Friday, April 15, 2016

Day 25, and it's wind-down day for the reptiles and for the pond ...


(Above: and more Rowe here).

Being slackers, this is the day that key members of the reptile commentariat turn their thoughts to the weekend rather than cultivating ongoing rage about the state of things ...

Oh sure the odd inconsequential and irrelevant ratbag turns up on the pages of the lizard Oz to sing a familiar tune ...


That'd be the culture of complaining about complaints, since all the dumb engineers had to do was sing in private, out of sight of mates' mobile phones, and no one would have been wiser.

But if there's anyone up to matching thugby leaguers, it'd be a certain sort of dumb uni boofhead.

Being engineers, the dumb fuckers - if the pond might be allowed to use engineering parlance - were snapped by a couple of their fellows having a singalong on a bus.

The funniest aspect to the story? Probably that News Corp felt the need to asterisk "f***" while printing the lyrics the dumb fuckers chanted ... epic tales of shooting boxes, creaming buns, dumping tuck loads, and doing sheep up the arse of a kind frequently sung by virgins and men with small peni (College scandal: Sydney male students' pro-rape chants caught on camera).

Well it takes inherently stupid people to manage this sort of feat, and even more stupid people to take up their cause, though perhaps in a precautionary way, the pond should apologise to engineers and note that not everyone at Philip Baxter College at UNSW is an engineer ...

Of course it turns out that the culture of complaint is only an excuse for a more generalised culture of complaining ...

Surely our intellectual elite should have the guts to stand up to these crazy grievance mongers. OK, young men’s right to sing a dirty ditty isn’t actually a noble cause. But there are important issues at stake in the inability of university authorities to withstand such silly, vexatious campaigns. This month the University of Sydney Union gave in to protests and decided the 88-year-old Catholic Society at the university should face deregistration on the grounds that it was discriminatory to require senior members to be Catholic — that’s despite the union funding a “women’s room” and a centre for indigenous students. Similarly lily-livered behaviour now characterises some of the world’s leading universities.

And so on and on and on, and then quoting at great length, that world famous climate scientist and intellectual genius James Delingpole ... before concluding a trivial issue, perhaps, but symptomatic of a wider malaise.

And indeed, anyone who cites Delingpole is symptomatic of a wider malaise.

Moving right along, the reptiles were transfixed by other matters sexual. It seems the homosexual agenda is horrendous at the moment ...


Indeed, indeed, and next thing you know, you'll have engineering students on a bus singing ...

“I wish that all the ladies were sheep in the grass and I was a kiwi I’d do ’em up the arse.”

And then Bettina would have to jump into print and defend them, but instead it was the reptile editorialist who took a 'won't someone think of the children' view ...


The pond didn't get past those first two words "kids sexualised", and immediately reverted to distant memories of Freud ...

It is a part of popular belief about the sexual impulse that it is absent in childhood and that it first appears in the period of life known as puberty. This, though an obvious error, is a serious one in its consequences and is chiefly due to our present ignorance of the fundamental principles of the sexual life. A comprehensive study of the sexual manifestations of childhood would probably reveal to us the existence of the essential features of the sexual impulse, and would make us acquainted with its development and its composition from various sources.

Freud wrote that in 1910 in Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory - you can find it here and elsewhere on the full to overflowing intertubes.

Whenever anyone starts from the premise that kids are being sexualised, they've got the wrong end of the pineapple.

Frequently the corollary is that young kids, pre-puberty, can't have any understanding of sex, that they are blank blackboards or an empty canvas or a sheet of virgin paper. So they're blissfully unaware of any gay or TG feelings, and if they stay pure and innocent, by the time of puberty everything will sort itself out and it will be all for the best in the best possible world, and they'll be happily married, have children, be divorced, remarry several more times, and have more children, because that's the way the world works.

Put it another way. So-called reptile social exclusion is no excuse for abusing children with reptile stupidity ...

But the pond wanted more, and there was the possibility of being distracted by a fresh reptile discovery ...


Yes, the reptiles have just discovered an idea that's been kicking around for yonks, and to make sure everyone knew about the notion, it suddenly became an EXCLUSIVE:


It's a measure of how lazy and stupid the reptiles get on a Friday as they bask on their hot rock, and shriek about sex and Eureka moments ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, there was the brick with eyes, putting out a press release on 21st March 2016 which inter alia said:

As I have already stated, I will only support the ABCC bill if Malcolm amends it to include corruption across all industries including banking, finance and politics. “The banking sector is one of Australia’s biggest industries and is constantly on the front page of papers for corruption. “Mums and dads are losing money and their life savings every day at the hands of corrupt advisers and rogue bankers.

And indeed the lad had already stated it ... over and over. He must be startled to discover it's now a reptile EXCLUSIVE. And they reckon that Stairway to Heaven is a rip-off ...

But being a former thugby leaguer, the brick with eyes drew the pond's attention to this pitiful attempt at the art of distraction ...


Yes, in the great town of Sydney, Mike Baird has hit on the ultimate solution.

Knock down buildings and hand the space over to developers; put up buildings and collect handsome regard and rewards from developers; and best of all, the ultimate panem et circenses solution, knock down functioning stadia and replace them with ... functioning stadia ... so that Malware might purport an interest in football (instead of spending his time in the corporate tent) and the lizard Sheridan might provide a bout of faux indignation ...

But stay, the pond is always up for a serious discussion, and this day the reptiles are keen to explore, in an agile, innovative way, the future of the country.


Now there's a good way to start.

Indeed the way to become more collaborative, the pond has found, is to label one's colleagues a collective bunch of drop kick losers.

Change your minds and become more collaborative, you drop kick losers, if we wish to develop a culture of innovation ... or else the pond will label your mindset as being one of collective loserdom.

In much the same spirit, the reptiles offered up an editorial ...


Now the best the pond could work out from this fine spray of words is that the reptiles have decided paper shuffling for corporate greed is the best way forward for News Corp, but perhaps not for the nation and so ...

We need to bring people in from overseas ...

We need more apps instead of specialist teachers ...

We should force students to take compulsory courses without skilled teachers to teach them ... unless we bring people in from overseas ...

We must promote innovation and capitalise on it ... but only if it doesn't involve spending any money, on wasteful things like specialist teachers ... not when we can force students in a mandatory way to compulsorily study ... because compulsion always works so well as a motivating force for study ... especially if we refuse to give them specialist teachers with specialist qualifications, when there are so many other options ... see above, bring people in and spend money on apps...

Or some such thing. No doubt it's terribly agile and innovative, but perhaps the pond should just return to paper shuffling the companies to minimise the tax payable ...

All the above said and done, the pond feels remiss at not having provided sufficient reptile reading matter.

So inspired by Amanda Meade at the Graudian drawing attention to the reptile wars in her weekly beast column here, the pond offers this fine skirmish from earlier in the week for those who missed it ...


Now there's nothing like scrambled eggs in a dither to get the reptiles excited. They love to raid birds' nests and make off with the eggs.

The silly scrambled eggs fail to realise that they're on a mission to crush Islam around the globe, a crusade if you will, a holy war if you're a little indiscreet in a Hastie kind of way ...

The reptiles therefore felt the need to reprove the scrambled eggs ...



The pond of course relies implicitly on the reptiles for the defence of country.

There's nothing like sitting behind a desk in a bunker in Surry Hills wittily deploying intangible, abstract and postmodern' to show the fighting spirit of the reptile at his or her best ...

 Now all that needs to happen is for the reptiles to resign en masse and join the military to show them how it's done ...

And so to a final flourish, this time from the oscillating fan ...


Yes, what they needed was more specialist apps, or perhaps some bureaucrats imported on a visa.

Now if all that doesn't amount to reptile nirvana, the pond is in the wrong game ...

Any other matters before the pond moves on to the major weekend business?




Oh that's more than enough pig, way, way, way more than enough ...



21 comments:

  1. More STEM, you say? And more diversity? What better way to include a wider spectrum of views on science in the Govt than to draft in cranks from the hard right of the Libs? Leave the selection, then, to someone who is totally blind to what's happening on his left. So, Tony Abbott getting behind (wink, wink) Walter Villatora for BBishop's seat confirms one thing, for sure. Walter must be an "extremely attractive" chap.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I reckon he would be flat out "working" for the people of Aust.
      http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Walter-Villatora/1796939091

      Delete
    2. Oh, yes! I see he has an abundance of experience hacking away at the grass-roots. All for the benefit of shareholders. Leaner, better and fairer. Just how our tax system should be, ScoMo has said so and there's no need for more detail. Just so long as the right managers are at the helm.

      Delete
  2. Oh Dorothy, as I read today, I'm starting to fear for your overstimulation!!

    I hope you can handle it. Bear it, even.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The reptiles may be winding down for the weekend but Dame Groan is wound up and taking off on her favourite blog.
    She is outraged and playing up or down to the delcons who lurk there and are very amusing in a strange sort of way. A couple of the more rancid wannabe alpha males engage in "stoushes" during the dark hours. They really are weird about women so Dame Groan must have the ability to rise above the misogyny or perhaps she enjoys it: Women must be equally damaged by a sexually repressive upbringing as men are and consequently the rwnj women perhaps like the way alpha males disrespect them.
    But Judith does her best to fit in with the superior sex and never challenge their right to free speech that's calculated to cause hurt to others, who deserve it of course and women so deserve to be hurt in conservatism.
    So Judith uses the sexist language like this;
    "As the taxpayer is about to be touched up for over $70 million to pay out the entitlements of the former Queensland Nickel workers, given that QN is now in liquidation, a number of important questions arise".
    Thhere may well be important questions but Judith only asks stupid questions.
    She is"common as muck" my mother would say. Talks like a stereotype wharfie but hates the wukkas and loves the suits who claim tax is theft.
    So she could be a contender for rwnj woman of the year perhaps

    ReplyDelete
  4. PvO clearly knows SFA about the Australian Public Service and how it's changed. While things certainly have changed drastically in the last few decades, those changes have been the exact opposite of his comments. Once upon a time you could join the APS at a base level, with no tertiary qualifications (though over time, more and more people had them), and work your way up; I once had a very senior APS boss who had started out several decades previously as a 15 year old office boy assembling files. These days you'd probably need that "First Class Honours degree" he mentions, and more, simply to get that office boy-type job, and even then it would probably initially be only on a short-term contract. You'd be fairly well-paid, though, as most of the old lower-ranked positions no longer exist, thus eliminating much of the traditional career path and resulting in paying $80-100,00 a year to people who end up spending a fair amount of time just photocopying or filing - because _somebody_ still has to do that sort of work. As for sacking whoever wrote that admittedly farcical speech; well, somebody will probably take the fall for it - most probably be disciplined or moved, but probably not sacked. However, any such speech will have been a collaborative effort, with input from multiple sources, and it will have been checked and approved right up the line, probably with input form the Minister's Office from very early on. What's the bet that any blame simply gets dumped on the lowest person on that particular totem pole?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If you know anything about the APS, Anon, you'd also know that the speeches are sent to the Minister's Office for acceptance or declining. The MO vets and approves any speech, so if it was used, the MO is to blame.

      Also government departments now take their permanent intake almost exclusively from graduates; they are put through a cadet-like program and are told they are the future of the APS. Gets em all excited thinking they'll soon be pulling on the levers of power.

      That usually takes a few years. There are no low paid jobs any more; a large number of those people were pushed out in the recent exodus of redundancies. The tasks those people used to do are now done by, as you said, higher paid officers.

      So much for efficiency.

      Delete
    2. I'm a bit of a living fossil, here Anon. I called it the CPS (down below) because that's what it used to be, but you correctly called it the APS which is what it is now. Such is life.

      Anyhow, according to the ABS there was 235,000 APS staff in fy 2014-2015. The total population of Canberra is getting on for 400,000 in 2016 so even assuming a fair percentage of the 235K pubserves are resident in State offices, that's still nearly half of the population of Canberra.

      But there's been a 'push out' in the CPS/APS for a long time: for instance, back in 1975, there were still morning and afternoon tea ladies (trolley, tea and cakes). Then they disappeared.

      There was also typing pools as late as (and later than) 1980, then they disappeared with the advent of the desktop PC. Photocopiers came onto the scene so late that we always did our own photocopying. So it goes.

      So what do all those 235,000 honours graduates do during office hours ?

      Delete
  5. Richelle Hunt and Brian Nankervis on 774 just played Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come. Neville Bros have a pretty version, too, but apart from the original, nothing beats James Taylor on that West Wing episode. Gets me every time. Recovering slowly.

    ReplyDelete
  6. A "first-class Honours Degree" to even think of a pubserve career in Canberra ? My, my, how times have changed. Back in my day - I first became a pubserve in 1963 - the CPS had four divisions. The entry divisions were:

    Div 3 - for which a 'Leaving Certificate' (ie a pass in Form 5 or Year 11 as it is called now) was highly desirable, but not mandatory - a pass in Year 10, aka Form 4, aka Intermediate, was adequate.
    Div 4 - the gardeners, cleaners and tea ladies etc (there was no such thing as a photocopier back then), for which basically any schooling was sufficient.

    I simply can't recall ever meeting a pubserve - even when I did work in Canberra for several years - who had an honours degree in anything. Even ordinary pass level Bachelors were quite infrequent. So it goes.

    And Arndty Bettina should thank her lucky stars she wasn't part of Melb Uni's SCIIAES* era. But maybe she'd have enjoyed all the humiliating attention then as much as she plainly does now.

    [*Society for the Control of Immoral Impulses Amongst Engineering Students, rampant in the 1960s and 1970s]

    ReplyDelete
  7. Shaun Micallefs take on Bolt's bid to host Media Watch. Worth repeating.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtabDcnNgzU

    ReplyDelete
  8. To paraphrase Jimmy Carter.

    "If you've half a mind to vote for the Liberals...that's all it takes."

    ReplyDelete
  9. Andrew Bolt appears to have a problem with Lebanon and the Lebanese. Does he realise that over 40% of Lebanese are Christian?

    Lebanon is the most religiously diverse country in the Middle East. As of 2014 the CIA World Factbook estimates the following: Muslim 54% (27% Shia Islam, 27% Sunni Islam), Christian 40.5% (includes 21% Maronite Catholic, 8% Greek Orthodox, 5% Melkite Catholic, 1% Protestant, 5.5% other Christian), Druze 5.6%, very small numbers of Jews, Baha'is, Buddhists, Hindus and Mormons.

    Inconvenient facts get in the way for Bolt.

    ReplyDelete
  10. First Dog is superb.
    But, picture the scene at an adjacent artisanal frippery.
    Ron Van Til, owner of Rangiora Bakery said the Plough Hotel’s stance was “a colourful and provocative move” but cyclists - and lycra shorts - would continue to be welcome in his establishment.
    Precisely. Suppose Michealia and a couple of her girlfriends are at table in the Plough. In comes Tony and his horde. He parks his bulging package on Michealia's table-top. What is she to do? Absolutely nothing! Real men will be out and proud, so suck on that.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Abbotts package is the biggest lemon alright, and Screech as born and bred sour puss too would just keep on truckin'

      Delete
    2. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    3. Michaelia looks a bit like a squid in that FDOTM. Nowhere near as sensible, though.

      Delete
  11. After watching that lame, smarmy video of De Bolt on Charlie Pickering I felt Andy needed a spray and my WD40 was not at hand. Also noticed Charlie didn’t really pick him up on any of his crappy ideas.


    ®evolution Revisited
    (Apologies to John Lennon).



    You say we don’t need revolution
    We-ell, you know
    We all need to change the world
    You say let’s stick with evolution
    We-ell, you know
    We really need to change the world

    But when your words inspire dissension
    Don't you know I’m gonna call you out

    But you’re always gonna be - so right!
    But you’re always gonna be - so right!
    But you’re always gonna be - so right!


    You say you got a real solution
    We-ell, you know
    We don’t need to see your plan
    Cos it’s built on fear and retribution
    We-ell, you know
    We know you stole it from the Klan

    But if you write rubbish for people with minds that hate
    All I can tell you is Andrew you’re no-one’s mate

    But you’re always gonna be - so right!
    But you’re always gonna be - so right!
    But you’re always gonna be - so right!


    You say don’t change the constitution
    We-ell, you know
    We’d much prefer to shave your head
    Then put you in an institution
    We-ell, you know
    Where you could talk to walls instead

    And you could keep shouting your hate from a padded cell
    But you might get a visit one night from old Cardinal Pell

    But you’re always gonna be - so right!
    But you’re always gonna be - so right!
    But you’re always gonna be - so right!


    So Right - So Right,
    So Right - So Right,
    So Right - So Right,
    So Right - Aaalll Rrright!!!

    ReplyDelete
  12. Just a thought - Anthony Whealy and Chris Merritt look like the same person to me - Bill Colllins that is!

    ReplyDelete
  13. You realise that the term 'Charlie' (as in don't be one) is Cockney rhyming slang for 'Charlie Hunt'?

    ReplyDelete
  14. 'Economic rationalism' has been revealed for what it is. A giant Ponzi scheme to enrich the rich, slavishly supported by the likes of Abbott and Turnbull, and yes Keating and Hawke.

    The world is fucked.

    http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

    http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/clive-palmers-antics-are-the-very-same-ones-multinationals-use-20160413-go5xho.html

    ReplyDelete

Comments older than two days are moderated and there will be a delay in publishing them.