In which the Caterists do a bait and switch to gasps of awe from the vulgar herd ...

Could there ever be a better job description for working in a Murdochian tabloid?

Cue the Terror this day ...

Well yes, the Terror is the natural home for racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, misogynists ...

And what a timely introduction that is to the pond's regular Tuesday spot with the taxpayer-funded, grant-loving, cash in the paw Caterists ...

Today's Caterist outing is a classic example of the bait and switch ...and all novice students of the subtle art bait and switching, with bonus trolling, will be rewarded by playing close attention ...

Ostensibly the subject of the day is the Press Council adjudication on this headline in the Currish Sunday Mail ...

Now the pond has been around long enough to know that this is a play on the Australian slang sense of knockers, and the conventional slang usage of "knockers" beloved by the British and Americans ... for those uncertain of the latter usage, head off to the Urban Dictionary for tits, hooters, bazookas, bazongas, mosquito bites and zits ... or just watch Carry On movies ...

The Phrase Finder has a bulletin board posting dedicated to the mighty omnipotence of "knockers" in its variegated forms here ..."knockers" has also been transformed by being used to describe the knitted knockers used in matters of breast prothesis (knitted knockers)...

Now the pond might have had more sympathy for the Currish Snail reptiles if they'd been honest, and come out and said, "of course it was a play on knockers, what's wrong with knockers, we're a childish tabloid and boobs are fun and it's not like the knockers on page 3 of our UK sister, The Sun, and we really like Benny Hill and didn't Barbara Windsor have big knockers?"

Instead the weasel-word reptiles tried to wriggle off the hook:

“The publication said the headline meant the word “knocker” in the sense of “critic”, and that this was the primary meaning of the word ahead of a vulgar meaning, such as women’s breasts. It said the headline was not intended to refer to women’s breasts and conveyed only that more and more critics of Mr Trump were speaking out against him, which was the substance of the report,” the Press Council noted in its ruling.

This is, if the pond may speak in a knocking way, absolute bullshit.

The pond has been around long enough to recognise a double entendre of the half-baked, clever dick, risqué, Murdochian tabloid kind. The Murdochian empire has long prospered on smut, and indecent innuendo, along with the explicit smut of page three.

Just look at the sidebar in today's, or day's Terror sidebar, with its talk of real estate television ...

Charming, this realty TV ...

The trouble of course is that using "knockers" as a clever sub-editor double play might have been best done in another story, and not at the top of a story about women with complaints about a pussy-groping president (well he did say he was a groper, and the pond takes him at his pussy-groping, intruding on undressed women word):

“The vulgar use of the word “knockers” in such a context could be read as mocking women who raise allegations of being sexually harassed, in focusing on a physical characteristic of women, and trivialising their complaints,” the ruling stated. The press council censured the article and found the meaning of the word “knockers” could contribute to offence, distress, prejudice to women and people who have experienced sexual harassment. (adjudication 1708 is here).

Little Timmie Bleagh and others had great fun with the notion - oh he loves his knocker jokes and possibly has small hands and what fun to talk of knockers in the context of sexual assault and a bit of harmless pussy grabbing - along with straight reports on the affair and the finding at the likes of Mumbrella here ...

As usual, context and the ostensible status and purpose of the publication is everything, the Currish Snail supposedly being a step above a blog like the pond retailing knock-knock jokes...

And now with the background set, it's time to turn to the Caterist bait and switch, which bemusingly starts by presenting the lad as some sort of free-wheeling anarchist libertarian from the days of Haight Ashbury, keen to drop out, tune in and have some of that there free sex and dope, man ...or possibly the reincarnated spirit of Voltaire ...

It's bullshit of the Caterist kind, but an even greater crime is the misrepresentation of the word "wowser", which, if we trust what Greg Hunt found here ...

The term originated in Australia, at first carrying a similar meaning to "lout" (an annoying or disruptive person, or even a prostitute).

This sense perfectly fits the annoying, disruptive cash the paw, taxpayer-grant loving Caterist ...because he's not really interested in wowsers, or the way the Sunday Snail tried to wriggle off the hook, he wants to do a bait and switch, and that last line about obesity provides the clue.

The pond thinks it's a fair bet that if the Menzies Research Centre were ever to reveal its list of donors, someone with an interest in the sugar or confectionary industries might turn up ...

The argument runs a bit like the one that served the tobacco industry for so many years while dealing in coffin sticks ... it's all a matter of individual responsibility, and if you can't handle your addiction yourself, why you deserve to die for lacking self-discipline, or turn to the public health system, groaning - if the pond might be a bit Currish Snail - under the weight ...

The pond has been down this path before. The arguments are exactly the same that were peddled in relation to tobacco, with elites dragged into the conversation, and even Voltaire's name.

It's just enormous fiddle-de-dee and filagreed fiddle-faddle, and while it purports to deal in empirical evidence, the resort to talk of elites and regal courts and Voltaire is a healthy reminder of the bullshit lurking in the rhetoric ...

More than enough evidence is around that obesity is booming, no matter what the Caterist knockers say, and there's more than enough evidence that junk foods, using sugar and salt and fats, facilitated by supermarket suppliers, drug dealers if you like, are at the heart of the boom ...

The addiction starts early, facilitated by advertising directed at very young consumers. The pond is painfully aware, from personal experience, that once addicted, the addictions are terribly hard to break, with sugar even harder than salt, and both harder than fat and flour ...

All this is obvious enough, and it becomes even more obvious when special interests and rent-seekers are serviced by Caterist denialism, dressed up in noble wowser clothes, with a special regal free speech Voltaire tie ...

Conflation and confusion is at the centre of this kind of scribbling ...in much the same way as the Caterists can be relied upon to write about climate science as if its some modern form of theology ...

Why does this cant, this hypocritical bullshit, stick in the pond's craw, with all its blather about elite logic, and the invocation of the name of Voltaire and Bill Leak?

Well it's because yet again the Caterists have dipped their paw in the taxpayer purse and come up with a healthy new grant, funding for their talk about the difference between illusion and reality ...

If Bill Leak had been a half-way decent cartoonist in the latter days of his time on earth, he would have been kept busy skewering the horse shit emanating from the Caterists and all the other reptiles (along with the necessary business of giving Comrade "white bread" Bill a hard time).

As it is, pompous devious asses like the Caterists, in service to the climate denialist, and obesity denialist special interests, while on the taxpayer dime, get away with their hypocrisy scot-free ...

The pond uses scot-free advisedly:

Scot-free arose in the 16th century as an alteration of the earlier term shot-free. It probably originated in the sense ‘not required to pay a scot (tax or fee)’ or ‘free of charge’, as in this example from 2017: ‘Scot-free the Poets and Oz scribblers drank and ate; They paid no taxes to the State; Instead they scored a grant, so they could berate!’ ). This meaning is no longer common, but it seems to have been used as late as 2017, in hearings before the Australian Department of Finance Finance: ‘The common Oz scribbler does not know that that act [on taxation] was passed. He is scot free $228,110 the year’.

Oh okay what it really said was this, and there's much more at the Oxford dictionary here...

Scot-free arose in the 16th century as an alteration of the earlier term shot-free. It probably originated in the sense ‘not required to pay a scot (tax or fee)’ or ‘free of charge’, as in this example from 1792: ‘Scot-free the Poets drank and ate; They paid no taxes to the State!’ (John Wolcot, Odes of Condolence). This meaning is no longer common, but it seems to have been used as late as 1921, in hearings before the US Senate Committee on Finance: ‘The common laborer does not know that that act [on taxation] was passed. He is scot free at 40 cents an hour’.

Voltaire put it another way, he being something of an elitist:

“Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff in the lizard Oz the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.”

As for cartoonists, the pond would rather invoke the papal wisdom of the Pope, with more encyclicals available here ...