A very, very effective first Federal Election 2010 campaign ad from opposition leader Tony Abbott :



But there's something about one part of that ad that reminds me of something else....

Rodent Rogered

By Darryl Mason



Miranda Devine, September 3, 2009 :

"A surfeit of self-love is almost a prerequisite for success now, and the proliferation of egomaniac sites, from Twitter and MySpace to Facebook and YouTube, make the peer pressure to be grandiose and irrationally self-confident almost irresistible."

On Sunday, Miranda Devine, columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, 2003 recipient of the federal government's Centenary Medal and former board member of the Catholic Weekly, engaged with 20 year old university student Justin Barbour on Twitter. Barbour didn't like one of Devine's recent columns about gay marriage :




Miranda Devine, "born in the early 60s", replied :




Devine responded to the 20 year old student's demands for an apology for publicly associating him with the raping of mostly harmless rodents, with this message :



No doubt she will get a column or six out of the Twitter frenzy and journos-on-journos column inches that followed, and no doubt it will be all to her great delight.

In at least one of the columns she will write, she will portray herself as a hapless victim of online hate speech.

As for Devine's previous views on homosexuality, she wrote this in August 2002 (excerpts) :

Gays kiss on prime-time TV shows without protest. The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras has become so mainstream that it's unfashionable. Society's attitude is basically that what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms is nobody else's business.

...modern society....is already benignly tolerant of homosexuality. There is no longer any stigma attached to homosexuality, no discrimination, not even a raised eyebrow.

But that is not enough, it seems. Activists will not rest until homosexuality is treated as just another sexual preference in life's infinite smorgasbord, just as desirable as heterosexuality, if not more so. Failure to go along with the equivalence argument will result in heavy penalty...

The US Library of Congress is now archiving every public post that appears on Twitter.

From now until the day the sun explodes, there will be a permanent digital archive at the Library of tens of thousands of Twitter messages filed under the subject Miranda Devine and #RogeringGerbils.

At its peak last night, the number of Twitter messages posted under #RogeringGerbils soaked up an astounding 1 in every 100 tweets.

The Herald Sun decided to go with the headline : You've Been Rogering Gerbils.

How could they not?




Here's a piece I wrote for ABC's Unleashed back on April 16, warning all of the permanency of everything posted on Twitter. Miranda Devine tried to delete her comments, but it didn't work.

Nothing disappears.

Roger The Gerbil : Bulwark Of A Civilisation In Devine Decline

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How Australia's 5th Richest Man Is Trying To Fuck With Your Mind

By Darryl Mason

It's like watching Jabba The Hut channeling Glenn Beck, with a script written by Rupert Murdoch's chief propagandist Andrew Bolt :




Clive Palmer has had some exceptional training in psychological manipulation.

You can break down most of the key Palmer responses into three categories - Emotional Triggers, Fear Triggers and The Brighter Future theme, to inspire hope of better things to come. All of it done purposefully.

The Emotional trigger phrase is "Mums and Dads".

The Fear trigger word is "Destroy".

'The Brighter Future' theme can be seen in variants on what will happen "when" (not if) opposition leader Tony Abbott wins the 2010 Federal Election.


Emotion :

"....when mums and dads and ordinary Australians have seen the treasurer destroy their future and the future retirement."

"Everyone knows this is true. And this is bad for our workforce. It's bad for the mums and dads that work in the mines."

"But don't destroy the economy and don't destroy the industries that are employing thousands of Australians - ordinary mums and dads around Australia."

Fear :

"....ordinary Australians have seen the treasurer destroy their future and the future retirement."

"...that's what the Labor party and Mr Rudd's about - destroying the wealth of Australians."

"But don't destroy the economy and don't destroy the industries that are employing thousands of Australians..."

"(Treasurer Wayne Swan is) suggesting 'Let's take our best industry and destroy it and bring it down to the level of the rest of our economy'."

"...give them the ability to invest in projects that will provide real jobs and create real wealth, not destroy wealth. "

"And that's why we don't like to see it being destroyed by these guys."

"...he's the first person that I'd sack for bringing a tax like this, trying to destroy our resources industry."

"If it ain't broken, leave it alone. Don't try to tinker with it. Don't try to destroy it."

The Brighter Future :

"....let's make a firm stand against the ALP and send them into the Opposition where they belong. And that's what Tony Abbott's going to do in the next election..."

"...this tax is thrown out once and for all as it should be and the Treasurer is thrown out of office as he will be in the next election."

"...the Treasurer should get the boot as well and as the Prime Minister will get the boot at the next election..."

"...that's why Tony Abbott's the last sentry at the gate and he'll throw the Government out at the next election."

Here Palmer manages to cram all three into less than 15 seconds :

"....when mums and dads and ordinary Australians have seen the treasurer destroy their future and the future retirement.

And this is what's really wrong - it goes at the whole viability of our nation and that's why it's got to be stopped and that's why Tony Abbott's the last sentry at the gate and he'll throw the Government out at the next election."

And, for the smirking amusement of his mega-rich pals and his allies in the conservative media elite, he remembers to label his enemies as Communists and Socialists :

"Just because you happen to be a socialist or a communist like we know Mr Swan is, as he wants equal distribution....But comrade Rudd and his team are going to bring them back to Australia."

Communist China is, of course, one of Clive Palmer's biggest investors.


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Yes, I am recycling posts & links from my Twitter feed and trying to pass it off as fresh blog content, but only for your weekend light-reading pleasure. The best from the past week or so :

If that dog taking the lead in the Greek riots looks familiar, he's been out front of Greek protests for TWO YEARS. http://bit.ly/c2yd8e

Poor Elvis. Death by constipation. http://tinyurl.com/2cdknax Too many opiates, not enough olive oil.

lStory claims 'Fat Elvis' would shit himself onstage and had 5 month old turds in double-width, double length colon. No wonder he shuffled.

Reading #ge2010 (UK election tweets) for an hour is like having the front pages, op-eds & editors' letters of a thousand UK newspapers poured into your head.

Seriously, a typo is the cause of the biggest intraday points plunge in the history of the US stock markets? I cough **bullshit**

Why can't we taste food over the internet yet? WHY? Even scratch & sniff would be a step in the right direction.

WTF? NYTimes, 1864 : Woman has snake living in her stomach. Sometimes rises up her throat causing strangulation http://tinyurl.com/3x22gyo

Every Magazine Your Girlfriend Ever Read, In One Issue http://tinyurl.com/2awcwss

Scotch is for unpacking, beer is for moving in. Bourbon is for rental home hunting. Lots of bourbon.

Americans don't deserve Barack Obama. Considering the fuckarama he inherited, his 1st year record of achievements is utterly astounding.

Australian needs a new political party. The Barbarian Party. Pro-drugs, pro-binge drinking, pro-street fighting, pro-tasteless comedy.

....pro-smokes on the PBS, pro-violent video games, pro-porn, pro-public executions for major corporate fraudsters

Thanks Monsanto! Mutant superweeds that grow 3 inches a day invading American farms. http://tinyurl.com/27bmosz

New York Times reporters return to sifting through "maggot covered garbage" for a story. But they got it http://tinyurl.com/2e87x4d

Celery salt is a main ingredient of KFC's 'secret herbs & spices'. Once you start adding it to food, it's hard to stop. Addicted.

Newsreaders breathe a sigh of relief that next major volcano predicted to erupt isn't named something unpronounceable http://j.mp/d6w0F0

"nuclear blasts were used 169 times in Soviet Union (to create) underground storage spaces (&) building canals." http://tinyurl.com/267x3bj

In 1967, United States had 31,255 nuclear warheads. they now have 5133. How many were detonated below ground for mining/tunneling?

Miners are whiners. Man up.

Dear @NASA . If the Earth was about to smashed by a fat meteor, would the ISS crew have to bail out to make way for the First Family?

Conservative media try to float campaign to have Rudd replaced by Gillard. Rudd has "only" 63% approval ratings. "Only." Hilarious.

Washington DC medical cannabis freedom law will have to pass House & Senate. Commercial potshops with 95 plants.http://tinyurl.com/28bq5ee

If Obama develops glaucoma, he will soon be able to legally score 4 ounces of prime cannabis a month, and smoke it on his West Wing balcony.

So the only time in recent memory The Age gets national media coverage is not for breaking a huge story, but for sacking a writer.

Murdoch's assemblage of right wing loudmouths keeping their jobs thanks to endless flow of Avatar profits. Greenie propaganda saves jobs?

"He begins to think of the sound (of citylife) as something almost alive, the rumbling exhale of a great creature" http://tinyurl.com/2c3m96q

If someone gets good video of PMRudd in a rage, hurling abuse at his staff and calling them cunts, this election is over.

Remember how Al Qaeda was going to "destroy our way of life"? Turns out it was psychotic capitalist greed instead http://tinyurl.com/3xb3dcm

If the states are abolished, does that make my mum's States of Australia tea-towel collection more or less valuable?

Blue Whales Hold Press Conference : "U really screwed up this time. Stop the oceans filling with oil or we're becoming land mammals. Again."

President @barackobama praises The 99, "comic book superheroes who embody the teachings & tolerance of Islam" http://tinyurl.com/3473ok3

Rarely seen 2003 Chris Morris short film http://tinyurl.com/36nrhqq

BP admits there are few resources "left in the world" to fight Mexico Gulf oil spill. Where are The Thunderbirds? http://tinyurl.com/36nc659

The Benjamin Button effect in Osama Bin Laden photographs http://tinyurl.com/2g86fkt

If men didn't have sports in which to show off to women, and each other, would we start growing plumage?

You Can Read My Pre-Recycled Twitter Posts Here

If enough of you regular readers join Twitter, I'll do a piece on the most interesting people to follow on Twitter, and why. Be sure to say howdy after you've signed up.

On April 30, Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, published the transcript of a short debate she had with Opposition Leader Tony Abbott on Channel 9's Today Show. The transcript included every stutter from Abbott, every repeated word, every uh and um.

Was this done for purposes of accuracy, or mockery?

Excerpts :

TONY ABBOTT: There’s no, there’s no, there’s no confusion.

...But let me say this, but let me say this, let me say this....

...I, I, I don’t see why, ah, if they want to make a donation, ah, we, we shouldn’t accept it.

The Full Transcript Is Here

Why Australians Say "I'll Kick Your Arse" Instead Of "I'll Kick Your Ass"

Piers explains all why in Crikey :

For me it’s all about the ‘r’. It leaps off the page with a meaty trill, evoking at once the hairy bum of a commando-kilted highlander and the war cry of a Cornish pirate. By contrast, ‘ass’ packs virtually no punch. To my mind it bleats in a plaintive falsetto, conjuring nothing more than a pair of sculpted ’tocks in spandex hot pants, waiting to be drop-kicked by a muddy boot.

The issue is probably more about spelling than language and I would wager that it’s a uniquely Australian dilemma. I very much doubt that ‘ass’ will be introduced into Britain any more than Americans are likely to adopt ‘arse’. Why? Linguistic jingoism aside, perhaps it has something to do with pronunciation. To the extent that written English words have at least some relationship to the way they sound, an Australian English ‘ass’ will probably sound pretty close to an Australian English ‘arse’. This is because Australians typically don’t make use of the so-called post-vocalic (or after-vowel) ‘r’, which means that for us the words ‘balmy’ and ‘barmy’ are pronounced identically. Contrast this with an American pronouncing ‘car’ as ‘carrgh’ (known as the rhotic ‘r’) or a Scot rolling the ‘r’ in ‘person’ (known as a trill or tap, depending on its length).

Kelly Gets Into The (Historical & Cultural) Detail Here

RuddRagers thought they had found and noted and ranted and whined about every last fault they could or would ever possibly think of when it came to the prime minister. They were wrong.

The photo :



The comment :

....who else holds a hot dog like that?

There is the brink of petty, and then there is the abyss.

Charlie Brooker on why the contestants for Britain's Next Prime Minister seem so hollow :

Two-faced contempt is the basic mode of operation for many newspapers: mindwarping shitsheets filled with selective reporting and audacious bias. The popular press is a shrill, idiotic, bullying echo chamber; a hopelessly poisoned Petri dish in which our politicians seem resigned to grow. Little wonder they develop glaringly artificial public guises. Picking a modern leader boils down to a question of which false persona you prefer.

Luckily we don't have that problem in Australia. Our politicians would never develop false personas designed to please the media, before the people. That would be UnAustralian.

Looks like this John Clarke and Brian Dawe bit is circulating online as a real current affairs interview, starring an Australian politician struggling to spin his way through a massive oil spill,. Which is just brilliant, really :



(via @clubwah)

Nipples = Clickbait

Back in the 1970s, Rupert Murdoch's mum put her foot down and refused to let her son publish topless pics in his Australian tabloids, as he was doing to great success in Britain. That ban has stayed in place ever since, denying generations of Australian newspaper readers some nipples with their breakfast, or morning tea break.

Until, that is, the arrival of the News.com.au 'After Dark Special Edition'.

1am :



9am :



News.com.au's 'After Dark Special Edition', for insomniacs and really early risers. But only until Rupert's mum wakes up.


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Stories I've Been Reading :

New Scientist : Adverse Reactions To Australian 'Triple Flu' Vaccine Seen In Less Than 0.5% Of Vaccinated Children

One Mile Down In Gulf Of Mexico, 'Failsafe' Systems At WellHead Fail Completely, Now Hydraulics Won't Work, Oil Continues To Pour Into Gulf, Will Obama Nuke It?

Nick Clegg, January 2009 : Israel Must Be Punished For Its War On Gaza, UK Must Stop Selling Israel Weapons

Obama Waited A Week, Just Like Bush, To Get Geared Up For Major Disaster Response

Obama's War On Wall Street Carves $21 Billion Dollar Hole In Goldman Sachs

Pervy Humans Force Animals To Fuck In Public At Zoos Because They're Denied The Right To Privacy....No, Really

Publishing Books In China : "It's Not As Controlled As You Might Think" - But Nothing On Islam Or The Dalai Lama Allowed

Flying Killer Robots Via Videogame Controls May Result In Real World War Crimes - CIA Drone Pilots Liable For Prosecution In Countries Where Attacks Occur

The United States Wasn't Under Threat From The Soviets In The 1980s, They Made It All Up, To Keep The War Industry Alive

If We Lose All The Bees, We Will Have To Eat Each Other

Pope Benedict XVI Has Seized Control Of Powerful, Wealthy Roman Catholic Religious Order 'The Legionaries Of Christ'

John Lennon's Across The Universe Has Been Beamed To The North Star - "Aliens Are Alien. If They Exist At All, We Cannot Assume They're Like Us"

17 Million Americans Use Twitter - Half Don't Update, They Just Read Along (Or Don't Exist)

Warren Buffett Has $5 Billion in Goldman Sachs - "It's Hard For Me To Get Terribly Sympathetic When A Bank Makes A Dumb Credit Bet"

The Green Rush Is On : This Is The Early Days Of The American Corporatisation Of Legal Cannabis

We Are Loading Up On Data Like No Generation Before Us, It Is Ruling (And Perhaps Ruining) Our Lives

Some Funeral Homes Will Pose Your Corpse, Say, On Your Favourite Motorcycle

The Age Of Self-Publishing : Three Times More Titles Were Published By Independent, Niche Book Publishers Than The Majors

President Obama Praises 'The 99', Islamic SuperHeroes Who "Embody The Tolerance Of Islam" & Who Will Soon Team Up With Superman And Spiderman

Tim Flannery : Elephants Have Raided Warehouses Where Body Parts Of Elephants Were Stored, Taken The Body Parts Back And Then Buried Them

Up, Up And Awa....Shit



An ABC News crew shot spectacular footage of the launch and subsequent crash of a new NASA space research/spy balloon in the Australian outback.

Watch The Vid Here

First news reports claimed that wind was responsible for the crash. But conditions around the Alice Springs launch site are now described as "calm".

No explanation has been offered yet for the crash of the balloon and its payload that was supposed to have soared to the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere at 50 metres a second.

"The World Thinks Australian Wine Drinkers Are Smug Wankers"

Mumbrella cites the below Jacob's Creek ad, screened internationally, as one of the most hated, most utterly despised Australian ads of last year, if not of all time. The Mumbrella YouTube channel, where this cloying drivel is embedded, is awash with brutal, violent comments from around the world, including this one :

"If I were at that party, I’d smash that Jacob’s Creek bottle and jam it into his throat"

And this one :

"What a complete fucking cunt that bloke is. He needs to be savagely raped with that wine bottle whilst his equally detestable stable of middle class cunt friends need shooting too."

Over the top? Yeah, that's what I thought, too. Until I watched it :



Mumbrella has collected more comments on how much this ad has made the world hate Australians here.


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An impressive collection of The Best Movie Posters Of 2009. Who says a movie poster can't be art? This is one of my favourites, and induced me to see a movie I otherwise would not have bothered to check out, which of course is the whole point of a great movie poster :



Dozens More Here

Australian born novelist Peter Carey, now living in New York City, explains Australia to the New York Times :

“This is a country that began with the most enormous trauma, and things like that stick around. History matters. For the people who settled there, it really was like being sent to Mars. They were an outcast lot — not just the prisoners, but the soldiers who guarded them. You were not a very successful soldier if you got sent there.

"So you grew up with the notion of the convict stain — people really talked about that. And that’s the power of the story of Ned Kelly: it’s really about the possibility of a people who seem to have no possibility.

“A trauma like that leaves enormous amounts of self-hatred, and we carry that degree of damage. It’s not inconceivable that a country like this would be a little unsure of itself culturally. You wouldn’t be nuts to feel insecure.”

Stories I've Been Reading Instead Of Writing Blog Posts Here :

In Australia, You're More Likely To Be Beaten By Drunks Or Sexually Assaulted In A Place Of Worship Than In Strip Clubs Or Brothels

Ratings Agencies Conspired With The Worst Of Wall Street To Defraud Investors

Pat Tillman : How Journalists Betrayed Americans By Publishing War Industry Propaganda

British Right Wing Media Has A Nervous Breakdown Over Nick Clegg

The Future Of Online Business Development - The Lean Start-Up

"Elephants Have Been Losing The Battle For Survival For The Last 50,000 Years - Since Humans Started Leaving Africa"

The Buck Stops With News Limited In The Melbourne Storm Scandal

For The First Time In A Decade, Rupert Murdoch Is About To Be Locked Out Of British Politics

European Royalty, Alive And Living Well In New York City

US Troops, Defeated By Taliban, Retreat From Remote Afghanistan Outpost

No Explanation, Yet, For How Potentially Fatal Fungus Found In Australian Eucalyptus Trees Reached North America

Democrats & Republicans Agree That War-Born Militant Populist Movements Must Be Smashed

James Cameron On Avatar 2 : "Not Only Is It Good Business, It's Good For The Environment"

The British Ministry Of Defence Have Been Ordered By A Court To Pay Iran More Than $700 Million For Decades Old Dodgy Arms Deal

Why Old Media And Social Media Don't Get Along

"Its a primitive game sometimes"







Via Reddit

New lanes under construction at Sydney's Iron Cove Bridge :

ANZAC Day in a Sydney nursing home :

The Australian Piles On The Lawyers To Hide Its Secrets

Amazing :

...the federal government anti-corruption agency, the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity....cut a deal with The Australian in which ACLEI agreed not to publish any of the information obtained about the newspaper during the investigation. ACLEI has also agreed to allow The Australian to review any future report it writes that refers to the paper or its employees.

A federal government anti-corruption agency has to allow a newspaper to review reports which discuss, or refer, to possible corruption at that newspaper. All of this results from a story The Australian ran on its front page about a anti-terrorism squad raid, a story they ran before the raid actually took place.

Your Right To Know?

Not in this case.

No wonder News Limited despises Crikey so much, they're just about the only news media company in Australia willing to report on how News Limited fights so hard to keep its secrets. And successfully so.