Murdoch's Pot Of News Gold

By Darryl Mason

Front page from the only newspaper in Australia I would pay to read online, The Northern Territory News :



Yesterday's front page was even better :



The story :

Territory victims in large-scale accidents or catastrophes will soon be barcoded at the scene before being sent to hospital.

Experts say it is only a matter of months before Territory emergency services adapt the revolutionary barcode card technology

Card?

The technology is designed for major catastrophes which involve more than 10 victims.

Royal Darwin Hospital director of disaster preparedness Dr Ian Norton said it would put the Territory at the forefront of major emergency responses in Australia.

"It's the holy grail of disaster management," he said.

Disaster or large scale accident victims will be given cards, with barcodes on them.

But I read the whole story. So it worked. The few moments of 'Wait, nobody's going to be forced to get barcodes tattooed on their arms and/or foreheads?' disappointment faded because it turned out to be an interesting story anyway.

Pretty soon the Northern Territory News is going to find a way to combine two of their most popular front page subjects - UFOs and crocodiles. At least I hope they do. I know they can.

UFO and crocodile (sighting, attack, wrestling, death roll, walking upright) stories bring the NTN the kind of international traffic that makes jaws drop across the rest of the 'serious' News Limited newspapers, like The Australian and the Daily Telegraph. Why the rest of Murdoch papers don't raid the NTN mercilessly for stories and headlines is a mystery. Why Fox News, for example, doesn't have a chunk of a show devoted to rounding up a week's worth of NTN's WTF? news and outback wisdom and madness is just bad business.

Anyway, soon the Northern Territory News will run a front page claiming that crocodiles are being abducted by UFOs, or better yet, that crocodiles leaped up and grabbed a low-flying UFO and caused it to crash, and I'll be ordering a copy of that front page, laminated.

No, framed.

To add to the collection :






Crocodiles + Bikini Girl :



I love that a g-string eating dog takes news priority over some guy getting smashed in the head with a television set. As it should :




Still one of my favourite news stories of 2009 :



That's how you sell newspapers.

And by the way, that cat can talk, and if yours doesn't, well, that's probably because you don't love it enough.


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The Late Show, in the early 90s, saw the future :



The state of Australian wogomedy, 2010, international distribution and a chunky location budget



It will be one of the highest grossing Australian movies of the year. Sweeet mate.

(via @ClubWah)

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The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig was longer and wider than a football field. It sits at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, after explosions shattered the platform and killed 11 people on April 20.

Then the oil and natural gas began to flow. BP doesn't know how to stop this :

,,,,one intense kick of natural gas caused the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to be shut down because of the fear of an explosion just weeks before a similar release succeeded in destroying and sinking the platform and sent millions of gallons of oil on a collision course with Louisiana and the rest of the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

The hole from which tens of thousands of barrels of oil now geysers reaches 30,000 feet down into the Earth's crust. They can only make educated guesses about what's down there, or what's coming up the pipe.



From NOLA :

Shortly before the accident, engineers argued about whether to remove heavy drilling mud that acted as a last defense against such catastrophic kicks, and the decision to replace the mud with much lighter seawater won out.

...(frozen natural gas) slush forced its way to the rig, shot 240 feet in the air and heated into a gas that quickly ignited into fireballs....Among those tossed asunder by the explosions were BP officials who were on the rig to celebrate a seven-year spotless safety record.

This Is A Must Read

Stephen Colbert : "No One Knows What The Fuck They're Doing"

Federal Election 2010 : Free Buckets Of Fear & Paranoia For All

The Liberal Party may have John Singleton about to start churning out 'Tony Abbott : The Real Choice' ads, but Family First has got Groupthink :



UPDATE : I was shocked to learn the above is not a real ad for Family First's election campaign. They should purchase it immediately.

Unfortunately, that fake ad is exactly of the style and theme that we are going to be inundated with all the way up to the election.

It will be a repulsive campaign of negativity and fear.

And millions of Australians will fall for it, willingly, because they love to think they've got something other people want, and will do anything to get.


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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.

Actor Simon Pegg sums up the mocking outrage today in Britain towards ex-Australian Rupert Murdoch, as the owner of 40% of Britain's newspapers is repeatedly exposed for desperately trying to control, yet again, who will be elected prime minister :




An ad from the UK Independent, getting widespread exposure through non-Murdoch media, blogs and Twitter :



Murdoch's The Sun Accused Of Hiding Poll Results That Show Third Party Candidate Nick Clegg Could Become Prime Minister

James Murdoch Storms Into Office Of Rival Newspaper Editor Shouting, "You're A Fucking Fuckwit!"

Desperate Days As Murdoch's Anti-Democratic Behaviour Lights Up Internet

SpinMasters On Murdoch's Sky News "Like Watching The Live Abortion Of Democracy"

This beautiful image of Tasmania's Franklin River, by Peter Dumbrovskis, has been chosen as one of the best nature photographs ever taken :



A couple of Australian images made the list.

Slaughterhouse photo by Tommaso Ausili

More Winners Of The Sony World Photography Awards 2010

Reader Steve S. came across this piece of oh so honest news categorisation by Google this morning :


(click to enlarge)

"Good Headline, Boss!"

News Limited boss John Hartigan on what is being termed The Biggest Fraud In Australia's Professional Sporting History, involving the Melbourne Storm, the rugby league team News Limited owns :

"This club has had a couple of rats in its ranks...."

It was a line Hartigan ran out for an interviews on A Current Affair, ABC News and every other encounter he had with news media yesterday.

News Limited's The Herald Sun complies on its online front page :





John Hartigan must be feeling particularly rattled by this scandal, not only for the millions News Limited will lose now its team is facing a massive plunge in merch revenue and sponsorship dollars for the rest of the season, but also because News Limited's "exclusive" coverage of all things Melbourne Storm was said to be one of the key selling points of the 'premium' paywall packages the corporation is now putting together for a launch only a few weeks away.

News Limited no longer has the Melbourne Storm as a viable attraction to entice rugby league junkies to pay to read The Herald Sun or The Daily Telegraph online.

That's gonna hurt.

The First Rule Of Elderly Ex-Prime Minister Fight Club Is....

This video story from Lateline explains what's going on behind this excellent photo from an AAP photographer, which appears to show former Australian prime ministers Bob Hawke and John Howard on the verge of exchanging blows....or Hawke beating Howard in a particularly aggressive game of Rock, Paper, Scissors :

This isn't going to help the Rudd government unload its massive stockpile of quickly expiring influenza vaccinations into the arms of Australians :

....45 children have been taken to hospital suffering high temperatures and febrile convulsions after receiving the vaccination.

That's 45 children under the age of five, in West Australia alone.

The flu vaccination program in WA has been suspended.

More images from Australia's media history in this ABC News photo archive :

Fielding : 1 In 2 Australians Afraid To Go Out At Night, Terrified Of Drunk Women Vomiting On Themselves

I had no idea the Blink Drinking culture in Australia was so completely out of hand. Senator Steve Fielding brings us up to date :

Australia has become a nation held to ransom by binge drinking with one in two Australians too frightened to go out on the streets at night.

Haven’t we all had enough of drunken yobbos taunting people walking by, of young women lying sprawled on the street with vomit down their party dresses and groups of grog-fuelled men wandering our streets looking for a fight? many Australians enjoy a drink responsibly for too many having a drink means getting blink drunk.

Our drinking to get drunk culture is destorying this country."

The destoryuction must be stopped.

(via @ScottBridges)

Sky News accuses ABC News of corporate espionage :

In a statement to The Australian, Sky News chief executive Angelos Frangopoulos labelled the actions of the ABC both "unethical" and "unprofessional".

"The Sky News content used by the ABC was not intended by either Sky or the Prime Minister to be broadcast," Mr Frangopoulos said. "It indicates that the ABC has tapped into the Sky News bureau feed and has used the footage without our permission.

The fallout should be interesting.

Before children stared at TVs, they stared at radios, in almost the exact same utterly transfixed way :



More Excellent Images From ABC's News Photo Archive On FlickR


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"I Don't Care"

Documentary maker Errol Morris (The Fog Of War) calls this "the best commercial ever made". It's definitely the best no-budget commerical ever made.



The challenge has been laid down. Australian zero-budget local commerical makers, beat that.

Extras : How the commercial was made -Two Guys, One Camera

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It's Not Movie Piracy When Hollywood Does It

So if you've got a couple of minutes, watch these two movie trailers and spot the similarities. It's not too hard. First, an Australian movie called Freedom Deep :



And next, one of Warner Bros. mega-budget box office monoliths (or so they hoped), The Book Of Eli :



Yeah. Amazing, isn't it?

So how does an Australian movie get away with blatantly ripping off a big budget American flick?

Well they don't. Because they didn't.

Freedom Deep was made in 1995. The Book Of Eli was made in 2009-2010.

Think about that the next time you hear Warner Bros. executives whinning about movie piracy and how it's "destroying the movie business".

More from Encore Magazine :

(Australian writer/director Aaron) Stevenson claims The Book of Eli is “virtually identical” to his film Freedom Deep.

“It’s not just the premise of the prophet getting the book back to the remnants of civilisation; that plot point is the same, but there are lots of visual references as well,” said Stevenson. “The last 10 minutes make it a little different, but up to that point, it’s pretty much the same.”

“We’re independent and we don’t have the money to go to the US and start a legal case. It’s a David and Goliath story and we need the publicity first. We’re looking at the possibility at the moment,” said Stevenson.

It will be a long and ugly and expensive fight, unfortunately. Hollywood studios don't give in easily to such lawsuits, even when it's obvious blatant plagiarism has occurred.

The Full Story Is Here

One of the latest contributions to the There's NothingLikeAustralia.net tourism website :




More Here

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Nick Barker, from back in 1994 :



Nick Barker, in 2010 :



I should mention that Nick Barker is rumoured to be reforming his awesome rock band from the late 1980s/early 1990s - Nick Barker & The Reptiles. I'll write some more about them when I confirm the rumour as true.


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Political Career Tweets Itself To Death

By Darryl Mason

The future of the Young Liberal National Party doesn't look so bright when they've got vile racists like Nick Sowden representing them.

Some of Sowden's recent contributions to Twitter, after watching the Kerry O'Brien interview with US President Barack Obama on the 7.30 Report :

@nicksowden I'm not sure why they paid Kerry to fly to the US, if they wanted an interview with a monkey surely a Ferry to Taronga would have sufficed.

But one revolting outburst wasn't enough. He had to post another :

@nicksowden If i wanted to see a monkey on TV id watch Wildlife Rescue.

He then revelled in the outraged comments reacting to his racism :

"nothing like a little bit of hating to make you feel that little bit better!"

Then Nick Sowden deleted his Twitter account.

He's obviously a deep thinker :

When I equated (Tony) Abbott's comments to a general feeling of the community I meant to show that if Abbott's comments were homophobic, then Australia is also a homophobic country. This is about as true as saying that Australia is a racist country. Whilst those on the left will push this portrayal of Australian society, the rest of us know differently.

Oh yeah, we know.

Sowden's friend @PeterBlackQUT, an academic, claims he only did it "to shock and offend" :

as i know @nicksowden i know he was joking and i'm not going to condemn him for it

More Sowden presumed attempts at "joking" :

(On NSW premier Kristina Keneally) "stupid bitch, youre not in the kitchen anymore!"

(On shadow minister for education, Christopher Pyne) " it's hard to describe Pyne without sounding misogynistic and homophobic. Fuck it, he's such a camp whiny bitch."

"Fuck you UN - i'll give you 'overt racism' you retards. #leftyfucktards"

"its not the obama administration, its the obama disaster and it is an affront to freedom and the history of the WHITE house."

"We need to see another film with a minority in it. there has to be a film with a gay darky in it"

"technically (refugees from the Middle East) aren't people, is there something from the UN on animal rights?"

A political career ends before it begins.

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Sydney from the International Space Station.


(click to enlarge)

Photo by Astro_Soichi

Why Are Australian Soldiers Training To Sniper Fleeing Unarmed 'People'?

In a fake West Australian town, robots riding Segways are being used as targets for 'urban warfare' live fire sniper training :



For now, the Segway riding robots are not shooting back. Or planting IEDs. Or running at sniper positions wearing bomb vests.

They're just playing the role of civilians, rolling around their town, getting picked off at a safe distance with high-powered sniper rifles.

I wonder if they've tried this out with the automated sniper/sentry bots already in use in Iraq and Afghanistan? A bit of robot killing robot action?

And those who think today's youth are the cause of all crime and misery and street violence will be pleased to note that some of the robots are wearing hoodies!


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The Greens Are Now Bigger Than The Nationals, Even In The Bush

It won't be the Labor Party or the Liberal Party who see startling swings towards them at Federal Election 2010. It will be The Greens, as Lenore Taylor explains in National Times :

In 2010 the Greens want to be seen as a mainstream party, not a protest movement in political disguise. They base the claim on their polling and on how they have used the power they have already got.

In the latest quarterly breakdown of Newspoll the Greens are polling 11 per cent, 3 percentage points ahead of their 2007 vote. Even taking into account the tendency for opinion polls to slightly overestimate the Greens' vote, it's a strong position. The Greens now outpoll the National Party in both the cities and in the bush.

And ever since 2007, when they found themselves the largest party on the Senate crossbenches with five senators, after the demise of the Democrats, they deliberately set about proving they could be "responsible" holders of the balance of power.

They negotiated the passage of many critical bills including the government's second stimulus package, which Malcolm Turnbull's Coalition opposed. The Greens also negotiated through bills like the youth allowance and the Medicare levy surcharge. The claim to be mainstream could have a significant impact on this year's poll.

In the Senate the Greens will be pitching to the centre - with a message that a vote for them is a vote for stability because they can negotiate a way through legislative deadlocks.

"We're the ones that made the stimulus package better and then voted it through. Without us there wouldn't have been a stimulus package and we are not going to let that be forgotten," (said leader Bob Brown)

The Greens vote in the recent Tasmanian elections was a whopping 21%. Their best result yet. And this makes the gatekeepers of the traditional Two Party State System very, very nervous indeed.

It's going to be a strange election. You'll see Labor hammering The Greens wherever they can, while the Liberals will stay quietish. An unofficial Greens-Liberals coalition may become reality sooner than most political pundits think.

The Full Story Is Here

Pity The Wife

I don't want to have to keep pointing this out to international readers of The Orstrahyun, but we are not weird and scary people.....mostly :



(Via @prawn_gravies)

"Print Is Dead"

Rupert Murdoch should have listened to Egon, who made this prediction about the future of printed works back in 1984 :