After the bromancer's attempt yesterday to explain that everything was back to normal and it was business as usual, the pond hoped to be able to embrace the crazy as the new normal, as that notorious liar Sarah Huckabee Sanders kindly proposed ...
Instead the pond was confronted by the forlorn sight of the tedious Tudge trudging off into the distance and the reptiles suggesting it was all the fault of the tolling of the trolls ... because in reptile la la land, do not ask for whom the tolls troll, they troll for thee ...
What's this?
No, not the reptiles pretending that it's all the fault of the tolling of the trolls, because that's understandable.
In reptile la la land, the robodebt royal commission simply doesn't exist, hasn't existed, never will exist, and you have to look elsewhere for the news of that saga ...
Bing as you will you trendy lovers of AI, as the pond explains that what caught the eye was that "20 minutes ago", attached to the telling of the tolling of the trolls ...
It revealed the tendency of the reptiles to dress mutton as lamb, because that very same story about the tedious trudging Tudge was out and about yesterday, without that pretence that reptile readers had woken this morning for a serve of a freshly heated, brand new, only twenty minutes old, lamb chop ...
The pond hastens to add that it only kept The Mocker as evidence of the Thursday date, that being the day the mocker does his mocking, not so the reptiles could go on an extended rant about how they hated anonymous bloggers.
It turned out that the immortal Rowe had said as much as needed to be said about the self-pitying Trudger and the tolling of the trolls ... balls to that ...
As for that disgracefully anonymous mocker, he (well the dog botherer is a he the last time the pond checked) was only doing what the reptiles do on a daily basis ... as shown by this morning's top of the page ma, digital edition ...
Why there's the bouffant one, also a reheated serve of mutton dressed up as lamb, with the reptiles still blathering on about the voice and doing their level best to use it as a wedge, given that the poor old mutton Dutton has so few, and now has to deal with the possibility of a return of the jolly Josh ... oh please make it happen, just for the fun of it ...
But what's that, some observant correspondent might ask, there, slightly on the left of the bouffant one, Jimbo writing EXCLUSIVELY for the lizard Oz, and so deserving of respect, instead of when he was writing all that gibberish for another rag, when he blew the reptiles' minds, and so column after reptile column denounced him?
Indeedy do ... and as well as assigning the notorious echo chamber to slobber all over him, the reptiles gave Jimbo pole position in the commentary section, because it's a Jimbo EXCLUSIVE ...
Oh Jimbo, Jimbo, you hide behind the reptile paywall, and expect taxpayers to fork over shekels to Chairman Rupert to discover your keen insights? Fuck that, and no, the pond isn't going to recycle it ...
Instead the pond immediately felt the need to run a cartoon ...
As for the rest, there was no doubt how the pond would waste its morning.
With cackling Claire doing the standard transphobic reptile thing - apparently transphobia is all the go in Finland and trannies are all deeply disturbed, mental nutcases - it was red card time, and the pond turned with relief to the hole in the bucket man for its usual Friday lesson on bucket repair ...
You might get your wish concerning the art department, DP:
ReplyDeleteCorp to cut 1,250 jobs after missing second-quarter estimates
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/feb/09/news-corp-job-cuts-missed-estimates
Not that the pond's malicious GB, but that's worth a quote and a wondering if the reptiles will ever change their business plan and move beyond appealing to the loon demographic:
DeleteReduced ad spends due to rising inflation and higher interest rates have battered Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate
Media conglomerate News Corp said on Thursday that it would cut 1,250 jobs after it missed estimates for second-quarter earnings due to weakness in its news and digital real estate businesses.
“The initiatives now underway, including an expected 5% headcount reduction, or around 1,250 positions this calendar year, will create a robust platform for future growth,” Thomson added.
Yeah right, it already looks like a throwaway suburban newspaper (of the sort the reptiles threw away), and sometimes when you cut to the bone, all you get is a lot of messy, unsightly bleeding ...
It always intrigues me, though that they've got to slash and burn so as to "create a robust platform for future growth". Makes me wonder just who they're slash/burning and why - and why they don't just halve the excessive salaries etc for all the current folk - after all, there's nowhere else that's going to employ them, so they can't leave, can they.
DeletePlus “future growth” of…. what? Revenue, presumably, but how? Content? That hasn’t varied much in decades, has in fact become narrower if anything. Audience reach? Again, while the company may have substantial market share in most of its territories being the sole paper in some capitals probably helps there….), that audience has surely been declining, as long-time Reptile-speak consumers age and die, and those coming on board become fewer and fewer. Their attempts at attracting new audiences in recent years - most notably “The Oz” - have failed miserably. About the only potential improvements for the company that I can foresee are streaming services, particularly for sport - I’d expect the Reptiles to lobby governments heavily in an effort to allow more and more sports behind the Foxtel / streaming paywall. Of course that’s not going to allow Rupert andLachlan to maintain the belief that they wield massive political influence. So at least until, Rupert finally karks it, I’d expect they’ll refuse to cut their losses by reducing the propaganda outlets that (at least in this country, if not elsewhere) must haemorrhage money.
DeleteFuture growth of ? Hard to say whether Roopie values money more than 'influence' or vice versa. Probably so long as he has enough money to keep paying for his lifestyle, it's really 'influence' (aka 'power') that's his main turn-on.
DeleteBut for how much longer ? Will he make it to 110 d'you reckon ? Which would make Lachy a whippersnapper of but 70 odd years by then with James just a year or two younger ... but with a couple of superyachts to share between them.
Hi Dorothy,
ReplyDeleteHenry failed to mention the Court of Piepowders;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_of_piepowders
An oversight, or a glaring hole in our Henry’s legal knowledge?
What a great idea, a marketplace with pillory for entertainment. It's also a pity that our Henry didn't mention the perfidious French and their weird ideas about prosecutors ...
DeleteThe wiki reads like it was written by someone with a poor grasp of English, but he could have celebrated Western Civilisation in all its Neronian splendour ..."The criminal justice system of France, or the French legal system, is derived from Roman law."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_France
French law is based on Roman law ? Then where does all the Judeo-Christian civilisation and laws come into anything ?
DeleteBut it's just so, isn't it: from the rule of the 'head of the household' on through the local burrough, town, city, lord's estate etc, we just have to have a ruler to live under. And fortunately we have always had a whole hierarchy of them.
Yair, that Clive Williams chap is quite a lad, isn't he: "I recall from my defence days that in 1981 the US claimed Vietnam was using T-2 mycotoxin against local Indochina populations based on the existence of 'yellow rain' and people dying from mycotoxins." Yep, so that was all about "vthe US" of 1981 with Ronnie Raygun as President and of course there's absolutely no difference between then and Ronnie and now and Joe, is there.
ReplyDeleteSo clearly the Chinese balloon was just a schoolkid prank, wasn't it - no possibility whatsoever that it was intended to strengthen China by weakening the USA.
"No possibility whatsoever that it was intended to strengthen China by weakening the USA". I thought MTG was tasked with doing that. In fairness, she did have her own balloon and it would be remiss not to acknowledge Fox News as well.
DeleteHere’s one less job for News Corp to slash, with the “Third Man” - the latest senior editor to be booted recently - now identified -
ReplyDeletehttps://www.afr.com/rear-window/sid-maher-follows-dore-smith-out-of-news-corp-20230209-p5cja3
I was shocked to see Our Henry actually citing events from 1981 in today’s contribution - surely something so recent can’t possibly have any relevance or bearing? I think the rot set in when he started to mention the dangerous modernists of the Enlightenment - surely even Innocent III’s decrees, at a more 820 years old, can barely be said yet to have stood the test of time. No, Henry, back to the Classics hen building an argument, please - if it isn’t at least a couple of thousand years old, then it simply can’t be relied upon.
ReplyDeleteThere's one thing to be accurately stated about Holely Henry: he can be very enervating without even trying. And another thing is that, yes indeed, he cannot stay loyal to his historical heroes - not even a whisper of a mention of Thucydides in weeks of wayward wallowing.
DeleteOoh Henry, where are you at now ?
The Henry follows what is, for him, a common path of giving an established reptile take on recent or current legal proceedings, then attempts to season that with some vaguely appropriate quotes from - other times. The inference is that the players in current proceedings should be wholly conversant with the writings that Henry has found, no matter that many may be remarkably obscure.
DeleteOf recent time, the US Supreme Court - which the reptiles understand they should always write of in deeply respectful terms - ruled on the case known as ‘Davis v. Ayala’. It was essentially about that ‘due process’, one of the amendments to their constitution (and all those amendments are reverenced by the political side that Rupert promotes). The case went back 30 years, to when Ayala - of Hispanic descent - had been accused of killing three people in a botched robbery.
In Ayala’s main trial, prosecution challenged all Black or Hispanic prospective jurors. Not only did the trial judge allow that, but Ayala’s counsel was not present during those challenges. All of that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, where, in 2015, a narrow majority ruled that even if the trial court committed error, it was a harmless error, and Ayala did not suffer from it.
The majority - familiar names still - Alito - who wrote the leading opinion, Roberts, Scalia, with (Clarence) Thomas and Kennedy ‘concurring’.
Dissenting - similarly predictable - Sotomayor, Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan.
There is still discussion over Kennedy’s ‘swing’ vote, and that discussion is of interest to readers in our area because Kennedy claimed his conclusions were guided by the work of criminologist Norval Morris. Morris was born in New Zealand, completed much of his studies in Australia, but was an influential lecturer across the USA, attached to several prominent law schools, albeit ones with a disturbingly ‘liberal’ bent.
In 1970, Morris and the Australian Gordon Hawkins, published ‘The Honest Politician’s Guide to Crime Control.’ Yes, that featured in many jokes, but it introduced, amongst other things, a pyramid showing that, as a defendant moved through the system from first apprehension by a (usually uniformed) compliance officer, up to the highest court in the land - any land - the amount of discretion that practitioners at each level could apply to considering that defendant’s case steadily diminished, while the interpretation of ‘the law’ expanded to take in every detail - of the law. Discretion applied to gathering and documenting evidence, by officers who were required only to be familiar with the legislation they were paid to enforce. An important principle at that first level was that, as soon as compliance officers decided, on what they had seen or been told, that an offence had been committed - they had no discretion to not proceed to report evidence and statements to their agency for further action.
Writers on ‘Davis v Ayala’ are still mystified over just what part of Morris’ output supposedly swung Kennedy to side with the likes of Alito, Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Kennedy has done little to inform them in the 3 years until he retired from the Supreme Court, or the 5 years since.
In the context that the Henry has tried to set for this day, if he were truly interested in educating the great unwashed in the broad principles of the legal systems at least of the English-speaking world, he might have taken up some of the things Hawkins and Morris set out in their ‘Honest Politician’s Guide’. In the Australian system, a defendant is several steps up the pyramid - usually following committal hearings - where a magistrate (yep, one of them!) decides if there seems to be sufficient evidence to proceed further - before they attract the attention of DPPs or their ilk.
Oh, of course - we are not concerned with broader principles and processes - we are continuing to gnaw at the bones left by Dame Slap, and the Meretricious, from just a couple of cases that make the Dreyfus affair look like a reprimand for jaywalking.
I notice that Henry appears to consider the “massive crime wave” of the early 19th century to be a factor in the development of Britain’s criminal justice system with an increase seven times that of population growth. However, he never seems to ask “why did this growth occur?”, let alone “errr.. did it really?”. It’s possible that the disruption to established society caused by the early Industrial Revolution may have been a factor, but Henry himself says that statistics on crime only began being kept circa 1805, and they may well have been pretty rudimentary and inadequate at that time, resulting in underreporting, with more accurate later figures being interpreted as a boom in offences. “Hard crime” figures may also have been pumped by once comparatively minor offences - the proverbial stealing of a silk hanky or loaf of bread - becoming serious crimes on the statute books. Henry may well be correct in his claims and assumptions, but he always seems to present a too-simple progressive narrative in his screeds - “This happened, then this, and therefore that resulted”. I always get the feeling that the real world often doesn’t operate as simply and smoothly as Henry appears to assume.
DeleteI get a bit of an impression, Anony, that with Albanese having been "in power" for 9 months, he should have fixed all our problems already - you know, those problems that 'the triumvirate' *Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison) took about 9 years to create.
DeleteLots of detail about how the world really "works" Chad. I confess from the little I can grasp ('little' compared with the scope of your grasp) I've never understood why any honest or decent person would ever agree with Alito, Scalia and Clarence T about anything.
GB - During Justice Kennedy's tenure there were comments that his judgements were developed largely by his clerks. His 'Wiki' records that two of his clerks were Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. What are the odds, hey?
DeleteTalking about Australia's compulsory voting systems - which got a mention in passing the other day - it seems that us Aussies, and especially us Victorians, are kinda losing interest:
ReplyDeleteWithdrawal symptoms: Why are Victorian voters staying away?
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/withdrawal-symptoms-why-are-victorian-voters-staying-away/ar-AA17joOn?
Which really has been kinda obvious for a while: just ask Bill Shorten about that. Funny thing is, IIRC, most if not all of the 'compulsory voting' requirements applying in Aussie states were instituted by the right wingnuts as a way of entrenching themselves forever.