It's Not Comedy If Nobody's Offended

On Twitter, ABC boss Mark Scott points out this piece published at the National Times on how TV comedy is being killed by committees and the easily offended. Excerpts :

....the BBC has decreed that its comedies are not to be ''unduly intimidatory, humiliating, intrusive, aggressive or derogatory''. John Howard Davies, who used to run BBC comedy, pointed out that this is the sort of absurdity that happens when a committee decides guidelines. An individual exercising editorial judgment is far preferable, especially if that individual has been chosen because of his or her connection with the real world, and what makes people laugh in it.

I have occasionally thought that I used to find programs put out by the BBC funny because I was so much younger when I saw them. However, watching re-runs of old comedy programs, I realise I was wrong: they were, plainly and simply, very funny. The famous Fawlty Towers episode in which Basil insults the Germans fails every one of the new guidelines. It is racist, intimidating, humiliating, mocks Spaniards, Germans, and the mentally ill, and commits other offences too numerous to mention. It is also dementedly funny, even after repeated viewings over 30 years.

After 70 or so years of influencing and shaping the definition of the national sense of humour, the BBC now seems to have forfeited its ability to do that.

I don't know what, indeed, there will be left for us to chortle at.

It makes me realise that my wife is right when she says that once you get past the age of 40, there isn't really anything on the BBC for you. Except Gardeners' World, of course: and we should make the most of that until someone realises how much it discriminates against those who don't have gardens, and who might feel humiliated by the lack of one.

The push for more censorship of Australian comedy and satire does not appear to be coming from the public, but from groups concerned with garnering publicity and profile and tabloid media looking for easy, cheap content to fulfill it's weekly clickbait 'Moral Panic! quota.

Why ABC Boss Mark Scott Should Tell The Daily Telegraph To Get Fucked

The Australian Tries To Stir Up Support For Murdoch's War On Free, State News Media

By Darryl Mason

From The Australian :



Criticism from who exactly?

Let's go to the story and take a look :

ABC managing director Mark Scott will this week attempt to hit back at mounting criticism...

note : "mounting criticism"

....of the public broadcaster's role in the internet space which commercial media companies say is threatening their business models.

So, the mounting criticism is coming from "commercial media companies."

Now there's a surprise.

The debate is heating up...

The debate is heating up in the pages of The Australian, who are now trying to convince an overwhelmingly skeptical public that they should pay to read Murdoch media news stories online.

The debate is heating up after Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation (owner of The Australian), again urged media companies to adopt online payment platforms for news at the World Media Summit in Beijing.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to creating a new model is taxpayer-funded content appearing free on websites such as those of the ABC and BBC.

Taxpayers getting their news for free from news sites that their taxes pay for? Fucking outrageous!

Rupert Murdoch is just plain terrified.

"We find ourselves in the midst of an information revolution that is both exciting and unsettling," Mr Murdoch said.

Anyone else feeling unsettled by this information revolution, by the greatest free exchange of information, art and knowledge in the history of mankind?

No?

Said Rupert Murdoch, who's now losing billions :

"The presses are now silent at some of the world's most famous newspapers -- they were supposed to report on their societies, but somehow failed to notice that those societies were changing fundamentally."

So this Great Media Visionary is telling us that newspapers are going out of business because they failed to notice the dramatic changes erupting across the societies they are reporting on?

What's the problem here? As Rupert Murdoch said back in 1989 :

"If someone goes bust, too bad."

Back to Digital Rupert 2.0 :

"The Philistine phase of the digital age is almost over."

Really? You think so?

"The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content," he said.

But will the Murdoch media pay for all for the content they "plagiarise" from other news media they do not own, along with the reams of content they find for free at Facebook and Twitter, and lift without credit from Digg, Reddit, TMZ and dozens of other independent blogs, aggregators and alternative news sites?

Fuck No.

Mr Murdoch said if media companies "do not take advantage of the current movement towards paid-for content, it will be the content creators....who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs will triumph".

I've written ("created") more than 2 million words of free-to-read blog content in the past four years (not including the content I've kleptomaniacised) and the only price I've paid is spending many hours doing something I love, making a whole lot of new friends and developing deep interests in subjects I probably would have never cared much about at all if I hadn't felt the drive to write about them here, and at Your New Reality.

Anyway, enough of Digital Rupert's hilariously 20th century opinions.

Let's get back to evidence of the "mounting criticism" as claimed by The Australian :

Chris Wharton, the chief executive of West Australian Newspapers, which is also examining online charging for its news, said the ABC was "the elephant in the room in this debate".

So, we've got Rupert Murdoch and Chris Wharton. And that's it.

The Murdoch media reports on "mounting criticism" coming mostly from Rupert Murdoch. The criticism is "mounting" because The Australian keeps reporting on Murdoch's criticism of free news media.

That's not a news story. It's corporate media PRganda.

Anyway, the ABC isn't the only Australian news media giant that intends to keep allowing readers and viewers to access its news content for free.

Mumbrella reveals that NineMSN has vowed to keep its news content free, as its hundreds of thousands of daily readers have come to expect.

NineMSN CEO Joe Pollard (excerpts from her blog statement) :

The debate over charging for online news content intensified again last week after a number of independent research studies showed this to be an immensely unfavorable strategy amongst those surveyed.

As Australia’s largest online publisher, ninemsn is frequently asked about our own business strategy when it comes to revenue generating streams for our news product. For the record, we do not intend to charge for our online news content.

As premium, innovative and differentiated as our news product is however, introducing a charge for our audience to consume it is just not part of ninemsn’s game plan…but nor is this really what the “paying for online news content” argument should be about anyway.

At ninemsn, we firmly believe an advertiser-funded model is what Australian audiences expect and accept when it comes to the consumption of online news....it’s a model that’s proven and tested…and if it continues to be available as professionally produced, freely and easily as it is now, audiences will continue to vote with their “feet”.

Charging audiences for online news content they can currently access for free is like putting a toll booth in the ocean…and it’s a big ocean.

And unfortunately for Rupert Murdoch, he's no longer the biggest fish. He's more like a lumbering whale being vigorously pursued by a million little fish, constantly nipping away, slowing him down, diluting his influence, subjugating his once formidable power and control.

Now that's a free media in action right there.

And something to be celebrated.

July 2, 2009 : John Hartigan's Idiotic Claim "Bloggers Don't Go To Jail" Becomes International News

August 2, 2009 : The Orstrahyun Hails Murdoch's 'Death To Free Information'
Movement

August 10, 2009 : Who Just Lost Another Few Billion Trying To Convince You That Celebrities Are Important And That People Who Don't Look Like You Can't Be Trusted?

Murdoch Media Asks : Michael Jackson, Not Dead?

September 17, 2009 : Rupert Murdoch Celebrates Death Of Newspapers : "It's Going To Be Great!"

Apparently, the botox doctor who did this to half of The Chaser's Chas Licciardello's face....



.....is now promoting himself in press releases as the`trusted doctor to Chaser’s Chaz Luciado''!

He should use that photo in his publicity.

More...Chas gets a copy of the press release and responds.

Fantasy Boy Steve Fielding Still Appalled, Mortified By Realisation That Jesus Was The Original Hippy Greenie

By Darryl Mason

Is Senator Steve Fielding outsourcing his press releases to Rupert Murdoch's anti-Greens chief propagandist, Andrew Bolt? Sure reads like it :

The Greens would rather send Australia back to the Stone Age than use common sense....

“I don’t know what planet the Greens are on, but by the look of their ‘Safe Climate Bill’ they look like they’re lost in space,” Senator Fielding said.

“If Bob Brown and his hippy friends really believed in their cause they’d ride their bikes to Parliament House instead of using the Commonwealth’s petrol-guzzling V8s.

“If we did what the Greens propose Australia would no longer exist because there’d be no industries left to drive our economy."

“The Greens’ proposed 40 percent reduction in emissions would cripple our economy and boot thousands of jobs offshore.

“The hypocrisy of the Greens beggars belief with the way they carry on about the environment yet show no evidence of doing anything about it in their personal lives."

“The Greens should either practice what they preach or just shut up and go away.”

Further proof needed? Here's the headline Fielding chose for his press release, in all screaming caps :

GREENS PLAN ECONOMICALLY LAUGHABLE, FOOLISH AND LUDICROUS

Fielding better watch himself. Rupert Murdoch has been ranting like a loon (or like someone who's lost a few billion dollars) about the evils of "content kleptomaniacs" recently. If Fielding's going to lift so much content from Andrew Bolt, he may be in big trouble :

"(the) plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content."

But can you copyright political propaganda?

UPDATE : Earlier today, Andrew Bolt published the key lines for the revived, and rather boring, political strategy for attacking The Greens (they use cars! and planes!) from Fielding's press release, before it went online.

How very similar it is to Andrew Bolt's own favoured "Look! Hypocrisy Over There!" methodology for attacking The Greens. Surely just a coincidence, and not at all groupthink.

Or something more suspicious.

Did Andrew Bolt get a preview of the press release from Fielding by e-mail, or fax? Or did Fielding read it to him over the phone while he was 'putting it together' ?

Family First Senator Steve Fielding is tired of being hectored by hypocrites:

From 1 July to 31 December 2008 Greens Senators spent $164,240 flying around the country.

“The carbon footprint the Greens leave behind jet setting across the country is just another minor detail they forget to include when they campaign about lowering carbon dioxide emissions....”

(No link yet to press release.)

How very, very interesting.

Is 'journalism' now a second job for Andrew Bolt?

Below, David Marr catches up on the Sunday morning papers, during the 'Morning Papers' segment of Insiders, while Bolt waffles about his latest climate change conspiracy theory, that doesn't include the fact that his boss, Rupert Murdoch, is the world's leading promoter of global warming fearmongery and carbon neutral corporatism.

Murdoch Attacks Bloggers, Again, As His Empire Self-Destructs

This is from an Associated Press story, about the Associated Press boss, Tom Curley, and News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch complaining, once again, about search engines and bloggers "stealing" their content. Interestingly, this story is hosted on Google who paid Associated Press to the use the story, and yet the Associated Press boss, Tom Curley, is angry about search engines like Google using their content without paying for it :

The leaders of two of the world's major news organizations said Friday that it is time for search engines and others who use news content for free to pay up.

The comments from Tom Curley of The Associated Press and News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch come as the media industry struggles in the Internet age. Many news companies contend that sites such as Google have reaped a fortune from their articles, photos and video without fairly compensating the news organizations producing the material.

"We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission," Curley, the AP's chief executive, told a meeting of 300 media leaders in Beijing.

"Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers," Curley said. "We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content."

He said content aggregators, such as search engines and bloggers, were also directing audiences and revenue away from content creators.

"We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost — to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it," Curley said.

Murdoch also told the opening session of the World Media Summit in Beijing's Great Hall of the People that content providers would be demanding to be paid.

"The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph," the News Corp. chief executive said.

The AP and its member newspapers contend that unauthorized use of their material is costing them tens of millions of dollars in potential advertising revenue at a time when they can least afford it.

The AP's revenue is expected to be around $700 million this year, down from $748 million in 2008, in part because of reductions in the fees it charges newspapers and broadcasters, whose advertising revenue has been dwindling as more marketers shift to less expensive or better-targeted options online.

Murdoch and Curley were speaking to 300 representatives from more than 170 media outlets from 80 countries at a meeting that will look at the challenges and opportunities the media face from the Internet, changes in technology and the world economic crisis.

It'll be interesting to visit this story again in three or four years and see what's happened.

We Told Them Everything!

In 1977, Voyager 1 & 2 were set loose into the solar system. Voyager 1 is now 10 billion miles from home, and sometime in the next few years will reach interstellar space. Both spacecraft contain copies of The Golden Record, gold-plated discs filled with information about where Earth is located in the Milky Way galaxy, how our genitals work, far too much info about human DNA and various images of humanity at play and at work, and a selection of spectacular locations from across the planet.



One of those images is of Heron Island (image 41 in this collection)



Another shows the Sydney Opera House (image 95)



Maybe it's the booze-alternative talking, but I think that is monumentally cool.

It's possible that long after the Earth has been burned to a cinder by the death of our Sun, those images of Australia, and the greetings of Earthlings from more than 100 nations, will still be floating through the galaxy (fuel sources are expected to expire around 2020), waiting for something to find them, to fire up the disc player, push the right button and to learn all about our species, who we were, what we did and how we once dreamed of something bigger than ourselves and our petty squabbles that seem to consume too much of the lives we live on this little blue-green planet.

UPDATE : Carl Sagan says it all so much better :



I'm on a bit of a Carl Sagan jag at the moment, which never fails to refresh the mind and refill the well of wonder that can get a bit dry sometimes.

Carl Sagan On Cannabis : There Is A Religious Aspect To Some Highs

"Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds.

"When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time."

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Murdoch Journo Declares Allegiance To Taliban

Yesterday I pointed out the shared beliefs of conservative extremist Andrew Bolt and The Taliban.

Today, another Murdoch conservative extremist, Piers Akerman, announces his solidarity with The Taliban :



I thought it was illegal to announce your support for terrorists?

Next thing you know these conservative extremists will be telling us that the Taliban and Hamas are legitimate freedom fighters.

Someone call ASIO. These people are fucking insane.


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It's a clever way to announce your return. Pick up exactly where you left off, almost mid-sentence, when you were fired :

"The federal parliamentary Liberal Party is consumed by fear and loathing. Barren of anything that might be tricked up as rational policy, its members are stuck together only by a seething stew of grudges and whinges and a gnawing sense of entitlement denied."



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Laurie Oakes : Hark, Hear The Turnbull Death Rattle

Brendan "Pensioners Eat Cheap Soup! Soup!" Nelson must have to steer clear of most newspapers and TV news these days, lest he risk choking to death on karma laughter.

Laurie Oakes explains why :

Now that Joe Hockey has indicated he would not leave the party in the lurch should Turnbull's leadership become untenable, you can hear the death rattle. No matter what he does, the muttering among Liberal MPs becomes increasingly ominous and the erosion of his authority gathers pace.

The public sees an Opposition racked by internal brawling and a leader lurching from crisis to crisis, so the polls get worse and Turnbull's position deteriorates further. The accepted wisdom is that the Coalition has brought all this on itself through a lack of discipline and Turnbull's ineptitude.

But credit where it is due. Turnbull and the Opposition would not have got into such a disastrous position without a great deal of help from Kevin Rudd.

Rudd has played clever and ruthless politics. Wedge politics. And he learned how to do it from an expert.

John Howard made an art form of using issues such as asylum seekers to divide the Labor Party. Climate change is for Rudd what Tampa and "children overboard" were for Howard. He has used the emissions trading scheme legislation as a wedge to open up a deep ideological fault line in the Coalition.

The only valid reason for Rudd's insistence that the ETS Bill must be passed before the United Nations Copenhagen climate change conference in December is a political one - to wedge his opponents. And the strategy has been spectacularly successful.

Rudd long ago refined the Divide & Inflame techniques used so effectively by John Howard. The prime minister now does pretty much the same thing to Turnbull, month in, month out, that he did to Howard for the entire year leading up to the 2007 elections.

Rudd promised to fuck with the minds of the Liberal Party when he became the Labor opposition leader. Becoming prime minister only meant he got to have more fun breaking their spirit, and sowing confusion and paranoia amongst their ranks. So much so, the Liberal diehards are pulling away, distancing themselves, and have taken to claiming they are "Conservatives" instead of Liberals.


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Andrew Bolt : The Taliban Are Right

By Darryl Mason

Back home from what one Murdoch colleague has labelled a "typically fascist" European holiday, Herald Sun conservative extremist blogger Andrew Bolt finds himself in almost complete agreement with like-minded conservative extremists The Taliban, over the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Bolt :

"Obama did nothing at all to deserve an award once handed out for ending wars"

The Taliban :

"We condemn the award of the Nobel Peace Prize for Obama"

Bolt :

"Where is the peace Obama has brought?"

The Taliban :

"He has done nothing for peace..."

Conservative extremists in Australia, like their comrades in the United States, and Afghanistan, have nothing left to contribute now to plans for a more peaceful world but their endless hate.

Well, It Was A Kind Of Peaceful First Week And A Bit For The Obama Presidency


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A Political Party Suicides, In Slow Motion

By Darryl Mason

Devastating. What a headline from the ABC :



Is it still dirty, rotten, ABC Lefty Bias when it's also the stone cold truth?

Chris Ulhman :

Mr Hockey has never actively sought the leadership, having made the quite astute decision some time ago that now is not a good time to be leader of the Opposition.

But since Mr Turnbull declared last week that his party should back him or sack him over his push to propose amendments to the Government's emissions trading plan he has completely lost control of events.

A growing group within his party is now desperate to see the back of him, declaring it's time to put an end to what some mockingly dubbed "the Turnbull experiment". For them ETS has become the "eliminate Turnbull scheme".

Yesterday one senior Liberal crystalised the views of many with whom I spoke.

"There is broad consensus in all parts of the party that it's over," he said. "It is just a matter of time. It's just not working."

And all the Liberals I have spoken to about this - even Mr Turnbull's supporters - lay the blame for the unwinding of his position squarely at his feet.

Turnbull will soon be gone. It can't last more than a few weeks. The daily humiliation is clearly eating away at him. When he steps down, presumably due to "health problems", in November, his attempt to lead the Liberal Party out of the 20th century will have cost him (depending on who you believe) $10-50 million out of his own pocket.

Will Joe Hockey step up before Christmas? Losing one election is not an unshakable curse, but if he doesn't take the leadership, Tony Abbott will and once Abbott has done his best to storm up a national vortex of peak-stupidity, by campaigning on a score of Andrew Bolt-approved conspiracy theories, there may not be much of a viable Liberal Party left for Joe Hockey to lead.

But Turnbull's insistence on all but fully agreeing with the Rudd government on the ETS, even as it turns the full force of the Liberal Party backbench against him, and sinks his poll numbers even further, has to make you wonder who Turnbull's political masters really are, and how many more major missions he has other than to get Australia signed on to an ETS and the seemingly inevitable worldwide carbon tax that would follow.

Then again, what the hell would I know? I announced the resignation of Malcolm Turnbull back in early August, while anticipating the return of Brendan Nelson.

And when Turnbull's resignation does come, Brendan Nelson will probably weep tears of laughter.


November 2007 : Listen Up Turnbull, This Is How It's Going To Be

How The Australian's Caroline Overington Tried To Help Malcolm Turnbull Win Wenworth

January 2009 : Turnbull's Problems With Coalition Climate Change Doubters Break Into The Open When Barnaby Joyce Says He Refuses To "Goose Step" Around Liberal Party Offices

July 2009 : In a Monty Python-esque Moment Of Doubt, Turnbull Almost Admits The Liberals Will Lose An Election Fought Over Climate Change Policies.

They May Be Out There, But They Won't Save The Liberal Party

By Darryl Mason

There is a conservative-minded fantasy that if only a Liberal Party leader would stand up and dismiss the entire idea of an ETS, and confidently, skeptically, laugh off the reality of global-warming induced climate change, that there will be a sudden, election-winning size surge in Liberal Party support. But it's just a fantasy, something for reflexively contrarian opinionists to fluff up to fill their blogs and columns with, and nothing more.

Numerous polls consistently, constantly, show the vast majority of Australians are convinced climate change is a dangerous reality and they believe that the introduction of an ETS will help fight those destructive changes.

There is a tiny minority of Australians who think Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull and Al Gore are all secret partners in a New Green World Order conspiracy to destroy the coal and oil industries and force Australians to live in electricity-free tee pees and ride tofu bicycles to work, but the AGW Skeptic Vote is not big enough to cause any major waves in Australian politics, at least not at a national level, no matter how many times some in the media try to claim otherwise.

Tim Blair, of the Daily Telegraph, recently tried to hype the (illusory) power of the unrepresented Skeptics Vote on Insiders, as a way for the Liberal Party to not only differentiate itself from Labor, but to also save itself from compete immolation. A last desperate gasp, presumably. Blair's curious little theories were quickly slapped down by The Australian's George Megalogenis and Radio National's Fran Kelly.

Blair : The one thing that's interesting about this...the more both parties bang on about the ETS, the more the public is disengaged. We had another poll today, saying, I think, only 14% of Australians think that climate change was an important issue. So, (this is) one of the great sweeping mysteries of our time. The biggest argument we're having right now time is what the temperature will be 100 years from now. And one of the big flaws about the Liberal Party's ETS is that it has an ETS. I know, privately, a lot of people in the Liberal Party are a lot more skeptical than Mr Hockey would let on.

(Insiders host) Barry Cassidy : But you haven't actually seen a poll that convinced you that the Coalition can vote against this and benefit politically.

Blair : Well, they might actually get some traction out of it. They might actually be seen to take a stance. At the moment it's arguments over tiny fractions. Anything with the word 'Copenhagen' in it will turn the public off.

Kelly : Yes, Tim, but as soon as you do that, then you're arguing, well, what next for climate change? So you're either arguing, we don't have to do anything right now...

Blair : Yeah, I'll vote for that.

Kelly : Yeah, I know, but I don't think a lot of the public would. I think the people are convinced that something is happening and something needs to be done.

Megalogenis : NewsPoll has tried to ask this question every which way, and the answer still comes out the same. Two thirds or more of the electorate want action.

Blair : But as soon as you put that in monetary terms, as soon as you say, "How much are you going to sacrifice" or anything, then the number drops off.

Megalogenis : It doesn't drop as much as you think, because even half were prepared to pay more for petrol. But the more interesting thing that has happened in the polls this year, there is no distinction between the views of Coalition voters and the Labor Party. So basically, it's at the same 'Yes' rate.

Another recent poll backs George Megalogenis' claims :

Three-quarters of Australians believe that the price of fossil fuels should be increased to deal with climate change and 92 per cent believe a legally binding global climate deal is urgent and should be made at the conference to be held in Copenhagen in December.

A surprisingly consistent majority (about two-thirds to three-quarters) in most countries believed that fossil fuel prices should be increased....

An overwhelming majority of respondents globally (Australia 94 per cent, Indonesia 92 per cent, US 90 per cent, China 89 per cent and Russia 86 per cent) believed their government should give high priority to joining any deal made in Copenhagen.

The Liberal Party will have a new leader within a month, but whoever that is, you won't see them fully opposing the introduction of an ETS, nor will they be embracing Andrew Bolt-style skeptic/denialist pronouncements ("Belief in man-made global warming will soon be laughed out of existence").

There is no potent political gain for the Liberal Party in embracing these positions, unless they want to make it all that much easier for The Greens to get that much closer to finally replacing the Libs as the second most powerful political party in Australia.

The United States' top general in Iraq, Ray Odierno, said today :

"I'm not sure we will ever see anyone declare victory in Iraq...."

That can't be right. Andrew Bolt declared Victory In Iraq in late 2007.



Army General Odierno, therefore, has now de-declared victory.

It sounds like the US is trying to cover up their late 2007 Iraq War win.

Must be some new kind of strategy to throw the enemy off.

Unless Andrew Bolt was wrong.

But how could that be? Look how accurately Bolt predicted the reality of the swine flu pandemic :

Australians are more likely to be eaten by mice than to die of swine flu

More than 140 Australians have died suffering from swine flu, including many children, since the first death from the virus in July.

But reports of Australians being eaten by mice are curiously rare in the Australian media. Must be another cover up to make Andrew Bolt look like a complete dickhead.

Why ABC Boss Mark Scott Should Tell The Daily Telegraph To Fuck Off

By Darryl Mason

After only one episode, Hungry Beast looks like a lock to replace The Chaser as the supplier of easy n free content for our tabloid media of Perpetual MoralOutrage! :

Netball Australia has condemned an ABC Television skit featuring a fake interview with a man claiming to have been sexually assaulted by the national team.

The skit, a clear reference to May's Four Corners interview with the woman at the centre of the Cronulla group sex scandal, is due to air on ABC's new current affairs/comedy crossover show, Hungry Beast next Wednesday.

A promo for the skit aired on Wednesday night.

Err, yeah. It was pretty obvious the short segment that aired was the skit in full, and not a promo for a longer segment next week. How fucking dim do you have to be to not get that?

And how ironic then that Hungry Beast's first show also featured a segment testing the gullibility of Australia's media.

I liked Hungry Beast. I thought the mix of skit comedy, serious interviews, media japery and WTF? statistics was very interesting. The jump from jokes to a shattering segment on the wife and mother of an Australian soldier killed in Afghanistan was jarring, but not wrong. And one seriously bizarre haircut from a host was not enough to turn me off.

Here's producer Andrew Denton talking about his latest creation :



UPDATE : The Daily Telegraph is crowing now about how it's manufactured MoralOutrage! beat up got the Man Gang Raped By Australian Netball Team skit pulled from repeats of Hungry Beast.



Gee, what a victory for good taste. Society has been saved, yet again, from laughing by the Daily Telegraph, backers of kid-killing wars and co-distributors of made-up stories about children having sex because of coloured wristbands.

You won't see the the skit on ABC TV again, but, curiously enough, the Daily Telegraph is running the 'banned' video on its website, with no adult content warning, generating revenue from taxpayer-funded TV clips, for which they paid nothing to use, as number-one-story-of-the-day content.



Most of the people who bothered to comment on the story at the Daily Telegraph website see it as anything but yet another pathetic MoralOutrage! beat up, and a further denigration of Australia's once infamous reputation for being able to have a good laugh at themselves.

"I feel sorry for my 8 year old son, because when he grows up Comedy will be illegal."

"Oh My GOD! Its official, we are now just like the YANKS. Consumed with political correctness and afraid to laugh at ourselves. WE ARE AUSTRALIAN PEOPLE."

It's an interesting conjob the Daily Telegraph has been running, from the days of The Chaser. Record a clip from an ABC-TV show, whip up some MoralOutrage! the next day, try and get the clip banned from further repeats on the ABC, while running the clip on your own news site, while also pointing out that the fact the 'controversial skit' has now been censored, leaving most readers little choice but to watch the clip at the Daily Telegraph website.

When will ABC managing director Mark Scott stop caving in and finally tell The Daily Telegraph to go and get fucked?

Join Twitter and ask him yourself right here.

Liz Ellis, by the way, doesn't have a problem with the skit at all :

"She knows it was a joke and can see the funny side of it — she doesn't feel defamed at all," Ellis' spokesperson Jessica Ball told ninemsn.

"She is out on the golf course playing a round right now, which shows how concerned she is about this,"

And thanks to the Daily Telegraph, the words "Liz Ellis Group Sex" now has a permanent listing in Google search.

No doubt Liz Ellis would probably find that funny, too.


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Cannibalus Australis

If it's playing near you, and you're looking for a movie to see this weekend, you can't go past Van Deimen's Land, a brilliant Australian movie with plenty of, dare I say it, bite :

Of course, a new debate on the death penalty will not be influenced at all by fevered front pages and panting columnists :

THE killer who escaped the noose in the '60s only to kill again 40 years later has sparked a debate on whether the death penalty should be reintroduced.

A poll conducted in Melbourne, where Leigh Robinson committed his crimes, found 78 per cent of about 3000 respondents voted for the return of capital punishment.

Was it a phone poll, or a read-this-story-and-now-click-vote poll? The story doesn't say. But only one person, Leigh Robinson's stepson, was needed for this headline :



We just can't get out of the 20th century.

Ring Of Fire Unleashes Death And Destruction In Indonesia, Samoa

The reading of the 7.6 magnitude earthquake off Padang

The death toll from two monster tsunami waves that smashed into islands of Western Samoa and American Samoa yesterday is expected to reach more than 200, but so little is still known about the extent of damage in the many villages that dotted coastlines and the dozens of isolated communities across the smaller islands. Whole towns, shopping districts, marketplaces, resorts, hospitals are in ruins. Thousands of homes have been destroyed, key bridges and vital roads washed away.

18 hours after the massive 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck near Samoa, causing the tsunami waves, another huge earthquake erupted 78 kilometres off the coast of Padang, in Indonesia's West Sumatra province.

The 7.6 magnitude quake collapsed hundreds of buildings across the island, and of this 1.20am posting, has killed at least 80 people. Thousands are believed to be trapped or lying dead in the ruins. Landslides are reported to have blocked roads, hampering rescue efforts. Power and phone lines to Padang were cut after the quake, leaving the city of 900,000 in darkness.

An eyewitness report from Joey Cummings, a radio host in American Samoa :

We immediately sent out an earthquake warning on air, to tell everyone to stay away from possible landslide areas. We also asked schools to initiate their tsunami plans to get kids up the mountains.

We sent a tsunami warning 10 minutes later as we saw the first rising water.

We stayed on the air as the water reached three or four feet in the parking lot.

The water stayed at that level for a few minutes, but then it surged to around 15 feet.

All of the staff at the station went outside to the second floor balcony to see what was happening - and the air was filled with screams.

The devastation was complete.

The villagers immediately started looking for trapped survivors. I dedicated myself and my staff to helping those that were hurt, and gathering food and water.

Debris was everywhere. Broken furniture mixed with old tyres and trees. Children's clothing and road signs were crushed under telephone poles.

We screamed for people to run up the mountain but they just ran down the street away from the wave rather than make a sharp left and up the steep mountain just feet away.

We walked down the road only to find that people who weren't trying to help had already begun looting the stores.

School buses full of kids were smiling and waving at all the excitement, while behind them there were pick-up trucks with bodies in them - their feet were hanging out over the tailgate.

Aftershocks from the quakes are still being felt in Padang and Samoa.

I'm not going to tell you what this remarkable story from 2007 is about, because I don't want to spoil the tale as told by Jack Marx, in a brilliant piece of journalism. I will only try to convince you to read the full story, by quoting these two paragraphs :

Patients were booked into the clinic under assumed names - an understandable necessity for privacy - and travelled in Leighton Jones' car from Eraring to Morisset, spending the 30-minute journey in the back seat with the donor monkey as companion.

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Today, the people of Dora Creek know little of what happened all those years ago, and they'll tell you even less. They squint through security doors and murmur that it's "all but forgotten now" or was "a queer thing". Some joke about it, reciting the urban myth all over again. Even the editor of the local paper declares the story of Henry Leighton Jones "nonsense" that belongs in "a mixing bag of about 5000 other local myths".

The truth, as it so often turns out to be, is far more interesting than the myth.

UPDATE : Jack Marx has a new book out called Australian Tragic, a few dozen forgotten tales of our dark history. Haven't read it yet, but there appears to be a follow-up on the story of Henry Leighton Jones in those pages, as well as a whole load of remarkable Australian stories stories I haven't heard about before.

Dust Storms : Caused By But Also A Solution To Climate Change?


A NASA satellite image of the dust storm shrouding the New South Wales coastline

According to the UK Guardian the sort of massive dust storms that blanketed country New South Wales, Queensland and red-skied Sydney and Brisbane are "are spreading lethal epidemics around the world", including "influenza, Sars and foot-and-mouth and....respiratory diseases."

Curiously though, not only are such dust storms apparently the result of drought and climate change, they can also "absorb climate change emissions."

The Sydney storm, which left millions of people choking on some of the worst air pollution in 70 years, was a consequence of the 10-year drought that has turned parts of Australia's interior into a giant dust bowl, providing perfect conditions for high winds to whip loose soil into the air and carry it thousands of miles across the continent.

It followed major dust storms this year in northern China, Iraq and Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, east Africa, Arizona and other arid areas. Most of the storms are also linked to droughts, but are believed to have been exacerbated by deforestation, overgrazing of pastures and climate change.

Sydneysiders were quite excited by the blood-red dawn, and orange skies, on September 23. But on a global comparison scale, the Sydney Red Dust Storm was a junior ranker. Only about 5000 tonnes of soil was dumped across Sydney suburbs. A dust storm coming out of China's Taklimakan desert in 2007, according to this story, lifted up some 800,000 tonnes of dust In 2006, a dust storm deposited 300,000 tonnes on Beijing.

Each year, some 2 to 3 billion tonnes of dust are whipped up by winds from Africa and carried around the world.

Drought, deforestation, land clearing, too many goats chomping every blade of grass they can find, all lead to soil becoming loose enough to lift off, but the apparent good news is that massive dust storms "could be mitigating climate change, both by reflecting sunlight in the atmosphere and fertilising the oceans with nutrients."

So climate change can help cause the dust storms that may help mitigate climate change?

Nature abides.

What Market Is The Murdoch Media Trying To Reach With Fictitious Stories About Children Having Sex?

It was the biggest story for the Australian online Murdoch media yesterday, so does it matter if it was made up?

From news.com.au :

From PerthNow :

They look like a symbol of childhood innocence. But these bracelets are part of an "insidious" game that sees primary school kids perform sex.

And it is feared the craze may soon sweep WA.

The exact same story, under the same byline, appeared in the Courier Mail. With a slight change of emphasis to lock in local interest, and concern :

"...these colourful bracelets are behind an "insidious" craze of primary schoolkids performing sex acts that it is feared will soon sweep through Queensland."

WA, Queensland, where will this insidious made-up craze that doesn't drive children into sex spread next?

PerthNow readers were not so easily fooled :

"this is so obviously made up/an urban legend, nice 'news' story"

"'And it is feared the craze may soon sweep WA' a fine example of yellow journalism."

"Stupidest news report I've ever seen. Parents don't be concerned if see kids wearing them it means nothing. Ridiculous!"

"These harmless fashion statments are not promoting the sexualisation of youth - this ill-informed journalist is!"

"Theseare all over the u.k media as well with almost identical headlines andstories.why would adults honestly think 11 year old kids would behaving sex behind sheds because the right bracelet was broken!!Hysterical adults on one side and pedo dreamers with wild fantasies ofdelusion on the other.Leave the kids alone!"

This near daily focus on the alleged sex lives of children by the mainstream media,where the stories more often than not turn out to be totally false, is disturbing to say the least.

Incredibly, this trash also made it into The Australian.

Is this the kind of "quality journalism" News CEO John Hartigan thinks Australians will pay to read online?

CosmicJester notes the only sources for this 'story' appear to be a Facebook page and UrbanDictionary.

If the"journalist" had bothered to google these evil sex bracelets, theywould have found out that they are nothing new and they are mainly amoral panic/urban legend designed to scare dim witted journalists andparents.

Snopes.com reveals that this panic goes back till at least 2003 and is a slightly updated urban legend from the 1990's.

UPDATE : The bullshit 'shag bands' story did the trick. It became the most read storyon the CourierMail, News.com.au and PerthNow websites :