The pond used to do a Sunday meditation ... and occasionally regrets that the constant chatter by Murdochian jihadists has ruined this simple pleasure ...
As a peace offering, might the pond offer the Daily Beast tale of an alleged 'geologist' wanting rocks from the Grand Canyon to prove the biblical flood story was historically accurate ...
That story ended with ...
...It almost seems to be a requirement for young Christians to draw a picture of the Ark, complete with a menagerie of (mostly African) animals. If you don’t want to paint a mural yourself, you can even order wallpaper or decals for your child’s bedroom. But this is actually a story about genocide. God gets angry and drowns almost all of the global population in one fell swoop. And yet children’s books describe the story as having a happy ending, establishing the rather uncomfortable precedent that, as long as God is the aggressor, widespread slaughter is “good.”
All these cultural assumptions and myths about the Ark continue to feed into modern “scientific” searches for evidence of the Flood. Dr. Snelling, for example, is looking for evidence of a Flood, not evidence of mass extermination; and he is looking for evidence of excess water on the earth caused by rain, not the underground or heavenly pools of primordial waters that caused the flooding. This kind of research is not just bad science; it’s also predicated on poor reading comprehension.
Well it wasn't an entirely successful genocide. Somehow gays got on to the boat, and dinosaurs too ...
These days the pond feels the need to balance this sort of nonsense with matching barking mad Islamic nonsense, to placate the reptiles, thereby turning a simple pleasure into an arduous chore ...
So the pond went looking elsewhere for a decent dose of weekend irony ... and sure enough ...
That story was in the ABC, back in 2015, here.
Of course the pollies, especially the Liberals, and senior public servants still use encrypted technology on a daily basis, to avoid prying eyes.
Yet suddenly a few days ago, encrypted technology was the new demon on the block ...
Yes, that'll do it, irony overload alert, irony overload alert ...
It reminded the pond of how politics hasn't moved forward from the days that Gladstone and Balfour talked of goose and gander ...
Speaking of squawking geese, the pond was impressed with this Eisensteinian montage ...
The pond was suddenly tempted to spend more time with the jihadists, especially when it looked like the opinion pages had turned to heretical thoughts ...
Relax, relax. That was just in the letters page ...
No need to expect the reptiles to put the boot into the Wahhabists.
The lickspittle fellow travellers remain safe in their bunkers with their Saudi chums ...
The lickspittle fellow travellers remain safe in their bunkers with their Saudi chums ...
... though things aren't quite working out the way the merchants of hate wanted ...
As noted on The Insiders, featuring good old prattling Polonius (further proof the ABC is full of useless old Xian fundies), that list contained a handy set of band names ...
So what other jihad favourite is doing the Murdochian rounds?
So what other jihad favourite is doing the Murdochian rounds?
Has the war on climate science ever gone away?
The Oz editorialist was on the case ...
A pond correspondent recently noted the way that the reptiles use petty signifiers to indicate their larger message, and this editorial showed how to do it ...
There came the signifiers in the fourth par.
Never mind the per capital emissions, never mind what the Adani coal will do to the world, we do so little, and other countries do so much, and it's all so unfair, and we're suffering oh so muchly and so bigly and so hugely ...
Never mind the per capital emissions, never mind what the Adani coal will do to the world, we do so little, and other countries do so much, and it's all so unfair, and we're suffering oh so muchly and so bigly and so hugely ...
As usual, in a not so covert way, the reptiles are in the same camp as the onion muncher, and routinely talk of "cheap, plentiful and reliable coal", and if it came to the crunch, would love to leave inverted commas off their talk of "clean" coal ...
It's just like Barners moaning about the demonisation of coal ...
As always, the Murdochians hunt in packs, and so Dame Groan was also on hand for a good groaning ...
For some reason, the reptile splash left off the punchline ...
And not on your nelly it is ... but the pond was immediately distracted ...
Another curious expression that my father used back in the 1940s was not on your Nellie, which some authorities think had been imported from the USA about ten years beforehand. Like Charlie it sounds home-grown, to the extent that it has been suggested that it is actually a piece of London-based rhyming slang: Nellie = Nellie Duff = puff. There was certainly an older slang phrase in existence: not on your puff, meaning “not on your life; never” in which puff means “breath” and so “breath of life”, life itself. To suggest that it was rhyming slang needs some explanation of this supposed person Nellie Duff. Duff has a number of senses. One of them is in plum duff, where it’s a regional pronunciation of dough. Another sense is “useless; rubbish; counterfeit”, once a common British word, and one which was taken to the US by Scottish settlers. So it is probable that the two mildly disparaging words were put together just to make the rhyme. (more here).A few correspondents suggested it came from a later song about Nellie the Elephant, but this is clearly wrong ... on the other hand, the lyrics are evocative of the climate wars ...
The head of the herd was calling
Far, far away
They met one night in the silver light
On the road to Mandalay
So Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk
And said goodbye to the circus
Off she went with a trumpety-trum
Trump, trump, trump (full lyrics here)
Trump, Trump, Trump ...
And so with a sigh and a groan, the pond turned to the fulminating Dame Groan nellying and belly-aching away ...
And so with a sigh and a groan, the pond turned to the fulminating Dame Groan nellying and belly-aching away ...
There's nothing to report here, except to note that Finkel and Malware are now caught between the greenies deploring their "political" solution and Dame Groan, the Oz editorialist, the onion muncher and sundry other denialists talking about Soviet-like commands ...
At the heart of it is a thinly disguised plea for coal, coal, coal ...
Good old creaking "clean" coal ... is there nothing it can't do, except maybe help fuck the planet ...
And so to the war between the UK and the USA as to who holds the Trump card, a new pond competition ...
Now there might be a temptation just to fold the hand ...
Uh huh ...
...but what, you might ask, do you do with the Joker in a misere hand?
...but what, you might ask, do you do with the Joker in a misere hand?
Note that if you are the contractor in a Misere, it is possible to keep the joker in your hand and nominate it as belonging to a suit. You may then be able to dispose of the joker by discarding it on a lead of a suit in which you hold no card at the time. If you bid a Misere, keep the joker in your hand and forget to nominate a suit, your Misere automatically fails, since your joker wins the trick to which you play it. (here).
Yep, make it a Trump.
Or if you're lucky, and score a Murdochian hand, you simply get to play a really low card ...
Or if you're lucky, and score a Murdochian hand, you simply get to play a really low card ...
A coalition of crackpots ...
And where are the Murdochians now? Baying along with the rest of the hounds ... or should that be the seagulls?
Another great Ozzie export! That's Andrew Snelling, the geologist in the Daily Beast article.
ReplyDeleteBack in the 1990s, before he became a high-profile climate change denier and Gina Rinehart's sockpuppet, Ian Plimer wrote a book called Telling Lies For God. Among other things it named and shamed a few Australian fundamentally-mentalists, including Snelling, who still lived here at that time.
In the book Plimer tells of meeting Snelling at a geologists' conference and asking him how he reconciled his scientific knowledge with his religious beliefs. "With great difficulty", he replied.
One would think that Australian fundamentally-mentalists migrating to the US would be a coals-to-Newcastle exercise. But they can have Snelling - and Ken Ham, too. (He's the guy behind the replica Ark in Kentucky that is linked to from the DB article.)
Aah, yes, memories of things past. Especially Plimer's brilliantly conceive3d court action in the 1990s against Allan Roberts of the Hills Bible Church in Sydney which Plimer lost in the court ruling of June 1997 and, after also losing an appeal, had to sell his Melbourne house to pay the total of $500,000 in legal fees (his plus Allan's).
DeleteNot to mention, but of course, his magnum opus: 'Heaven and Earth' of 2009 which the beloved reptiles of The Australian declared as giving "all the scientific ammunition climate change skeptics could want." But which, according to actual scientists was unscientific, inaccurate, based on obsolete research, and internally inconsistent. Ideas in it have been described as "so wrong as to be laughable".
But of course, unlike Snelling and Ham, Plimer is still with us: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/ian-plimer-senator-roberts-with-alan-moran-climate-change-in-the-trump-era-tickets-32145623425#
" ...Duff has a number of senses"
ReplyDeleteWhat about good old "Up the duff" ?