Saturday, April 04, 2015

In which the pond is relieved to learn, courtesy of the reptiles at the lizard Oz and Peter Craven, that the world is saved ...


(Above: an Easter thought from Pope for those who prefer the chocolate variety, and more Pope here).

Speaking of the environment, as the reptiles at the lizard Oz routinely do, the news is good. 

Yes, the story is all the go in denialist circles, and a stern refutation of the nonsense being peddled by the pinko pervert commie UN subverted black helicopter NASA mob in stories like 2015 Arctic sea ice maximum annual extent is lowest on record:

The main player in the wintertime maximum extent is the seasonal ice at the edges of the ice pack. This type of ice is thin and at the mercy of which direction the wind blows: warm winds from the south compact the ice northward and also bring heat that makes the ice melt, while cold winds from the north allow more sea ice to form and spread the ice edge southward. 
“Scientifically, the yearly maximum extent is not as interesting as the minimum. It is highly influenced by weather and we’re looking at the loss of thin, seasonal ice that is going to melt anyway in the summer and won’t become part of the permanent ice cover,” Meier said. “With the summertime minimum, when the extent decreases it’s because we’re losing the thick ice component, and that is a better indicator of warming temperatures.”

Typical commie blather and subterfuge. Enough of it you NASA pinko preverts.

What we need is an expert who can sort this mess out in a few words and what luck we have the reptiles at the lizard Oz ready to do the job:


Yes, it's stabilised, despite a record low maximum ice extent, and new research showing the melt is beginning days earlier ...

That's stability in la la Murdoch land, which perhaps explains why newspaper circulation figures are routinely stabilising in the same la la land.

But do go on, and please, make sure you cherry pick:


But lo and behold, not only is the sea ice and the world saved, there is good news and rejoicing in the West, as a new messiah is born and slouches towards Bethlehem ...

The favourite pet of the reptiles, the chosen one, is coming down under, and what rejoicing there is in lizard land:


Here for the hot links, and of course there's been a little petulant gnashing of teeth by small minds:


But the best line in that piece was saved up until last:


Yes, indeed, now we know where to go to, which is off to read The Millions Behind Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus Centre US Think Tank.

But hark, there's dangerous reefs ahead, shoals and sharks, which threaten the peaceful progress of denialists through the world, as Tess Livingstone noted today in her piece about the pope for the reptiles:


Yes, bugger off you wretched bilbies, leave poor puss alone ... a cat's just gotta do what a cat's gotta do, and the last thing the world needs is news that the Vatican has joined in the alarmist hysteria, and is providing a base for the UN black helicopters as they mount a final push towards world government ...

Fancy calling climate denialism a sin! Why if that were the case every reptile at the lizard Oz, every last one of them would be off to hellfire for all eternity! With Graham Lloyd's once white soul encased in the dank black carbon specks that are a sure sign of the sinner's sins ... or so a Dominican nun once assured the pond ...

And speaking of hellfire, there's an Easter message by Peter Craven - how hard it is not to make a cruel Tamworth schoolyard jape about this jolly chum's name - which follows the last refuge of the theological scoundrel and trades off art to sell the Christian message. This sort of stuff:


There is a lot more of this kind of nonsense.

Craven proceeds through Thomas Cramer, T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Piero Della Francesca's The Resurrection, Titian's Resurrection, Raphael's The Transfiguration, C. S. Lewis and his lion, the irrefutable Bach's St Matthew Passion, pausing only to take a sideswipe at Dawkins.

Then it's on, at tedious, mind-boggling, desperate length, trading off and slogging through Dante's Divine Comedy, Beckett's Endame, the mysteries of the cross, the Hosanna moment, Matthew's Gospel, Craven editing Scripsi (oh yes, he was once a literary god too), and an old poet talking of Pilate as a good literary model, and the Jews, oh the difficult Jews, not that anyone's got anything against the Jews, and St Jerome and the King James translators and Handel, and the sorrows in Isaiah, and the perfidious Jews again, and Paul Celan's Fugue of Death, and Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran and Julie Bishop and Tanya Plibersek and Malcolm Turnbull and other pollies, and living in a post-Christian country, and the great De Profundis psalm, and poet David Jones, and poet Peter Levi, and William Faulkner's Light in August, and Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot, and so on and on and on, until finally the pond arrived at this:


Strange indeed. Get lost bilbies ... bunnies are the go, and anyone throwing a bottle at them will be severely punished ...

Actually wouldn't it have been more honest, in this orgy of trading off and appropriation of artists, to at least acknowledge that Pasolini was a weird mix of Marxist, atheist, unbeliever and nostalgist? Who happened to get bashed to death ostensibly while picking up a male prostitute, though over the years the tale of the murder has muddied a little (Greg Hunt it here).

The real mystery here is how a gay atheist Marxist could make a film Craven hails as a masterpiece, because it makes a nonsense of his trading off, using other artists and art works to make spurious claims for Christianity ...

It's the oldest and cheapest rhetorical trick in the book, and it gives a special status to art and artists as a mystical sub-division of Christianity and the church, and yet when contemplating artists in the flesh, it turns out that they're just as big a bunch of thieves and rogues as might be found in the general community ...

Craven's methodology is as meaningless, pretentious and corrupt as the pond claiming Beethoven's ninth symphony as a militant ode to joy at the way atheists can write mystical tracts at the drop of a hat and fool the true believers into a state of mystical exaltation .... when they might just as easily get the same result by taking a toke, or dropping an E tablet or swallowing a tab of LSD. Ah yes, in days gone by, the pond enjoyed mystical pleasures while contemplating art ...

And speaking of the left, and just to wrap things up this wet miserable Sydney Saturday, didn't Pryor do a nice tip of the hat to good old Marty? And more Pryor here.




13 comments:

  1. On Bolt's report tomorrow...

    "Editorial: Christ, martyr to free speech. And some things just haven’t changed. "

    Talk about a God complex. Or that old Narcissistic Personality Disorder rearing it's ugly head again.

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  2. Here's the Reclaim Australia mob out in full force in Sydney this morning - and dressed as gladiators.

    https://twitter.com/NewsAustralia/status/584108689746894848/photo/1

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  3. Hi Dorothy,

    Coincidently I was just thinking about Pasolini this week.

    I had been reading about the under reported destruction of Sana'a in Yemen by Saudi bombing. That one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world containing many architectural gems was being bombed flat, with barely a murmur in the Western press seemed both outrageous and depressingly normal behaviour.

    In the old city many of the houses resemble ancient skyscrapers and I realised that I was first made aware of them when I watched Pasolini's " Il fiore delle mille e una notte" or "A Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights) in my youth.

    I was of course just watching it for its artistic merit and barely noticed the copious nudity and sex in the bawdy tale. Even then I wondered how they got away with filming it in such a conservative Muslim country like Yemen. Still offending local sensibilities seems like small cheese when compared to bombing a UNESCO World Heritage Site flat.

    DiddyWrote

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    Replies
    1. :) DW and strangely Craven didn't mention Pasolini's Salo and the Catholic church's role in its banning.

      http://libertus.net/censor/odocs/huntley_salo.html

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  4. Diddy I share your concern about the fate of Sana'a.

    I have never been there but I have a friend who lived there for 10 years and awakened my interest in that extraordinary city.

    Miss pp

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    1. Hi Miss pp,

      It's sad that this cultural vandalism is becoming so prevalent. That the Saudis tolerated AQ operating out of Yemen for a decade without doing anything but become belligerent when the Shia are involved belies their motivations.

      Religion seems increasingly the reason we can't have nice things anymore.

      DW

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    2. Tragic indeed but I don't blame religion. The world is full of power seekers who will use any means to dominate others even if that requires wholesale death and destruction.

      Best wishes Diddy

      Miss pp

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  5. Seems that it's not only Fairfax having problems with it's subbies.

    https://twitter.com/thecjnet/status/584146158668218368

    Interesting that Bolt's story is subbed "An objective report"

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  6. Richard Dennis gives an interesting perspective on the pernicious influence of the there is no other way "free market" thing tank propaganda hacks such as Lomborg in an essay in the new edition of The Monthly Magazine - it is titled Spreadsheets of Power How Economic Modelling Is Used to Circumvent Democracy and Shut Down Debate.

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    1. Oh, you mean like in the Harper Report ... and indeed anything by the so-called 'Productivity Commission' for the last twenty years or so.

      Long live the econorats !

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  7. Paul Celan's Figure of Death?
    DP, maybe you meant 'Fugue of Death' or Todesfuge. I wouldn't play the pedant, except that Celan wrote a masterpiece. Goes well with 'The Reader' (film).
    At MAP this morning, the Qantas terminal. Grab a free newspaper, haven't handled one for a while, will the "experience" be rekindled. Look! The pile in the rack is small, maybe they are going off at a great rate. But, looking around, no-one else is doing battle with a broadsheet. Could they have put fewer in the rack, to make it look like many have been taken, already? We'll never know.

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    Replies
    1. Ta, those damn ex-ABC style guide folk at it again, and misquoting Craven. Fixed, and the pond never minds people playing the pedant, being prone to the disease as well ... and yes UC, the pond treasures the occasional freebie from the airport ... so bizarre and passing strange, the rags now have the quaintness and charm of an LP or a Phillips cassette ...

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