Are you ready for some big bang disruption, or maybe some Clive-ish devastating innovation?

(Above: tin cars for tin men)


Standing beside global warming pin-up boy and former US vice-president Al Gore, Mr Palmer revealed the three incoming PUP senators who in effect hold the balance of power would vote to scrap the carbon tax, due to rise to $25.40 next week. 
Crucially, PUP will only do so if it is replaced with a dormant emissions trading scheme with the carbon price set at zero – as the Herald has suggested – until Australia’s trading partners implement a similar scheme. (here, under the appalling header Clive Palmer's carbon plan makes sense, without subsequent amendment or apology).

Crucially, the Fairfax editorialist is off in la la land, away with the pixies, is delusional, or if you prefer a politer, more subtle, genteel and nuanced assessment, is fucked in the head.

This in an editorial by a newspaper that once fancied itself as a paper of record and a keeper of Sydney proprieties.

Well that was long ago, and besides the witch is dead, and so on we wearily trudge, knowing that the flim flam man can now sell aluminium sidings in the eastern suburbs.

Crucially, of course, PUP hasn't placed a condition on the scrapping of the carbon tax requiring it be replaced with a dormant emissions trading scheme.

Sadly it allowed the likes of Akker Dakker a quiet gloat:

Trying to find a pony in the heap of horse manure Palmer and Gore were feeding the media, the global warmists’ handbook, The Sydney Morning Herald, even tried to take some credit for what it understood the duo’s garbled message to be — that repeal of the carbon tax was to be contingent on some future emissions trading scheme. 
In its infantile and misleading editorial, it wrote of the Palmer United Party’s position: 
“Crucially, PUP will only do so if it is replaced with a dormant emissions trading scheme (ETS) with the carbon price set at zero — as the Herald has suggested — until Australia’s trading partners implement a similar scheme.” 
Without wishing the Herald’s senior editors to collapse into their usual hysterical state, they should note that the PUPpies repeal of the carbon tax is only contingent on the obvious savings being passed on to consumers. Nothing else, despite the flaky hopey-wishey Fairfax views. 
The Herald serially misinformed its readers in its leader. Not only did it erroneously claim that the ETS was part of the trade-off, it also said the PUPs would “demand the present 20 per cent renewable energy target — which some in the Coalition are urging the government to scrap — remains in place and that the government ensures that all of the savings from lower energy costs are passed on to households”. (here)

That's what happens when you swallow the flim flam man's kool aid, you end up making Akker Dakker sound like a rocket scientist, well in between the abuse and the ignorance, and that's about as hard a job as the turtle holding up the world (yes, it does, it does, Greg Hunt it here, and Akker Dakker's a top notch climate scientist too, though if he brings out a straw and a credit card, get ready to scarper...)

The pond isn't sure where Akker Dakker dug up that last par about the RET, but it just goes to show that when the flim flam man gets going, no one can be certain of anything ... until the votes are in ...

This morning Mark Kenny felt the need to resort to ancient George Lucas mythology in Who are the winners from Clive Palmer's green conversion?

Yes, the dummy was still presenting the recent activities of Palmer as a green conversion, but the splash had a better phrasing:

A Jedi mind trick! So that's why the Fairfax editorialist was bamboozled.

Kenny's own Jedi trick is to hail the retaining of the RET and the CEFC as major victories, blessed by a conspiracy involving big Mal and Martin Parkinson, and never mind the end of the carbon tax and an ETS being a chimera and a dream, and the farcical direct action being abolished and Abbott not having the heart or the interest to push it ahead via regulation, especially as any such measures might then be disallowed by a vote in the Senate.

Which leaves Australia's actual target where? And its credibility in world forums aiming to take action on matters arising from climate science how high?

The gloating's already begun, and dummies like Kenny are too dumb to understand it:

Here's a jedi mind trick for you, Kenny and the rest of the Fairfaxians:

Oh yes, the future's in coal, coal, coal.

Well if you want an alternative view to that of the Fairfaxians, sans reptile gloating, you'll have to head off behind the Crikey paywall to read Bernard Keane's The politics: Palmer delivers a big win for climate denialists.

This is the man who announced he would challenge the carbon price in the High Court and never bothered to do it. The man who declared he was closing mines in the Pilbara in response to the mining tax and then admitted he’d “exaggerated”. The man who set up an alternative soccer governing body in Australia to replace the Football Federation Australia that was never heard from again. The man who claimed the CIA was working with the Greens and then admitted he’d just made it up. Clive “Wendi Deng is a Chinese spy” Palmer. 
Now he declares he’s a convert on climate science, but in fact will vote to dump the current carbon pricing regime, provided the government legislates a fig leaf to guarantee power prices will fall. There’s some ironic justice in this, given the Coalition has been inventing nonsense about the impact of the carbon price on consumers for years. Now Palmer has insisted they live up to their own rhetoric in statutory form. 
The rest is irrelevant detail. Palmer’s emissions trading scheme — to, erm, replace the emissions trading scheme that will commence on July 1 next year under the legislation he will vote to repeal, and apparently using text of the current legislation in his own bill — will never commence, remaining zero-rated forever, given one of the conditions for it operating is the United States embrace an emissions trading scheme. As Palmer well knows, much of the Republican Party that currently holds the House in the US don’t even believe in climate change, let alone an ETS to address it. So pointless is Palmer’s proposed ETS, it’s possible the Coalition might even back it as a replacement figleaf for Direct Inaction.

And so on. Modesty and a reluctance to do a Daily Mail or a Murdoch on the rest of the text leaves it behind the paywall, more's the pity because it's all worth quoting ...

By the time the pond got around to noting another editorial by the Fairfaxians, ABC reforms worth debating with safeguards, the pond was so over Fairfax that all the pond could think was The Fairfax The, which perhaps should be translated by Sideshow Bob into German so they'll understand it ...

The pathetic self-interest, the pathetic Fairfax TV and its pathetic failure, the whole pathetic state of Fairfax surged to the fore with this astonishing line:

In an internet age with myriad competitors, it is difficult to justify taxpayers subsidising one player over others.
What is more, the ABC has expanded into non-core functions – many of them online.

Uh huh, because you know, the full to overflowing intertubes is just so yesterday when it comes to communicating content to customers.

You'd have to be running Fairfax TV to think that ...

So what else in this vale of tears? Well today in the lizard Oz, there's Nick Xenophon trying to pump air back into the lungs of the corpse at one time known as "direct action".

Ah Nick:

But enough of Gorgeous George Nick, you're out of your depth up against the flim flam man, and a PM who really doesn't accept the current findings of climate science, and do you find it passing strange that you, along with that dodo Greg Hunt, are the only two politicians who seem to be taking direct action seriously?

So what else? Well even as Gorgeous Clive tears through Australian politics, there this very day is Hedley Thomas, still beavering away:

Hedley, Hedley, he's on the side of the lizards now ... he's Bolter approved.

Poor Hedley. If you read A hint for dupes: follow the money (inside the paywall because you need money to follow the money), it opens with a wondrous line:

In All The President’s Men, the film that dramatised the journalism responsible for piecing together Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, the informant known as Deep Throat told The Washington Post’s reporters to “follow the money”. 
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein still had to do all the hard yards. There were few short-cuts. Not much in the way of evidence came easily in their pursuit of a US president who would be accused of corruption and run out of office.


Hedley, Hedley, it's Clive you're chasing, not the President of the United States.

You're not going to be played by Ryan Gosling or Channing Tatum or any other Hollywood hunk you can name, and John Adams isn't going to write an opera titled Clive in China ...

The pond feels deeply sorry for Hedley. It would be great if he could nail the flim flam man, but he spends as much time in his piece attempting to nail the ABC, Tony Jones, Lateline (like some late night current affairs show is a flagship), and everybody else for failing to pay attention, but alas he ends up sounding like the ancient mariner and pointing a frail finger at passing wedding guests:

The lesson for journalists, many of whom are being made to look like inept fools by Palmer, is simple. Do your homework. Forget his media conferences and the PR stunts unless you have researched the detail and can maintain a line of questioning. When his track record shows he makes stuff up on a regular basis, it is journalistic irresponsibility to fail to question him with rigour. 
Many years ago on the Nine Network’s Sunday Business program, finance journalist Michael Pascoe did his homework, and questioned Palmer without fear or favour. Pascoe remained calm while Palmer deflected, dissembled and, finally, ranted. 
While Palmer orchestrates a media circus and dodges the ­scrutiny that would be (and should be) applying to any other politician holding Australia’s balance of power, the hard evidence mounts up.

Indeed Hedders, indeed. The hard evidence is certainly mounting up.

Why don't you take it up with Tony Abbott?

Tell him to do a Michael Pascoe.

You see, Abbott's the man clambering into bed with Clive. He's the one making use of the politician holding the balance of power, and in the process Abbott's cynically fucking up Australia's response to the dire warnings emanating from climate scientists around the world ...

Yes, it's Abbott who's fallen into line with a man who routinely makes stuff up.

Oh wait, you're scribbling for the reptiles at the lizard Oz. You want Tony Abbott to be able to do all that without any need to join Clive's circus ... he's good enough to make up stuff all on his own.

Speaking of Abbott, the pond pauses to commend an unnerving insight into the young Abbott and his seminary days, in Seminary similarity, which inter alia included this prescient, eerie assessment by one Father Bill Wright:

“Tony is inclined to score points, to skate over or hold back any reservations he might have about his case.”

Read the rest and your blood will run cold. It's right up there with Edgar Allan Poe ...

And finally, just to prove there's life outside the parish pump world of Clive and Hedley and the gang, please allow the pond to draw your attention to a couple of amusing reads. A couple are smackdowns of the hapless Marc Andreessen - as in Marc Andreessen and the Inevitability of Catastrophic Ideas, and Deep Thoughts with Marc Andreessen: The Poor Have it Pretty Good!

And the other is a smackdown by Jill Lapore of Clayton M. Chirstensen and all the other speakers of gobbledegook, like 'disruptive innovation' and 'creative destruction', and other abuses of the English language. It's at The New Yorker under the header The Disruption Machine, and right at the moment it's outside the paywall.

A taster:

Ever since “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” everyone is either disrupting or being disrupted. There are disruption consultants, disruption conferences, and disruption seminars. This fall, the University of Southern California is opening a new program: “The degree is in disruption,” the university announced. “Disrupt or be disrupted,” the venture capitalist Josh Linkner warns in a new book, “The Road to Reinvention,” in which he argues that “fickle consumer trends, friction-free markets, and political unrest,” along with “dizzying speed, exponential complexity, and mind-numbing technology advances,” mean that the time has come to panic as you’ve never panicked before. Larry Downes and Paul Nunes, who blog for Forbes, insist that we have entered a new and even scarier stage: “big bang disruption.” “This isn’t disruptive innovation,” they warn. “It’s devastating innovation.”

The long absent lord alone knows what Lepore would make of Clive Palmer, the Fairfaxians and the reptilian Murdochians ... but it would surely be devastating and fuck the innovation ...

(Below: so what exactly is Clive? Who knows, but he's certainly god's gift to cartoonists. She knows that David Pope will point out the elephant in the room, and more Pope here, while David Rowe is in smokestack heaven, and more Rowe here)