Here it is, 3.00 pm and still not a skerrick of moral panic on the horizon.

The closest we’ve come so far is Paul Gray’s piece for the Melbourne Rupert on why C. australicus Howardii would have made a better captain for the Titanic than Rudd:

But what is the biggest moral problem facing Australia today?

John Howard said last week it isn’t climate change.

It is impossible to state statistically what proportion of the population does believe that climate change is our biggest moral problem. Given that it is an in-fashion view among our tertiary-educated elites, it’s bound to be a substantial percentage.

But not a majority percentage among Australians.

Most people still think that more important is how we treat our fellow human beings.

That’s why crime — human beings beating up, robbing and murdering each other — is always going to be much more passionately followed as a matter of public interest than a debate between scientists and economists over peak-flow charts and whether we’ll have enough coal and water 25 years ahead.

Never mind getting the passengers to the life boats - for gawd’s sake don’t give them any chance to steal the deck chairs!

I fear you are right about rats and deserting ships, but not for the reasons you state. I thought it was quite clear I am a common garden variety Labor voter.

About 70% of all the votes I have ever cast have been for Labor. I even voted for Blair when I was living in London. About 10% have been for Independents (local issues), 10% for International Socialists (we all have a past), one for each of the Hemp Party and Shooter’s Party and I put Aden Ridgeway at the top of my Senate vote last time. Apart from Aden I, of course, share any sane person’s belief that the Democrats should all go back to teaching primary school in South Australia, where they belong.

The rats I see deserting are the parliamentary ALP. I am greatly relieved that the Luvvies are finally being disenfranchised from the party’s policy thinking. However, I despair Rudd has not filled the vacuum with a re-embrace of Labor’s base.

But my link to L’Albrechtsen’s article has nothing to do with any of this. It is just a little joke with Kim about Mondays.

He died in 2000.

It is just the last desparate shuffle before the writers abondon ship and head for the liferafts. Rats and sinking ships John.

Gillard denies Labor IR policy is anti-business: [link]

Paul Kelly: A bizarre blast from the past: [link]

Union deals to be forced on bosses: [link]

Editorial: Labor looks for its future in the past [link]

Glenn Milne: PM buoyed as ALP caves in to unions [link]

Janet Albrechtsen: Kev turns Left after all [link]

He must be stopped!

You who. Wakey wakey. It’s moral panic manic Monday! If you want a quick heart starter, check out your favourite ‘feminist of convenience’s’ offering today. It’s a pearler.

I said it at my 16th birthday party, about a thousand times since, and I’ll say it again:

DOWN WITH MODERATION!!!!

Colonel Klink, of course, was played by Werner Klemperer, whose father was the famous conductor Otto Klemperer (and whose version of The Magic Flute is still my favorite). I think Werner went on to become a successful conductor in his own right.

Klemperer should consider doing a series, lecturing on music history as Colonel Klink. (If he’s still alive.) It would be even better than Sister Wendy!

Re: Don’t Fear The Reaper - the prescription is, more cowbell.

Don’t Fear The Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult was the suicide inciter of choice for my generation of adolescents. Must have been those arpeggiated power chords, or a subliminal message in the effect produced by Buck Dharma and Allen Lanier rubbing their guitars against each other on MTV.

Nope. It was the cowbell.

As Simon Sebag Montefiore points out in his biography of Stalin, Uncle Joe was very much into the music. He was an excellent singer in his own right, and was responsible for the choice of Alexandrov’s magnificent composition as the Soviet (and now Russian) national anthem after a nationwide song contest to choose a new anthem. (He was also responsible for the crap lyrics glorifying himself and the mass murder of his opponents.)

As for Hitler, whilst he wouldn’t have appreciated a liberal like Beethoven who was sufficiently moved by Schiller’s democratic polemical poem Ode To Joy to put it to music, he certainly got Wagner. You must have missed the Hogan’s Heroes episode in which Colonel Klink sings the melody to Flight of the Valkyries.

Or to swing the viewpoint around, imagine if Hitler or Stalin had actually “got” Beethoven or Tchaikovsky. Then one would have immigrated to NYC and ended up as a longwinded but energetic SF and fantasy magazine illustrator (thanks for that vision Norman Spinrad) and the other as a rather sleazy Georgian version of Don Camillo.

Personally, I don’t see how music could push you over an edge… in my mind people are always ready to jump over anyway, regardless. If I’m in a bad mood, listening to sad music actually makes me feel better. I’d be more depressed if I constantly confronted with happy music in such moods, really. Angsty music, in my opinion, is more likely to make depressed teens feel an affinity, as it gives them a sense that others have, or are still, in the same emotional boat as they are. It ameliorates the sense of loneliness and alienation that is the real killer, if you ask me.