The pond has a Kohler toilet in the bathroom, so the news that Kohler had unveiled at CES a US$7,000 smart toilet with built-in speakers, mood lighting and Amazon Alexa voice controls (here) produced a barely controlled luddite desire to smash the Kohler to pieces.
When that was followed by news of a new LavvieBot for cats the pond went into an uncontrollable luddite rage …
To have the oscillating fan follow up with a fuckwitted piece of simple-minded trolling no talking toilet could cope with was insupportable …
Well no, the plan was for Mexico to pay for the wall. That was what was offered to voters, and no amount of mealy mouthed nonsense about how they are paying for the wall can't hide the snake oil salesman pitching a dud bill of goods … even if it was to be expected of a man who could manage to bankrupt a casino ...
If you have the slightest understanding of a political promise, you wouldn't sweep that under the rug … so while the oscillating fan brings stupidity to the argument, the pond will bring a cartoon …
It's a bit like Brexit. Nobody knew what they were voting for, given the lies and delusions that were spread around the land, promising nirvanas (and possibly marvellous new speaking and listening toilets with musical abilities and mood lighting for just the right crap…)
Well the pond supposes it must, in a pro forma way, run the rest of the oscillating fan, if only so the trolling and the epic stupidity can be compleat …
Do the University of Western Australia and Griffith University have the first clue at the way the oscillating fan defames them and shreds their reputation for academic excellence when the oscillating fan is allowed out and about to scribble this sort of tosh?
Probably not, but the good news is that the Pope is back dishing out his infallible thoughts, and there's more to catch up with here, but the pond just had to run this one …
It didn't have much to do with the pond's contents for the day, but what a ripper portrait of the mutton Dutton and his natural constituency … though really a few HUN reporters should have been included in the rat cheerleaders …
The other reptile contribution that caught the eye came from old hole in a bucket Henry …
Actually the reptiles need a women plan.
You see, right there, at the get go, there's the problem. Who thought it was a good idea to wheel out some desiccated coconut of the male kind to muse on the plight of women in the Liberal party?
Wasn't there a Liberal party woman to hand? How about a Liberal woman columnist at the lizard Oz?
Of course they're in limited supply, up against the sort of barking mad, howling at the moon, wild-eyed reptile fanatics such as the Oreo and Dame Slap, who are about as usefully Liberal as Laura Ingraham … and don't even begin to talk about being 'liberal' ...
But again pro forma politeness kicked in and the pond decided to give the hole in the bucket man a run ...
The question, in other minds, is whether Henry's hand-wringing and capacity for blather will make a jot or whit of difference …especially as his argument seems to be running along the lines that maybe there aren't so many women in the Liberal party because maybe they're not particularly competent, maybe they don't have the attributes required for the task …
You know, it being very tricky on the Liberal river …
What to do, knowing that reading old Henry was simply a waste of time?
Press on and hope to make it through not so much the rapids as the desiccated turgidity … and the usual ability of ragbags to conflate and confuse 'Liberal' with 'liberal', and throw in lots of Burke, because that'll really help SloMo fix things in the here and now...
Sheesh, is it any wonder the pond felt a cartoon coming on?
What a fine Burkeian bout of blather, but will old Henry lead Henry the horse to drink the poison of quotas? Not on your nelly …
What a wimp, what a wretched fop, what a half-baked, half-arsed piece.
"Whether one should go that far is questionable" is precisely why the Liberal party has ended up where it is, half-hearted and full of hard men of singular mutton Dutton incompetence …
The pond was so distraught at wasting any stray passing readers' time that it turned to the Speccie mob for a night cap, and who better to produce a deep sleep than Flinty? Save this one for bed time ...
Now in recent times, all the pond has done has been to mock Flinty via headlines … just yesterday in fact …
But enough of the headlines. It seemed only fair to dive headfirst into a Flinty read to confirm that ahh, me hearties, Flinty is still Flinty and full of black spots …
Australia's internationally influential, and Flinty is one of our leading intellectuals? A first class member of the 'leets and an internationally recognised climate scientist?
Is it any wonder the pond had a stock of cartoons on standby?
Just to get through a Flinty these days requires the pond to play mind games and ask its Alexa toilet to help.
So here's one game: when will the pompously vocalising 'leet Flinty mention 'leets in a disparaging way?
Thanks toilet Alexa.
The pond spotted it there in that last par, and at the same time, the mention of the Donald provided the pond with the barely needed excuse for another cartoon …
But wait, this talk of 'leets gets richer and richer ...
So the US Supreme Court produced the Civil War? The erratic Churchill was burnt by experts, apparently incapable of doing his own burning? At last a proper Flinty explanation for Gallipoli ...
And so on and so forth, enough nonsense and distortions of history to keep stray readers going for months … while the pond will just revert to its favourite Flinty cartoon …
Okay, Alexa toilet advisor, would it be possible to fit in a reference to "Gramsci's long march through the institutions", the definitive indication that the pond is in the land of loons and conspiracy theorists?
Done and dusted, and the Gramsci conspiracy wins again.
And so to an explanation.
There's a reason the pond is sometimes grateful it does screen caps and not hot links.
Otherwise some foolish possum might have been tempted to click on that link and so end up on Flinty's change.org petition, which at the time the pond landed had 623 supporters, and yet had been started well over a year ago, and even worse had been mentioned by Rowan Dean and Ross Cameron on Sky …
Since then Cameron has been sacked for unremittingly relentless stupidity, exemplified by racist comments, while Rowan Dean continues on his merry sexist way …
Sure heading to change.org would be a cheap and easy laugh, but bugger it, the pond would rather go and talk to a Kohler toilet ...
And now there's nothing for it but another cartoon, and perhaps hope for a weekend which might provide a chance to recover from the sorry way the new year has started …
"What a wimp, what a wretched fop, what a half-baked, half-arsed piece."
ReplyDeleteWau, you sure know how to praise a man, DP. And so well and condignly deserved, too.
The Fan: "If ever an American president had a mandate for a policy, surely it is Donald Trump's plan ..."
ReplyDeleteIf ever a self-defined reptile "journalist" emitted a damp brain-fart, surely it's the Oscillating Fan. How on Earth could anybody but the certifiably insane state that a crooked, lying, grifter fraud who lost the popular vote by a huge margin has a "mandate".
Keep on your long march through the academic institutions, Fan-boi, you'll turn them eventually ... maybe.
Really DP, you're going to make me say it again? "The long march through the institutions"("Die langer Marsch durch die Institutionen") first appears in Rudi Dutschke in 1968, by which stage Gramsci had been dead for 30 years. Gramsci never used the phrase.
ReplyDeleteAdmittedly, continuing to misattribute the phrase for the thousandth time is not quite as stupid as claiming the SCOTUS caused the Civil War. In any case, the Missouri Compromise had been destroyed in 1854 by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, three years before the Court (led by a Chief Justice from a slave-owning family) handed down its embarrassingly inept judgement on Scott -v- Sandford (so inept, BTW, that they couldn't even spell the defendant's name correctly)
Marvelous to see Flinty's grasp of legal history is right up there with his mastery of climate science. Truly a Renaissance Man...
Now you say that, FD, as though you think a noodled wingnut such as the Flinty might actually be in the least concerned about accuracy, truth and honesty.
DeleteI'm sure DP knows that what Gramsci actually proposed was "A war of position is one in which one first identifies “switch-points of social power” and then one seeks to peacefully take control of those switch-points." and that indeed it was some time later that "In 1967, Rudi Dutschke, a German student leader, reformulated Antonio Gramsci’s philosophy of cultural hegemony with the phrase, “The long march through the institutions.”"
But then, this is hardly the first popularly recognised saying that has been mis-attributed, it just happens to be one that reptiles and RWNJs love to trumpet because they have no interest in accuracy, truth or honesty.