Friday, March 06, 2015

Once more with feeling, but please, don't mention climate science ...


The trouble with David Rowe is that he routinely gazumps what the pond was going to say - at great, tedious, verbose, repetitive sloganeering Abbotttian length - with a single image, and in this case - the pond - never ever having watched an episode of any cooking show - with a deeper awareness of popular culture (and more Rowe here).

But hey nonny no, on we go, because by way of a big slice of luck, the pond recently managed to get hold of the 1919 intergenerational theft report, which projected what might happen in the next twenty years or so.

Now because it was prepared for the government of that great charlatan and rogue, William Morris Hughes - you can do a Greg Hunt and ADB him here - it's suitably gloomy, and takes the view that Germany should be blamed for everything, and Japan blamed for daring to hint that the White Australia policy might be wrong.

But naturally it was sanguine about Australia's prospects, provided Billy himself stayed in charge.

Strangely however, it didn't foresee the bubble of the 1920s, or the great depression that followed, or the second world war, or much of anything else that actually mattered.

No doubt other intergenerational theft reports are equally myopic.

Now it might well be true that climate science is a fraud and a hoax and a conspiracy perpetrated by the United Nations as a covert way to introduce world government, aided by black helicopters. After all if Janet "Dame Slap" Albrechtsen endorses Lord Monckton, it must be so ...

And after all, we have in our midst some of the very greatest climate scientists in the known universe. There's the Bolter, Moorice Newman, Cardinal Pell before he went kitchen fittings hunting in Rome, Dame Slap herself, Akker Dakker, Miranda the Devine, Paul "magic water man" Sheehan, and all the reptiles of the lizard Oz, led by that noble investigator Graham Lloyd.

Why we're only missing Bjorn Lomborg and the lordish Monckton, though we have plenty of parrots to recycle their views ...

On the other hand, there's a slim chance these luminaries might be wrong, in which case the current report on intergenerational theft is as useless as projected spit on a projected griddle, with the funniest aspect of the matter the way the scientific luminaries ridicule computer modelling, then sit down and expect jolly Joe's statistical brew to be taken seriously ...

Not to worry young 'uns. The pond can make a couple of reliable projections of its own.

Before he can do much about anything, jolly Joe will turn from the world's most useless treasurer to more solid work as a feather duster, while the pond won't be around to see how his 'make work' scheme for bean counters and number crunchers worked out ... so good luck with that, and all the best and here, have a tasty David Pope cartoon (and more Pope here).


The pond was particularly startled by that threat of a slide night from the Danube cruise. Surely Pope realises that these days old fogies are likely to line up some kind of tablet and run through a slide show of a million digital images ...

Of course the reptiles were on hand to sing the siren song of fear.


Grey cloud on nation's horizon?

Is that a reference to jolly Joe? Or climate science?

Of course not, it's the dangers of that grey tablet full of satanic images taken by selfish old farts on their Danube cruise ...

Naturally the pond turned to the Oz editorialist for the official line, much as one did in the great days of Pravda:


Uh huh. What do you know, the Oz editorialist is up there with the Bolter when it comes to climate science. Just like the valuable diagnostic tool itself, the reptiles can't be bothered thinking about it.

And what's this? Even the reptiles spotted the nakedly partisan nature of the presentation? 

Do go on:


 Yes, well played, and not a word about climate science, which is, we understand, from the many eminent scientists employed by that eminent scientist Rupert Murdoch, so much malarkey.

Talk about all that Arctic ice! Where's your warming now, eh warmistas?

As for the rest?

Well Bernard Keane in Crikey (behind the paywall) had this little note:



The report also assumes annual GDP growth of 2.8% — slightly up from 2.7% in the 2010 IGR. Coming a day after we learned the economy managed just 0.5% growth in the December quarter, it reinforces the tension at the heart of the government’s fiscal stance. The government will be pumping tens of billions of dollars into the economy over the next three years and still expects below-trend growth for much of that period. Its remorseless insistence that it has inherited a budget disaster and that we are heading for a multitrillion-dollar debt under “Labor settings” is contradicted by its macroeconomically necessary deficit spending. 
Hockey was at pains in the report lock-up to emphasise his desire for a sensible debate about the long-term fiscal challenges the report discusses. Fair enough. That could start with greater clarity and honesty around the government’s current rhetoric about the budget.

And in the meantime, as part of the price of Abbott saving his skin, the government has splashed cash at the military, dropped its co-payment plan, and otherwise de-gutted its 2014 budgetary strategy, a strategy that was foolish from the get go, with such ineffable stupidities as proposing we could use the co-payment to indulge in medical research to benefit oldies suffering from disease, rather than using it to pay down debt ...

Clarity and honesty about the budget? Nope, all the pond sees is the pain of being a chicken little, projecting doom and gloom forty years into the future, and sssh, not a word about climate science.

Well at least it produced a joke:


After all, the only useful thing about scientific infrastructure is the way it can be used for extortion and blackmail. So there's your collegial and consensual way right there, in action ...

No wonder some are forced into whimsy:

(and more Leunig here).

Meanwhile, the Oz had words on another matter:


It would be hard to find a better example, if you wanted a classic example of how detached from reality the reptiles are ...

Progress on gender equity?

Was it only a few days ago that the pond was reading the PwC report on the gender pay gap, here?

Australia dropped six places to 15th position - the largest drop out of the 27 OECD countries measured - in an annual index that ranks female economic empowerment, Global head of PwC's People Business Jon Williams announced today. 
"Australia now sits right on the average, and trending to below the average, largely due to an increased gender pay gap and a small increase in female unemployment," Mr Williams said.

There's your progress in gender equity right there, and it's a bit like trying to spot a woman in Tony Abbott's cabinet ... and yet you won't find any hint of that Oz reality in reptile Oz la la land.

Instead you'll have to head off to SBS to read A new low, as gender pay gap hit 20-year high.

Meanwhile, thanks to the intergenerational theft report, the pond can wrap things up with a look at a more immediate future, thanks to Moir, and more Moir here.




24 comments:

  1. Ah, whatever happened to the impartiality of the Australian Public Service?

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    Replies
    1. The Oz PS is completely impartial: it'll lie on behalf of whoever is its current master.

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    2. It's still there in the ranks and middle management. Get up to senior management though, where these days the occupants can be hired and fired at the whim of the government of the day and "disloyalty" can even include having worked effectively for the previous administration, and "Frank and Fearless" are a couple of blokes who are very rarely seen.

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    3. GrueBleen do you mean the Murdoch Oz PS? You know, those hacks at Holt St beavering away producing stuff that supports the LNP?

      They only lie on behalf of one master.

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    4. It never was. Pollies wrote your conclusionfor you and your job was to find some some facts to support it (or invent them)

      Ex Commonwealth Public Servant (resigned)

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    5. I don't think it was ever that bad, Anon.

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  2. It seems to me that those with the instincts of fascists always need an enemy, a Beast of Blame.

    Step forward all those who are eyeing off walking frames in shops which sell mobility aids and associated products including chrome hand rails and the white plastic chair for the shower.

    Be careful stepping forward. Don't totter and take a tumble. You don't want to burden the taxpayer further by clogging up hospital waiting lists.

    How has it come to this?

    We have have become economic units. I heard some voice on the wireless this morning describing people who went out at night as participants in the 'night economy'.

    So the old geezers who go nowhere except their university of the 3rd Age gathering at the local library, or, heaven forbid, the doctor, are just drains on us all. They are non-participants in the economy, day or night.

    It makes me sick. It really does.

    There is something wrong with us.

    Miss pp

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  3. EEEKK!! That Pope cartoon has me worried. I'm recently retired, am heading off in a few days on a trip which will include a European river cruise, and somewhere or other we've got my grandfather's old slide projector - though yes, a tablet will be the preferred medium for boring the family on return.

    I also seem to be leaving a lot more blog comments these days, too........

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  4. The baby boomers didnt give a rats arse about looking after my generation, so why should I give a shit about what happens in forty years time.

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    1. Baby boomers were begot by fukt depressionista kids. Fukt in the head edwardianista kids begat depressionista kids in turn. In turn, in turn, the worm turns... Now your turn, where there's far greater access to vastly greater knowledge. That access and knowledge increasing at increasing exponential rate. Knowledge is power. With great power comes great responsibility... greater power = greater responsibility. Your greater responsibility. That, or cry baby off to begat some la la just deserts loony blame, doom, and dodge it head up your arse memes. Meanwhile, it's not getting any cooler.

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    2. 'The baby boomers', were well fleeced by 2008 end. I know this because my of own family elders who went without luxury all their lives and saved instead, lost the lot+ some.

      I guess no one noticed we have regular fleecing as growth industry model on regular cycle goes awry always, at less than 10 year intervals.

      Junkie economics invented by crack heads be the irony to behold most I'd recon.

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  5. Reading that 2nd Oz editorial covering gender equality, my mind went back to that singing commercial for Trent cigarettes aimed at women,
    "You've come a long way, baby,
    To get where you're going today!
    You've got your own cigarette now, baby,
    You've come a long, long way."
    It had an identical patronising tone, which irritated me then when it was released 40-odd years back. Ungrateful sods, those women! Went and implemented plain packaging!

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    Replies
    1. Wasn't that Virginia Slims, GD?

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    2. Oops - too hasty!

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  6. Sorry to be a pedant, GD, but I think the gaspers in question were Virginia Slims. I'm pretty sure that you've got the jingle spot on, though, both in wording and in tone.

    Julie Bishop would have been the perfect Virginia Slims model.

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    Replies
    1. You're right, Anon, thanks.

      I should never have forgotten that, especially with their sponsorship of women's tennis. Dunno how I got Trent. I guess it's all of one with Big Tobacco as my dementia creeps in.

      Virginia Slims: are they still made today?

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    2. VS's don't seem to around in Australia anymore, GD, but I believe they're still on sale in the USA.

      I'd forgotten that they used to sponsor women's tennis! Remember how the Tories told us that Big Sport couldn't survive without the sponsorship of Big Tobacco?

      Here are some of the old Virginia Slims ads (on the wonderful Archive.org), demonstrating how liberating durries were for women:
      https://archive.org/details/tobacco_leo23e00

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  7. Just reading Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel's excellent sequel to Wolf Hall, about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell at the time of Henry VIII.

    Cromwell (himself the son of a blackmith tried to pass a bill in the House of Commons to provide famine relief for the poor via income tax on the rich, as there had been a series of bad harvests meaning people were dying on the streets. He wanted to put the landless poor to the task of building roads and bridges etc. in return for a basic dole to give them food But the Commons would have none of it.

    "But Parliament cannot see how it is the state's job to create work. Are not these matters in God's hands, and is not poverty and dereliction part of his eternal order? To everything there is a season: a time to starve and a time to thieve. If rain falls for six months and rots the grain in the fields, there must be providence in it; for God knows his trade. It is an outrage to the rich and enterprising, to suggest that they should pay an income tax only to put bread in the mouths of the workshy."

    The King even came to the Commons to argue in support of the law...But the Commons sit stony faced and stare him out. "The wreckage of the measure is comprehensive. It has ended up as an act for the whipping of beggars..."

    Things haven't changed much in 450 years.

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    1. Smokin' Joe (himself the son of a of a deli shop keeper) unlike Thomas Cromwell is again shown clearly to be an economics nobody.

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    2. I know its historical fiction, but Mantel has done her research and knows her sources and is a truly great writer (she's won the Booker twice). Under her pen Cromwell comes across almost as a proto-socialist who takes the poor and orphaned into his household, works to make the King sympathetic to 'ordinary people, but can also mix it with the best of the great and the good, manipulating European ambassadors in Henry's interests and playing the great game across the world. The Boleyns are ambitious nouveau-riche and Henry is a likeable but naive rogue. Cromwell rises above this sea of intrigue and manages to grow great.

      Read it!

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  8. Awright!..all you blokes seventy-plus....raise your dicks if you want to really live to be one hundred!

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    Replies
    1. You want me to stick it to some kinda old testament? As it's Medina market day, try Genesis 6:3 here for starters.

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    2. I match your dick and raise you a cunt.

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  9. I think the Baird Coalition is headed for a downfall. CSG destruction of the Hunter, massive carve-up of western Sydney, sacrificing the Powerhouse, and selling off people-owned assets, and the corruption revealed by ICAC in selling out to developers and coal miners, the fucking of aged care and hospitals to the almighty God of private profiteers.

    They are goners.

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