"Surrogate grandparents" are a sad sign of the times

Surrogacy is usually defined as having someone else's baby for them. So we often hear about surrogate mothers. But now there's a variation on the term: surrogate grandparents.

It seems that increasing numbers of Australian families are so fractured these days that senior strangers are being asked to fill these traditional family roles. Parents of kids missing the gentle presence of caring codgers advertise for them online so frequently that law firms are issuing warnings about the potential legal complications of the practice.

The whole thing is bizarre and depressing. It's spookily reminiscent of elements of the comedy movie Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star.  In that flick, a former sprog celeb hires a real family to give him the experiences he missed as a child so he can land a part requiring the emotional maturity he never developed. 

Surrogate grandparents -- another phenomenon to go into the "life imitating satire" file, I reckon.

Gillard's end of the world spoof is life imitating satire

I'm sure you've heard about Julia Gillard's allegedly tongue-in-cheek address to the nation about the impending catastrophe predicted by the Mayan calendar. It's such a stunningly stupid stunt my eyes started to bleed after I watched it. It's actually beyond cringe-worthy and even beats Craig Emerson's "No Whyalla Wipeout" as the most tragic publicity stunt by an Australian politician so far this century. 

Countless people must be scratching their heads about why she's done this. I think her spin doctors have put her up to it to maintain her support amongst the sneering hipster demographic. But what's the point of that? It's a given anyway ... They're probably trying to get the focus off all this AWU stuff, too.

Whatever the motivation behind making the video, it's embarrassing in the extreme. Any non-moron would be wondering what on Earth it has to do with running the country. Can you imagine John Howard or even Paul Keating doing something so frivolous, puerile and totally unfunny?

The saddest thing about it is her droid-like delivery. She reads her lines in the same completely emotionless way that she announces her stupid failed policies.

You'd think that she'd know that for it to work as comedy it requires a bit of wit and oomph in the delivery. Apparently not.

And she's pretending to announce the end of the world, remember. Where's the mock-seriousness? She managed to summon something that seemed sorta heartfelt for her embarrassing suck-speech to the Yanks a while back (which actually was funny, for all the wrong reasons). Why not do a bit of pseudo-emoting here?

It's just sooo Gillard. Whatever she does she does not only badly, but in the most thoroughly inept manner possible. The only things she's good at are knifing people in the back, lying shamelessly and hanging onto power at all costs. 

And I wonder who wrote it, by the way? Presumably someone on staff at Triple J. More of your hard-earned taxes at work, people ...

Final Hamster Wheel shows same old left-wing bias

In comedy and satire everything is exaggerated. So you can see the political subtext very clearly. Many satirists purport to dish out mockery across the board without fear or favour. But that's a crock. They're just as selective as anyone else. And it shows.

Watch anything vaguely humorous on the ABC and you'll see the same dreary left-wing bias every time. The writers and performers are clearly terrified of transgressing uber-PC rules relating to race, gender and sexual identity among other things.

Take the final episode of the Hamster Wheel, which was shown this week. Pretty much every sketch reeked of obnoxious undergraduate Bolshevism (as it always does). Kinda sad for many reasons, not least because the "boys" who write and perform the show are swiftly approaching middle age.

For example, there was a segment on some media beat-up by A Current Affair about the growth in the number of Asian shops in a shopping mall. It was an easy target that was predictably handled. But there was one little part of it that I thought was particularly interesting because it revealed a specific double standard often applied to racial politics in this country.

The boys were making fun of the fact that the tabloid show had hugely exaggerated the extent of the Chinese "takeover" of the mall in question, saying that according to the racists at ACA "just a tiny bit of Asianness makes something completely Asian".

If such a concept can be freely mocked when it comes to discussions of "Asianness" then surely it would apply to related aspects pertaining to Indigenous issues too, right?

No way. As we are all well aware, the official line is that just the slightest hint of Indigenous ancestry is enough to make someone completely and authentically Aboriginal. And woe betide anyone who dares suggest a contrary view.

Good to know that the Chaser boys observe this little legal idiosyncracy very carefully. Otherwise their show could result in even more wasted taxpayers' millions in the form of massive compensation payouts to people whose feelings they had hurt.

And it's not just the writers and performers who know what's required of them by the bullying Left. The audience are right up to speed on this as well.

The "standby eulogy" for Julia Gillard was a case in point. Apart from the fact that it failed to mention the AWU scandal specifically -- which would surely have been the biggest target by a country mile if they really were anarchic takers of the piss (I mean, if anything's gonna "kill" the PM, surely it's this!) -- the audience took offence at the lame, tame gags near the end and even started to groan. It's as if they were saying: "Boys, we chuckled at the beginning to give the impression that we can laugh at our own side. But mocking the Great Helmsperson's recent face plant was simply beyond the pale. You're seconds away from being officially deemed sexist and misogynist. You have been warned!"

Depressing stuff. And to think lefties believe they're the ones with the best sense of humour! What a joke.

The Hamster Wheel's lame Dumb, Drunk and Racist parody

There's just so much dreary ol' bolshie bias in the ABC it's hard to know where to begin. And it's obvious in ways both big and small. Last night, for example, the Chaser boys did a sketch about Joe Hildebrand and his show Dumb, Drunk and Racist.

I was only watching The Hamster Wheel intermittently so I can't remember the exact details but basically it attempted to satirize the fact that when he wasn't making docos for the public broadcaster he worked at the eeevil News Ltd. So they concocted this follow-up to the initial series, in which he confronted some Indians with the horrible reality of his co-workers' appalling attitudes. The sketch took pot shots at Miranda Devine, Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman, etc, basically accusing them of being racist.

In the same way that misogyny has a clear and unequivocal meaning -- hatred of women -- racism means perceiving others as different and inferior on account of their race. Now all these high profile journos have said controversial things about racial politics, railing against divisive policies that identify people according to their race before their essential humanity. But none of them have ever condemned, sneered at, or looked down on any group or individual because of their race -- at least as far as I know. (And if any of them have, I'm happy to be corrected.)

So the sketch had a false subtext -- not that this would bother the kind of meatheads who think The Hamster Wheel is insightful, courageous and cutting edge, of course. They are forever conflating race with political belief, culture, even religion, after all. 

As well as completely missing its intended target, the sketch also scored a massive own goal in that its, er, "humour" depended on the seeming incongruity of the right-on Hildebrand working with these appalling reactionaries. But all this really proved to any thinking person was that News Ltd actually employs people with a range of political views. (And Hildebrand isn't the only one who tends to take a PC line. There are heaps of other journos who clearly have more left-wing sympathies in that corporation.)

Yet do the Chaser boys hold a diversity of views? Or can you find any conservatives in the entire national broadcaster, for that matter. (Maybe one or two, but they're rare as hen's teeth.)

Another case of taxpayer-funded self-satire from the sneering hipsters at their ABC.

Chaser boys sledge Alan Jones on The Hamster Wheel

I wasn't surprised that The Hamster Wheel really went to town on Alan Jones last night. Lots of gags about his off-colour comments regarding Julia Gillard's father's death, of course. But also some nasty stuff about his sexuality; stuff that would provoke howls of outrage and rampant accusations of homophobia if it were aimed at a darling of the Left (Bob Brown for example).

Of course PC lefties would counter that accusation of a double standard by saying that Bob Brown is out and proud. So he cannot be criticized. But isn't a person's sexuality his business? If he prefers to keep it private shouldn't "compassionate", "tolerant", "progressive" people respect that, regardless of his political affiliations. If they don't they're just subordinating gay rights issues to partisan politics, surely a backward step. What do they wanna do, take us back to the fifties? 

Still on double standards, and sexuality: If you're going to bring up the decades-old story of Jones being arrested in a public toilet, then why not make jokes about a much more contemporary scandal; one involving a very well known and successful broadcaster being sprung downloading thousands of images of kiddy porn, for example?

The story of former ABC celebrity Andy Muirhead's trial and incarceration has been hogging the headlines of late. If anyone's just askin' for a cruel piss-take it's that guy, surely. And the Chaser boys could really have run amok with their "collector" gags!

Gee, I wonder why they didn't go there? Aren't they fearless satirists committed to waging a "war on everything?" Was it because they're too gutless to show their employer in a negative light, therefore risking their jobs? Oh no, that couldn't possibly be ...

And the show is supposed to be political satire with a media focus, right? So why no mockery of the hilariously desperate and silly attempts by every Labor pollie and his dog (as well as some commentators) to link Jones's comments to Tony Abbott? Nope. Instead they just joined the pile-on on the conservative broadcaster. 

The Jones material took up a lot of the show. It was followed by a reality TV parody mocking Tom Cruise and the Church of Scientology. Good on them for taking the piss out of that organization, but if they want to find more locally relevant and extreme examples of group-think to subvert with their courageously irreverent humour then why don't they try looking a little closer to home? The retarded, inward-looking culture of the ABC contains an abundance of juicy targets for sharp-eyed satirists.

If they were to do this The Hamster Wheel might even draw a bigger audience. And it would be one containing fewer parasitic sneering hipsters, and more of the productive, thoughtful people the organization is purported to serve. What a heartening subversion of the dominant paradigm that'd be! They are the ones who are paying for it, after all.

Earth Hour satirized on Rod Quinn's ABC radio show

Had the wireless on in the wee hours of this morning. Was channel surfing and I ended up on ABC Local. Rod Quinn was chatting to a bloke about Earth Hour. It seemed like it was a dinkum, prearranged interview.

Anyway, this guy said his name was Nick Day, and he was a member of the International Coalition of Earth Hour Supporters. He sounded like your typical garden variety climate change catastrophist and I thought he was the real deal. But then he turned it up a notch, saying that turning off the lights should be mandatory for all citizens, and that the power stations should be shut down for Earth Hour. 

That's when I started to sense a piss-take. Among other things he said that if transport accidents caused by these national shutdowns resulted in deaths they were a "small price to pay for saving the planet". He advocated the widespread use of candles, and more fondue style cooking. When Quinn quizzed him further on this he became indignant, railing at the imputation that he had anything to gain financially from this position. 

It was actually pretty funny in a sly, wry way. This bloke, whoever he was, carried it off well. And Quinn played his part convincingly. I didn't twig while it was happening, but in retrospect I now realize that it was an April Fool's Day prank. 

I continued to listen for a little while after this and those callers I heard responding to this segment mostly seemed to have taken it seriously. Just one guy I heard suspected Day "was having a bit of lend".

This cheeky, prearranged satire of Earth Hour zealotry was a small but not insignificant sign that the warmist mindset at their ABC is shifting somewhat. If a late night presenter can do this on one day of the year when irreverence is expected then more prominent broadcasters in the organization might one day follow suit, maybe even at any time they feel like it.