The pond happened to notice that General "Killer" Creighton was out on the ABC battlefield last night, suggesting that a few casualties were acceptable in his war on the virus.
How Field Marshall Haig would have appreciated his service, and why hasn't he gone to work for the Donald, who has managed to do a mighty amount of killing in a short time?
Well, it was good and worthy and noble of the ABC to propose the killing off of one of their core demographics - they're coming to get you boomers - but the pond has given enough time to our Adam this week. Did it occur to him that after reading one of his pieces, wherein he despatches lives willy nilly, almost anyone would feel deeply depressed?
And so what else on this reptile Friday? Well the silly sods took the Malware bait and did their very best to attract attention to his book, and perhaps help with the sales …
They can't help themselves. Once a reptile has got it into its tiny brain that there's a predator about, they never rest.
It's true they sent out a nonentity, a certain """ Switzer, to propose that Malware was a nonentity, showing that most nonentities don't mind getting the short straw ...
Don't get the pond started on """ Switzer's lasting legacy … instead the pond must explain its other curatorial decisions, with this curious juxtaposition of the lizard Oz editorialist and recent news …
Never mind the irony, or the lizard Oz editorialist's taste for cheap puns mocking the Virgin Mary. Isn't it the Catholic Daily? Would the Pellists approve?
And why would the pond pay attention to this outing?
A risk? Who is this loon? The United States is comprehensively fucked and will be for some time to come, and the narcissist con artist Donald and his nepotic brood have more than played their part. "Dangerous strategy" is the Donald's middle name, so what's the point?
That left the pond with only one place to go, a pond favourite, our Henry channeling the spirit of Gallipoli …
Our hole in the bucket man is a bit of a General "Killer" Creighton, and likes to lead from the bunker, while perfectly content to send others over the top ...
Notice the empathy? There's a meme going round that perfectly captures our Henry's warlike-spirit …
Now when the reptiles get in warrior mood, and throw ashes in the air lamenting the economy, it's important to remember that part of the strategy is a fit of 'billy goat buttism.'
Our Henry delivers a spectacular example: the restrictions won't be entirely removed tomorrow (a case of the bleeding obvious), nor should they be (because our Henry doesn't quite have General Creighton's killer instinct), and then the billy goat bit: "but that hardly means that they ought to continue until we go for weeks without new cases."
It's always neat and tidy when "buttisms"are mixed with straw dogs, and just for good measure, the current virus is downplayed because, really, it's not Ebola or polio, or such like … but the pond fears it is pre-empting our Henry's deep thinking, so on with it ...
Note the easy way that the bunker king manages to slip in a comparison to pneumonia, and drags in Sweden, though Sweden hasn't been doing that well of late.
Why all the fuss? Why it's nothing, just an ordinary virus, and no doubt the 142+k dead thought it was a great way to go …and our Henry is standing by to lead the way out of the morass
All the pond can do is urge our Henry to lead from the front, step outside, and show us all what is surely just a minor bug, especially for those in his age group ...
Ah the life raft of public spending.
How it irritates the reptiles so, how they're haunted by a spectre worse than Malware … conjured up by the infallible Pope in a vintage piece ...
But that was then, and the immortal Row is now, with more immortal Rowe here …and that's enough for this Friday, for fear that Generals Creighton and Ergas might produce an even deeper depression ...
Much to emote about there ... well you don't have to actually think about a Holely Henry rave, do you; absence of material substance m'lud.
ReplyDeleteBut here's a slightly different view - provided by the "hard science fiction and space opera" scifi author Charlie Stross:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/04/itll-all-be-over-by-christmas.html
Much more realistic.
From your link, GB:
Delete" A quarter of the senior ministers of state are rabid objectivists who actively hate the poor and want them to die,... (the PM) in principle, has the credibility to pull them back from the brink, and is a perfectly ideology-free vacuum of naked ambition". No, he is writing about Britain.
Indeed so, Joe, so the PM he's talking about is Boris "I'll shake hands till I get COVID-19, oops I have" Johnson. I may be a tad pollyanna-ish, but I don't think we've ever had as bad a set of "rabid objectivists" in government here as the British. Maybe comes from not having a millenium or so of aristocratic regals and regal aristocrats plus enslaved colonial possessions (we've only ever had this one), perhaps. See Jacob Ree-sMogg as an example.
DeleteAnd for anybody unfamiliar with the terminology, 'objectivists' aren't people engaged in objectively rational thoughts and values, but that collection of fvckwits that are true believers of Ayn Rand. (Hands up who hasn't read 'Atlas Shrugged', 'The Fountainhead', 'Anthem', 'We the Living', 'The Virtue of Selfishness' et al in their misspent youth).
GB - do you know people who read, to 'et al', in their youth? I tried 'Atlas' and 'Fountainhead' in my undergrad days, but completed neither, mainly because Mrs O'Connor didn't write all that well. I did complete 'Fountainhead' a couple of years back, when she was supposed to be on the ascendancy again. Completed, but did not change my view of the turgid quality of the writing.
DeleteAt that time I also really really really tried again with 'Atlas'. By then I had become acquainted with enough 'captains of industry' and their ilk to know that too many of them accumulated money and authority because of the power it gave them. They were never likely to withdraw to a Walden for the Wealthy, and give up opportunities to harangue the other 90%. It was difficult to suspend disbelief for long enough to take 'Atlas' seriously enough to finish it.
Other Anonymous.
Errr (sheepishly raises hand), yes, me, OA, and one or two of my adolescent mates. But I was a scifi fan back then and an awful lot of that is decidedly turgid too, amongst sundry other faults. But reading largish amounts of scifi does condition one to seek the ideas and ignore the quality of the writing.
DeleteThen one fine day, you realise she hasn't really got any ideas either (especially if labouring through 'Atlas'), and that's an end to it.
Oh, I also happily dipped into scifi, GB. And there were many who wrote well, and with good ideas. Right back to E M Forster and 'The Machine Stops'. Pohl's 'Tunnel Under the World' is timeless (if anything, more appropriate to our time than the middle of last century - where now I look up some physical location, and tomorrow find a tourist promo for that place on my F...book, just for me) and what John Harris wrote as John Wyndham.
DeleteOther Anonymous.
Yes that is indeed 'dipping', OA. I bathed and swam in it: Worlds of If, Galaxy, New Worlds, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Astounding/Analog; Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Pohl and Kornbluth, Hal Clements, Alfred Bester, Philip K Dick, especially Philip Jose Farmer and many, many more quite deservingly forgotten (especially Edgar Rice Burroughs).
DeleteBut it's good that you know about the Troons, and troublesome lichen and triffids. Those were indeed the stuff of wasted adolescence.
PS: And I nearly completely forgot: Ayn Rand's Anthem.
DeleteThe pond just has to add Robert Sheckley into that list GB. He was funny, which most sci fi writers found hard to do. The Laxian Key still lurks in the pond's mind as the definition of comic futility
DeleteOh well, then I'll just round it off with Asimov ('The Gods Themselves'), Bradbury ('Farenheit 451'), Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, Clifford D Simak, 'Cordwainer Smith' (Paul Linebarger), Kurt Vonnegut Jr and even L Ron Hubbard ('Final Blackout').
DeleteI honestly can't recall anything of Sheckley, DP, despite him having had a story in Galaxy as far back as 1955 ('A Ticket to Tranai'). But you are quite right, as always: the scifi writers of the 1950s, 60s and even 70s took everything very seriously indeed. A lot less so these days from what I occasionally see in the scifi section of bookshops - lots and lots of very fluffy 'fantasy' rather than what I'd call scifi. Scifi was Arthur Clarke's 'A Fall Of Moondust' and Asimov's 'The Naked Sun'.
With one possible exception: A C Clarke's 'Tales from the White Hart' which contains the moderately well know story 'The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch'.
DeleteOK, setting aside the anthropomorphism of the Henry’s last sentence - which reflects the Trump going on about how ‘the germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic cannot keep up with it’.
ReplyDeleteThe penultimate paragraph - with its ‘it will also provide a breeding ground for the politics of rent-seeking cronyism and corruption.’ indicates one of two possibilities. One is that the Henry has not looked at the nominations to that ‘National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission’ that is supposed to restore the LNP vision of an economy, or, two - that Henry has yet to receive his nomination to the NCCC.
I suspect he has not been nominated because, when you look at his experience, he is just not in the same league as the rent-seeking cronies who have been named, and who have already splashed their individual version of what should be co-ordinated, in suitably receptive outlets of Limited News.
As further evidence of that proposition, M’lady, I cite the last sentence in that paragraph. The last decade has been a golden age - of rent-seeking cronyism.
In the case of galloping negative gearing - literal rent-seeking as the general populace understand the term. But rescinding carbon pricing, blocking moves for government to take anything like a fair portion of resource rents, mandating alcohol content of petrol, water thieving - add your own examples - there were very few opportunities for rent retention that did not receive legal sanction of that side of politics.
And all done in the name of that well-known economist ‘Jobson Grouth’.
Other Anonymous.
Right on OA! Other travesties notwithstanding, stupid Henry deserves to be satirised to the max for anthropomorphising a non-living entity. To that purpose I have appropriated what is arguably the soppiest song Glenn Campbell ever warbled.
DeleteDreams of the Corona Virus
It looks at the humans
And smiles at them mingling, says
“It’s my lucky day!”
And dreams of the bodies
That soon will be mounting
Laughs that Trump thought
It would just go away
It floats up their nostrils
In Brownian motion
Its RNA helix unwinds
Then starts invading
The cellular membranes
Of all of the fools
Who believed they’d be fine
Oh such are the dreams
Of the corona virus
To infect everyone
Any time everywhere
The corona virus
That’s cutting down people
Like trees…
Kez - mere thanks do not seem enough, but they are sincere. Actually, double thanks, because, in checking something from yesterday, I came across your contribution to that discussion. I second GB's response. Too many other blogs lack genuine wit, which makes them tedious.
DeleteOther Anonymous
Henry's 'league' ? Well he was an Adjunct Professor at the U of Singapore, apparently. They generally don't get paid, do they. And I think his putdown of 'rent seeking' is just a case of envy of those more successful than he.
ReplyDeleteBut it's his primitive monetary theory that I find most amusing. It wouldn't surprise if he doesn't have a little embellished sign hung from his study wall that says "Money is gold and nothing else". He still seems to think that money is some kind of concrete reality - like a pocket full of coins - and not a social fabrication like a 'low interest' loan.
But it was the happy little reptile/wingnut trope about "multi-generation debt" that most amused. Just for one thing, we never hear about 'multi-generation assets" do we. Yet my taxes, amongst many others of course, paid for things like the construction of Monash Uni and the Tullamarine jetport and the Westgate bridge that lots of "multi-generation" people make free use of.
But mainly he seems to have this weird idea that debt should be "paid off in full in the shortest possible timeframe" or something. Has he ever had a mortgage, d'you think ? And there's simply no recognition that a central bank "printing money" is just part of the normal processes of an advanced economy - they all do it (just see how much money the US central bank created under the title of 'quantitative easing').
And as for increasing inflation, our (and other) central bank has been trying to do that without success for quite a few years now and inflation actually decreases the value of debt.
The interesting thing about this crisis is that it is happening in near real time. The predictions of folk like our Henry usually apply at a time frame sufficiently long enough for the reptile memory to fade before the error is brought to their attention. Henry now has the opportunity to demonstrate he is wrong in a matter of days.
ReplyDeleteIn this case Henry is already wrong in his comparison of Swedish Covid 19 and Australian pneumonia death rates. By next week they will probably be at parity and the Covid rate will continue to rise.
Mind you, being wrong doesn't seem to matter
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-coronavirus-theory-that-informed-the-trump-administration
We talk about people "on the autism spectrum", but we really should be talking about 'people on the libertarian spectrum'.
DeleteAutism is just a fairly minor variation of the human psyche, libertarianism is outright rampant madness.
Good link BF. The pond had seen it, and it's as good an example of a prime doofus as any in recent times ...
DeleteAs PZ Myers puts it, Lawyers and self-importance go together like a slime & maggot sandwich https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/03/30/lawyers-and-self-importance-go-together-like-a-slime-maggot-sandwich/
Delete