenge has been vowed, by an isolated, feverish few, while the majority remain appalled that this years-long nightmare of death and misery and sadness ever happened, ever began, ever smeared the name of Bali with the blood of foreign tourists.

The hatred and intolerance that drives men to do such things no doubt still burns strong in the hearts of some, but you have to believe, at least you want to believe, that this fever will fade, must fade, that it will not spread, does not grow, that any religious or political belief that promises a better life promises the same for all humanity.

They wanted to die for what they did. Now they are dead. They died in far less agony and fear than many of their victims.

There is consolation in knowing they cannot taunt the families of their victims anymore simply by being alive.

Claire Hatton, who lost her husband in the 2002 attacks :

"I saw a quote by Mahatma Gandhi and it said: 'The trouble with an eye for an eye is that it makes us all blind'. That's what I think."

Maria Kotronakis lost two cousins and also two sisters in the attacks :

"We're very happy ... we've waited a very long time for this and this is our justice.

"Finally the moment has come ... we are over the moon."

John Mavroudis, who lost his son David :

(he) said he "couldn't care less" about the bombers.

"I don't give a damn about them really ... we just try and get on with our lives."

A panoramic night image of the incredibly serene memorial to the victims in Kuta, Bali

Live Tourists Wanted To Pay To Swim With Crocodiles For Bemusement Of Northern Territorians



Life in the Territory :

"In the Northern Territory, the saltwater crocodile is an icon and is part of our life. They are always in the news, either in someone's swimming pool or killing someone's favorite horse..."

Man and the Crocodile can co-exist peacefully together, particularly in Darwin when it's usually too bloody hot for man or crocodile to be bothered trying to kill each other. Besides, crocodiles must comprehend by now that chomping down on humans brings much violent attention and stomach opening.

Crocodiles watch, carefully, and remember details of the movements of animals and humans in their stretch of the river for years. They know we bring flesh bags far meatier and tastier than we into their world. I'm not sure how many horses are taken by crocodiles in the NT each year, but it sure sounds like enough for it be of a 'Oh bugger, not again' frequency.


You can now go swimming with five metre long saltwater crocodiles. It's The Territory's most thrillingest new tourist attraction.

Yes, enjoy that, live bait....sorry, I mean tourists.

Getting within ten feet of the monster below is as close as I ever want to get to a crocodile again. The electrifyingly vicious snap of those jaws unleashes a primal, ancient terror that pumps hot adrenalin into your veins and turns your stomach into a trembling clenched fist.

Even on a boat, embedded on a muddy bank into which you will sink to your knees if you step off, it's with a brittle resistance that you must fight the panic-mode flight of Go! Run For Your Fucking Life! when the crocodile suddenly, and with great agility, lifts that massive head and turns those ice-cold reptilian eyes on you.

Come on, run! I dare you...

The Ocean Was Dark And Evil That Day, My Friends


Photo by Andrew Buckley

The surfer of this 40 foot wave, on a reef some fifteen kilometres off the coast of Western Australia, explains what it feels like, to do that :

“It was not like any other wave I’ve seen, it was a real evil wave, the hardest wave I’ve ever had to surf.

“It all happened so quickly though I didn’t even realise what was happening, I just knew it was a big, powerful chuck of ocean, it was just amazing.”

“It breaks so far out, right in the middle of the ocean, the deepest water you can get. It’s really cold and choppy and rough, and the water is really black out there, it’s very creepy and eerie to be out there.”

More Photos & Story Here

Points For Effort

Now this, this is amazing...


Snake Nearly Swallows Whole Kangaroo - Watch more free videos


Do snakes dare each other on to such remarkable feats of jaw stretching?

"Pffft. I once ate a whole koala, claws, everything."

"Oh yeah? Right. See that wallaby over there? Well, watch this!"

Another fantastic video to anti-promote Australia to tourists. 'It's not just dingos that can swallow your baby.'

Note to international readers : as the video shows, we Australians really do stand around in crowds on suburban street corners watching huge snakes trying to swallow wallabies and 'roos. Happens all the time.

Not So "Funny", Now...

In August, The Daily Telegraph's Tim Blair thought events following the sacking of more than 500 staffers and journalists from The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald was "fun" and "hilarious".

(Sacked staffers are) having a little rally in Sydney tomorrow morning, in case you’re wondering about an apparent increase in the city’s homeless population. Sing along, comrades!

Blair was particularly excited about the sacking of a highly paid Herald columnist.

But how many laughs will Blair get out of the fact that his boss Rupert Murdoch is about to start sacking some of Blair's own friends and fellow staffers, along with a savage culling of his barnyard of highly paid columnists?

Announcing a 30-per-cent fall in first-quarter profit yesterday, the media magnate, 77, said the company would step up cost cutting and "manage down" staff numbers where appropriate.

Asked about his newspapers in Britain and Australia, where News publishes The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and The Courier-Mail, Mr Murdoch told analysts: "You will see even leaner operations in both those places. I'm not prepared to say how many people - I know, but I don't want the headlines - but expect across-the-board cuts."

News shares fell 21 per cent yesterday, posting their biggest losses since December 1990, after the company said its operating earnings would fall as much as 15 per cent in 2008-09.

"Did you get fired, pal?"

"No, of course not. I was managed down."

Bridgit at Grods explains here why Murdoch's Sackapalooza Festival exposes The Rupe's first Boyen lecture on Australia's future as :

"...a masterly concoction of cloying nationalistic cliches and paternalistic bullshit."

There's an interesting rumour coming from media friends in the US that Murdoch will follow the example of a growing number of American newspapers and will take at least one of his own Australian newspapers out of printed circulation, to become an online only production with greatly reduced staff numbers, by next February or March.

I'll predict The Australian will get the chop from daily printed editions to become a more lavish, more expensive weekend newspaper, maybe with two magazines and a weekly free DVD.

It seems impossible to think that actual newspapers could eventually disappear, but without classified advertising, most newspapers can't afford to keep going, unless they raise circulations and cover prices and shred staff numbers.

The more newspapers rely on simply printing up Reuters and Associated Press wire stories and running syndicated op-eds, as the Sydney Morning Herald now does incessantly, instead of having actual reporters reporting on real local news, the more newspapers will die. The more reporters they sack, the less individual and local those daily newspapers will become and the less reasons there will be for readers to buy those papers. It does sound like doom.

For me at least, the daily newspaper is already all but non-existent, unless there's a long train ride to be...rodden. I've read most of the next day's paper online by about 2am. From the age of about 12 to only recently, I brought newspapers every single day, without fail. The idea of letting a whole day pass without picking up a newspaper was thought blasphemy, and downright wrong. But I can't say I even noticed when a full week had passed without having picked up a weekday newspaper along with lunch, or the evening bread and milk run.

But losing the weekend newspapers, that actual bundle of magazines and supplements and wind-catching broadsheet pages, will be devastating, and will forever change the fabric of lazy Saturday mornings, particularly those Saturday mornings spent sipping lattes at a paperback-sized, heavily leaning, curb-side table at an achingly fashionable Newtown coffee shop after a big night 'reading Miranda Devine'.

The New Anti-Americanism : Obama Win Is A "Victory For Stupidity"

By Darryl Mason

It's only been 48 hours, but the rise in Australia of the new anti-Americanism, now that Barack Obama has won the White House, by millions of votes instead of just a few hundred, has been swift, shocking and sickening.

And the worst of this vile new anti-Americanism comes from the Murdoch media.

Tens of millions of Americans voted to end the nation-gutting eight year rule of Republicans in the White House, but Australia's finest conservative, Liberal minds can't stop talking about the colour of Obama's skin. Obama didn't win, they tell us, because he had more popular policies and ideas, he only won because he is black, and "many, many Americans" only voted for him because they were stricken with whitey guilt.

Evil Pagan Lefties hated the Bush administration, that much is clear, but these anti-American extremists in the Murdoch media are claiming the majority of Americans are so dim, so deluded, they only voted for Obama because he is black, like them, or black enough to assuage white man guilt for building a nation off the broken backs of millions of African slaves.

America is now, claims one Murdoch dancing bear, "a racist nation".

Another claims Obama's win is a "victory for stupidity".

Seriously, this is how fucked up Murdoch's ballistic-bile-brethren have become months before Obama takes his seat behind that beautiful old desk in the West Wing. No doubt, their anti-American extremism will grow only more bitter and twisted.

One of the worst of these new anti-American extremists is The Australian columnist, Janet Albrechtsen. It should come as no great surprise that this anti-American sits on the ABC board.

Here Janet suffers a hilarious but disturbing downward spiral of the brain. She starts by making up headlines for an event that didn't happen :

Had Republican John McCain beaten the odds and been elected the 44th US President today, the sure-fire headline would have been “America is a racist nation”...

Now, I’m sure there are many Americans who did not vote for Obama because he is black. Some may well live in Wasilla. Hockey-mom Palin may well have encouraged them to turn out to vote for McCain. But let me run this by you. If it’s racism when an American refuses to vote for Obama because he is black, surely it is also racism when an American votes for Obama because he is black. And can anyone deny that plenty of Americans did just that when they voted for him?

Yes, they can deny that. They voted for a Democrat who wants to end the Iraq War and provide health care to the poor, for starters.

...let’s not for a second be so deluded – or hypocritical – as to imagine that race was not a reason why many, many Americans voted for him.

That must be it. They successfully fought the irresistable urge to return the Republican Party to power, while more than 90% of Americans say the country was headed in the wrong direction, just because Obama's dad was from Kenya? You're insane!

...in the meantime let me be the first to say...that this election result confirms that the US is still, in part, a racist nation.

Maybe through your hate-blinded, anti-American eyes, Janet, but the rest of us saw millions of grinning young Americans, of all religions and races, dancing in the streets of their hometowns, together, united, and so damn happy.

The Professional Idiot remains obsessed, as usual, with the colour of a man's skin. November 5 :

The Democrats are offering the cool, young black guy promising change - the African American whose mere election will heal the country’s racial wounds. The man whose age, colour and African heritage suggests he’s of a new century, a new order.

A black president. Fantastic. Now can we all get over this colour thing?

Sure. Can you?

No.

November 5 (later) :

America has elected its first black president.

If you are really looking for a race-based vote, how can anyone avoid the black vote in this election?

No. No. No. No.

November 7 :

Some 95 per cent of black voters backed the black guy against McCain...

True, looking black, he didn’t need to say more...

The Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman claims Obama's big win is "a victory for stupidity." :

Without a white woman contesting the party’s nomination, it seems unlikely a black man would have won the party’s vote.

Though Obama’s Republican opponent, war hero and former PoW and US Senator John McCain, has not raised race as an issue, the Democrats have used it to engender a sense of guilt in white Americans who harbour doubts about Obama’s capacity as the leader of the free world. Not to support Obama raises the question of whether that decision has a racist undertone...

Then there was the Daily Telegraph's Tim Blair trying to claim, on ABC's Insiders, that the only reason Barack Obama could pull 100,000 people to a speech was because he had "The Rolling Stones" opening for him, which never happened.

How shocking and crushing it must be for these new anti-American extremists to actually realise that 100,000 "Victory For Stupidity" Americans could gather to hear a political speech because they were interested in...politics?

Maybe they preferred it when Americans didn't pay enough attention to national politics so that George W. Bush could get 'elected' twice? Because Americans sure seem to be paying attention now, don't they?

Seriously, all of you Murdoch-sponsored anti-American extremists need to GET SOME HELP.

Disgusting Anti-Americanism Rears Its Mutated, Festering Head

The Professional Idiot's fading legion of Secret Fuckwits express themselves in the only way they know how when faced with the utter political demolition of the world's biggest, most powerful conservative government :




That blog is the home of the new anti-Americanism. So much hate for the world's greatest democracy. The threats have already begun to flow, have been flowing for days. No doubt, ASIO and a dozen other intelligence agencies around the world monitor the hatred. Closely.

John Howard, February 2007 : Al Qaeda Should "Hang On" In Iraq And Pray "As Many Times As Possible" For Barack Obama To Become The American President

By Darryl Mason

Pointing out that President George W. Bush can have moments of confusion about international forums ("APEC/OPEC"?) is not an international scandal. Kevin Rudd is right. What John Howard tried to do to Barack Obama as soon as it became clear he might have a reasonable shot at ending two centuries of mostly privileged white male rule of the White House was far, far worse, and will be a larger and far more noticed footnote in history now that Obama is president.
John Howard was the first high profile conservative to carefully try and link the words 'Obama' and 'Al Qaeda' in the international media, back on February 11, 2007, doing so within hours of Barack Obama announcing he intended to go for the Democratic Party's presidential
nomination :

The conservative leader said on commercial television that Senator Obama's pledges on Iraq were good news only for insurgents operating in the war-ravaged country.

"I think that will just encourage those who want to completely destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for an Obama victory," Mr Howard told the Nine Network.

"If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March (sic) 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats."

Obama's response was tough, and quick :

"I think it's flattering that one of George Bush's allies on the other side of the world started attacking me the day after I announced," Mr Obama told reporters in the mid-western US state of Iowa.

"I would also note that we have close to 140,000 troops in Iraq, and my understanding is Mr Howard has deployed 1400, so if he is ... to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he calls up another 20,000 Australians and sends them to Iraq. Otherwise it's just a bunch of empty rhetoric."

Kevin Rudd's response on February 12, 2007 :

"Mr Howard must not allow his personal relationship with President Bush to impact on Australia's long-term alliance relationship with the United States."

"I disagreed with the coalition's decision to invade Iraq ... But I have seen it as my role to discuss the future of Australian foreign policy on Iraq, not lecture United States citizens on how they should vote in the upcoming presidential election."

Of course, Al Qaeda want the wars that have cost the United States tens of thousands of lives, minds and limbs, and more than a trillion dollars, to continue for as long as possible. Bin Laden's announced strategy at the start of the war was to bankrupt the United States through endless war, so Al Qaeda endorsed John McCain :

"Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election...(McCain will continue the) failing march of his predecessor."

Howard's unprecedented interference in American elections was the first sign to me that he was was full of panic over the majority of Australians, British and Americans rejecting the continuation of the Iraq War and that he was going to lose the late 2007 elections, if he didn't get tossed from the leadership first. It was an extremely stupid thing to do, and a clear sign that Howard was losing his previously razor-sharp political instincts, perhaps from drinking, or a bit of dementia.

Howard's attack on Obama was the first or second story on every American national news broadcast that Sunday night, and both Republicans and Democrat senators told Howard to butt out of their politics. President Bush did not come to Howard's defence, and made no comment on the incident.

Howard's hilarious, but sad, attempts to unfuck his monster fuckup only showed further how much he'd lost the plot :

"...my job is to try and call what I think are the consequences of certain actions against Australia's national interest..."

"...if America is defeated in Iraq, it will be a colossal blow to Western prestige and it will give an enormous boost to terrorism and to terrorists not only in the Middle East but in our part of the world and that will not be in Australia's national interest..."

"...if we are out in a year's time it will be in circumstances of defeat."

"Now that would be circumstances of defeat and I know that the consequences of that for the West, its prestige, American prestige and influence in the Middle East, to spur that would give the terrorism in the Middle East, the implications it would have for the stability of other countries in the Middle East and also in our part of the world, the spur to terrorism..."

So will John Howard publicly welcome the Barack Obama administration, and will he apologise for his bizarre and utterly false February 11, 2007 comments?

More sttories on this from February, 2007 :

Prime Minister Advises Al Qaeda In Iraq On Strategy To Defeat America And The West

Howard : Democrat Win In 2008 Presidential Elections Will Spell Victory For Al

Demands Made In Parliament That Howard Retract Obama Comments And Apologise To All US Democrats

Howard Steps Up Attack On Obama

US Democrats Say Howard's Comments "Bizarre"

Howard Vs Obama Over Iraq Dominates US News

Obama To Howard : Send 20,000 Troops To Iraq Or Shut Up