Now it's true that the Murdochian press has led with some of the finest, keenest, most penetrating and incisive front pages ever seen around the world ...
Oh good stuff, and next week, the return of the roller skate, the hula hoop, and the Coca-cola professional yo-yo team and many other crucial Murdochian exclusives... yes, kids, if you fail in your chosen career as BMX champion, think yo-yo...
(much more tooth-rotting, stomach-enlarging memorabilia and junk here).
So easily distracted this meditative Sunday, but you see, the pond was fondly looking forward to, hoping and expecting, a continuation of the reptile wars, and in particular Miranda "perfumed essence of poison" the Devine v. Chris "the caped dog botherer" Kenny ...
Instead what we get is just another routine exercise in greenie bashing ...
Yes, it's just another story of coal, coal, coal, for Australia and the woooorrrld, the sort of thing the Devine tosses off in her sleep, when not hanging a greenie from the nearest lamp post.
All that's required is a capacity to recycle government and industry press releases, and reverse the psychology, so that Big Mining becomes Big Green:
All the world’s renewable energy in 2014 would have provided just nine days of “heat, light and artificial horsepower”, according to Brendan Pearson from the Minerals Council and Michael Roche from the Queensland Resources Council, citing the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2015. While mining industry sources may be prone to gild the lily, the fact is that 80 per cent of world energy still comes from fossil fuels while China’s appetite for coal keeps growing.
India, too, is demanding its fair share of cheap power. Energy Minister Piyush Goyal last month told an environment and energy conference in Kolkata that coal will remain “the staple power source for India”.
And, on the eve of the latest Paris gabfest on climate change, he hit out at the hypocrisy of rich Western countries which had “enjoyed the fruits of low-cost affordable thermal power for the last 150 years”, and are now lecturing poorer countries about carbon emissions, reports India’s Indo-Asian news service.
Of course, that doesn’t mean renewable energy shouldn’t play a growing part in quenching our energy needs, or that we shouldn’t invest more of our (resources-dependent) wealth on research and development of clean technologies.
Exciting innovations in battery technology, for instance, are making solar power more feasible.
But, as Frydenberg points, out “you can’t have renewable energy without natural resources, as it take 220 tonnes of coking coal to make a wind turbine and over 15 metals and minerals to make a solar panel”. It’s time to stare down the bullies of Big Green. Their anti-progress ideology is a more lethal to humanity than rising sea levels ever would be.
Stupid as ever, especially at the very moment when rising sea levels are in the public eye, but sadly no reptile feud.
Instead it was left to other reptiles to maintain the rage about the coup conducted by the soft-bellied toff, or at least hint mysteriously at the unknown unknowns which might never be known:
It turned out this was a classic click bait non-story, and if the pond saves just one hapless soul from clicking on it, or googling it up, it's time on this planet will not have been in vain.
Maiden ended this furphy about Turnbull's wealth - which revealed and added nothing - in this compelling way:
After Turnbull and Wran left the company, it was revealed Star was considering donating $300,000 to Zhirinovsky’s party accounts.
Zhirinovsky was variously described as a rumoured KGB agent and a neo-fascist, promising voters free vodka and a police state featuring summary executions. “Vote for us and these will be the last elections! The last ones!” he promised.
Labor’s pursuit of Malcolm Turnbull has failed spectacularly to date. That much is clear. But as former US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld once said: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me.
“Because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know that we don’t know.’’
It’s those unknown unknowns that journalists need to be careful about before declaring case closed. Can we be certain, for example, that this is Turnbull’s only brush with Cayman Islands-style capers? It may yet prove prudent for Turnbull to divest any investments domiciled in offshore tax havens.
It may yet prove prudent for Maiden to actually have some interesting information when writing a story, instead of a dose of Rumsfeldian speculation about unknown unknowns.
Maiden didn't deliver and deserves no clicks, and yet pond is up for any defamatory libel of big Mal ...
Getting up yesterday to be greeted by an Optus HFC supplied "broadband" system that was even slower than the customary wet wick, the cursing and the invocation of Malware was something fierce and shocking to hear ... especially as it occurred precisely at the time the NBN Co. was pissing money against the wall in a big publicity drive, explaining how very very soon ... some time in the next three years ... "broadband" would soon be coming to the pond ... via HFC ...
The Optus The, or if you will in German, Bart, Die Optus Die, and please, NBN, go jump off the nearest copper cliff, you useless pack of node-ish losers.
At least now you can see why the pond was in despair this meditative morning.
No continuation of the reptile wars, and all that was left was an Akker Dakker tirade against the Islamics, which also happened to be a tirade against that soft-bellied toff, Malware:
Indeed, indeed. In fact, the pond understands that before parliament rose there was no mention of Australia in the context of the war mongers of Iraq and Afghanistan, and lately of Syria ...
So we can't be pleased all the time ... and Akker Dakker was inconsolable ... and he at least is maintaining the rage at the sell-out big Mal.
Indeed, indeed, and the pond was vastly relieved to discover that there are absolutely no barbaric verses in the bible - what's a little genocide, slave-keeping, rape and murder amongst jolly chums? - and how splendid of Akker Dakker not to mention the splendid outcomes arising from 2003.
Sadly, however, the pond was moved mainly to tedium, because the rhetoric and the hate-mongering and the fear and the loathing was all so predictable, and predictably failed to contemplate why Australia had decided to join in the war that set the whole region in an uproar for the past decade or so ...
It wasn't always this way, as a correspondent noted recently to the pond ...
For this bit of ancient history, the pond must make reference to prattling Polonius and his dobbing ways in a pdf from 1998 here, under the header Piers Akerman, once a leftie (scrolling down required to get to the tasty bit):
...Mr Akerman’s criticism of the stance taken by Australian wharfies “against men and women serving not only in WWII but also in the Korean and Vietnam conflicts” was deeply moving.
Especially in view of the source.
For, on 27 November 1971, the leftist Nation Review carried a full page advertisement addressed to the (then) Coalition prime minister William McMahon. The petition was based on the (false) assumption that the McMahon government was about to send military advisers to train Cambodian forces. At the time the Cambodian government, headed by Lon Nol, was doing battle against the North Vietnamese Army and Hanoi’s (then) ally the Khmer Rouge.
Piers Akerman decided to take a stance. He cosigned the Nation Review advertisement which, interalia:
• claimed that, due to the decision of Robert Menzies’s government to send forces to Vietnam, Australia had become “an accomplice in one of the most obscene crimes of the 20th century”.
• alleged that Australia’s Vietnam commitment had “made mercenaries of our Armed Forces” and was “the most shameful chapter in our nation’s history”.
• and maintained that the Coalition was “once again to throw our national integrity and the rights of the Indo-Chinese people to the winds and go careering into another cesspool of American imperial politics”.
The Akerman-endorsed petition criticised the “reactionary regimes” in Saigon and Phnom Penh. But there was no criticism whatsoever of communist movements in Indo China - the North Vietnamese Army, the Viet Cong or Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.
Why would there be? After all Mr Akerman co-signatories included well-known communists (Laurie Aarons, Jack Mundey) and leftists (Alex Carey, Hall Greenland, Helen Palmer, Jim Cairns, Lionel Murphy, Pat Clancy) alike. Oh, by the way, Jennie George (who these days is a regular Akerman target) signed the advertisement.
There was also a “Trade Unions” section. Here those comrades lining up alongside Piers Akerman included Waterside Workers Federation national secretary Charlie Fitzgibbon and Elliott .V. Elliott of the Seamen’s Union.
Hang on, just a minute. At the time the Waterside Workers Federation and the Seamen’s Union were acting against Australians serving in Vietnam. Little wonder, in a sense. If Akerman was right in November 1971 in arguing that members of the Australian Defence Force were “mercenaries” taking part “in one of the most obscene crimes of the 20th Century” while participating in a “cesspool of American imperial politics” then, perhaps, the wharfies were acting honourably.
But not, of course, if the Akerman et al thesis was false. The stance of Piers Akerman and his (then) leftist mates has been mentioned twice - some years ago by Malcolm McGregor on the Channel 10 program The Last Shout and, independently, by Gerard Henderson in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on 5 May 1998. An indignant Akerman sought and received a right of reply. He claimed that it was “absurd...to draw any philosophical joy” from his “opposition to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War”. (Piers Akerman’s letter to the Sydney Morning Herald 7 May 1998 and The Age 8 May 1998).
But that’s not the point. Many patriotic Australians opposed Australia’s involvement in Vietnam. Including Akerman’s contemporary nemesis Kim Beazley. But Kim Beazley never described Australian soldiers as “mercenaries” or publicly accused their own country of being “an accomplice of one of the most obscene crimes of the 20th Century”.
At least the vast majority of Akerman’s one-time comrades-in-arms circa 1971 have held a consistent position. Few have jumped the fence to moralise at length about the faults of wharfies who acted against Australia’s Vietnam commitment without stating that they once co-signed a petition with the then leaders of the Waterside Workers Federation and the Seamen’s Union. Shame, Piers, Shame...
Never mind, at least it helps explain why Akker Dakker has remained a loyal war-mongering frothing and foaming right wing ratbag ever since those dark, dark days ...
And there was a fine illustrative photo of the fat owl of the remove in his young days:
It's just another reminder of the pond's thesis that once a fundamentalist, always inclined to fundamentalism, and never mind the stripe or the flavour, just dose up on the bigotry, bile and prejudice, and fight with whoever's in the vicinity that might be of the opposite stripe or flavour ...
Which inevitably draws the pond to that new honey pot of tirades, with the bonus of brevity.
The pond has only recently caught up on this feuding and fussing, and now perforce will probably have to watch 4 Corners, a show it routinely misses:
Oh indeed, and you might wonder why the pond never tweets ...
One of the warring parties wouldn't let it go ...
Actually the first person to instantly lose the argument is the one who peddles rumour instead of substance ... as Samantha Maiden so ably demonstrated this very day ...
It would have helped for example, to have actually watched the show and to know what it contained, rather than to speculate about same ... but the pond did love the irritable owl, and suddenly understood the cause of its own dyspepsia ...
And now, just to place the ravings of Akker Dakker in some kind of context, the pond is indebted to this LeLievre cartoon, found on twitter of course ...
You can do your own cartoon for the causes of death in Iraq and Afghanistan ...
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