The pond regrets that today is going to be a bigly huge edition - as large as certain hands - and devoted to unreliable reptile memoirs ...
As anticipated, the reptiles have been very busy this weekend ...
As anticipated, the reptiles have been very busy this weekend ...
There was the business of tidying up a rabidly fundamentalist Xian bigoted homophobe and showing her surrounded by admiring family ...
Alternating with that 'focus, reach, insight' on the fundamentalist bigot and Xian homophobe helper and champion came another 'focus, reach insight' ... an unreliable memoir from the clown from Kogarah...
Now the obvious question is why the polar bear sign has a question mark on it.
Senile, doddering, dying soon enough Clive James is a full-blown climate denialist these days ...so why the question mark?
Senile, doddering, dying soon enough Clive James is a full-blown climate denialist these days ...so why the question mark?
But climbing that Everest comes later.
First, a study of reptile manoeuvres. Before sending in the straw dog sock puppet to argue climate denialism at length, the reptiles go about their climate denialism with canny cunning ...
The reptile editorialist provides one opening thrust and parry ...
Observers will recognise this as a variation on stage four of climate denialism, which is usually to deny that it can be solved. In this variation, only the reptiles know the only way to fix the problem, which, of course, isn't really a problem ...
How can it be recognised as a denialist text? Well there's a sure sign if any piece begins with a reference to alarmists ...
There you go ... everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds ... you see, Llloydie said it was so ...
And so to stage two in the Oz denialist saga. Wheel out the Lloydie bin...
The pond is always bemused when the reptiles use the Donald in their advertising ...
... especially when it's Lloydie's business to explain how astute the Donald has been ...
Now the point of the Lloydie form of climate denialism is to obfuscate and muddy the waters. Paris is hopeless, the Donald is astute, but somewhere around the corner, off into the distant future, there will emerge a real world wide treaty, with teeth, yet without any pain for the indulged and indulgent west ...
It is, of course bullshit. How Lloyd lives with himself is one of the greater pond mysteries. As everyone knows, the Donald is a full-blown climate denialist. There's no need to rehearse the many climate denialist Chinese conspiracy tweets of the Donald ... Vox managed to assemble 115 of the Donald's tweets here ...
Instead, the pond must press on and examine the ultimate reptile cunning, their clever strategic response, which is to suggest that they give some kind of flying fuck about climate science, while really not caring a fig.
Send in the senile old sock puppet to fulminate and crack aged jokes...
The trouble is, the sock puppet goes on and on ... how to pre-digest it, so that the pap can be swallowed quickly?
Why not get a useful fool to summarise the story ...
It's Trent Dalton's turn this day to play the useful summarising fool, for those incapable of reading the full, extended bout of unreliable climate denialism ...
Now it might be noted that Clive James rose to fame on second level poetry of an inordinately tedious kind, and epic studies of Japanese game shows and other lightweight bits of television fluff, but that's the entire point of James' denialism.
Make it personal, make it abusive ... because as a man of second hand opinions and little science, he hasn't got much else ...
Make it personal, make it abusive ... because as a man of second hand opinions and little science, he hasn't got much else ...
Nor has Trent Dalton's summary - and the pond, with great restraint, makes no comment on parents who call their children Trent ... when surely Timothy would have been the obvious joke ...
And here's where the climbing of the climate denialist Everest gets tough ... you see, after the reptile summary, there's only James' actual piece, and it goes on forever ... a man with little understanding naturally takes much time to reveal it ... and sure enough, this Kogarah clown denialist licenses the use of the "denial" word by opening with talk of alarmists ...
It's typical of the sort of blinkered thinking that the senile old dodderer should lead with that he should think the science a matter of right or wrong, either/or, black or white, 1 or 0 ...
But the pond isn't going to argue the case. There's no point in arguing with someone who has already made up his mind and yet pleads the case for scepticism and open minds.
That way ends up with conceptual penises and mind fatigue...
For those already wilting, the pond offers a way out ... Malcolm Roberts Raises (shouldn't that have been erects?) 'Conceputal Pensises' To Challenge Climate Science ...
And now for the few hardcore stayers, on the pond goes ...
It occurred around this time that with readers dropping like flies, few might get to the cartoons of the day, including this Pope, with more excellent japery and popery here ...
That reference to Low is a reference to Low's famous cartoon ...
But enough of that, because the doddering senile old goat is just getting the bit between his teeth, and there's that question again. Why is the polar bear carrying a sign with a question mark? There's not a shred of doubt in the dodderer's mind ...
Around this point, the pond realised that it had been terribly unfair to the immortal Rowe ... for he too had produced a cartoon, and funnily enough, it featured that very same polar bear (with more Rowe here).
Meanwhile, the fulminating fool was still showing off his folly ... but it slowly began to dawn on the pond as to who might be behind the unseemly display ...
Ah yes, the fiendish big TV outlets forbidding the wrong kind of humour ...
But that's the way it goes with someone who knows very little about the actual science. He knows about television, he knows about writing, he knows about jokes and personal abuse, in what once passed as wit but now tastes like Devine bile ...
The pond usually extends pity to the demented, driven there by their impending sense that their time on earth is short ... but in some cases, like Patrick Cook or Clive James or Bill Leak, why bother?
What's left of the creative spirit is essentially warped and bitter ... and being absolutely certain in one direction, there's no alternative forms of humour allowed ... not even a hint if irony ...
Around this point, the pond decided to give up ...
Here then are the remaining gobbets, unreliable memoirs from a gullible old fool ...
But at least at the end of all this tedium, it's possible to work out who is behind the sock puppet, and why he's such a useful fool for the reptiles of Oz ...
Look to the credit at the end of this final gobbet ...
The IPA, yet again ...
And now the pond is pleased to present Clive James, deep in the development of his extraordinary skills as a climate scientist ...
"It's not unprecedented - GW Bush and John Howard did it too."
ReplyDeleteThankyou reptiles. The two nutjobs that adventured into Iraq in 2003 to spend billions, and kill hundreds of thousands, and till the ground for ISIS and Daesh did it?
Could a bar for naked, ill-informed, irresponsibility be set any lower?
"... a man with little understanding naturally takes much time to reveal it ..."
ReplyDeleteAn astute observation, DP, and one that accords with my anecdotal evidence. It explains why 'War and Peace' occupied 1225 pages (first published edition) and why Marcel Proust took up nearly 1.3 million words.
Now Clive James is doing his very best to out prolix them all. And succeeding magnificently. Already 40-something published volumes of his outpourings and still going. Ah, but James' poetry - every line of it absolutely worthy of IPA inspiration and of inclusion (eventually) in Quadrant.
Clive James: "I was agnostic, until I became ill and suddenly had lots of time on my hands. Rather than read scientific journals, I read some blogs I found on the internet and they convinced me the science is wrong.
ReplyDelete"I still haven't read the journals, but I don't have to because the blogs are so obviously accurate. And anyway, the scientists are commies"
Thanks for all your hard work DP. Trump says China started the climate change hoax to steal US jobs. So why then does China?...oh never mind!
ReplyDeleteYour handy link to Trump’s 115 tweets led me to reflect…
It’s useless to argue with Trump
He should be thrown back in the swump
His tweets are malicious
His hair is factitious
And his mind is a toxic waste dump
But in light of the Right’s history
Prez Trump was a fait accompli
Cos free enterprise
Needs wealthy white guys
To uphold the plutocracy
And when Donvlad’s tenure has ended
Perhaps all our woes can be mended
Unfortunately
That’s pure fantasy -
Our world will by then be expended!
“There is no need to entertain visions of a vast, old style army of disoccupied experts retreating through the snow, eating first their horses and finally each other”. So who has entertained such visions, except him? The average blogger at Andrew Bolt doesn’t come up with this kind of historical allusion. Maybe that’s part of the “ocean of his wit” promised by Trent Dalton. Must have gone over my head.
ReplyDeleteHe says he tried to keep the anger out of his essay, but couldn’t. He wants to punish the usual hate targets – Flannery, Gore, Williams, Hansen – as selected by Bolt. Doesn’t he realize how mediocre and second-hand all this stuff is, and that being remembered as a boring climate crank will ruin whatever reputation he had as a writer?
“I speak as one who knows nothing about the modelling of non-linear systems”. Obviously only a mad “scientist” would know about that rubbish. I have often wondered why non-linearity is supposed by deniers to be fatal to models. Practically the whole of nature is non-linear e.g. the shape of the earth, and the only way of knowing about that is a mathematical model.
“Alarmists have always profited from their insistence that climate change is such a complex issue that no ‘science denier’ can have an opinion about it worth hearing. For most areas of science such an insistence would be true”. He then gives himself a dispensation in the case of climate science apparently because he, similar to Einstein, has noticed a fact which ruins the theory right at the beginning. Actually, Einstein said that he was unaware of the Michelson-Morley experiment until after he arrived at his theory. Feynman also said that all science is an approximation. In any case both he and Einstein were talking about universal laws, which climate models aren’t.
You would have to wonder why formerly normal people end up as virulent right-wing nut jobs. Mark Latham is another. I suppose you could talk about disappointment, revenge etc. There is a parasite transmitted by catshit that if ingested by humans can cause them to become reckless thrill-seekers. Dead motorcyclists have a high frequency of this parasite in their brain. A similar idea is that people with an over-active disgust reflex become more right wing. This of course is wild conjecture which should be confined to denier blogs.
Perhaps it's payment from the Chairman that keeps them going, NH. If that is so, they are disgusting examples of humanity.
DeleteAn erudite appraisal NH. And I just love your parasite theory.
DeletePoor old Clive has come late to the party and we've all seen this denialist tripe before. On close reading this essay is a shambling display of his unfortunate decline. His puerile ad hominem attacks and his disrespect for the seriously complex science involved in climatology expose him as just another ignorant hack in the denial pool – up there with Monckton and his ilk. Clive’s incomprehensible paragraph on lightbulbs is just one example of his ignorance and confusion. I can’t really get what he’s trying to say - so I’m only guessing he thinks we had to accept “dimmer” lighting because of a “climate change fad”. This shows a misunderstanding of the phasing out of incandescent lightbulbs in favour of more efficient non-incandescents. Incandescents are rated by power use (watts), but new bulbs are rated by light emitted (lumens). To emit 1500 lumens an old bulb needed 100 watts of power whereas the new ones need only 17 watts. So does Clive think the new bulbs are dimmer because they’ve gone down to 17 watts to save power? He seems to be saying that this need to save power is “poppycock” concocted by alarmists and we should bring back 100 watt incandescent globes – but I could be wrong. As far as I know Mr. James is the only person on earth who thinks the lights have “dimmed” since the introduction of these new lightbulbs – simply because they haven’t! By the way, phasing in these new bulbs was a Howard government initiative - hardly a bunch of “climate change faddists”.
It’s futile to quarrel with Clive
The poor git’s just barely alive
Through surgery he’s gone
And he’s plodding along
But his intellect didn’t survive
:-) Yet again at the top of your game (as the sportsters say) Kez, but I'd have to opine that I reckon James seriously declined long before that essay (and not from a great height to begin with). Though I do vaguely recall a shortish series of TV shows he did maybe about 30 years ago which at least showed a mild touch of ocker irreverence and larrikinism (can't remember which one, might have been Saturday/Sunday Night Clive).
DeleteAs to the dimming lights, there was a huge uproar in the USA when light bulbs were required to achieve a certain level of energy efficiency which essentially precluded incandescents - there was all sorts of uninformed and hysterical opposition as I recall, and "the light is dimmer" was, I think, one of them (though I haven't been able to google a reference to confirm that). It's my recall from having adopted CFLs many many years ago that because of their much longer lifetime there was a slow, but perceptible, decline in light level over the years of their usefulness. Mostly fixed now, I think, and in any case LEDs don't suffer much from that.
I agree GrueBleen, Clive should have stuck to the short TV joke format that showcased his satirical talents. I find it sad when people whose intelligence is obviously east of the bell curve cannot or will not take the warnings of the world's climatologists seriously. All large groups of humans make mistakes, but to home in on the trivial miscalculations and indiscretions of a handful of scientists is an example of the denialist’s singular motive to disrupt and confound.
DeleteI have a lifelong friend who is smart as a whip yet he believes the tripe these denialists dish up. I'm beginning to think there is a virus, similar to NH's catshit parasite, which makes people reject science because it will seem too hard and they will need to use their brain logically. The amount of people who confuse weather with climate is astonishing, and of course the obfuscators play on this confusion all the time.
Re Clive’s “lightbulb moment”. Yes, the introduction of CFLs did cause confusion, mainly for the disparity between wattage and brightness. Also, CFLs had problems in that even within the same brand and model the variation in brightness could be huge. The newer LEDs seem to have fixed that glitch.
The confusion within the light bulb shopper’s world is a microcosm of the confusion of consumers generally - there is an excess of choice and a corresponding lack of clear information. For instance, I now read Nutrition Information Panels on products and can understand how much sugar and salt etc they contain but only because I take my time to decipher each manufacturer's unique way of presenting these figures. Most of these NIPs are deliberately confusing and as a result I don't see many other shoppers reading them when I'm at the supermarket.
Probably the most extreme example of deliberately cryptic or ridiculously complex product information is the myriad of mobile phone or internet "deals" offered by telcos. Reading through them is an exercise in futility which brings to mind Tom Waits’s reference to “harder than Chinese Algebra”. I'm sure these "deals" are designed by nameless company backroom hacks to present so much confusing and conflicting information that the customer ends up paying more for a package that is essentially the same as all the others offered!
That said, here is my advice to Clive of Kogarah;
Poor Clive! - I suggest you relax
You’re clearly impervious to facts
You’re doped up for sure
Your essay’s a bore
And it’s loaded with lies to the max
Your mind it is slowly dissembling
You wake up at night with a trembling
And a giant wombat
Has come for a chat
Methinks this is madness resembling
So lay off these investigations
You don’t have the qualifications
Even monkeys could tap
Out the same sort of crap
You display in your dumb remonstrations
The thing is, Kez, how are we going to get your fine memorial limerics read at Clive's funeral ?
DeleteBut as to your sharp mate, well I'm sorry but sharpness has never been enough - if it were, humanity wouldn't have taken as long as it has to get only this far: we'd have already annihilated the planet many millenia ago.
Seriously, it's just the old problem that talent isn't enough: it takes learning and practice to get things right. And we just don't include any useful learning in our formal education. I can remember many years ago doing Matriculation (as it was then called) English Expression (as it was then called) at a Melbourne High School (as they were then called). And there was a topic in the course titled 'Clear Thinking' - and you know, we spent all of about 4 one hour periods (ie, less than one week) on that weighty and important topic. I wonder if they even include that topic at all nowadays.
So you can guess just how much our class learned about 'clear thinking'. The really sharp ones do go on to pick up - ie 'learn on the job' - the useful and effective ways of thinking about their professions and maybe, just maybe, about one or two other subjects (avocations and hobbies, perhaps) as well, but that's generally it. And such is life, so I've found.