What If You Decide It Tastes Like Shit Halfway Through?

A fantastic series of photos here, of a black-headed python consuming a big fat goanna, near the Cloudbreak mine in the Pilbara.

Can python do it?



Yes python can.



It took five hours for the python to finish its lunch.

The whole series of photos is here.

Real Journalists, Not Bloggers, Break The Big, Important Stories...Particularly Those Big Stories About Other Journalists

Murdoch Spying Scandal Erupts, Thousands Had Phones Hacked, Millions Paid Out To Hush It All Up

By Darryl Mason

I got a bit carried away last weekend bagging out ex-Australian Rupert Murdoch's News Limited chairman, John Hartigan, for his attack on bloggers, and independent online news media.

John Hartigan said that bloggers and independent news sites, like Crikey and Mumbrella, can't really compete with the Old Media because they can't afford to pay investigative journalists to break the stories that matter :

Our job is to tell many people what few people know. That takes lots of resources – newsrooms of two and three hundred people. If we can’t afford them, important stories won’t get told.

It might mean that those in power and those with influence can avoid the scrutiny and accountability that keeps them in check.

Hartigan cited the recent UK MP Expenses Scandal as a big story that could only be properly uncovered and investigated by paid journalists working for a professional news operation.

John Hartigan is 100% right. We do need well-paid professional journalists to break the big stories that keep the powerful in check and to hold "those with influence" to account.

After all, look at the amazing, huge, monumental story that the professional investigative journalist Nick Davies, working for the UK Guardian, has uncovered (excerpts) :

What we've uncovered is systematic activity by Rupert Murdoch's journalists....using illegal techniques of one kind or another to uncover information.

One bunch of illegal techniques is to do with using private investigators to do what's called "blagging" - that's conning their way into confidential databases, things like your bank statements, credit card statements, itemised telephone bills, tax records, all that kind of stuff.

That's all illegal and they've been doing it. And the second kind of illegal activity is using private investigators to do what's called "phone hacking", which just means that they can get into other people's mobile telephone networks and hear messages which have been left on the target's mobile phone.

....there was clear evidence of News of the World journalists, including a middle ranking executive, handling the raw material that was coming through from these intercepts.

....my understanding is that that paperwork shows us that the News of the World were hacking the phones of 2,000 or 3,000 public figures of one kind or another.

(the police) didn't pursue charges against the Murdoch journalists. And I don't know the answers to these questions, but it raises the worrying possibility....that the police at New Scotland Yard didn't want to get into a fight with powerful Rupert Murdoch...he's politically very powerful.

.....you begin to get this alarming picture of the newspaper groups drifting beyond the reach of the law because they're just too powerful.

The above quotes from Nick Davies are from an interview by Mark Colvin, of ABC's PM. You can listen to the interview here (full transcript as well). Davies is very excited, because he knows just how big this story is going to become. Already has become.

In a particularly bad piece of news for Rupert Murdoch, the story has already been picked up by the financial media, who are reporting that police are now investigating his journalists in the UK.

While that kind of news grabbing headlines in the financial media might seem bad enough, there are Wall Street brokers right now trying to find out the exact size of the payouts Murdoch's UK tabloids have already been forced to hand over to only a few victims of this corrupt, rotten-to-the-core corporate spying scandal.

The figure for payouts to victims, so far, is a couple of million in total, meaning some received at least a few hundred thousand dollars to shut the fuck up and go away. A few million already paid out to a few victims. But brokers will be touting up what this scandal may ultimately cost Murdoch if all the 2000 to 3000 victims of his journalists' hacking and spying all decide to sue for payouts at least the size of those already awarded in out of court settlements.

What figure are those brokers and stock analysts coming up with? $US800 million? $US1 billion? More?

Below is a screen grab of how Rupert Murdoch's Australian media portal, news.com.au, first ran with the story, yesterday. It'll be interesting to see how Murdoch's Australian journos cover this story as it continues to unfold. This scandal will, and should, shake the Murdoch empire to its core, particularly since Rupert Murdoch himself has denied knowing anything about the millions already paid out to victims of this corrupt, outrageous spying scandal :



Like most of the bloggers so despised by John Hartigan, I sure can't afford to hire private investigators to hack into the phones of thousands of people and supply me with transcripts of their private lives so I can provide all of you with 'Breaking News' and 'Exclusives' of the kind that some Murdoch journalists are able to come up with.

So yeah, Hartigan was right, and I was wrong. Independent bloggers can't compete with the kind of journalists that Murdoch likes to employ, because we sure as fuck don't have the dollars to compile files of the private conversations and personal messages and financial details of thousands of people.

Then again, who would want to compete, or even be compared to, corrupt, intelligence gathering scumbags like that?

The Old Media Eats Itself Alive

NOTE : This story will get a whole lot more interesting, devastatingly so, if it turns out that Rupert Murdoch himself was being fed details of what was uncovered in all that hacking and surveillance by his journalists, considering one of those many thousands being spied upon was then UK deputy prime minister John Prescott.


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Andrew Bolt : God Doesn't Exist

The Professional Idiot :

Man who says sorry to people who don’t exist meets man who prays to god that doesn’t exist, either

Now you know. There is no God, and the Pope is a liar and a fraud.

It's strange, though. The Idiot was only recently prattling on about his belief in 'The Messiah', during a cosy little trip to Israel to attend a meeting along with Peter Costello, Julia Gillard and Christopher Pyne, a meeting he tells us he isn't actually allowed to report on.

Then there's this, from July 1 :

"....a Sistine Chapel makes a worshipper of even a pagan like me."

The Professional Idiot sounds like he's rolling with a bit of cognitive dissonance since his return from the Holy Land.

On Friday I Will Shout "Follow Me Friday" On A City Street And See Who Follows Me

Charles Purcell finds brilliant inspiration in the idea of testing out his online social networking skils in the flesh and blood reality of Sydney's CBD :

As one final Facebook-related gesture, I surprise hug one of my Facebook friends in real life. "You probably looked more uncomfortable than I did," he laughs. The tech editor described the status-updating feature of Twitter as like "standing in George Street and shouting out what you had for lunch". So I stand in Pitt Street Mall during lunch hour.

"I'm going to have Hungry Jack's for lunch today smiley face," I bellow. A few people look on in contempt. The lunchtime crowd walks around me as if there is an invisible bubble of shame around me. I wait an awful 30 seconds, then scream: "I polished my corns last night." (I have no corns.)

People continue to stare at the Twitter-based freak show I have become but none come near or talk to me. "I'm looking forward to Terminator 4," I cry. Despite my sharing of information, I have clearly become a social outcast. "Am I the only one who thinks the Beatles are overrated? Lol," I shout. But I'm not really laughing out loud more like crying on the inside. It's safe to say Twitter updates are the social kiss of death in the real world.

The whole Purcell piece, where he also tries to Facebook-style poke strangers to become their friends, is fantastic. Read it now.

If only he'd vid'd it.

The Chaser must be kicking themselves that they didn't think of doing this first.

Photos By Darryl Mason

Murdoch Media Jumps The Bullshit Shark In Michael Jackson Cash-In Frenzy

By Darryl Mason

News Ltd CEO John Hartigan defines the kind of quality journalism that he believes Australians will soon be paying to read online at Murdoch media sites :

It will have to be well researched, brilliantly written, perceptive and intelligent, professionally edited, accurate and reliable.

Quality will be defined as content that is original, useful, unavailable elsewhere and relevant.

I'm guessing then that in the Pay To Read future of Murdoch news sites that a story like this, from news.com.au yesterday, will be a freebie :



Media Watch takes a closer look at some of the Hartigan-praised Murdoch media "well researched, brilliantly written, perceptive and intelligent, professionally edited, accurate and reliable" stories that flowed across nearly all of Murdoch's Australian news sites, including the Daily Telegraph and the supposedly far more reputable The Australian, in the wake of Michael Jackson's death. All three stories have since been debunked by bloggers and not by the newspapers that originally published them :

Deborah Rowe Said Michael Jackson Children Aren't His
(The Daily Telegraph online, 29th June, 2009)

Jacko's Autopsy Results - Bald and a Skeleton
(The Daily Telegraph online, 29th June, 2009)

Jackson 'Overdosed Regularly'
(The Australian online, 29th June, 2009)

This is what the nanny, Grace Rwaramba, who a Murdoch fire starter falsely claimed regularly pumped Michael Jackson's stomach due to drug overdoses, had to say about the fabricated quotes published alongside her name on numerous Murdoch news sites and in just about every newspaper in the doom-speckled empire :

"The statements attributed to me confirm the worst in human tendencies to sensationalize tragedy and smear reputations for profit."

She'll never get a book deal with Harper Collins with that kind of talk.

But Grace Rwaramba was right, she nailed the truth, acutely. Tragedy was sensationalised and the profits are vast (if brief). As always. As has been the Golden Rule in the Murdoch media for almost 50 years.

For all of John Hartigan's pipe-and-tweeds aroma-soaked talk of the important role that "real journalists" and "quality journalism" plays in democratic society (and I couldn't agree more), making up shit to cash in on tragedy and horror and grief will always remain the essential core of Rupert Murdoch's profit margin.

"Well researched, brilliantly written, perceptive and intelligent, professionally edited, accurate and reliable" news stories....Well, who doesn't want all that in the newspapers we buy? And why does he need to point it out as some kind of aspirational? Shouldn't that already be the standard for all journalism?

The big problem for Hartigan is he knows better than most that it's the sensationalized tragedy and smearing of reputations-type stories that really shifts the newspaper bundles.

Used to shift those bundles, anyway.

Before the old business models of how to run a hugely, consistently profitable news corporation that maintained a semi-visible facade of self-respect, for the most part, turned to dust in the hands of Murdoch executives like John Hartigan.

But Hartigan would rather blame "the bloggers" than his own corporation's debasement of society for all those lost readers, and fast-fading profits.

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"They Had The Courage To Come When No-One Else Did"

Balibo is the new movie from director Robert Connolly (Three Dollars, The Bank) about the "no witnesses" slaughter of Australian journalists in East Timor :

A tense political thriller, BALIBO recreates events surrounding the shooting of five Australian journalists during Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975. BALIBO is told through the eyes of a sixth Australian, Roger East, who is lured to East Timor by Jose Ramos-Horta to investigate the truth behind the death of the five men, who were supposedly "caught in cross-fire" during the invasion.

Can't wait to see it. Balibo hits cinemas in mid-August.

Some recent stories of mine up at Your New Reality :

The Most Incredible Air Disaster Survival Story You Will Ever Read

Osama Bin Laden In America

Shit Monster Lives

Iraq PM Declares Victory Over US Occupation

The Moon : One Day, We May Have To Bomb The Hell Out Of It

If Only We Could Mine And Export 'Having A Go'

PM Kevin Rudd gets a decent, fairly serious profile in the US Time Magazine.

It's often interesting to read how American, UK or European media portray Australia in its feature stories. The perspective, obviously, is greatly different from anyone living here, and what may seem common knowledge to us, or to Australian journalists, often seems fascinating to outsiders. It's also curious to read a feature story in corporate media that makes Australia sound so damned triumphant, so successful, with the potential of being a major player on the world stage through the rest of the 21st century.

This Australia? Here? Really?

If Time Magazine is right, Kevin Rudd cuts a much more impressive figure on the world stage than the local media has led us to believe.

Grabs from the Time Story :

As Rudd reveals his foreign exploits, the crowd shifts; attentions wander. The Aboriginal elder who kicked off the event with a traditional welcome ceremony lets his eyelids droop....Rudd, 51, doesn't fit the typical mold of an Australian man of action....Rudd is the consummate globalized citizen....,"(Rudd will) put in a full day in the Parliament and then, because of the time difference, call world leaders way into the night".... Its geographic remoteness notwithstanding, Australia deserves watching.... (Australia) has a chance to show the rest of the world the importance of maintaining good relations with both the new century's superpowers....If Rudd can navigate warm and friendly relations with both the U.S. and China, he will turn out to be a politician of more than local significance.... "I'm in the business of making a difference"....After more than 17 years of sustained growth, Australia is flirting with recession....Rudd comes across as more buttoned-up than many of his predecessors.... In moments of crisis, his emotions resonate.....the global financial crisis underlines how individual countries, even supremely powerful ones, cannot rely on go-it-alone approaches...."I am acutely conscious of what happens when you simply allow things to drift to unrestrained nationalism".... "friends of all, enemy of none"....as a child avoiding work in the cowshed, he would retire to the farthest reaches of the farm with a book on Asian archaeology.....For the better part of two centuries, Australia's self-perception was that of a chunk of the West that unaccountably found itself floating in the South Pacific....Until the 1970s, an exclusionist White Australia Policy kept out most Asian immigrants. But today, around 8% of Australians are of Asian descent...."At last," says the Prime Minister, "we have some decent food to eat"....Some Asian, Middle Eastern and African Australians complain that they are somehow considered less truly Australian than those who came from, say, Italy, Greece or Croatia....the specter of a communist country of 1.3 billion people can spook even close economic partners.....In Taipei, where Rudd studied Mandarin, his home was the wonderfully named Republic of China Anti-Communist Recover the Mainland International Youth Activity Center...in a speech in Mandarin to students at Peking University last year, he infuriated his Chinese government minders by highlighting human-rights abuses in Tibet....can a nation really welcome being economically yoked to China if it also sees Beijing's ambitions as a threat?.... "America has a great history of reinventing itself".... at the dawn of this new century, as a country and a continent unto itself, Australia has to define its security on its own terms...."You can sit around quietly on the global diplomatic circuit and get nowhere," he says, "or you can ball up a few ideas, some of which have some prospects".... Makes you wonder whether Australia couldn't export that having-a-go spirit along with its iron ore, coal and gas. The world might be better for it.

Read The Time Magazine Profile Of Kevin Rudd Here

John Hartigan : The Uastralian iS Stell Aa Qaultiy Newpaper

By Darryl Mason

I'm absolutely loving how many blog posts the speech by News Limited CEO, John Hartigan, is producing for this blog. All that free content courtesy of Harto himself. Brilliant. And all from a speech where he berated bloggers and independent online news sites for taking a free ride on "original content" produced by News Limited.

So many stories already, and I haven't even gotten into all the marvelous data he revealed in his speech about how unprofitable online news is unless you can get people to pay to read it, and I haven't yet listed the carnival of Old Media cliches that peppered his News Limited Still Roolz speech at the National Press Club, broadcast by Sky and the ABC.

So here's John Hartigan explaining why newspapers are not dead, and why people will pay to read quality journalism that is "brilliantly written" and "professionally edited" :

This is not the territory in which aggregator sites or amateur bloggers will do well.

This is the natural terrain of the well-trained, professional, experienced, clever journalist.

Inspiring.

And here's how Hartigan's words were turned into yet another "professionally edited" cross-promotional puff piece weeping defiantly for the future of quality newspapers, in The Australian, all under this gloriously typotastic headline :




Mumbrella, who was dabbed with the smirking flint of Hartigan during his press club speech for being "not wrong for long", tries not to laugh too hard :

So let’s do some role playing. You’re a sub on The Australian.

Your boss has just given a speech about the health of newspapers.

You’ve got to put a headline on the speech.

Do you a) Check the spelling of the word “newspapers” in the headline or b) Not check the spelling of the word “newspapers” in the headline?

Clearly the answer is b). Then again, Hartigan has been sacking journos and sub-editors across News Limited, so...maybe it was an intern's fault.

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When Murdoch Newspapers Do It, It's Journalism, When Bloggers Do It, They're Stealing "Original Content"

By Darryl Mason

John Hartigan, CEO of News Limited, publisher of The Australian, is very upset with independent online news sites like Crikey and Mumbrella because they take "original content" from Murdoch publications and run excerpts of it on their sites, for free. They are using Murdoch content to create content for their websites. They disguise this 'theft', you see, as media commentary, but they're not fooling Hartigan. No way.

Most of the content on these sites is commentary and opinion on media coverage produced by the major outlets.

These sites are covered in links to wire stories or mainstream mastheads. Typically, less than 10% of their content is original reporting.

And they won't survive. Quality, Original Journalism will, says Hartigan :

If you want to attract readers, break stories people want to read.

Give them something they can’t get anywhere else....

Most online news and comment sites don’t generate enough revenue to pay for good journalism.

Good journalism is expensive.

Hartigan is upset with blogs that feed on Murdoch content like Crikey and Mumbrella sometimes do, taking a story published at a News Limited website, like The Daily Telegraph or The Australian, and quoting extensively from it. Filling, say, 90% of a blog post not with original opinion or original journalism, but with heavy, fat slabs cut and pasted from Murdoch journalism that is "expensive", according to Hartigan.

This is wrong, claims Hartigan. Unfair.

But this is just as bizarre as his claim that bloggers don't go to jail, and aren't held accountable for the things they write.

John Hartigan is, of course, full of shit.

The Australian, Daily Telegraph, all News Limited newspapers and websites, rewrite stories published in non-News Limited newspapers and magazines and print them, or post them online, as "original content".

The New York Times gets an exclusive about Saddam Hussein moving forward with plans to launch his own nuclear-missile equipped space station? Some barely heard of young actress admits to a dildo addiction in Vanity Fair? There's a couple of non-Murdoch media originated stories that can be quickly republished as "original content" in all the Murdoch tabloids, from Australia to New York To London and Manchester.

This rewriting, and heavy quoting, of other stories, essay, letters and articles originally published elsewhere, fills Murdoch publications with news, features, breaking news, entertainment, sport and 'WTF' type stories that they never paid for, or spent any more money on 'creating' than it cost for one journalist to quickly lift the best bits and write a few lines like "She revealed to Vanity Fair magazine" or "The New York Times has claimed" to dash some original half sentences around all that furious cutting and pasting, to add 10% original content to the republishing of someone else's work.

This method of taking stories published elsewhere to fill some of that space in its publications is by no means a Murdoch speciality. It's centuries old, and all newspapers, TV news, cable news, magazines, radio stations do it. They feed off each other, and republish each other's work for free, constantly.

Where do you think all the bloggers and the independent online Australian media, now so despised by the heavily populated ranks of the Murdoch executive class, learned how to do it?

As but one example, here's a piece of "original content", as John Hartigan would call it, from The Australian, published shortly after his speech at the National Press Club where he moaned about bloggers taking content from News Limited and using it to fill their own publications.

Cameron Stewart, associate editor of The Australian, takes a 7000 word essay written by Robert Manne and fills more than 90% of a 1700 word story published in his newspaper's print and online with fat slabs of quotes from Manne's essay. Cameron adds the prerequisite "Manne says" and "Manne writes". The essay was published at the independent online magazine The Monthly. The Australian's cut and paste of the Manne essay did not include a link to the full essay.

The Robert Manne essay is, in part, about the tragedy of the bureaucratic responses to the Victorian Fires in Fenruary, where 8 out of 10 phone calls to emergency services from towns like Kingslake and Marysville went unanswered that awful Saturday.

The Australian tastefully titles Cameron's cut and paste effort of this essay on the events that led to the appalling deaths of more than 170 people : 'Manne On Fire'.


The hypocrisy of John Hartigan railing against bloggers and independent online media for doing exactly what his own newspapers do constantly, have done for decades, is hilarious, gagging, mind-frying. You have to have a lot of gall and front to be a Murdoch CEO, obviously.

Try this :

People will pay for it if it is good enough. By good enough I mean that it will have to be: well researched; brilliantly written; perceptive and intelligent; professionally edited; accurate and reliable.

This is not the territory in which aggregator sites or amateur bloggers will do well.

This is the natural terrain of the well-trained, professional, experienced, clever journalist.

Clever journalism obviously also includes building a lengthy story for your online and print newspaper out of a brilliantly written essay originally published elsewhere.

But questions remain.

When News Limited begins charging to read 'prime' or 'premium' content from The Australian online, will we have to pay to read the stories where associate editors rustle up a cutandpaster filled with slabs of other peoples' work? And how much will John Hartigan charge us to read a story in The Australian almost entirely composed of an essay published at its online competitor, The Monthly?

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News Ltd CEO's Idiotic Claim "Bloggers Don't Go To Jail" Becomes International News



By Darryl Mason

Raw Story has picked up on the absurd, misinformed claims about bloggers aired yesterday by News Limited CEO, John Hartigan :

The difference, he says, between professionals and amateurs is that bloggers don’t go to jail for their work – they simply aren’t held accountable like real reporters.

This is now running as a major headline story on Raw Story, which pulls more online readers than many Murdoch news sites. So this must be particularly irritating.



Raw Story corrects the News Limited CEO for his ignorance:

Even in America, bloggers have been jailed for various reasons.

It is amusing to see that John Hartigan, who seemed so angry that bloggers and independent news sites were using Murdoch journalists' work as "free content" has now provided so much more "free content" for those independent news sites and bloggers.

This story, and all the other "free content" stories to be found in Hartigan's speech about Why Bloggers Are Shit, will now start taking flight through that despised blogosphere, and provide a feast of "free content" for independent online media.

UPDATE : Hartigan's attack on bloggers and stunning disinformation that bloggers don't go to jail, and are not held accountable, has been cut from the column-stuffing reprints of his speech, here and here, running in today's copies of The Australian.

John Hartigan : Blogs Are Shit And My Bloggers Are Too Scared To Tell Me I'm Full Of It

By Darryl Mason

Yesterday, I wrote about the 'Blogs Are Shit' speech by News Limited CEO, John Hartigan. News Limited has dozens of blogs across its websites and online newspapers, including very popular blogs by Piers Akerman, Tim Blair and The Professional Idiot. Here's a reminder of what Hartigan had to say :

"Then there are the bloggers. In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we've paid for. Something of such little intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance."

"It could be said the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no insights."

"Blogs, and a large number of comment sites, specialise in political extremism and personal vilification. Radical sweeping statements without evidence are common."

Yeah, he sounds like a fucking wanker, and Mumbrella and Pure Poison have already returned some fire, but what about reactions from some of News Limited's own bloggers? Bloggers who, amongst their ranks, pull in more than 4 million hits a month to News Limited websites? Surely Hartigan's snarky, smirking, dismissive anti-blog rant must have ruffled a few feathers amongst News Limited bloggers?

Here's The Professional Idiot's reaction to his boss labelling his '1 million hits a month!' blog "barely discernible from massive ignorance" :

He’s also confident that our own internet sites and blogs...can beat off the challenge of other blogs and news aggregators...

Err, right, Hartigan was talking about those "other blogs", was he?

Not in the speech transcript released to the media by Hartigan, or in the double-teleprompter speech he gave at the National Press Club yesterday.

John Hartigan said bloggers were full of "radical sweeping statements without evidence", and the Professional Idiot deemed his words "informed and provocative".

Even when John Hartigan spits in The Professional Idiot's face, insults his many readers who devote many hours to writing comments and providing free content for News Limited, he still curtsies and puckers up.

Surely Tim Blair, at the Daily Telegraph, will have the guts and self-respect to take Hartigan to task for dissing a blog like his that pulls more than 600,000 hits a month for News Limited?

Go hard, Tim, tear the boss the new one he deserves :



Oh.

Tim Blair pretends he hasn't heard or read his boss's complete dismissal of the Australian blogosphere and all the years he spent blogging and giving the new medium some spark and fire.

So if you're the CEO of News Limited and you pay your 'Tell It Like It Is' bloggers enough, you can not only buy their silence on Rupert Murdoch's promotion of corporate greenism, carbon taxes and global warming fearmongery (even in The Simpsons), but you can give a speech to a roomful of professional journalists and call your own bloggers' work meaningless shit in front of them all and your bloggers won't dare raise the slightest harsh word in their own defence. Or their readers defence.

How fucking embarrassing.

How shameful.


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Murdoch Boss Viciously Attacks Murdoch Bloggers For "Political Extremism" And "Radical Sweeping Statements"

By Darryl Mason

This is shocking. Digitally nervous News Limited CEO John Hartigan has launched a brutal, vicious attack on bloggers, all bloggers, including his own Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph bloggers : Piers Akerman, Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt :

"Then there are the bloggers. In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we've paid for. Something of such little intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance."

"Bloggers don't go to jail for their work. They simply aren't held accountable like real reporters....It could be said the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no insights."

"In the blogosphere, of course, the mainstream media is always found wanting. It really is time this myth was blown apart."

Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt's boss has obviously been keeping an eye on their blogs for a while now :

"Blogs, and a large number of comment sites, specialise in political extremism and personal vilification. Radical sweeping statements without evidence are common."

That's a bit hardcore, isn't it? Doesn't Hartigan know how much traffic blogs that specialise in personal vilification and political extremism generate for News Limited?

After using most of an hour of a live ABC TV broadcast to pump and hype the success of the Murdoch media online, News Limited CEO John Hartigan didn't have time to explain how New Limited lawyers acting for two journalists have tried to shut down independent blogs; desired to find out anonymous blogggers' real names; demanded payments for "immeasurable hurt" allegedly caused by bloggers to News Limited journalists, all fit into his high-profile 'Right To Know' campaign to protect sources, shield whistleblowers and demand greater freedom for the media.

Maybe next time.


Note : Seeing as John Hartigan didn't single out certain bloggers for criticism, we have to assume that when he says "And there are the bloggers" he is referring to all bloggers, including Akerman, Blair and Bolt.

He Said 'Mate' But He Meant 'Messiah'

The Professional Idiot goes to Israel and comes home with a fever :

Peter Costello was in Jerusalem last week, just a few metres from where Christ rose from the dead, when he heard a voice.

"Mate," it said.

"Mate, ya gotta take over the leadership."

It was just another tourist who'd recognised the former treasurer as the Messiah....

The Professional Idiot closes his declaration of religiously-fevered brolove for Peter Costello with an Old Testament translation of what the tourist said, but didn't :

...even more would have added their voices to the one Costello heard a few days later by the hill of Golgotha.

Peter, rise again. Your people await their Messiah.

The Professional Idiot is now beyond parody.

Jeremy Clarkson Defends Hapless Druid Hippies Against Police State UK

Hairy people in a field in England after midnight, trying to have some fun, and forge a link with their ancient cultural past, are harassed by the relentless buzzing of the unmanned spy planes that the people of Iraq and Afghanistan now know all too well. Spy planes circling religious ritualists in a field.

When powerful, influential writers like Jeremy Clarkson start taking the sides of hairy, dope-smoking old Druid hippies against the constant WTF? impositions of a rapidly expanding British police state, it's clear the cops have gone too far, for just about all Brits :

Last week (the Druids) were at Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice. Apparently, 36,500 poor souls got up in the middle of the night and were dragged by their beliefs and their little Citroëns to a field in Wiltshire where they were forced by custom to mark the disappointingly cloudy dawn by chanting and pretending to be King Arthur.

....I have every sympathy with these people and I wish them well. I like having hippies in the world. They bring a richness and a calm, and while they like to wear hoods, they do not beat up old ladies.

What in the name of whatever god you hold dear were the police doing using an unmanned spy drone to fly around, taking pictures of these people as they swayed gently in stillness of morning?

I can see why the army might need a spy drone in Afghanistan. But how on earth could the Wiltshire constabulary justify the purchase of such a thing? To catch crop circlists? It’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.

Why send sniffer dogs to their annual summer get-together? We know there will have been some dope and we know, because they’d stayed up all night, that some of the morris men will have got some marching powder up their schnozzers. But if it’s busts they’re after, Plod would probably have had a higher success rate if they’d had a snout about in their own locker rooms.

Read it all, it's excellent, and Clarkson's riff about saluting magpies is hilarious.

Yes, The Sky Is Blue

Australia's most boring columnist states the bleeding obvious as only he can :



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?'

Yeah, whatever.

UPDATE : Gerard Henderson, Howard Hater :

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.

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 :

Malcolm Turnbull has paid for his botched attack on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, with more than half of voters believing he was deceitful about a now-notorious fake email. Even among committed Coalition voters, nearly a third believe he has been deceitful and another 10 per cent say he has been dishonest.

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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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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