Good morning? Good grief Mr Rowe, and more Rowe here ...
Well that was pretty much a disaster. The pond accidentally ended up in a booth on Parramatta road, where the school building could easily have been mistaken for a gulag.
There was just one person ticking off names, one handing out the forms to the names ticked off, one supervisor who valiantly did her best to look worried, and a couple of lackeys whose job was to explain that there would be an interminable wait, an hour plus.
Have another person ticking off names? Get the supervisor to do something useful? Use a lackey to do meaningful work? That'd require planning.
They even ran out of pencils. That'll make the fix-ups in the back rooms harder to do (relax, relax, that's just a Brexit joke).
The pond had toured other locations in the inner west earlier in the day, and the queues were long. This is what happens when you try to do things on the cheap.
The pond was surrounded by RPA workers on a break, and the mood was ugly. There wasn't enough a sausage sizzle to break the sullen tension, as one of the lackeys carting away the votes complained.
Then came the coverage. Sky had crammed a bunch of second raters into a set that resembled a sardine can. So that's what people pay Pay TV to provide? Half baked tossers in a cheap arse set?
Seven offered the most offensive panel (including Latham and Kennett) and gratuitously offensive Tower of Power graphics and MPs being hurled towards the moon.
The pond thought it impossible for any commercial network to be equally base and degrading, but reckoned without Nine's garbage compactor graphic, as demeaning and insulting and loathsome a representation of democracy as might be imagined. Casually cruel, while at the same time interminably boring, Nine was reprehensible at every moment the pond dropped in and then clicked away.
And then there was the ABC, which lamentably failed to cope. Instead a foolish man, looking like he was on a moonwalk, went out into an empty, alien, Bauhaus-style building - let this wretched construction remain nameless - to be confronted by inept graphics which repeated the obvious ...
It was pretty much a disaster, and with no decent coverage anywhere to be found, the mood in the room turned sour early in the evening, as it became clear Malware's political career is now a series of disasters, and the make-up of the senate is now to his eternal discredit.
What a foolish fop he was and is, and now we must all live with the consequences, murky as they are this morning, with the del-cons rampantly delusional and a never ending smirk on Scomo's fundamentalist lips.
The pond saw this coming, though not the nicety of detail, and so had prepared a placeholder. Better to contemplate another nation's and continent's calamities than our own, and better to see it through the risible eyes of the bromancer.
What's needed now is humour, and a man celebrating the demise of Europe provides the sort of gothic, coffin-black, dark humour that usually could only be found in a Strangelovian Stanley Kubrick film ...
Death of a dream? Yep, you can rely on the bromancer to dance on your grave and your dreams ...
Note that well. There's a lizard Oz commentator favourably quoting Marine LePen at the start of a column.
The fascist instinct is alive and well, and how it loves to talk of the death of Europe, and at interminable length too ... if only he could have followed Woody Allen, and offered small ghastly gobbets and in such small portions too ...
It occurred somewhere in reading all this, that around this time the battle of the Somme was being honoured in Britain and Europe.
The pond's grandfather served in the battle of the Somme, a machine gunner who survived three months in the mud and the death and the carnage.
The long absent lord knows why and he returned ruined and a life-long drunk, and after the great war there was another war supposedly to end all war, and out of that war arose a dream of Europe that the bromancer is now cheerfully tramping all over, like a grotesque kissing cousin of the Putinists ...
Yes, here's a neo-fascist joking hopefully that there will be no bullets anywhere, as he tramples on the dream of a peaceful, collaborative and harmonious Europe ...
What to make of all this rambling? Well at least the naked fear of the "other" puts the lie to that other blatherer in the lizard Oz, the wretched faux Marxist arch-Tory, high Catholic loving Brendan O'Neill ...
Uh huh, so it's got nothing to do with immigration, and yet everything to do with immigration, as we return to the bromancer ... (you can google the O'Neill or you can keep hitting yourself with a hammer, the choice is yours) ...
Well it's about time to bring this to a close. Things are desperate and the centre will not hold, but the pond never thought it would see something more pitiful and offensive as the bromancer defending the loathsome Nigel Farage.
That's right, the bromancer thinks that Farage was given rough treatment. The despicable, loathsome Farage scores the bromancer as a sympathiser ...
Reasonably rough and ready? That's an apologist ready to walk into a German beer hall and celebrate Herr Hitler as a rough and ready sort of chap ...
Well there's certainly a destructive game in town.
It's the bromancer, the wall puncher, Chairman Rupert, Dacre, and the rest of the puppet-string pullers blathering about elites, while quoting the likes of Farage and Marine LePen.
They have trampled on dreams, and we have reaped a harvest of Pauline Hansons ...
Will it ever dawn on these clowns that the world is a connected place? Probably not, because they still believe in copper.
And yet they now embolden Putin, and Trump is on the march, and the onion muncher lurks like some monster waiting to march towards Bethlehem, and they don't have a clue about the way they cultivate anarchy, disorder and discontent ...
Well at least there's more Wilcox here ...
Oh and the pond just couldn't resist this deplorable bit of graffiti from up New England way ... as good old Barners returns to provide irresistible comedy routines until the next election, and how soon will that be?
Hmm, the euro was supposed to be dead and buried by now, according to the Bromancers of the world. What are the odds that the EU will out live the "Australian"?
ReplyDeleteA little late, I know but I had intended to highlight a couple of Greggy Bromancer's points until I got distracted by some election or other. Herewith:
Delete"In short it means that Germany has a chronically undervalued currency, which allows it to create vast trading surpluses, and the rest of Europe, especially the southern European states, have chronically overvalued currency from which they can never escape."
Is he talking about Greece ? I think Greggy has been reading Paul Krugman. And not only reading him, but believing him - isn't that enough to get him disqualified from the reptile team ?
Not only that, but also this:
"That is the EU over all. It confers almost no benefits, but escape is perilous."
Now that's more like it, Greggy lies safe in the bosom of Murdochracy once again.
"... Malware's political career is now a series of disasters ...".
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely spot on there, DP. Simple, sharp and to the point.
I hadn't truly taken on board until now the great convergence between Turnbull and Trump - freed by their own magnificent wondrousness from ever having to pay any attention to reality.
Oh, and congratulations to Mal for his gift to the Australian people of a wonderful Senate. In the more or less long ago, we just had the likes of Albert Field and Brian Harradine, but not necessarily together. Now in one Senate we have Hanson, Lambie, Hinch, the Xenophon mob and Lord knows who else all in one. Hurrah for us.
Right.
ReplyDeleteCareers mangled, mandate evaporated, and Pauline Hansen back in Parliament. Not a bad outcome.
There's never been a more exciting time to be as clever as Malware.
Monday's edition of The Australian will feature a group apology from the commentariat for reading the tea-leaves absolutely and utterly incorrectly, and wasting the readers' time through both MOC and MUC.
Bank on it.
If I bank on it, VC, what rate of interest will I get ?
DeleteI still cannot even begin to grasp how Malware Turnofabull made his money. He did get a big boost from putting about $500,000 into Ozemail and later selling out for $57 million, so that was a big boost. As to how he turned that into a reputed $200 million or so, I just can't comprehend.
57m to 200m in, say, 20 years? implies the lump doubled twice, roughly, or about every ten years on average. Rule 72 for compound interest (72/time to double in years=interst rate) sees it at about 7%. A 7% return was not hard to get on the stock markets through that period, even ordinary savings bank rates were up there for a time, and Malcayman pays little or no tax for an extra boost. Last year Malcayman said in recent years he'd had funds placed with some manager that was regularly returning north of, if memory serves, 30%pa.
DeleteYeah, but Anony, Turnbull didn't sell his Ozemail holdings until 1999 (just before the dotcom bust, apparently). He still had his part in the investment company started by Nick Whitlam, Turnbull and Nev Wran (but initially funded by Packer and Adler, apparently, to the tune of about $50 million), and I don't know how much he milked that (especially after he pushed Whitlam out) or how much Goldman Sachs paid him to come across to them, but he has acquired a very large portfolio of property investments in what appears to be a very short time.
DeleteYeah, if you can put in $57 million, and get a minimum of 7% for 20 years and not have to pay tax on, or significantly spend, any of the earnings, it would make a large pot. But I think he was a bit more active than that.
Good morning Dorothy Parker,and a warm thank you for your monumental effort during the longest Reptile campaign in our history. This is for Mal,and all the reptiles at the Herpetarium.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcAl93uEYUA
We should let people know it's Alice, Anon.
DeleteNotice how Turnbull ground his teeth on 'Australian voters are receiving fake text messages from Medicare telling them not to vote for Malcolm Turnbull' for his condescension speech? He grabbed hold of it, "Call the cops!", as if it was his salvation.
ReplyDeleteRemember Godwin. Let's see how far Mal gets with this bit of techno wizardry.
And what about all those fake text messages from the CFA Volunteeries telling people not to vote for Dan Andrews ?
DeleteWell, it's worth a try, isn't it ? Dunno how it might have gone over in WA though - being a capitalist libertarian state, everybody in WA is a "volunteer" aren't they ?
Maybe we should have had Andrew Bolter as a 'write in' candidate ? We do have 'write in' don't we ? 'Cos otherwise I can't see how most of 'em would get selected as candidates in the first place.
FD analysis....with interesting comments.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/02/first-dog-on-the-moons-election-night-musings
Sheridan's criticism of those dreadful members of the British elite who complained about a dumb electorate being hoodwinked over Brexit is interesting, given the chorus of Liberals complaining about the dumb electorate being hoodwinked by Labor's dishonest scare campaign over Medicare.
ReplyDelete