Monday, August 03, 2020

In which the Caterist provides some light denialist relief before the dog botherer takes centre stage ...


Don't  look at the pond, it's been wearing masks religiously in public since the plague began, not that you could say the same thing for the young things that ramble about King street - though it is a pleasure when they catch the pond out of a corner of the eye, and see it doing its medieval plague Seventh Seal impression, and they lurch away, veer off in alarm, abruptly cross to the other side of the street, as if suddenly remembering what might be in the air …

But enough of that for the moment, the dog botherer will turn up soon enough to explain the situation. 

Meanwhile, the pond thought it might be pleasant to start the week with a different topic, and who better than the Caterist, who, it turns out, is not just an expert in the movement of flood waters in quarries, but is a veritable Homer Simpson when it comes to the nukes ...


Solar? People fall off roofs installing panels? At last the Caterist has joined with the pond in the calling for the end of roofs on houses, what with all the deaths caused by the installation of roofing iron, tiles, slate, whatever …

Are you not entertained? Is not Caterist comedy born with a half-life that might plague the earth for a half a million years?

Of course it's a favourite ploy of climate science denialists, coal lovers of the dinkum Oz kind (it'll be clean by Xmas), and assorted reptiles to trot out the nukes every so often, just to scare the greenies, and oh how how they love to peddle the thoughts of denialists of the Ridders kind, a keen obscurantist, confusionista and conflationist ...


By the way, speaking of rational decisions, competitive markets and all the rest of the government-sponsored, heavily government-subsidised nonsense spouted by the Caterist and his centre, the pond has its own distraction.

The pond sincerely trusts that everyone still drops in on the Graudian's Weekly Beast just to keep in touch with a keen and expert herpetologist, as here ...


Alas and alack, that link in the Graudian leads to the paywall, so it seems only fair to keep the Caterist on hold for just a little more …


Wasn't it thoughtful of the Caterist with his burblings about climate to give the pond a chance to reproduce the APC adjudication?


Best practice?

Wouldn't that mean that every Caterist piece should carry a warning that the Menzies Research Centre was heavily subsidised by the federal government? But the pond digresses, there's still a conclusion ...


Well, it's a slap over the wrist with a lettuce leaf, but that's because the council has no real clout. And so to the Caterist's solution to everything … remove regulatory barriers.

You see, having rambled on at length about the wonders of nuking the planet, see how the Caterist slips in the real point, so that we might really get to fracking the planet properly ...


Back in the day, the Caterist was a more honest climate science denialist, albeit just as disingenuous …


Back in the day, that raised the question Does climate science denialist Nick Cater know the difference between an ice sheet and sea ice? What fun to have the sundry errors pointed out.

Of course the pond wonders whether the Caterist ever understands his bum is on fire, or whether speaking of the movement of flood waters in quarries might lead to trouble in court … but as we've drifted back into the past, might as well complete the job …


Ah sweet nostalgia, what a pleasant distraction from troubled times, but the pond must now return to the unpleasant present ...


Can it get any more unpleasant? Well the virus causes death, and the dog botherer is a plague on all our houses of a quite different kind … especially as he begins with undiluted essence of Wuhan Trumpism ...


Ah, another chance to refer to the Weekly Beast and its essential reading …


Indeed, indeed, get him coming, get him going, and meanwhile, the reptiles keep doing what the dog bother purports to deplore …

  

  

What sayeth the dog botherer? Well, he's always fair, in his fairly stupid way, to his fairly stupid fellow reptiles carrying on about the Wuhan, because, well, who doesn't love inflammatory language ...

Most of us? Rational consideration?


Really, fuck News Corp, and fuck the dog botherer while we're at it, remembering that a fucking should be considered a pleasant activity, but can too often turn painful …

Before running the last dog botherer gobbet, please allow the pond to refer to The Conversation and James Murdoch's resignation is the result of News Corp's increasing shift to the right - not just on climate … and The Graudian on the hapless phone hacker apologist who found the stench too much to bear in How departure of James laid bee the Murdoch family rifts …

Better than a telly series in these troubled times, and way better than a final dog bother gobbet ...


Schools, where the virus hardly matters? 

How different it looks when you're in the eye of a Trumpian storm, and stories about young people losing lungs bob up on prime time …


What a stupid moronic Wuhan blathering fuckwit he is, but never mind, never mind, as always at the end of a morning with the reptiles, the pond can always reach for an immortal Rowe for consolation … with more consoling here



14 comments:

  1. If you want the Truth -- the Real Truth -- you can't go past Fox entertainer, Tucker Carlson.
    https://crooksandliars.com/2020/08/tucker-carlson-s-obama-smear-not-only

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Aww, c'mon JC; Tucker has an election to win for Trump and his own future presidential run to prepare for. You wouldn't expect anything else from him, would you ?

      Delete
    2. That was pretty intense. The bit that amazed me was the admission that the system is flawed, but must be defended....no matter what. We can not have these “other” voting.
      Fear and loathing a la max. It could only have been improved with a bit spit foam.
      CA.

      Delete
    3. Pond comments often refer to projection but it would be hard to find a better example than than this. Fox news only exists to facilitate all the things this shill is claiming to oppose.

      The civil war still seems to be under way and attempts at 'keeping things the same' is the very essence of the decline of Merika.

      You have probably all seen this before but it shows how the RWNJ is likely to react if someone bursts the bubble. Air a diversity of views? :-)

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_nFI2Zb7qE

      Delete
  2. I have sometimes wondered why the University of Exeter was so desperate as to award Cater an honours degree in sociology. Or contrariwise, what serious mental deficiency has overtaken him since. Oh well, such are the idle speculations one might indulge in when imprisoned inside one's dwelling by that evil dictator and ruler of the devastating, destructive power of the State of Victoria, Dan Andrews.

    But one thing I simply don't get about reptiles - especially Cater and the Doggy Bov - is the "frozen in space and time" syndrome they exhibit. So some ice came from an Antarctic glacier, therefore all ice near the place is "Antarctic". That's silly enough, but it's the 'frozen in time' bit that's worst: so if we were to lift the savage "lockdowns" instead of reinforcing them, somehow we just would never, could never end up with a runaway pandemic like the USA, Mexico, Brazil, India, South Africa etc. And now looking at resurgences in Japan and South Korea. And even infectious cases beginning in Vietnam. Only Taiwan appears to be holding, but we never hear about that - I wonder why.

    No, we aren't 'frozen' into our current very mild state of relatively few infections and very few fatalities. COVID-19 simply is not 'frozen in time' - give it the merest chance and it will take over. And does anybody really believe that places such as Sweden have not had a severe economic 'collapse' ? The USA ? Britain ?

    Anyway I'm glad I have the internet - well I do again now after Telstra recovered from a serious DOS attack yesterday - otherwise I might have to go back to reading books ! Or [shudder] watching daytime TV.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's notable how, when they have selected a line of argument, they just double down when the facts start to line up against them.

      When the pandemic started there was little risk in running numerous scenarios as to how things would pan out. It kind of requires you to ignore recent experience with SARS, MERS-CoV and the long history of infection control, but the average punter wouldn't have much interest until something was likely to affect them personally.

      Six months down the track and most of the loopy ideas have been tried somewhere or other with disastrous results. Remember when the US was taking comfort in deaths per million?

      https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-covid-deaths-per-million?tab=chart&country=OWID_WRL~USA~AUS

      Oops, best find some other statistic and compare with the laggard countries.


      Delete
    2. Talking about doubling down against facts, here's some interesting ones that reptiles just don't want to know:

      More coal power generation closed than opened around the world this year, research finds
      https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/03/more-coal-power-generation-closed-than-opened-around-the-world-this-year-research-finds

      Delete
  3. Hi Dorothy,

    “Coal has twice the energy density of wood or cow dung. Natural gas is 50 per cent denser than coal. Calculating the energy density of uranium is somewhat complicated for the layman, but rest assured it is a stinking great number.”

    You can always be sure you are in expert hands when a statistic is described by how big it smells.

    Cater of course doesn’t want to bog down us poor laypeople with complicated science-speak but we must assume in referring to uranium he is actually referring to the fissionable isotope Uranium-235.

    Indeed a kilo of 100% Uranium-235 could in the right conditions produce millions of times more energy than a lump of coal. This however would be described as a nuclear bomb and would be an ineffective way of producing electricity.

    Most fuel rods therefore only contain 3-5% Uranium-235 and have to be enriched to this level which is an energy intensive process. Also the Uranium ore has to be mined, milled and enriched, all processes requiring substantial amounts of energy.

    Therefore a kilo of Uranium Ore would only have an energy density 3 to 4 times that of a similar mass of coal, a far less smelly number.

    Fortunately thanks to the intertubes someone else actually worked out the real energy density of uranium.

    http://www.plux.co.uk/energy-density-of-uranium/

    Cater also doesn’t mention that at each stage of the process from mining the ore to creating the enriched fuel rod radiation is emitted and all the equipment is irradiated.

    As usual with a Cater article the final smell in the nostrils at the end is bullshit.

    DiddyWrote

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. TANSTAAFL, DW. Nevertheless, some lunches are cheaper than others but nuclear fission power isn't one of them. And nobody ever mentions the very long term cost of dealing with ongoing and post-lifetime radioactive waste. I wonder why not.

      And I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for any "fourth-generation small modular reactors" to reach a practical level, nor to be cheap - wind and solar are already much, much cheaper.

      Delete
    2. Sheesh, DW, the pond is always alarmed when someone introduces actual science into the discussion. This is anti-Caterist, anti-reptile, and always alarming, hinting as it does at the way the reptiles might live in an alternate reality. Yet surely you would agree that the Caterist thumped his rod upon the soil, and the seas divided, and the waters moved in the quarry as he ordained … which is why the pond doesn't just get a whiff of bullshit, it gets a hint of a practised rod-thumper ...

      Delete
    3. Well at least, DW and DP, if we're all still getting a good whiff of bullshit then it's highly likely we don't have COVID-19. However, just to be precise about these things - but not to introduce much science - then the true situation with the Himalaya glaciers is conveyed in this:

      Two-thirds of glacier ice in the Himalayas will be lost by 2100 if climate targets aren’t met
      https://theconversation.com/two-thirds-of-glacier-ice-in-the-himalayas-will-be-lost-by-2100-if-climate-targets-arent-met-143207

      So the IPCC wasn't all that far wrong after all.

      Delete
  4. DP - My Source tells me that that vicious attack dog, the Australian Press Council, has been completely routed and sent howling back to its lair by none other than Piers Akerman.

    The Source has had a particular interest in Piers from his appearances on ‘Insiders’ those years ago. She was hugely impressed with his assertion in one episode, which had been discussing something Dame Elisabeth Murdoch had said. Piers claimed she had been deliberately misinterpreted; he knew, because he had been one of her confidants ‘for over 50 years’. The Source took a quick look at Piers’ entry in the ‘Wiki’ and found that he was then all of around 61 years old - so he must have started being a confidant of Dame E from around age 10, and living in Perth. Presumably, Rupert, who always had special regard for Piers, had become aware of his precocious talents, and, no doubt, flew him over to the farm in Victoria to comfort his dear old mum.

    But, moving on - and please don’t feel any need to consult the Akerman ‘opinion’ in the Yellergraph; the Source is aware that many people can feel IQ points seeping away as they read any of Piers’ writings, so she has extracted sufficient words to convey the gist of the item. I have already thanked her for that consideration.

    Anyway - in support of Plimer, Piers (I assume we may be so familiar as to use his given name) cites that ‘indefatigable seeker of the truth’ Liberal MP Craig Kelly, on the allegation that the BOM fakes temperature data.

    He also cites ‘other experts’ - Dr Ronan Connolly and his father Dr Michael Connolly, who have been ‘recalibrating the pre-satellite data’ on Arctic sea ice. The Connollys do have a website, but it seems to be as much about plastering houses as about sources of ‘pre-satellite’ data on sea ice. Never mind - Piers is quite firm in his conclusion that these sources show that ‘the APC adjudication is absurdly wrong and misleading and should be withdrawn.’

    So there you have it. The editors of the Flagship - a publication entirely separate from, and in no way involved with, the Yellergraph - have wimped out, and published the pap forced on them by the APC. Whatever happened to fearless, red-blooded journalism?

    Chadwick

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ah, your 'source' is always worth the price of admission, Chad. And what a prince of the press to comment on: that indefatigable seeker of the truth, Piers Akerman.

      Used to even get an occasional Akerman here in loonpond until I think DP gave up entirely on the 'Yellergraph'. His stuff is way worse than the Flagship reptiles, as you have clearly shown.

      Delete
    2. Excellent maths Chadders, and yes GB, the pond did give up on the Terror. There's only so many times you can compare the blimp known as Piers to Billy Bunter before you begin to feel deep pity and sympathy for Bunter and his yaroop garoooars ...

      Delete

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