"Crazed Weapons Bearers"

There is almost a need to begin this post with an apology, or at the very least an explanation, because once again the topic is Daily Life, where lunacy's lily lacks not for the gilding of further comment. That Fairfax engaged the service of an editrix who is either deeply cynical or certifiably insane has been evident since she was charged with planting the company's flag in the hip new world of digital publishing. That she then engaged the services of writers with more loose screws than Bunnings tends to suggest the latter diagnosis, for if she was aiming to recruit gibbering frothers to attract an audience of gibbering frothers then a little voice must surely have whispered that she would be able to push that agenda so far and no further. With Clem Bastow making common cause with the Salafist weird beards who have visited grief upon the Miss World pageant, it is once again clear that no nuttery is beyond Daily Life's pale. And if there is slightest doubt remaining, Peter Giugni's thoughts on the Kenya massacre will dispel them.

Let us start with the headline, which should have been rendered thus:

How not to respond to a humanitarian crisis another Muslim massacre

Then it gets worse. Here is the first pragraph:

It is an unfortunate truth that tragedy abounds these days. Sometimes in the form of unavoidable natural disasters. Or the most abhorrent man made events, such as the one we have just witnessed in Nairobi over the weekend, where crazed weapons bearers chose to assault innocent civilians.

"Crazed weapons bearers" indeed! Couldn't Giugni have been a bit more accurate. You know, "mad Muslim butchers"? Perhaps he was worried that mentioning the Religion of Peace by name might see Bastow's front-invitation to the next burqa fashion show invalided.

It gets better, though. With all those infidels bodies clogging Nairobi's morgue,  Giugni seizes upon a tweet, one of several billion sent every day, as his launching pad for some thoughts on the rug-kissers whose creed inspires them to execute anyone who cannot name Old Mo's mum.That he manages to do this without once using the word "muslim" is quite the achievement.

"I doubt they’ll have a great deal of time for your anxieties," he tells the tweeter, "over visiting a coffee plantation cum family heirloom cum relic of international imperialism that arguably accounts for some of the tensions in Somalia today which led to the creation of Al Shabaab as a militant insurgency in the first place."

Clear on that? Scores have been murdered in cold blood because Pommy planters with a taste for gin, polo and other planters' wives planted coffee seedlings in a country with but the slightest connection to Somalia, whence the latest batch of bearded animals emerged.

Giugni piles more fashionable obscenities and circumlocutions each atop the next, pausing only to upbraid his tweeter for not being a master of thumb-typing and spelling. This from a man whose first paragraph is an end-to-end fender-bender of verb-less "sentences" and who has not grasped that compound adjectives need hyphens. Neither has Daily Life's editrix, apparently.

So Daily Life, edited by a nong, also publishes nongs. What's the surprise there?

Just this. When not writing for Daily Life, Giugli is a lawyer and globe-trotting field operative for the Red Cross, with a special and recent interest in Afghanistan. Can't you just imagine the conversations with "clients"?

"So, Mohammad, you blew up an Australian troop carrier."

"By the beard of the Prophet, indeed I did!"

"Well that's not nice, but it is understandable in light of what happened to poor Truganini."

Dribs and drabs of charity flow to worthy causes from the Billabong, and quite a few of those over the years have gone to the Red Cross. There will be no more donations to that particular charity from this point on.

UPDATE: When not making excuses for murderes, Giugli is a pretty cool guy -- so cool there is even a little song about what a cool guy he is.

Peter Giugni is a pretty cool guy
He wrote to his girlfriend over three hundred times
A letter for every day he's away
Saving lives and slaving away
Some might call him Korny
But I think he's pretty fly
Peter Giugni: The king of Generation Y
Peter Giugni: He'll troll you till the day you die
Peter Giugni: He doesn't even have to try
Peter Giugni: He's a pretty fuckin' awesome guy
ؤ نهٔ ؤ يو سړی ؤ چې فلټر نومېدهٔ
خوست پهٔ ښار كې يې كار كاوهٔ
ډېر ښهٔ سړی ؤ
د كنجوسۍ ډېر سخت خلاف ؤ
ډېر خلكو سره يې مرسته كوله
او همېشه عجيب و غريب تحفې انډيوالانو ته يې وركولې
(Once upon a time there was a man called Peter
He used to work in Khost City
He was a very good man
He was strongly against tight-assery
He really helped the people there
And he was always giving his friends all sorts of wondrous presents)
Peter Giugni
Talkin' 'bout Peter Giugni

Drug dealing and honest work -- same thing, really

We all know that things are tough at Fairfax these days, but just how tough only became apparent with this morning's perusal of the insights available at Daily Life, where moonlighting Radio National web editor Daniel Stacey explains why the TV series Breaking Bad is so much more than a show about a man whose moral flaws become fissures. Stacey is one deep thinker, that's for sure.

"The show resonates because Walter White’s journey towards moral annihilation describes, albeit in hyperbolic form, the experience awaiting anyone joining the modern workplace."

"Breaking Bad illustrates the devil's bargain all young people face, entering a jobs market where most of the outcomes their work will create–pollution, inequality, misinformation, division–are at odds with their personal morality."

"The gangster metaphor plays to Gandhi’s observation that a society should be judged by how it treats its weakest members. Society allows that many of the poor are forced to sell addictive, harmful products to make a living, and compete for clients in never ending bloody turf wars. Is it any surprise then that at the big end of town the same thing happens with oil – where the addiction is structured into the economy, the harm global, and the turf wars, well… wars?"

"...the way to get wealth and power isn't to carry out humble teaching or police work, it's to find employment in jobs that serve profit and ignore consequence. For White that job is cooking meth, for the rest of us it means working for companies that pollute the environment, feed people products that kill them, and shear off mountain tops to generate power for air-conditioning units in the suburban homes in which we raise our children."

And finally, this gem: 

"There is a shade of Walter White in all of us when we try and hide, excuse and eventually give up justifying the negative work we do. When we work for and consume the products of companies that contribute to anthropogenic climate change, sweatshops, obesity, diabetes, species extinction, conflict and hate, and pretend that these outcomes will never come back to harm our families or haunt us in the suburban Arcadias we're so obsessed with building (and fleeing to)."

As noted, things must really be bad at Fairfax, where the stock of resident idiots has now fallen so low they have had to borrow one from the ABC. Because Stacey does not have one of those squalid, profit-oriented jobs -- the ABC is good like that -- he can opine on the moral fitness of others with   absolute confidence. Then he can post another Phillip Adams audio, loiter at the bicycle rack or write his next contribution for Daily Life.

As for the rest of us, out there working for the man, why, we're no better than ice dealers!

A FURTHER THOUGHT:  When we get the long overdue inquiry into the ABC -- a Royal Commission, preferably -- one term of reference needs to be the way in which the ABC goes about filling vacancies. The paper trail that led to Stacey's current position might provide some fascinating insights.

Age readers converge on Swan Island

UPDATE: Have a look at the photo below, which captures the scene at Swan Island this morning. Notice the sign in the background? Get the message about Australian blood being spilled in someone else's wars (no need to guess which Great Satan the protesters have in mind).

Now look at the photo credit. In case your eyes are to old too make out the fine print, here is what it is says:

"Supplied: Swan island peace".

If only the ABC had struck a similar arrangement with al-Shabaab it could have obtained some absolutely wonderful pictures of that protest in Nairobi's Westgate Mall. al-Shabaab, by the way, is said to be one of the targets the decent people on Swan Island, not the scum at the front gate, put a lot of thought and effort into monitoring.  

______________________

A GROUP of the usual ferals descended on Swan Island this morning, protesting the presence and activities of the Australian intelligence members and SAS troops who train and plan there. It was a variation on the usual urban affair, the Occupy crowd this time enjoying a country excursion, and the protest resulted in a number of arrests and much free publicity for their cause on the ABC. Sadly, the arrests were made by members of Victoria Police, who are a pretty mild lot these days, so there was no bruising scenes nor blur of crashing truncheons. Isn't it a tragedy that the wallopers weren't all overcome by the sudden urge to go and buy pies and lemonade at that particular moment, leaving the defence of the base to the resident commandoes, who must get thoroughly sick of restricting their bayonet training to dummies of the straw-filled variety.

What sort of evil the hippies imagine is hatched on the other side of the security fence, not one of their member has so far specified. But then they probably didn't feel the need to list their suspicions, as The Age and ABC have mounted such a long and comprehensive campaign of innuendo against the facility that its nefarious purposes are taken by some as needing no elucidation. Rafael Epstein, one of those connected souls who jump from Fairfax to the ABC according to which mate happens to be hiring at the time, can certainly take some credit for today's (disappointingly bloodless) confrontation.

Epstein is now back at the ABC and gabbling away late on weekday afternoons, no doubt pleased as punch that he secured a new job before Fairfax went down for the count. Good work if you can get it, and even better when old ABC cobbers overlook that little bit of trouble the last time you worked there. As he controls the microphone and his producer vets callers, there is no hope of him being asked to explain if the name Ross Langdon incites a little guilt. In case you haven't been following the news, Langdon is the Tasmania architect murdered with his pregnant Dutch wife by Muslims in a Nairobi shopping centre.

According to Epstein and his former Fairfax colleague, Dylan Welch, one of the great causes for concern about Swan Island is that rough men sally forth to places like Kenya, where they gather intelligence on terrorists and their schemes. Why, several of the stories even mention that a particular interest of those working out of Swan Island is al-Shabaab.

Australia's security service, ASIO, is increasingly concerned by the domestic threat posed by the Somali Islamist terrorist group al-Shabaab. ASIO has concerns a group within Australia's growing Somali community is sending money to al-Shabaab.

All very wrong and worrying to any Age writer and his Occupist readership.

Ross Langdon, however, might have disagreed.

UPDATE: Diggers sound off on journalism Age-style



 

The newly reformed Ross Gittins

See, optimism about the human condition is justified after all. A little encouragement really can prompt even the lowest wretches to lift their game, as Ross Gittins, patron saint of the shallow and formerly a prime advocate of using others' words without attribution, has done in today's Silly. It is the usual Gittins drek and he gets any pretense at originality out of the way in the first few paragraphs -- original if you haven't tuned in to the ABC since the recent election.

What a [Coalition] to-do list: sack econocrats guilty of having worked with the enemy, pass an edict against climate change and discourage all discussion of it, stop publicising boat arrivals, build more motorways, move to a cut-price national broadband network and take science for granted.

After that, the column is largely composed of cut-and-paste quotes from chapter seven of this document, whose author Doctor Sticky Fingers rightly acknowledges.

And that is why we should all take heart. Even though Gittins borrowed almost an entire earlier column from an OECD report, and despite the fact that his Silly editors ruled that he had done no wrong, he has now taken it upon himself to change his ways and give credit where all but senior Fairfax executives would think it due.

 

See, even the worst of us aren't entirely beyond a small measure of redemption. 

Oh, such a perfect day

The billy needed boiling early this afternoon and what had been planned as a simple overnight trip to scope out stretches of the Howqua, Jamieson and Goulburn very nearly became a weeklong escape from the Big Smoke. If the camp mattress had been stowed and the only tent did not have a hole, well it would have been easy to linger and celebrate this year's trout season, which began on September 6. The batteries in the radio were flat, too, which was another incentive to remain. No chance of catching any more post-election spite and bile from the ABC's apostles of the left.

The sun had that wonderful spring muscle to it, bright for a cloudless hour or two in a sky the colour of kittens' eyes. At the other end of the log that was a Bunyip's sylvan throne a blue-tongue came out to charge its batteries, the leading advocate in our little clearing of sustainable solar power. The bush, which never really goes to sleep, is shaking off the southern winter's lethargy. Further to the east about now, in the hills around the Snowy, Gippsland water dragons will be waking to pursue their brief couplings with an enthusiasm that shames Craig Thomson. Then again, water dragons are far more appealing species than corruptocrats. By October the dragon ladies will have dug their nests and be laying  eggs, and come December, the kookas, snakes and other lizards will have gobbled most of their children. Even the trout will get their share of wiggly morsels.

And then along will come a Bunyip with rod and woolly bear, haul them to the bank and eat them all. But today, it was just a cup of tea, a dekko and a mental note that a big brown bugger has made his home in the slower water beside and below the rocks that squeeze the stream into a tumbling, tiny cataract. With a little luck the foxes will have overlooked the water rat family which were in residence last year.

There is a lot wrong with the bush -- invasive species are now occupiers, not intruders -- and with conservation policies orchestrated by Fitzroy greens and administered by Spring Street bureaucrats things will only get worse. But just for a bit today, in the sun and beneath trickle of wood smoke, you would not have considered being been anywhere else, not for all the tea in China. 

The pain of youth

Some people like to be tied up and lashed or have their private parts nailed to the table, neither a hobby that has ever inspired much enthusiasm at the Billabong, where the masochistic urge manifests itself in a perversion even further beyond rationality's pale. In these precincts the twisted delight is visiting the Fairfax websites, where two sharp lessons are administered with very nearly every flick of the mouse. The first is that youth carries more weight than wisdom, a sad realisation for anyone on the wrong side of a middle-aged belly and reinforced by all those mugshots of the newspaper's star writers. Look at Ben Cubby's innocent and ever-trusting face, for instance.

Have you seen such a look of absolute belief since those long ago Christmas Eves, when your little ones' faces were aglow with the faith and conviction that Santa and his presents were on their way. Ben still waits eagerly for the next arrival from the North Pole, his delight at further confirmation that it is melting no less intense than the joy of trying on a New Power Ranger outfit and performing globe-saving feats of imagination before the festive tree for Mum and Dad. These days, going by the selective eye with which he sifts the latest climate news, little Ben capers and poses for the approbation of David Karoly and Tim Flannery, whose kisses and hugs and gratitude for never being seriously quizzed he must find even more congenial than those of doting aunties.l

Baby Ben has plenty of company in the Fairfax romper room, including playmate Bianca Hall, who is the Sunday Age and Sun-Herald political correspondent and today addresses the misogynist impulse that shaped Tony Abbott's all-but-gal-free cabinet. The suspicion that she has moved straight from rattling the plastic pots in Barbie's Kitchen to reheating the accepted wisdom was bolstered by her quoting of retiring Senator Sue Troeth, who she introduces only as a Liberal. If Hall was just a little older, had a few more years of observation behind her, she might have mentioned that Troeth is the sort of Liberal who would say that. Her older readers will have immediately recalled that Troeth crossed the floor to support the Carbon Tax and that she is, as people of Hall's generation like to say, "down with" re-editing the dictionary to make the word marriage applicable to same sex couples. Well it worked for "misogyny".

Bianca and fellow Fairfax reporters chase a story

Curiosity inspired a quick google and, yes, it's true -- Hall is only two years removed from reporting building applications and parking restrictions for the Emerald Hill local rag.

And therein the second lesson, albeit a more subtle one: When a Fairfax woman laments the lack of inexperienced women elevated to high office, what she is really saying is that Abbott should run the country much as Fairfax executives run their company.

The Age knows Melbourne from A to B

Fairfax investors should make a point to read alleged humourist Danny Katz's latest attempt to be funny in this morning's Age. It will explain an awful lot about where their money has gone and why.

Katz tells us that he was off to Hobart with the little woman for a dose of culture at MONA, an acronym from which he attempts to squeeze a gag as might a victim of terminal constipation strain to extrude a poo. Well that's just Katz being Katz, but his further observations on (a) Age readers and (b) his fellow  aeroplane passengers do tell us rather a lot.

"What's wrong with you Age readers?" he asks of those he imagines to be tittering at his bid to make 'MONA' the punchline of a joke about a romantic weekend. "You're supposed to be a mature higher-managerial AB demographic but you're behaving like low-brow junior-clerical BCs! Come on!)"

Age readers are "high-managerial AB demographic"? Who knew -- certainly not the high-end merchants who no longer advertise in The Age, no doubt because the papers' remaining readers, having taken its advice to eschew consumerism and re-cycle, now do their shopping at Vinnie's and the Salvo shops. Once upon a time well-heeled people did read the Age, but that was before the celebrated Fairfax charter of independence was amended to include the provision that they be reviled for (mostly) not voting Greens.

Having courted a section of the population that no longer reads his tosh, Katz next makes sure to alienate potential Age buyers. Just imagine yourself to be one of those "junior clerical" types and wonder how you might feel to find yourself described as "low brow", purely by definition of your occupation. Insulting your audience works for Don Rickles, but not so well for a paper that has deluded itself into believing it speaks for the real Melbourne (which extends only from St. Kilda to Northcote to Yarraville -- the famous Fairfax Triangle, where profits and reputation vanish without trace).

It could be that Katz is sleeping with the Saturday edition's editor, which might explain why his columns continue to appear. But a more likely explanation is that both are suckers for any orgy of elitist disdain, and today's column delivers that toxin in spades. People who wear tracky dax -- at this very moment their number includes a certain Bunyip -- are to be objects of derision. So, too, families with unfashionable luggage, those who might take an interest in sport, and young women with big bags and unruly hair.

So, students of the stock ticker, look no further for an explanation of your Fairfax-induced poverty. With Danny Katz on the job your portfolio, like the Age itself, is going to shrink even further.

Katz finishes his column thus: "I don't know who you readers are any more, I really don't."

He said it.

UPDATE: Hear Katz promo his latest book -- you'll have to wait for the audio to begin -- amid panting and a background soundtrack of things being rattled and shaken. It will take little imagination to assume, and assume correctly, what Katz was playing with at the time.