BEYOND RIDICULOUS

Copyright specialist Jeremy is aghast at the huge payout ordered against a woman thought to have illegally downloaded 1,700 songs. His outrage is despite the woman declining multiple settlement offers and the likelihood that she'll circumvent the judgement anyway:

Throughout, the RIAA has said it is willing to settle and at one point was asking for just $5,000 from Thomas-Rasset. There is a chance that she could walk away from the nearly $2 million damage award by declaring bankruptcy, legal experts have said.

Jeremy is quite an emotional fellow.

BIZARRE INDEED

Is it just me or does this say something entirely different to what was intended?

From his childhood lived in a show business hyper-reality, his seeming asexuality while dating sought-after stars, a claimed passionate love affair with wife Lisa-Marie Presley and police raids over his activities with children – his sex life was anything but normal.

His friend of 40 years and biographer J Randy Taraborrelli has detailed Jackson’s bizarre relationships in the days after the King of Pop suddenly died of a suspected cardiac arrest.

Now there's a mental image I didn't need.

TOO MANY LETTERS

With Andrew Bolt offline PP boy Scott Bridges turns his intellectual dishonesty debunking attention to Bolt's wife, Sally Morrell. Unfortunately for Bridges, Morrell is harder to spell than is Bolt.

Update: Two counts of Beck ignorance in this post: I thought Bolt was still overseas but he was already back and posting to his blog; and Bridges' character count of Morrell's article, which I assumed was correct, is wrong, apparently rendering her article un-Twitterable.

EPIPHANY

After much soul searching a heartfelt owning-up from PP boy Jeremy:

I am the worst blogger ever.

Or maybe not.

MUSICAL INTERLUDE

IRANIAN IRE IRONIC

Very little news is making it out of Iran but there is a report of injured protesters being silently disappeared:

Iranians wounded during protests are being seized at hospitals by members of an Islamic militia, an Amnesty International official told CNN.

~

Amnesty International has collected accounts from people who have left Iran and expatriates with relatives there who say the Basij has prohibited medical professionals from getting identification information from demonstrators wounded in the streets, Akhlaghi said on Saturday. They are also not allowed to ask how the injuries happened.

Once the patients are treated, the militia removes them from the hospital to an undisclosed location, she said.

Iranian authorities are attempting to distract attention from events at home by making a big deal out of a protest at its Swedish embassy:

"Following the terrorist attack by anti-revolutionary groups on Iran?s embassy in Stockholm on Friday, the Swedish ambassador was summoned immediately," the IRNA report said.

An embassy employee was hurt when protesters entered the compound and attacked him, Stockholm police said.

Between 150 and 200 people had been holding a demonstration outside the embassy in protest at post-election violence in Iran.

"The protest was largely peaceful except ... when an unconfirmed number of people got through the fence and attacked one of the embassy staff," said police officer Ulf Hoglund.

The protesters were simply following the embassy invasion precedent set by the Iranian government itself. Cry babies.

Update: Iran retaliates:

Iran has detained eight local staff at the British embassy in Tehran on accusations of having a role in post-election riots, local reports said.

The Islamic Republic refuses to play the game by established rules.

Update II: The Iranian embassy in Switzerland was also attacked.

A STAR IS BORN

In just his second game of AFL football West Coast Eagles rookie Nic Naitanui (19 years-old, 6' 7") scores three goals from three kicks -- the third goal a magnificent solo effort.

IAIN HALL VS GRODSTERS ET AL BICKER-FEST

Fight it out here. Any off topic comments in other threads will be deleted.

DOUBLE FATALITY

Michael Jackson's death will likely kill Iran's incipient revolution:

As the protests dwindle amid intensifying official pressure, the opposition may suffer from a decline in international attention. The protests and violence dominated Western news broadcasts for nearly two weeks, with the reports substantially bolstered by videos gleaned from Internet sites and by commentary from social networking sites.

Such sites were a key pipeline for the opposition amid the tight restrictions on foreign media in the country.

But along with the diminished action on the streets in Iran, other stories have arisen to siphon away attention — especially the death of pop star Michael Jackson.

Television coverage of Iran's turmoil has fallen since Jackson's death Thursday; on the Twitter micro-blogging site, Iran remained among the most discussed topics, but fell below Jackson and comments about the movie "Transformers 2."

Fickle, fadish Westerners.

LONGING FOR BIG BROTHER

Erich Honecker wasn't so bad after all:

More than half of Germans from the former communist east see the failed dictatorship in a positive light, according to a new survey conducted for the government.

Yep, Germans are partial to strong leaders. Always have been.

REALITY REPORTED

Arab Media Watch's Sharif Nashashibi looks at an analysis of coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

The BBC and al-Jazeera both unequivocally portrayed Israeli violence as a direct response to Palestinian violence, in the use of words such as "responded", "responds", "fired back", "in response", "in retaliation" and "deterrent against". On no occasion did either portray Palestinian violence as a direct response to Israeli violence.

Furthermore, both broadcasters implicitly portrayed Israeli violence as a response to Palestinian violence by overwhelmingly reporting the former as following the latter: 10 times and seven times, respectively. "Only once did the BBC report Palestinian violence as following Israeli violence. This was one occasion more than al-Jazeera," the study said. "The effect of this is to legitimise and justify Israeli violence, while portraying Palestinians as the instigators of violence that has no explanation or cause."

Rather than draw the obvious conclusion it's assumed both news organisations are effectively anti-Palestinian.

NO WEAPON? NO PROBLEM

Determined criminals don't need a gun, or even a knife:

A "MADMAN" armed with a length of wood has put two pub patrons in hospital in a Perth southern suburb.

And:

Two volunteer paramedics were attacked overnight and their ambulance 'smashed up' by a rock-throwing vandal.

The spate [of rock throwing] has prompted Attorney-General Christian Porter to last week moot introducing laws making rock throwing punishable, even if the missiles miss their targets.

The world isn't getting more violent, it just seems that way. Really.

MAKING FUN OF DETAINEE = TORTURE

In June 2008 Antony Loewenstein linked to a press release from The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) condemning the "detention of Palestinian Journalist Mohammad Omer Mughir by Israeli Occupation Forces":

The young journalist returned to Gaza from the London ceremony and was subsequently seized and detained by the Israeli Military for several hours. During his detention he was assaulted, stripped, beaten, and interrogated about his trip to London and about the press award, which he received.

Sol Salbe, heretofore a Loewenstein ally and thus one of a select few commenters not subject to moderation, pointed out that the ANHRI report was incorrect:

Omer was set upon at the Aleenby Bridge while crossing the Allenby Bridge into the West Bank from Jordan. With the Rafah crossing closed someone with a permit need to travel via the West Bank into Israel and from there in to Gaza. If bloggers would like to be treated as journalists then fact-checking of obviously impossible assertions is not an option but a necessity.

Loewenstein remained silent, allowing a commenter to respond for him:

Sol, your invaluable work and insights are an important contribution to informed dialogue about Israel/Palestine and so you do yourself an disservice by choosing to score cheap points against Antony with such utterly trivial matters and inflating them to appear as if some major journalistic lapse is involved. This is unworthy and debases the serious issues at stake.

In short, the facts of a matter are unimportant when scoring points against Israel. The points scoring continuing with Loewenstein today again getting it wrong:

Back in June last year, Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer was detained and tortured by Israel after returning to Gaza from London.

Loewenstein must know this is wrong: by all accounts Omer was taken into custody at the Allenby Bridge, which connects the West Bank and Jordan. This "seized from Gaza" nonsense -- such could have occurred only through an armed IDF incursion -- is meant to make Omer appear to be a high value target.

Also note that Loewenstein now claims Omer was "tortured". Exactly what happened during Omer's time in custody is far from certain, however. Mondoweiss, which links to Loewenstein's blog and occasionally hosts his posts, also claims Omer was tortured:

While there was some reporting of Omer's torture at the time (most notably this amazing piece by Gideon Levy - read it!) for the most part it was ignored, or misreported.

Here's what Levy wrote in 2008, immediately after Omer was detained:

Over the phone from his room in the hospital, he describes what happened; it is evident that he has been traumatized. The security people took apart all his belongings, asked where the prize money was, and couldn't understand why he was returning to Gaza. "Mohammed, are you crazy?" asked one. "Why did you leave Paris? Did you leave Paris to return to Gaza? You could have lived better in Paris. You are choosing to suffer." Omer replied that he has chosen to document suffering, not to suffer.

The searches and questioning lasted for hours; he was treated like every Palestinian, a suspicious object, unless proven otherwise. After Europe, which had showered him with a prize, honor and prestige, this was apparently particularly harrowing.

Then he was forced to strip. He agreed to take everything off except his underpants, but says the interrogator pulled them off by force, pressing a gun to his body. He will never forget that humiliation. He broke into tears, fell onto the floor, partly unconscious, and began to vomit. He says the security guards hurt him, putting a foot on his neck and sticking their hands under his eyes and behind his ears. "I felt like an African under apartheid," he explains. Afterward he asked his interrogator: "Why are you treating me like this?" The reply was: "Wait, you haven't seen anything yet." He says he was dragged on the floor of the terminal, while a female traveler shouted at the security guards: "Why are you doing that to him? Leave him alone!"

After hours of waiting, interrogation and delay, Omer finally found himself in a Palestinian ambulance that took him to the hospital in Jericho. After he calmed down somewhat he was taken in the Dutch embassy car to the Erez crossing and from there he arrived home late in the evening, exhausted and in shock. Two days later he felt ill and was rushed to the European Hospital, where he was kept for observation.

~

"I'm emotionally destroyed," [Omer] told me this week over the phone. "I have nightmares. I have never experienced such humiliation. They stripped me and made fun of me. Maybe it's so hard for me because I'm a person who is familiar with basic human rights. After all, if I weren't a Palestinian, if I had only had a different passport, they would never have done that to me.

One year later Omer's memory is enhanced:

After receiving the Martha Gellhorn prize I returned home through the Allenby Bridge Crossing in the Occupied West Bank between Jordan and Israel. It was here I was detained, interrogated, and tortured for several hours by Shin Bet and border officers. When it appeared I may be close to death an ambulance was called to transport me to a hospital. From that day my life has been a year of continued medical treatments, pain -- and a search for justice.

Omer has gone from "humiliated" at being "made fun of" to torture victim with Loewenstein jumping on the bandwagon with him. It's no wonder then that the MSM frequently turns to Loewenstein when in need of anti-Israel spin.

SHOCK FINDING: EXCESSIVE ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION AFFECTS HEALTH

BBC News reports on a Lancet article:

One in 25 deaths across the world are linked to alcohol consumption, Canadian experts have suggested.

The solution?

Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians and chair of the Alcohol Health Alliance UK, said: "This study is a global wake-up call.

"We need an international framework convention for alcohol control, similar to that on tobacco, as soon as possible, to put into practice the evidence-based measures needed to reduce alcohol-related harm.

"These include increasing the price of alcohol, reducing its availability and banning advertising, and the action needs to start now."

Didn't see that coming, did you? There is no such thing as too much regulation.

CLIMATE NOT FULLY UNDERSTOOD; PROJECTIONS IFFY

New Scientist describes the UK's Met Office climate forecasts as "worthless or worse":

A review of the projections by outside researchers warns that flaws in the way the projections handle phenomena such as European blocking "cannot be compensated for by any statistical procedures, however complex".

Sort of makes the whole climate prediction thing iffy, now don't it?

KING'S DEATH NOTED

PP boy Jeremy Sear tries to milk some hits from the Michael Jackson-is-dead frenzy with a post critical of the volume of news coverage devoted to the entertainer's death. There's some irony in there somewhere.

MSM news coverage is simply a response to public interest:

The internet suffered a number of slowdowns as people the world over rushed to verify accounts of Michael Jackson's death.

Search giant Google confirmed to the BBC that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack.

Millions of people who Googled the star's name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results.

It warned users "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application".

Google's trends page showed that searches for Michael Jackson had reached such a volume that in its so called "hotness" gauge the topic was rated "volcanic".

Jeremy's personal blog also addresses Jackson's passing, albeit somewhat irreverently:

“You could always rely on Michael to come up with something unexpected and disturbing,” friend and producer Quincy Jones told the LA Times.

“Whether it was sleepovers with other people’s children, tearing his face apart with horrendous plastic surgery, clearly fake marriages, naming his two sons “Prince”, dangling one of them out of a window, commissioning unbelievably kitsch works of “art” – Michael Jackson was undoubtedly the King Of Batshit Insane. I will miss him terribly, as will everyone else who made a great deal of money off him.”

Anything to generate some traffic.

Update: A continent mourns:

News of pop star Michael Jackson's death has been greeted with a mixture of disbelief and sadness across Africa.

No condemnation from Jeremy, yet.

SOFT TIMES AHEAD

Swedish Customs on the seizure of an illegal shipment of Viagra:

Spokesperson Ronnie Ohlsson told the Helsingborg Dagbladet newspaper that customs officials often seize packages of Viagra which people attempt to smuggle into Sweden via post.

“But 9,000 tablets is somewhat out of the ordinary,” he told the newspaper.

That's enough Viagra for one erection a day for almost 25 years. Maybe Swedish women are hotter than I thought.

SARYCHEV PEAK ERUPTS

More NASA photos here.

RIDICULOUSNESS NOTED

With Andrew Bolt offline Puerile Penman Jeremy Sear homes in on Tim Blair but refuses to mention the notorious winged-monkey overlord's name. Jeremy's apparent point? Blair didn't write the post Jeremy would have written. With only four comments so far, even the PP faithful have lost interest in the ridiculous sniping.

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN REPORTS FROM NEW YORK

From the RWDB archive (December 2006):

Journalist and author Antony Loewenstein is writing a book on the Australian media to be published by Random House in 2007. I hope Random House knows what it's doing.

Random House staff wised up; the book was never published.

The post also discusses a George W. Bush "quote" fabricated by Loewenstein and ultimately disowned by Crikey:

Our writer got it wrong -- the observation should not have appeared in quotation marks or been attributed to the US President. We apologise for the error.

Unlike Random House, Crikey maintains its links with Loewenstein, today publishing a report from the now New York-based "journalist". In it he remarks on the distinctive features of local speech, the "slow and deliberate New York drawl". An odd description of the rapid-fire stacatto speech many Americans have trouble understanding.

Loewenstein can't even get a cliche right:

Their journalistic insights were far and few between...

As if Loewenstein has had a journalistic insight, ever.

HEY, LOOK AT ME, I SPENT €30,000 ON A BICYCLE

With its high price, Stefan Gulas is realistic about the sales potential of his human-electric hybrid eRocket bicycle:

The newest model costs nearly €30,000, making it an expensive joy for those that can afford the firm’s handcrafted precision products. And Gulas makes no excuses for the high price tag.

“Our goal is not to decrease the cost, but rather to fully develop the concept of the human hybrid,” he said.

Instead, he suggested the lofty purchase ought to be seen as making a stylishly green statement.

Different? Definitely. Expensive? Ditto. Stylish? Only to those who are impressed by a really ugly electric bicycle.

NAME NAMED WRONGLY

Published in yesterday's Crikey subscriber email and republished today at Pure Poison:

While there are many aspects to this saga, clearly the most central is the question of that email from the Prime Minister’s office to a public servant by the name of Gordan Grech.

Another Crikey exclusive.

VEILED NONSENSE

Griffith University PhD student Nada Ibrahim responds to French President Sarkozy's assertion that the burqa is "not a sign of religion", but a sign of "enslavement ... and subservience":

It is actually an obligation that is put in the Koran.

"If you go into a chapter called 'the light', God particularly tells us Muslims to cover ourselves, so it's a commandment from God."

It has nothing to do with Muslim men being oppressive and controlling ... nothing to do with terrorism ... it has everything to do with God commanding you to do it," she said.

This is nonsense, of course: a majority of Muslim women wear neither veil nor burqa, with Ms Ibrahim pictured with neither.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SURGES

Increasingly the perpetrators are women:

There has been a startling increase in the number of women who are the perpetrators of domestic violence.

New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics figures show that over the past eight years, the number of women charged with domestic abuse has rocketed by 159 per cent.

As noted, men are loath to attempt to restrain violent partners out of fear it will be wrongly assumed they are the aggressor. Active self-defense is out of the question.

CLIMATE CHANGE COSTS LIVES

Paint poisoning?

MAKING A LIVING

The sources of elk antlers and walrus meat are mysteries no more.

WHY GAY

Time magazine considers homosexuality.

TASER QUESTIONS

From what I gather, Queensland police use the X26 Taser, which operates in two modes: incapacitation, where darts are fired with an incapacitating shock administered; and drive stun, where a painful but non-incapacitating shock is applied to a small area.

In which mode was the Taser when supposedly activated 28 times to subdue "[a]mphetamines addict Antonio Galeano"?

EDITOR REQUIRED

Perhaps hoping to keep readers at his blog Antony Loewenstein often quotes whole pieces rather than excerpts -- copyright apparently does not apply in Loewy-land. Here, for example, is an external blog post in its entirety. Strangely, Loewnestein's copy differs from the original, which doesn't contain this paragraph of Loewenstein-like gibberish:

The revolution brought about by blogging—which Loewenstein dedicates his Given these connections Loewenstein is making about the role blogging now plays throughout the world, it is significant that many news organizations that initially criticized bloggers as not being ‘real journalists’ have now opened their pages to their staff blogs in a mode of ‘if you can’t fight them, join them.’book to exploring—focuses on how blogs are being used by “the imprisoned dissidents everywhere.” He is clearly driven in writing this book by the mission of calling our attention to the struggle many dissidents face in countries where it is difficult—and dangerous—to try to get heard in these repressive environments. Governments would not crack down on the Internet and suppress its voices, if bloggers are not articulating messages and information that they find offensive or feel threatened by.

Loewenstein experienced a copy-and-paste malfunction and hasn't noticed, and his readers haven't bothered telling him. The guy needs his very own personal editor.

Update: The paragraph has been silently corrected.


Editing note: "it's" changed to "its".

BOYZ BUSY

A belated explanation from Scott Bridges:

Sorry about the quiet week, everyone. The three of us have each been up to our eyeballs in work and found it difficult to find time to write much content for Pure Poison. Things have settled a bit for us now so we should be back on deck this week. But in the meantime, have at it!

Jeremy, who's had the time for personal blogging during the PP lull, put up a PP post a few hours later. Gee, it's almost like these two aren't communicating. By the way, with Bolt not blogging at the moment, Jeremy is forced to find fault with second-stringer Tim Blair.

THE BEST GIG HE CAN GET

Andy Dick now works for PETA and will henceforth be known simply as McDick.

HIGH TIDE

Beachcombing is the new Scandinavian hobby:

A kilo of cocaine in a well-sealed package has washed ashore on the Swedish west coast.

The street value of the drugs are worth around 1 million kronor ($126,000), according to TTELA newspaper.

Swedish authorities say that additional packages may still be out to sea, and authorities, including the coast guard, are conducting a search on water and land.

HEAD-SHOT FUN

Zombieland

LINK SEVERED

Jeremy Sear links to Grods in happier times: "Grods Corp (Scott Bridges and others - sometimes including me)"

After the upheaval: "Grods Corp (Scott Bridges and others)"

Update: With only one authored post over the past four days at Pure Poison it looks like the boyz might have done their dash. Grodster Bridgit Gread lays blame:

I agree that it's too fixated on Bolt and Jeremy drives that.

Just a bit of constructive criticism from a friend.

Editing note: quotation marks and link added.

SAKHALIN SUMMER

Expat Brit Tim Newman and friends go camping with great fun had by all. While at his site check out his other recent posts; the Russian bureaucracy is just like bureaucracies everywhere, only more so.

SCIENCE GUY PROVIDES IFFY LINKS

Sage advice from Tim Lambert: always click on the links. When reading Lambert always click on his links; you'll likely find they don't support whatever argument he's making. The following is typical:

The use of DDT against malaria is not banned. The LD50 (quantity that kills half of test subjects) for DDT is 200 mg/kg for monkeys (closest analogue to humans). So for a 75 kg person that's 15g, or one tablespoon. A 50% chance of killing you does not, to me, seem to be the same as "no harm at all". And DDT does thin bird shells...

The first link above is to an earlier Lambert post with further links to other Lambert posts. These address not the general use of DDT but rather Sri Lanka's use of DDT in the 1960s and '70s.

The second link is to the Pesticide Action Network's pesticide database -- apparently Lambert could find no reputable science sources providing the information he needed. Clicking the link is worthwhile because Lambert need not have used information about DDT toxicity in a test analogue; human lethal dose figures are provided: the LDLo for humans, that is, the lowest lethal human dose, is 500.0 mg/kg, which is equal to approximately 2.5 tablespoons.

If Lambert had taken the time to look he might have found this:

Amounts at least as high as 285 mg/kg have been ingested without fatalities.

In fact, there is no proof that anyone has died as a result of acute DDT poisoning.

Lambert's third link is to the index of the book Biology of Marine Birds. It proves nothing.

There's more iffy linking in comments with this from educator Ed Darrell:

One must marvel at people who deny that DDT is toxic. The skull and crossbones on the old DDT containers was there for a reason. We know that one cup of prepared DDT kills kids -- a five-year-old kid thought the milky solution might be tasty as it dripped from a tank. Fatal.

And even today, DDT is a common suicide poison in Asia. Does Monckton think Asia doesn't exist? Does he know that DDT is poisonous, but hope to hoodwink everyone else? Is he just a blazing misanthrope?

As noted earlier, DDT is not proven to have caused anyone's death -- the solvents in which DDT is disolved are thought to account for the deaths resulting from consumption of DDT solutions. Click the Darrell provided link and you'll find a story about a woman who unsuccessfully attempted suicide by consuming DDT powder. If she does die, she will be the first documented death from acute DDT poisoning, provided it was actually DDT she consumed.

As always, everything at Deltoid about DDT must be regarded as suspect.

DEJA VU

MOVING ON UP

Now reporting from the Jew heartland:

Antony Loewenstein is a New York-based journalist and author of My Israel Question.

From where the Middle East specialist will closely monitor events in Israel and surrounds.

Update: Loewenstein exaggerates, just slightly:

During this year’s Gaza war, Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard was incapable of condemning Israeli brutality against the Palestinians. Her upcoming visit to Israel (and a few spare minutes with the Palestinian Authority) has caused loud protests across the country.

Click the "loud protests" link and you'll find a story about the Prime Minister's unheralded artist nephew and 170 others signing a petition "calling on Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard to cancel her planned visit to Israel." Wow.

Update II: New York-based journalist Loewenstein is interviewed on the ABC -- he speaks like he writes: poorly.

PAY-BACKS ARE HELL

A reap as ye sow moment:

Armed tribesmen have killed six suspected Taliban militants in north-western Pakistan in their government-backed revenge campaign for a deadly mosque blast, police said.

Up to 3,000 villagers in Upper Dir took up arms in early June, forming a militia - known locally as a lashkar - after 38 people died in a suicide bombing at a mosque in the district. The Taliban were held responsible.

PP LULL

Pure Poison's media analysts have been uncharacteristically quiet over the past few days, apparently running short of intellectual dishonesty to debunk. The blogging action instead taking place at the PP boyz' personal blogs –– Grods and An Onymous Lefty -- with the uber-intelligent lefties falling out over a police raid on an Australian producer of pornography. See conflicting posts here and here -- you might want to rustle up some popcorn or a coffee before clicking those links; there's lots of lefty acrimony to wade through (pretty much the whole Grods crew -- John Surname, Chuck A Spear, Scott Bridges, Jeremy Sear, Keri James, Bridgit Gread, Bron, Darryl Mason, THR, zoot, Bruce, cosmicjester and Toaf -- participates).

And to provide perfect back-stabbing symmetry there's this little effort from Random Brainwave. Yep, there's nothing quite as much fun to watch as a lefty bloodletting.

Warning: these paricular lefties are prone to making fools of themselves, later claiming it was all a cunning trap to sucker less intelligent right-wingers into commenting.

CRAZY LOW

The embed won't work so click here to see a Dutch F-16 pilot frying chickens in the barnyard, so to speak.

GREATEST. HALF-ARSED. CLASSIC. EVER.

Media analyst and online satirist Scott Bridges' post ("All tip and no iceberg") lampooning Peter Costello's unrealised leadership ambitions is greeted with superlatives: "Greatest. Hypothetical. Ever." and "Stone. Cold. Classic.". Here's the first paragraph of this satirical classic:

This guy — let’s call him Peter — walks into a brothel but has no money. His mate — let’s call him John — promises that if he can go first he’ll shout him a root when he’s done. But John reneges on the agreement and refuses to lend Peter the money. Peter notices that John has left his wallet sitting on the table, wide open, hundreds of dollars hanging out, nobody in the room watching, but Peter lacks the courage to take the money out of the wallet. However, John finally leaves the brothel after staying for way too long and infuriating the working girls by saying that erections were a “non-core” promise, and gives Peter the money he promised him ages ago. But even then Peter can’t work up the courage to go and purchase himself a shag.

Brothel? What's the connection to an iceberg? Is the brothel meant to be a metaphor for parliament or perhaps Australia? Why does a broke Peter go into a brothel in the first place? Why does John ask his mate to let him go first when Peter has no money for a root anyway? Did Peter not do the right thing in not taking money from John's wallet? Are the prostitutes meant to symbolise parliamentarians or the voters of Australia? Do prostitutes become infuriated at a customer's failure to get an erection? What the Hell does any of this have to do with Peter Costello and John Howard?

Read the whole post and decide for yourself if it's a classic, or never developed beyond the "half-arsed idea" stage.

SECRET SECRETS

Darryl Mason, Australia's greatest online fantasist, imagines he has gigantic popularity secrets Fairfax and News Ltd should be interested in buying:

There are a few good free ways for corporate media sites like The Punch and National Times to pull quality and volume-high comments to their sites, but why give away good ideas like that?

Immediately below publishing expert Darryl's bold claim: "Comments 0"

Update: Darryl knows lots of secrets:

The ‘Exclusive’ story from Glenn Milne disappeared from News Limited sites within a matter of hours, but it’s still all up at The Orstrahyun.

The "disappeared" story, "Peter Costello set to be leader at last", is available at News Limited's Courier Mail.

POST-TRAUMATIC EMBITTERMENT DISORDER

Mental health professionals create a new source of income:

The disorder is modeled after post-traumatic stress disorder because it too is a response to a trauma that endures. People with PTSD are left fearful and anxious. Embittered people are left seething for revenge.

"They feel the world has treated them unfairly. It's one step more complex than anger. They're angry plus helpless," says Dr. Michael Linden, a German psychiatrist who named the behavior.

Christopher Lane, Professor of Literature at Northwestern University, pinpoints the source of this widespread, devastating trauma:

Now I grant that there's a lot of anger and bitterness out there. Part of it, I'd wager, is targeted appropriately at a Republican administration that managed in eight years to bring a largely healthy economy to its knees.

Do we need to give additional reasons for bitterness at that outcome? The Bush administration managed to lead the country into a protracted, illegal war, based on trumped-up evidence; ignored memos that said the country faced credible terrorist threats; locked up large numbers of suspects afterwards without trial or due process; lied to its citizens about the widespread use of torture; eliminated every sensible, necessary check on financial regulation to prevent a fiscal meltdown; mocked the facts of climate change; and dithered as Hurricane Katrina devastated a large city.

Heaven knows, there are reasons enough to be bitter about the untold number of opportunities squandered, the problems that have escalated in their place, and the crises now with us that were once entirely avoidable.

This disorder already has a name: Bush derangement syndrome.

WHAT IS IT?

It's made of plastic and rubber and runs on batteries. Answer to follow.

The Reaction Stick measures reaction time: it is dropped by one person, to be snatched from midair by another. See here.

BECK'S COROLLARIES TO BLAIR'S LAWS

For Blair's Laws see here -- didn't know there were two, did you?

Corollary to law one: The farther left or right are the merging idiocies the greater the likelihood that the resulting entity will be dangerous rather than merely useless. See here.

Corollary to law two: Teh left has a poor understanding of legal processes and really should think before typing.

Update: Blair's Law #2 has disappeared without explanation. Hmm, this sort of thing happens a lot lately. Dubya is gone so we can't blame him.

LIFE TOUGH, SHOPPING TOUGHER

Coles loses a customer miffed at its limited product range and failure to post unit prices. These problems are easily solved: visit the shops offering the products you want and use your phone's calculator to figure unit prices. Overcoming such insignificant troubles is actually easier than complaining about them. Some people just live to complain, I guess.

Update: Unit pricing is convenient for shoppers but is not without costs, real and possible. Coles has committed to introduce unit pricing at a cost of $10 million. Many times that amount would be spent introducing the scheme at all retail grocery outlets Australia-wide. This will ultimately be paid for by grocery shoppers.

Unit pricing might encourage retailers to raise prices on cheaper products. If, for example, unit pricing reveals two competing products to have prices of say 75¢ and 90¢, retailers will be tempted to narrow the differential by raising the price of the cheaper product. Shoppers will still save by buying the cheaper product but the retailer will actually make more than before.

It has been proposed that a mechanism be established to monitor this possible effect of unit pricing. This isn't going be cheap.

In tangentially related news, the UK government is considering scrapping "best before" food dating to help reduce needless waste:

“Too many of us are putting things in the bin simply because we’re not sure, we’re confused by the label, or we’re just playing safe,” Hilary Benn, the UK’s Environment Secretary, said.

"Best before" food dates have to be a huge money maker for food manufacturers with perfectly good products thrown in the bin to be replaced with new. Consumers also pay the costs associated with the "best before" labeling, which is effectively meaningless in any event.

Update II: A cook-it-yourself penny-pinching tip:

The great thing about a broth is you can use a cheap cut of meat that you usually wouldn't feed to the dogs...

The very next post revealing the possible downside of eating dog-quality food:

... last week I had a stomach bug all week ...

Probably a virus.

RUDD SIGNS PETITION CALLING ON GILLARD TO CANCEL ISRAEL TRIP

Not that Rudd, the other famous Rudd, "Van Thanh Rudd, the artist son of the Prime Minister's brother, Malcolm." Amongst the 170+ signatories:

Names on the petition include Greens MPs Ian Cohen and Lee Rhiannon, journalists John Pilger and Antony Loewenstein, Jewish actress Miriam Margolyes, Jewish Australian writer Sara Dowse, and academics such as sociologist Raewyn Connell, Associate Professor Jake Lynch, director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict studies at the University of Sydney, and retired CSIRO scientist Bill Snowden.

Lacking quantity, the petition compensates with quality. Before moving on you really should check out Rudd's artwork, provocatively blending footy, soldiers and exploding people.

Update: Always keen to get in on any action even remotely anti-Israel, Loewenstein is one of the 74 signatories to this petition.

Update II: Lowenstein tries to say he was commissioned to write a piece for the latest Sydney PEN magazine:

In their latest newsletter, I was commissioned to write about the freedom of the press in repressive states such as Sri Lanka and Russia.

In the article he writes (my bold):

The atmosphere of impunity against journalists in Sri Lanka is reminiscent of many other nations, including Russia, Colombia, Iraq, Palestine, Mexico and the Philippines.

Later in the same article Loewenstein says too many journalists to count have been killed in Iraq and in the next sentence gives a total:

The former presidential press secretary under George W. Bush, Ari Fleischer, said in the wake of 9/11 that Americans “need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” The murder of countless journalists in Afghanistan and Iraq by American forces suggests that this policy was not merely a rhetorical device. According to the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 138 journalists and 51 media workers have been killed in Iraq since March 2003.

Sydney PEN is apparently confident its writers require no editing. Wrong.

Update III: Loewenstein eloquently sums up a Noam Chomsky lecture:

It was like listening to a history lesson of the past and present.

A 13-word sentence containing a redundancy and an impossibility: classic Loewy.

Update IV: More classic Loewy:

This is a moving story about Israelis who dedicate themselves to paint over racist graffiti, a sadly increasingly phenomenon.

Huh?

RECIDIVISM PREVENTED

A possibly wayward youth will commit no future crimes:

Palestinian police say a 15-year-old boy has been found hanged near the town of Qalqilya in the West Bank.

They said several family members had confessed to involvement in the killing, accusing the boy of collaborating with the Israeli army.

Murder is cheaper than rehabilitation.

Update: More information emerges:

Sawalha is the youngest Palestinian to be killed on suspicion of collaboration.

Hundreds of other suspected collaborators have also been killed by Palestinians over the past few years.

A preliminary investigation launched by PA security forces revealed that Sawalha had been brutally tortured before he was hanged.

MURDOCH RESPONSIBLE

Antony Loewenstein reacts to the attack on Washington's Holocaust Museum not with a post about the Jew-hating shooter or the museum's extraordinary security but rather with a post about Fox News. Go figure.

SMOOTH MOVER

What female could resist a line like this?

Come back to my place and I’ll make you walk funny.

All of them, apparently.

SEED OF DOUBT

Anti-DDT campaigner Tim Lambert links to an anti-DDT article in Seed magazine -- his blog host. The article gets off to a bad start:

That DDT builds up in our environment, kills marine life, and thins the eggshells of songbirds are lurid facts.

DDT's thinning of songbird eggshells is not an established fact, at least not as far as I know.

Attached to the article is a photograph (titled "Silent Spring DDT") of a heavily protected worker spraying an unknown substance -- presumably DDT since the article is about DDT -- on a lush green field, whereas the article is ostensibly about the indoor spraying of tiny amounts of DDT in the fight against malaria. The photograph is meant to lead readers to think that the dreaded DDT is being broadcast into the environment when such use is unlikely to occur anywhere in the world today.

A large part of the Seed article is devoted to an interview with epidemiologist Barbara Eskanazi, who knows DDT's use in the fight against malaria will have dire outcomes but can't prove it:

I don’t really know. I can’t predict, but I can say that if the studies that I read hold true we may see higher rates of diabetes; we may see higher rates of breast cancer; we may see higher rates of male infertility. We may see poor neurodevelopment in children. We may also see more spontaneous abortions.

Or, maybe not. Eskanazi is the lead author of a recent report on a review of DDT studies which concludes (my bold):

The use of DDT historically may have resulted in preventing millions of infections and deaths from insect-borne diseases. Based on recent studies, we conclude that humans are exposed to DDT and DDE, that IRS can result in substantial exposure, and that DDT may pose a risk for human populations. However, few studies have measured body burdens of both DDE and DDT and studies have rarely investigated the effects of DDT/E exposure at levels observed in populations exposed through IRS. Furthermore, information on exposure to DDT/E during critical periods is limited for outcomes such as cancer.

Again, maybe not.

The Seed article is intentionally misleading, inaccurate and irresponsible. Lambert's link to it is proof enough that the article is a crock.

POM TIRED

The ABC describes how whinging Pom Ben Southall won the right to the "best job in the world":

The 34-year-old beat off more than 34,000 applicants for the six-month $150,000 contract to live and work on Hamilton Island as a caretaker.

Ben will never use that hand again. This is not the first editing lapse at the ABC, by the way.

Update: The superfluous "off" is now gone.

AUTHORS NOT REQUIRED

Pure Poison's open threads continue to draw more comments than do the authored threads. Just a few days ago the three page comment average was 19 for authored threads versus 33 for open threads; this has now widened to 17 comments for authored threads versus 43 for open. The PP boyz have invented the blog written by readers: the forum.

WRONG MESSAGE SENT

British SAS personnel are reportedly livid at the scuttling of an operation to rescue executed al Qaeda hostage Edwin Dyer:

“We knew where he was. We are convinced we could have got him out alive, but Whitehall bottled it.

“Whether it was the Directorate of Special Forces, the military chiefs or Government ministers, we don’t know. We have our suspicions.

“Of course there was risk, there always is in hostage rescue. The group said they were going to kill him anyway, so what was there to lose?

“And if we did it, it would have sent a powerful message to these sorts of people not to screw with Brits.”

Failure to mount a rescue sends an equally powerful message, unfortunately.

HAMAS MISUNDERSTOOD

The head of Beirut-based NGO Conflicts Forum makes a group of thugs seem almost cuddly:

Mr Crooke said that Hamas is a "moderate" organisation seen by many Muslims as a legitimate national liberation movement, but "demonised" together with genuine religious extremists by Europe.

"If you talk with any Hamas leader, they say 'Look, I don't get messages from God. I don't get instructions about who should be the Hamas candidate. We believe the Koran sets out principles by which a human being should live and we try to find a practical way in which to conduct our policies based on these principles.' That's not dogmatism. That's not irrationalism. It's not in any sense extremism."

Which of the various Islamist groups do claim to receive instructions from God?

Anyway, the Hamas charter rejects Western peace efforts:

[Peace] initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement... Those conferences are no more than a means to appoint the infidels as arbitrators in the lands of Islam... There is no solution for the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility.

Moderates my arse.

BETTER BUY A BOAT

Absolutely meaningless scare-mongering from Reuters:

Climate scientists say sea levels could rise by at least a meter this century.

It's like a sale where prices are reduced by up to 70%.

FALL GAL

It was perhaps inevitable that someone would lose his -- in this case her -- job over the decidedly unfunny Chaser skit:

In a statement, ABC managing director Mark Scott says Amanda Duthie has been removed from her position after a review of the process which led to the skit being broadcast.

"Where staff are concerned about the potential for satirical material to cause harm they should refer the matter to the next level of management. In this instance, the Head of Arts, Entertainment and Comedy reviewed the segment and did not refer it up," he said.

"This was an error of judgement."

The comedy professionals who wrote and performed the skit are guilty of more serious and direct errors of judgement and should also be sacked.

EVERYONE RESPONDS DIFFERENTLY UNDER PRESSURE

Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger calmly crash-lands a crippled airliner in the Hudson River.

Cincinnati police shoot to kill:

Lieutenant Paul Hartinger from the Blue Ash police department told WCPO that the officers had no choice but to shoot the dog after it had attacked them and other people.

Subduing the Chihuahua with a rolled up newspaper did not occur to the officers.

POLITICAL VIOLENCE INCREASES IN SWEDEN

Any guesses where it's coming from?

Violent threats to democracy from groups on the far left escalated in the run-up to the European Parliament elections, according to the Swedish Security Police (Säpo).

The far right Sweden Democrats were one of the main targets of the so-called "autonomous" movement. But parties in Sweden's coalition government also found themselves in the firing line.

The chief perpetrators came from groups on the extreme left such as Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) and Revolutionära Fronten.

"It's part of what they call their anti-fascist agenda. They don't believe that parties they consider critical of immigrants or opposed to workers' rights should be permitted to operate undisturbed," Olsson told news agency TT.

What is it with leftists and violence?

TRANSPORT

Wish I had.

Like to have.

Can afford.

FOWL IRASCIBLE BUT UNFLAPPABLE

Happy 75th Donald Duck.

THOSE MISSING CHUCK A SPEAR POSTS

Read on only if you're interested in the latest developments in the ongoing battle of blogging giants: Random Brainwave vs Beck. You were warned, so don't whine about it in comments.

Yesterday afternoon while relaxing with an after work coffee cruising the blogosphere I noticed a comment in the Random Brainwave sidebar that wasn't attached to a post. A cache search revealed four posts from earlier in the date that had since been removed -- the cache of the Random Brainwave homepage has changed and no longer shows these posts, but the three posts below were online long enough to be cached individually:

Hello Biafros

Hello Dawgs

Hello Idiots

The longest of the four post, Hello Derros, no longer available online, is shown below as two screen-grabs.




Anyway, my post yesterday simply pointed to the removed posts; no opinion on why the posts were removed was offered. Chuck Spear quickly responding that I had fallen into a cunning trap of some sort:

As predicted the bait has been dished up and has been swallowed. Beck, would you also like a spoon to eat out my arse?

Beck, you sir are a second-rate, fucking moron. You should hook up with a first-rate one we all know. It would be a good example of Blair's Law.

Chuck wants readers to believe a scenario like this:

• It's a holiday Monday with time to kill.
• Cunning trap plan pops into Chuck's brain.
  
• Four hoax posts written and posted.
• Posts removed after ensuring blog homepage is cached; otherwise Beck won't be able to find posts.
• Beck finds cached posts; makes complete fool of himself.
• Much lefty back-slapping and general hilarity at stupid conservative's naiveté.
  

The following scenario is probably much closer to the truth:

• Chuck goes for ritual early-morning back-to-nature dump in the garden; the broccoli loves a good crap.
• While squatting notice psilocybe cubensis.
• Ingest psilocybe cubensis.
• Watch TV; with Centrelink closed, time to kill.
  
• Vomit.
• Experience burst of creativity.
• Write and publish transcendental blog posts on idiot conservatives.
• Watch more TV marveling at the visual and sound quality of the programs -- adverts are especially good.
• Suddenly realise blog posts are embarrassingly incoherent rubbish.
• Blog posts removed.
  
• Frantically seek advice of lefty blogger mates.
• Go with consensus: claim blog posts were part of a cunning plan.
  

Regardless how events actually played out, reading Chuck's posts will show he has, yet again, made a fool of himself.

By the way, Chuck is lying, I have attempted to lodge no comments at Random Brainwave, either cloaked or in the open.

Update: The saga continues with John Surname nailing shut the coffin Chuck built for me:

Dreck will be unable to admit he fell hook, line and sinker for this most obvious ploy designed to play on his many - many! - personality faults. We are very good at this, we've done it before. It will be fascinating to see what sob story he concocts now, and whether he makes it to China before he admits he was wrong.

The RB posts were taken down; what did I get wrong, exactly? Hey, maybe Chuck doesn't really crap in his garden.

GIVE MY DOG A PHYSICAL OR YOUR EAR IS GONE

Don't you just hate news stories that don't make sense or at least seem to be missing vital information?

Police have charged a Shoalwater man with assault after he allegedly bit his neighbour's ear in a dispute over a dog.

Police allege the 49-year-old man took his ill dog to visit the woman and asked her to check it over.

When she refused, he allegedly grabbed her in a bear hug before biting her ear.

But... how's the dog?

SPOT THE DIFFERENCES

Remember the "spot the difference games" you played as a kid? You know, where you were challenged to spot the differences in a subtly altered version of the original image. Here's a website-based version of the game: compare a website's homepage earlier today with now to see if you can spot the subtle differences. (Be prepared to do some scrolling after clicking the first ink.)

As the subject website's homepage will change over time, the links above will eventually be replaced with screen-grabs.

Update: Master-baiter Chuck Spear apparently lured me into a cunning trap. It's a variation on the tried and true technique of using your face as bait when hunting wolverines.

Update II: With the updating of Google's cache the "earlier today" link above has changed. This post will be rewritten later today.

Update III: The new version of this post is here.

FREEMAN DYSON VS CLIMATE CHANGE CATASTROPHISTS

Physicist Freeman Dyson isn't a global warming skeptic but he doesn't buy the doom and gloom pedaled by warmenistas. Dyson elaborates.

TOURIST TALE FISHY

American tourist Chad Vance failed to reboard The Ghan in Port Augusta but knew what to do:

Mr Vance said he knew The Ghan would pull up just outside of town to change drivers before continuing its journey.

He decided to chase the train before it came to a rest.

Mr Vance said when he caught up to the stopped train, he started frantically banging on the windows of the first class dining carriage. He said the passengers ignored him because they "probably thought I was some crazy kid" outside.

After five minutes, the train started to slowly pull away again, leaving Mr Vance thinking he would be stuck in Port Augusta with just $10, a digital camera and the shirt on his back.

The young tourist then made an "instinctive" decision - which he admitted in retrospect was a "pretty crazy idea" - and managed to grab hold of the stairwell near the rear of the train and swing himself into a cramped sitting position.

This makes no sense at all. The driver is at the front of the train. Vance could easily walk the length of The Ghan and probably back in five minutes. Why didn't he walk to the front of the train to alert the driver to his presence? Something's seriously wrong with this story. Either that or there's something seriously wrong with Chad Vance.

GAZANS GET RICH QUICK

Palestinians taking advantage of Palestinians:

Jawad Tawfiq, a 52-year-old Gazan actor and director, was dubious at first, but his nephew insisted. If they could scrape together enough money, the nephew said, large profits could be made from investing in the tunnels that snake beneath the Egyptian border.

"They were liars," Tawfiq said bitterly last week. "They took my money to put in their own pockets. And we are being offered a fraction of what we gave them."

At first the tunnels emerged as smuggling routes; then they became the vital lifeline for a Gaza under economic siege by Israel. But many people who invested in the tunnels now see them quite differently - as a source of ruination.

The tunnel schemes were advertised as opportunities for doubling and trebling money by unscrupulous figures linked to powerful businessmen in Gaza and, allegedly, to senior officials in Hamas, but have instead led to huge losses for ordinary residents of the Strip.

According to Hamas's economics minister, Ziad al-Zaza, whose office is investigating the issue, some $100m has been taken fraudulently from would-be entrepreneurs. Others suggest the figure could be closer to $500m.

And not a Jew in sight.

How is it that supposedly poverty stricken Gazans have hundreds of millions of disposable dollars to invest in get-rich-quick schemes?

FORGET ABOUT SWINE FLU AND GLOBAL WARMING, WORRY ABOUT RUST

Not iron oxide; Ug99, a fungus that could end civilization as we know it:

Keynote speakers at a symposium on rust diseases held in Sydney last week said that a virulent new stem rust known as Ug99 posed a threat to wheat crops worldwide.

According to an international organisation set up to combat the disease, the Global Rust Initiative (GRI), the amount of stem rust now in the world might be very small, but there is about to be a lot more.

That was 2007; Ug99 continues to spread:

An epidemic of stem rust on wheat caused by race Ug99 is currently spreading across Africa, Asia and most recently into Middle East and is causing major concern and an increase of food riots and civil unrest, notably in West and Central Africa among the worst-hit countries.

Unlike other rusts, which only partially affect crop yields, UG99 can bring 100% crop loss.

According to Nobel laureate and father of the Green Revolution Norman Borlaug:

This thing has immense potential for social and human destruction.

Unless resistant strains are developed wheat crops worldwide could be devastated.

Via GMO Pundit

Update: Famines are the bane of humanity.

BOOKS PLUGGED SHAMELESSLY

Hold onto your hats folks, PP boy Scott Bridges has the dirt on new blog The Punch: it's a commercial site. Even worse, The Punch's mission statement is less than transparent:

No mention there of shameless plugs for new books by their authors, complete with Buy Now! links at the end.

Funny, no mention in the Pure Poison mission statement of the Crikey subscription plug and multiple ads cluttering up every page.

If anything, Bridges envies The Punch's authors, who stand to make some real money. Maybe Bridges should write a book and plug it on Pure Poison; surely he's an authority on something people want to know more about.

DIFFERENCES? OH YEAH, THOSE DIFFERENCES

The festival of Dreck continues at Random Brainwave:

John Surname writes: Hello idiots!

If you're visiting from Dreck's you're about to discover that, OMG, he's wrong and and as usual has no idea what he is talking about.

He claims:

The original post was posted online in the evening of 1 June and was silently
pulled before midnight (AEST). A rewrite of the post eventually reappeared at 5:56 PM (AEST) on 2 June.

The original post can be found here where Dreck might have found it if he'd actually bothered to do any research. Super slueths might also note that by looking at the Blogotariat feed, you can see it lists two posts, published two days apart that are exactly the same (save for one tasty lawerly difference that Beck and Blair may wish had remained private).

Rewrite my arse.

That's right, it's the same post, just resaved as a draft and reposted later as not to clog the page too quickly, just like Chuck said.

Beck PWNED. Do your fucking research next time. What is it with the right and just making up what ever they want to believe?

Oh, and stop using Hide My Ass to try and block your IP. It doesn't work.

Now why would anyone be worried about these guys tracking IPs. I mean, it's not like Surname was involved in the sock-puppet IP tracking nonsense at Pure Poison, now is it? Oh wait... Anyway, I find Anonymouse to be better all around than Hide My Ass.


The two Random Brainwave posts are not "exactly the same... save for one tasty lawyerly difference". There are insignificant differences like "cool Crusty Demon kids" changing to "Crusty Demon kids".

A more significant change resulted in this:

Poor Tim became a laughing stock when he sent letters threatening legal action to certain bloggers (one of which is teasing about posting the letter on his blog) and allegedly tried to get certain blogs shut down and get access to their logs. Tim was serial. Caught red-handed, he acted like a sook and was immeasurably hurt.

Becoming this:

Tim became a laughing stock when he allegedly sent letters threatening legal action to certain bloggers (one of which is teasing about posting the letter on his blog). Tim was serial. Caught red-handed, he acted like a sook and was immeasurably hurt.

And another change, with this:

Beck seems the only friend Tim has at the moment as the winged-monkeys desert the sinking ship. Some end up on Beck's comment threads as 'Anonymous' but as we know, most of those are from the guy who calls himself 'J.F. Beck.'

Evolving into this:

Tim must be rattled feeling the need to delurk (or at least shed his anonymous tag for a while) over at Beck's. He seems the only friend Tim has at the moment as the winged-monkeys have deserted the sinking ship. Some have ended up on Beck's comment threads as 'Anonymous' but as we know, most of those are from the guy who calls himself 'J.F. Beck.'

Surname's assurances notwithstanding, the post was pulled for rewriting: inserting "allegedly" and removing allusions to behind the scenes PP/Grods/RB discussions the main goals.

Surname is also incorrect in assuming I was not aware of the original post archived at Blogotariat: I was already in bed when the original post went online but found out it had been pulled, and is archived at Blogotariat, when I checked my emails early morning on 2 June.

In their defence, the Random Brainwavers have poor difference-spotting skills, here lampooning "Blair's writing", while the link is not to anything written by Blair, but to Blair's commenters.

Finally, whereas comments are much appreciated -- actually, they can be a huge pain in the arse, but that's another story -- there's no need for over the top make-a-fool-out-of-the-idiot-lefties comments: these guys are their own worst enemy and clearly do not know when to stop. Time to put down the spades, boys.

VINTAGE HUMOUR

The Chaser brouhaha got me thinking about bad taste humour, evoking memories of the early '80s. Within days of Azaria Chamberlain's reputed abduction by a dingo a workmate ambled up to me casually enquiring, "Have you heard that they've reopened the investigation into Harold E. Holt's disappearance?" adding after a perfectly timed pause, "Yeah, they're looking for a dingo with a snorkel." That joke probably wouldn't have gone down too well if aired on national TV.

NEW HEALTH FOOD: LARD

Pig fat not only tastes good, it's good for you.

WORTH A LOOK

Don't be put off by Pure Poison; several Crikey blogs are actually worth reading.

Tim Dunlop returns to blogging with Johnny's in the Basement, where he writes about, "Music for grown-ups who remember when they weren’t".

At Plane Talking Ben Sandilands discusses matters aviational. His series of posts on the disappearance of Air France flight 447 is very informative.

Take a look; be prepared to be pleasantly surprised.

TRIPPY PAINTING

12 year-old Alice Wang is this year's American winner of the United Nations Environment Program International Children's Painting Competition, addressing the them "Climate Change: Our Challenge."

"I drew a thermometer and three hands. Two of the hands are good and one is bad. The bad one [has] stuff that contributes to global warming, and the other ones are things that prevent it," she explains.

In Wang's winning work, tiny solar panels, sunflowers, wind turbines, polar bears and penguins dance atop the two green hands. In stark contrast, the third hand is a sooty black from polluting fossil fuels emitted from cars and power plants.

Alice Wang will travel to South Korea in August for the United Nations Environment Program Tunza International Children's Conference. She'll vie among first-prize winners from six global regions for a $2,000 cash prize.

The prize really should be carbon credits, not cash. Alice would understand.

UPDATE: UNEP is also responsible for Ozzy Ozone, one of the worst educational cartoons, ever.

BEEN AND GONE

Presumably because their readers have the memories of mice, the PP Boyz run this excruciating reminder every single day:

We love having you comment here at Pure Poison but it’s a little bit difficult for discussion to continue uninterrupted on specific posts when off-topic comments land in the middle of them. So each day we’ll launch an open thread where you can leave comments that don’t quite fit on one of the other posts. Remember that tip-offs can be made here.

Have at it!

The task of posting this always falls to Tobias or Scott. Jezzy is above the mundane work-a-day requirements of a lowly PP drone. By the way, the linked tip-offs page still shows the dumped Ant Rogenous as a contributor -- come on guys, surely it's not expecting too much that you'll stay up to date with events at your own blog.

Anyway, the PP open threads are where the action is: over the past few days authored posts have attracted an average 19 comments; open threads 33, with Andrew Bolt featuring prominently, of course.

Today's open thread got out of hand with one of the PP boyz -- or possibly a Crikey editor -- stealthily removing this comment after it had been up for hours:

More racism on show here…regarding Obama’s speech about Israel-Palestine. Bolt is careful to make Jews the focus of his assertions rather than Israelis as a whole. It sounds so much more exciting that way, doesn’t it?

The comment shouldn't have been approved in the first place and definitely shouldn't have been removed without notice: this is exactly the sort of intellectual dishonesty the PP boyz claim to be fighting. Their mission statement should be changed to reflect reality: "exemplifying intellectual dishonesty".

Update: An edited version of the missing comment has now appeared with this note:

{NB: This comment was approved in unedited form earlier today but should not have been. The comment was removed while there was discussion among the PP authors about the appropriate moderation approach. The comment has now been reinstated in edited form. We apologise for the lapse in moderation process.}

Why not simply remove the comment noting that the "appropriate moderation approach" was being discussed? The PP boyz are champion squirmers.

Editing note: "z" added.