New Bunker For ClimateFuehrer Clive

YOU HAVE to wonder about Clive Hamilton, who is celebrating yesterday's catastropharian triumph in the House of Representatives by once again denouncing democracy:

Over the last decade or so, politically driven climate deniers have adroitly used the instruments of democratic practice to erode the authority of professional expertise. They have attempted, with considerable success, to undermine the authority of climate science by skilful exploitation of a free media, appeal to freedom of information laws, the mobilisation of a group of vociferous citizens, and the promotion of their own to public office. In this way, democracy has defeated science.

It is well known that the bug-eyed loon, another of the New Establishment's kept creatures,  parted company with sanity quite some time ago. Eventually, even the Fairfax press noticed and declined to publish his submissions. The fact that all were inscribed with crayon on chains of the little paper dolls he cuts out during sessions of occupational therapy must have made that fact inescapable, even at The Age, where only plastic safety scissors are allowed.

But as Hamilton is of the left, no worries. Somewhere down the propaganda food chain, a less lofty pulpit is always waiting. In this instance it was The Conversation, where Andrew Jaspan popped out from beneath a foot stool, snatched up the falling columnist and added him to the site's roster of deep thinkers..

Australian society is certainly a noble and caring one, putting up $6 million of public funds to pay the mortgage of a failed-but-ideologically-sound newspaper editor, who in his turn scrapes reality's other victims from the grease trap of their ranting irrelevance.

On his better days, the ones when he is not instructing orderlies at his institution to polish his jackboots, Hamilton must register some flickering recognition of his great good fortune. Without Jaspan's intervention he would by now have only Lavatorious Polio* to broadcast his insights, and he could not sink lower than that. He should pen a little token of his gratitude -- a column, perhaps, on the evil of dwarf-tossing and why the CSIRO, universities and the Conversation's other generous backers must never, ever think of taking it up.

*NOTE: For those not versed in Latin, that translates as "paralyzing spectacle of the unflushed bowl".

Contagious Clive

IF YOU ever inherit an office, desk and chair from Clive Hamilton, do make sure to have everything thoroughly sterilised and fumigated. Whatever strange virus drives Clive to see benefits in democracy’s suspension* and to know with every fibre of his being that global warming will kill us all, possibly as soon as Wednesday, it must be catching. What else but a brain-rotting infection of Hamiltonian virulence can explain the bug-eyed alarmist’s successor at the Australia Institute,  Richard Denniss, who has a phobia of white goods in general and refrigerators in particular.

"When billions more people in China, India and other developing countries decide they want a fridge, quite frankly we'll be in big trouble … but I don't hear many Australians saying that in order to reduce our emissions I'm going to give up my fridge."

Clive has cried wolf quite a few times in the Fairfax press, so that explains the condition afflicting Silly stenographer Matt Wade, who quoted Denniss and penned today’s column. Let Australia’s very own Typhoid Mary enter your building, perhaps just once, and the contamination will consume every ounce of grey matter it can find on the premises.

Some readers may doubt this diagnosis, rightly pointing out that there was precious little mental capacity inside Fairfax to begin with, so how to measure the erosion of the negligible. Fortunately there is a control, Clive’s admirer Robert Manne, whose diseased mental state led him not only to believe that his mate might replace Peter Costello as the Member for Higgins, but also to urge the Australian’s readers to believe it as well.  Manne shines in the pantheon of Australia’s Silly-designated public intellectuals, so no one is safe.

Watch as Clive's madness further infects Manne:

FOOTNOTE: Because Clive’s delirium now leads him to deny saying many of the bug-eyed things he does, here is the quote as published in the Courier-Mail: “This is because the implications of 3C, let alone 4C or 5C, are so horrible that we look to any possible scenario to head it off, including the canvassing of ‘emergency’ responses such as the suspension of democratic processes.”