loon pond: Go on, Greg Hunt it here ...

It's a bit like the Bolter leading with a profound breach of Godwin's Law and not having the first clue what he's doing...

Now poor old Greg Hunt is back in the wars ...

The eager beavers at Fairfax dress it up as an EXCLUSIVE and it is the result of an interminably slow FOI request, but in the end what's the net news from Bureau warned Greg Hunt about climate change before he cited Wikipedia?

Why that Greg Hunt fronts a denialist government, and does the denialist bidding of his denialist master, and will, at any opportunity, downplay and ignore scientists, and if that means using information from wikipedia in preference to direct advice from scientists, a Hunt's gotta do what a Hunt's gotta do ....

But this is hardly news ... with Maurice Newman as your chief climate and business advisor, it would be surprising if it played out any other way ...

The documents shatter claims made by Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who last year dismissed any link between global warming and bushfires, and show the extent to which the government has been advised of climate change's influence on recent extreme weather in Australia.
Mr Hunt was questioned on Newshour on October 23 last year and appeared to use Wikipedia to defend the Prime Minister's assertion that United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres was "talking out of her hat" when she said bushfires were linked to climate change.
Mr Hunt said he had "looked up what Wikipedia says" and had learnt that "bushfires in Australia are frequently occurring events during the hotter months of the year … That's the Australian experience". Pressed about the impact of climate change on bushfires, Mr Hunt responded: "Well, we all have to be very careful. In talking with the senior people of the Bureau of Meteorology, for example, they always emphasise never try to link any particular event to climate change."
But the briefing papers released to Fairfax Media show that, three weeks earlier, on October 3, the weather bureau's director, Rob Vertessy, had told Mr Hunt that the intensity, extent and duration of record high temperatures in the preceding month had been "unprecedented" since at least 1910, when records began.

And so began the use of Hunt as an active verb up there with Google. Want an answer? Greg Hunt it ...

And if you get challenged about your quintessential stupidity, always remember to double down:

Mr Hunt said on Monday that during the October 23 interview he had "reconfirmed on multiple occasions our support [of] the science but also reaffirmed the advice of the scientists not to attribute individual events."
In relation to the suggestion that he sourced his information from Wikipedia, on Monday Mr Hunt said: "This is an absolute distortion ... I must have done 200 interviews referring to the science and the scientists. This was an overseas [interviewer], who has no idea about the CSIRO. The point was that even the most basic sources will say Australia has always had massive bushfires."

Now there's a really stupid man. You have to cite wikipedia as a source to assert that Australia has always had massive bushfires?

The best bit comes with the sting in the tail:

What they said
Greg Hunt in a BBC interview on October 23, 2013: "In talking with the senior people of the Bureau of Meteorology ... they always emphasise never try to link any particular event to climate change."
October 3, 2013, briefing paper for Mr Hunt prepared by bureau director Rob Vertessy: "A number of more recent studies are drawing probabilistic links between more extreme seasonal heat records and climate change, including the Australian summer of 2012-13."

But still it was a light meal. Greg Hunt's a fraud? Is that the news?

It's going to be a long hot summer? Who knows, but chances are ...

Just for fun, the pond did a Hunt on Hunt in wikipedia:

In October 2013, while being interviewed by the BBC, Hunt referred to research that he had conducted using Wikipedia to contradict Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in regards to the relationship between climate change and bushfires. He said: "Australia has since European settlement and obviously well before that, had a history of recurrent bushfires. I looked up what Wikipedia says, for example, just to see what the rest of the world thought, and it opens up with the fact that bushfires in Australia are frequently occurring events during the hotter months of the year. Large areas of land are ravaged every year by bushfires. That’s the Australian experience."
In November 2013, Hunt was criticised by Greens MP Adam Bandt, for ruling out attending the upcoming UN Climate Summit despite being the Environment Minister, saying: "Instead of sitting in his office reading Wikipedia, Greg Hunt should be in Warsaw tackling global warming and talking to the world’s experts on climate change." (Hunt here for the footnotes)

Seems fair, though thanks to the Wiki Nazi thought police, you can't add Large areas of Australian brains are ravaged every year by quisling politicians. That's the Australian experience ...

Meanwhile, on another planet, far away from Greg Hunt and wiki .... Oceans Getting Hotter Than Anybody Realized ....

Ah well, it's a nice distraction from the more sombre news of the day.

After all, climate change is only about the end of the world as we know it, and we need a war to distract us from that sort of mission.

Boots on ground is the cry, and boots on ground it will be ...

Yes, as operational matters at sea are being kept hush hush for security reasons, the war-loving Australian public are kept right up to date with news that Hornets didn't drop their bombs before returning to base:

Too much twittering, too much information about too little.

You mean we didn't bomb the bad guys and it isn't all over on day one?

So how's this intensive bombing campaign helping out with the battle for Kobane?

For that matter, how are the Turks helping out, seeing as how if the town falls, the Turks will have ISIS on their border?

What's that you say? ISIS raises flags on eastern side of Kobane?

Uh huh. Well that calls for tears and fears or a cartoon:

(and more Rowe here)

Now you don't have to be a student of Bomber Harris or bombing during World War II to realise that it's a limited tool - though it would certainly help the Bolter to do a little history so he might foreswear his many mindless Godwin's Law stupidities.

Look, you can Greg Hunt it here:

The effects of strategic bombing were very poorly understood at the time and grossly overrated. Particularly in the first two years of the campaign, few understood just how little damage was caused and how rapidly the Germans were able to replace lost production—despite the obvious lessons to be learned from the United Kingdom's own survival of the blitz. (Hunt it here)

At the end of the day, you sometimes have to flatten a town to save it, and at the end of the day you need people on the ground to sort the fighters from the civilians, and at some point, someone in the west will have to ask if they have the 'boots on the ground' ticker for the job, given the distinct lack of ticker in the government of Iraq ...

At some point, attention might have to be paid to the likes of Professor Hugh White, this very morning speaking into the void of RN's low ratings, yet making this very point in IS threat does not warrant Australian military intervention: strategic analyst.

How soon before buyer's remorse sets in at the Murdoch press?

Which brings the pond to a final matter for this back to work day, and that's the ratbag rantings of the right wing Gary Johns.

Now there's a deeply, inherently stupid man.

The whole point of religious symbols is you take them where you find them, and you use them how you like.

For the pond, the cilice is not of deep religious significance ...

... but you'd be barking mad to stand between a member of Opus Dei, and his cilice and his daily dose of religious and SM pleasure ...

Now the pond might think of the cilice as a symbol of oppression, but then you can count any number of things the pond finds a symbol of oppression - yes, just watch a slip sliding Jew or Islamic tuck into a meal of bacon or oysters, and it's as shocking as watching a Catholic eat meat on a Friday ...

Now you can if you like do a Greg Hunt on the burqa here, but let's just say that Johns, in the right wing way, is deeply confused.

Sadly the pond can't provide a link to No place for medieval practice in society, because it would only provide a link to a begging letter from the paupers of the press, but suffice to say, it's yet another case where conservatives turn liberal when it suits them.

Suddenly there's lots of idle chatter about the "liberal revolution" when in any other context hapless inner west latte-sipping and chardonnay swallowing liberals would be subjected to merciless abuse:

Religious practices, and some beliefs, are socially determined. The only Christians who pray five times a day in 2014 are confined to religious orders, and they are not as devoted as they once were. Medieval religious practices in Australia should not remain unchanged.
The state may not use its power to interfere with a religion but others should. Has that desire to liberate not been at the heart of our liberal revolution?

So liberals get hijacked once again.

Muslim women from Malaysia, for example, students that I observe in cities in Australia, wear a hijab, a scarf that surrounds the head but leaves the face uncovered. I also observe such women wearing jeans and, as the mood takes them, laughing out loud in public.
The burka is not something of deep religious significance; it is a symbol of oppression. Cultural and religious excuses are ways of fending off inquiry, of avoiding justification that would not be given any leeway if debate were among “our own”. So, guess what, to defend illiberalism among Muslims is discriminatory and often racist.

Well actually liberalism means being liberal ...

Sadly that means putting up with twits, conservatives, the Bolter, Gary Johns, the reptiles at the lizard Oz, Gerard Henderson, Akker Dakker, Miranda the Devine, and dozens of other examples of richly entrenched ratbag illiberalism ...

Of course the price you pay for a liberal outlook is that raving ranting ratbags like the reptiles at the lizard Oz poke merciless fun at you and bully you and savage you and the HUN sends out the Bolter with a demand that no prisoners be taken and claims Christianity is a religion of peace, which makes it bloody hard to explain the Crusades or all the other wars that have taken place over the centuries conducted for and by Christians...

Johns, who is clearly startled by the sight of fundamentalists and patriarchs dressing women the way they think they should be dressed, doesn't begin to get it.

Australia’s immigration has almost always had a legacy of conflict. The Irish and English have thankfully resolved old wars; the same is true for Anglicans and Catholics.
Each religion is now more liberal than was once the case.

Well no, sorry. That happened by way of education and by separation of education from the propaganda intent of religious institutions in control of the means of education.

Now thanks to the illiberals, we're using government money to fund fundamentalist Christian, Islamic and Scientological schools ....

The separation of church and state is fragile. Fundamentalists and conservatives scratch away at it all the time. The Catholic church remains dominated by men, as do the angry Anglicans. And their attitudes to women and gays are dead set the same as Islamic fundamentalists.

Tony Abbott self-confessedly gets agitated by gays and by Islamics ...

In this context, the liberal attempt to tell conservatives and fundamentalists to shut the fuck up and get out of the way of the public education system is a lonely and forlorn path to trudge ...

And just as Johns is trying to tell us how liberal we are, and how we now should be illiberal, but only about the Islamics, along comes a truly rabid fundamentalist such as Kevin Andrews ...

The only solution is to maintain a country where Life of Brian is hailed as the liberal bible, and Pope is honoured for his Popery (and more Pope here).