Don't slogan at them ...

(Above: and more Pope here).

Oh dear, there's David Pope stirring the pot yet again with his canberry flavoured pie ...

And this morning the Daily Terror also had its knickers in a knot:

Indeed, indeed. And for a moment there, the pond almost thought the Terror had gone communistic, pinko pervert socialist, and might actually have suggested a role for government in regulation. 

But the best they can produce in their terror-torial is hand-wringing:

While we can be assured local produce meets appropriate standards for public safety, it now emerges that nearly all the fruit and vegetables imported to Australia are not subject to any safety testing at all prior to going on sale.

This would not be such a worrying issue if, like Australia, imported produce was grown and harvested in secure and fertile surrounds. The trouble is, in more crowded foreign areas, fruit and vegetables share their growing space with real estate that is not particularly suited to the best possible health outcomes...

Ah those pesky furriners.

The Terror's solution? Perhaps do some safety testing? Note that there's a role for government? You know, public servants on the front line.

Of course not:

Until a source of infection is identified, parents of young children might want to take the nearly fail-safe precaution of buying only local produce.

Let the deregulation continue! Everything is working for the best in a free enterprise way, and who could quibble with that? Oh, and watch what you and your children eat ... who knows what's lurking out there ...

Meanwhile, big Mal made quite a splash in last night's Q and A. It seems that it was a job application.

Not that the pond watched. The moment the grandiloquent humbug turned to camera and started to address the Indonesian government, the pond had to retire with a sudden bout of nausea.

But big Mal did come out with the immortal words "Don't slogan at them" which has the virtue of turning a noun into a verb, so that a quaint antique word which is an actual verb - like sloganeer - can now be declared redundant and gracefully retired... while a grateful public can wear with pride the badge of "them" ...

As for the bromancer, it seems he was caught in a Stockholm Syndrome moment:

Fellow panellist, The Australian’s foreign affairs editor Greg Sheridan, said he would give Tony Abbott a “50 per cent chance” of remaining the prime minister, and nominated Mr Turnbull as his natural successor. 
“[If there was another spill], I think it is very likely the party would ask Malcolm Turnbull to take the leadership,” he said. (here at news.com.au).

Et tu bromancer?

Naturally the Graudian was all over big Mal's performance in Malcolm Turnbull plays convincing role as the man who is not Tony Abbott.

Big Mal was in particularly fine form praising Philip Ruddock to the skies and trotting out the now standard joke about the captain:

“[Abbott] is the one who has to explain it, but I just want to say I think Philip Ruddock is a great Liberal, a great parliamentarian and it was a very sad day for all of us when we learnt his services as chief whip had been terminated by the prime minister,” Turnbull said. 
“He is the boss. He is the captain. He can make a captain’s call.”

Oh dear, and this just as the Captain is going to slogan at the nation about national security, and even resorted to a tease, promising there'd be a slogan fest, but not actually delivering on the promise of the slogan fest until next week.

So that in the meantime, mice and cartoonists could play:

Yes, there's a bad man playing the Australian public for mugs ... and too lazy to do the washing up. (And more Rowe here).

It's got so everyone is making a joke about Abbott and his sloganeering:

That was at Mama Mia here, but even before he's delivered his speech, there's Michael Gordon at Fairfax deciding Tony Abbott overplays the national security card (forced video at end of link). Gordon even manages to swallow the simple-minded Seussian chant of "not bail, jail", but otherwise he wasn't buying much about Abbott's talk of systemic failure, or removing the presumption of innocence, or inviting rabid paranoia about "the other":

If Abbott needs more powers, he needs to explain in a measured tone where the gaps exist and how they should be filled. Otherwise, he risks being accused of talking tough to shore up his diminished leadership.

Measured tone? Evil, pure undiluted evil?

Risks being accused? See Mr Rowe's excellent cartoon, Mr Gordon ...

But enough of this failing, flailing leader, girding his loins to deliver yet another bout of slogans in his patented sloganeering way ...

Instead the pond would like to pause to catch up on a couple of recent posts. It's rare that the pond, like a wayward dog, returns to the vomit on the lawn, even after eating a whole patch of grass, but we were intrigued to see if anything had happened to a holocaust denying comment on little Timmy's column in support of the use of the word 'holocaust', provided the word had no capital H:

Yes, it was still there, a day later, but along the way it had picked up two likes.

Seems like the Terror is holocaust denial central, which isn't the same as Holocaust denying,  since it's lower case. So the writer was probably referring to Tony Abbott referring to jobs under Labor, which makes it even more poignant ...because he seems to be asking for proof that the jobs holocaust ever happened ...

And then there were the reptiles of Oz, attempting to explain the blatant bias of their reporting on wind farms.

It was as expected, the subject of a Media Watch report last night, which can be found here. 

The defence the hapless Clive Mathieson offered - well you always need a token reptile on hand to defend the indefensible - is available via that link, and is in turn risible and pathetic, and gave the show a free kick:

More scientific and objective? Now there's a joke ...

Which brings us to the latest bit of science in today's rag:

Uh huh. Garth Paltridge is of course a well known participant in the debate, and he distinguished himself when he published his book The Climate Caper:

Even those who support Garth’s views think that his book would have been more credible, more “respectable” perhaps, if he had chosen someone other than Monckton - indeed almost anyone other than Monckton - to write the foreword. (How climate change sceptics spread doubt and denial).

Ah yes, the Monckton ploy. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, before Monckton was revealed as a loon, and thereby made Paltridge look like a devotee of loons.

Paltridge is one of those who write on the subject in ways that combine verbal abuse with the procedural. It's a nifty variation on the proposal that climate science is religious in nature, and its followers subject to arcane belief.

Instead it's art that's the problem:

... the real worry with climate research is that it is on the very edge of what is called postmodern science. This is a counterpart of the relativist world of postmodern art and design. It is a much more dangerous beast, whose results are valid only in the context of society’s beliefs and where the very existence of scientific truth can be denied. Postmodern science envisages a sort of political nirvana in which scientific theory and results can be consciously and legitimately manipulated to suit either the dictates of political correctness or the policies of the government of the day. (At the AFR as Science held hostage in climate debate).

Damn you, Jackson Pollock, with your pissing on canvases and into Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace. Now every scientist around the land is having postmodernist pissing contests in their laboratories ...

Let's leave that simplistic defamation of thousands of scientists aside.

There's more of the same in today's piece which you can find by googling Climate of cherry-picking:

Basically the academy has fallen into the trap of being no more than a conduit for a massive international political campaign seeking to persuade a sceptical public of the need for drastic action on climate change. There are more than enough org­anisations already doing that. 
Perhaps instead the academy could be persuaded to spend its considerable intellectual capital on problems relevant to the ­general conduct of research — ­problems that the climate issue has brought well into the open. Among them are a peer-review system that is arguably corrupted by groupthink; a deliberate banishment of contrary opinion to the internet; and a publish-or-perish syndrome that is ­completely out of hand. 
Maybe the academy could use the resource of its overall fellowship to identify those situations where scientists have too much skin in a political game. US President Dwight Eisenhower foresaw that problem many years ago in his retirement speech to the nation: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded. Yet … we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could ­itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Ah the old scientific elite, which is even funnier when you consider that Garth Paltridge signs off as a "former CSIRO chief research scientist".

And it's also funny that in a short piece, Paltridge proves himself adept at cherry picking, so that he can raise saucy doubts and fears ...Roman and medieval 'warm' periods, wayward rainfall predictions, arbitrary data, useless models and modellers, and so on ...

But the real question is why the reptiles at the lizard Oz routinely give space to the Monckton lovers, and rarely run lots of stuff about the science that's known, the science that's in question, and the science yet to be done.

For that, you have to head off to other sites on the internet, because if your sources are either Paltridge in the Oz or Paltridge in Quadant, your knowledge is likely to be paltry ... even if your saucy doubts and fear quotient is high ...

What else?

Well today is Cater day ...

But sad to say, this is just a standard bit of boofhead bureaucratic bashing, with DHS staff coping most of the opening round of abuse.

It never occurs to the Caterists of the world to ask exactly what they're contributing to the economy, as they're tidily paid to piss abusive words against the wall in a reprehensible rag which arguably does more to drag down Australia than any other rag - and since it's up against the HUN, the Currish Snail, and the Daily Terror, that's a remarkable badge of honour.

The Caterists this week are up in arms that public servants might dare to go to lunch, but really the only reason the pond notes this outing is to drag up a splendid note from the comments section.

The correspondent provided a quote from Jeff Sparrow's It took two decades, but 'anti-elitist' posturing is finally out of fashion.

Inter alia, Sparrow came out with this:

Perhaps the “spirit of the front bar” exists only in the country. But where in the country? The Top End, perhaps? A prize to anyone who can give an example of a politician or pundit using the “pub test” to ask how a policy might be received by Indigenous drinkers in their local bar. 
But that’s the beauty of the argument. Because it relies on mythology rather than sociology, it’s infinitely flexible, so that almost anyone of whom you approve can be tricked out as a dinkum battler. You might suppose, for instance, that chamber music represented the quintessence of hoity toity cultural elitism. But Nick Cater seems to like it – and so a performance by violinist Richard Tognetti becomes as dinkum as a meat pie. He swoons: 
This is not a musical masterclass but hot, sweaty manual labor; by the end one senses it is not so much applause that Tognetti craves as an ice cold Victoria Bitter. […] That is not a bow in Tognetti’s hand but a blade, for he does not play his Guarneri del Gesu, he shears it. This is music as Tom Roberts would have painted it; cotton sleeves rolled up, dirt under the fingernails, a clay pipe in the back pocket; there will be no interval in tonight’s performance, just a twenty-minute smoko. 
 his hilarious method allows anyone to become dinky di. Murdoch herds his editors like an outback drover running his stock, shaping their copy with the efficiency of a Victa mower. Gina Rinehart inherited her wealth from Lang Hancock because mineral wealth’s as sticky as vegemite – and now she runs her empire with the aplomb of a sheerer playing his lagerphone. The Queen reigns over us, sturdy and reliable as a Hills Hoist.
The pond would love to know where Sparrow got that quote from. It's so sublimely silly, there must be a rich context for it ...

If nothing else, public servants could pin it to the pinboard, and use it as inspiration on their way to and from lunch ... or perhaps Paltridge could incorporate it into his latest rant about post-modernism and technological-scientific elites ...

How ineffably stupid Caterists routinely sound ... but at least we know that deregulation of food safety procedures is working a treat for public health ...

Oh and also in the comments section came the note that an Oz columnist has bitten the dust, as recorded in The Graudian in Columnist Tanveer Ahmed sacked by the Australian over new plagiarism allegation ...

Truth to tell they could sack the lot of them, the Caterists, the climate science deniers like Dame Slap, the wind farm haters, Graham Lloyd, and the rest of the bunch, and the IQ of the national debate would likely increase by ten points within the week.

No, there's no hard data to back that post-modernist thought up, but why don't we just try the experiment? If it fails, where's the harm? Oh sure, a few columnists might have to seek work at the ABC and other bureaucracies, since that's all they really know ... but most of the reptiles at the Oz already turn up at the ABC on a daily basis ...

But if it works ...

Oh wait, there is one more thing. Peter 'let loose the hounds Smithers' Reith is in crazy brave mood today:

Oh wait, that's a double dissolution after the Abbott government wins the next election "with some fiscal measures in its manifesto" ... though maybe it could happen in this term ... and maybe pigs could fly ...

And then, this very day, there was Peter Hartcher determining Monis was a fighter for Daesh, instead of a crazy fellow traveller after notoriety and a discussion with the PM, while Harcher blathers on endlessly claiming it was the information sphere and social media that was pumping up Daesh's influence ... as if giving Monis the status of a Daesh fighter wasn't subverting what has been established to date about the man, who even had trouble rustling up a flag...

So much stupidity, so little time ... and so little signs of change (and more Tandberg here).

Keep those slogans coming at them bad mugs:

And more Wilcox here.