The most notable aspect of the narcissist, snake oil salesman, multiple bankrupt, con artist's response to the present crisis has been its tone deafness … apart from the usual lies, malfeasance, incompetence and stupidity …
Take that hapless ship's captain for starters … take the Supreme Court sending voters out to mingle in Wisconsin, on the understanding that the right to vote is very close to the right to die …
But anything the Donald and his lackeys can do in the tone deaf department, the reptiles can easily match …
New virus of complacency?
Right at the moment, the pond doesn't get out and about that much, but complacent? The reptiles are calling Australians complacent bludgers? We've been infected by complacency?
The feedback the pond is getting is that some people are terrified, some are paranoid, some are lonely and sobbing into phones, many are worried about their work, and their future, many are dealing with an infestation of children worse than the rat plague that seems to have grown in Sydney … and many have a keen awareness that they're caught between the prospect of a painful death, or ending up like Boris, or getting out and about and doing something, anything, to end the time caught behind walls …
The pond even heard of a loon watching Stir Crazy, on the principle that if a really bad movie didn't kill him, he might make it to the other side…
These are desperate times, and yet the lizard Oz editorialist picks this moment to talk of the new virus of complacency?
Haven't you heard the news, lizard Oz editorialist?
What it is, of course, is a new variant and virulent strain of the IPA/Gina's mob messaging …
Oh and don't forget to make life easy for the reptiles, by you know, getting rid of rivals, and making a bumpy road smoother, because what would they do without a bit of complacency and a failing, flailing business model that was in dire trouble before the virus struck?
Now how does the pond know that we're in the zone of reptile bullshit and bluff? Well, a sure sign is billy goat buttism, of the "we are not suggesting that national leaders have already slipped into a comfort zone or lost the plot" kind.
That sort of walk back talk is surely just a prelude to suggesting that only the reptiles have a clue … a bit like their inspiration and role model …
Sorry, the pond needed that cartoon to stifle the rage.
Back to the billy goats and "we are not suggesting…", as inevitably in the billy goat butt way, they go on to suggest ...
The rhetorical promiscuity of the "new normal"?
Fuck a duck, they know how to be offensive, a bit like their inspiration and role model.
And will they try another billy goatist 'but, billy butt' line by opening a par with "No one is suggesting the states and territories adopt foolhardy approaches …"
They will, oh sweet long absent billy goat lord, they will ...
Stop idling and hop to it?
Might the pond first offer to the lizard Oz editorialist, as a first hop, why don't you just hop off and get fucked? Get fucked royally and mightily, and not in the usual way associated with sexual pleasure … oh, and as a reward, you can lead off your next par by stating in the opening sentence the bleeding obvious, as if it's some kind of insight or wisdom ...
Speak for yourself, you useless dingbat reptiles, with your sense of smug superiority and your elitist dismissal of the mass of Australians as idle, complacent, malingering folk …
Have you heard the news that death is for a long time, and painful suffering isn't much fun either?
Here's a tip on how to respond …
If you've been reading this lizard Oz editorial on a screen - a tablet, a phone, a computer - quick, immediately wipe it down and disinfect it, and yourself ...
Oh okay, it's the best the pond can offer, but the pond understands it's beginning to sound like a Florida preacher …
Now there was a lot more mixed messaging going down in the lizard Oz today …
After you Mr Laming, and you too Mr Goyder. Your presence on the factory floor will no doubt be an inspiration to your workers …hop to it, perhaps take a turn shelf stacking, or working as a nurse's aide, and for peanuts while you're at it ...
But your idle, complacent pond - as the lizard Oz editorialist proposes - will instead sup with the savvy Savva …
And why? Well certain pond readers will appreciate that the fickle finger of fate has plucked the savvy Savva's column out of the air and blessed it with an illustration by the cult master …
Hmm, are we in the ancient world of the Greeks, and the son of Daedalus doing a Donald and staring at the sun without suitable protection, or perhaps gasp, doing a lizard Oz editorialist, and hopping to it, and not worrying about the wax, and flying close, and joining Boris in an ICU?
Never mind, the savvy Savva was sounding a little complacent, and for once the pond didn't mind the notion of complacency …
Well yes indeed, and who cares if a little ideology has been zapped, on either side of the fence, because it could have been a lot worse …
And the savvy Savva kept on with sundry heresies ...
No worries about cruise ships. The pond has always loathed the meaningless monsters, and prays that one of the upsides of these terrible times is that the cruise ship industry has to steer away from being floating apartment blocks and destroyers of worlds …
But as for China? Disturbing news atop the reptile page this day …
How soon before the reptiles snap back to the "new normal" and begin reminding everyone that we must start shipping clean dinkum Oz coal north, because while the world has experienced and is experiencing and will go on experiencing, a dire virus, it's always the right time to begin starting to fuck the planet again?
Never mind, and what fun to see the savvy Savva cruelly reminding SloMo of his 'let's all go to the footy' days ...
Yes, it could have been a lot worse, not to say that it's terrific, or that we can soon reach the complacency the lizard Oz thinks we've reached ...
Well after all that, as usual the pond reaches for a Rowe, with more Rowe always reachable here …
And here's another for those complacent folk who think everything is hunky dory, as the lizard Oz editorialist suggests …
Oh and dinkum clean lizard Oz coal, don't forget the coal …
As my old mum use to say, the devil finds work for idle hands. I've been idle ever since. As a matter of fact, I'm idle now.
ReplyDeleteNot 'idol' ? But I hope you give your hands a good 20-second wash before and after fondling demons.
DeleteAnyway, JC, I would like to take this opportunity to repeat a couple of links you gave a few days ago because they are both eminently worth reading:
Firstly are we about to have a "revolution":
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/revolution-only-getting-started/609463/
Secondly, just a little bit of "this told me more about penguins than I wanted to know", but for a very good long read (which I haven't completed yet) about pandemics (and why we put people into 40-ine):
http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/alex-de-waal-new-pathogen-old-politics
Thanks for those, JC; highly recommended.
“When the goods were cheap then the goods we took.”
ReplyDelete“We’ll sell you pianers and pickels and spanners
For seventeen shiploads of stones:
Smooth ’uns or nobbly ’uns,
Firm ’uns or wobbly ’uns,
All we ask is stones.”
from The Glugs of Gosh by C J Dennis http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks/e00062.html
A much undervalued work of simple Aussie genius.
DeletePhew, DP - so much editorial. And, three paragraphs in, the muse of the editorialist ignited ’a momentary, neo-Whitlamesque fiscal freak show’. Yep, at a time when we (but not all?) are trying to deal with a massive challenge to the nation’s health and life expectancy, what a freakish idea it was to establish a national fund to help everyone receive basic medical treatment. And to have people use one of them new-fangled computer doohickies to administer it.
ReplyDeleteIt would be difficult to find a child’s toy now with as little computing power as the units available then. Yet, a group of smart people built up a system, in remarkably short time, that was efficient, offered a wide range of statistics to refine the system out in the clinics and hospitals and private practices, and was so robust it withstood the meddling of subsequent ‘conservative’ administrations. So robust that the system was based on that structure until quite recently.
Oh that similarly smart people had put together the sad pastiche that so tries the patience of the good folk trying to get the Centrelink system to work.
Then ‘the upswing’. For which the editorialist has proscribed ‘rent-seeking or grifting’. What else is there? Many of the comments about people with ‘good ideas’ (“You are an ideas man, Steve”) and ‘industry policy’ and ‘strategy’ seems to be circling around the ‘National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission’, whose members are stacking print columns with their - individual - visions of what should be rubber-stamped when the Commission gets to meet.
Those visions look awfully like the ‘5 year plans’ of the Stalin administration. Or something from the Ministry of Plenty. When can we expect to see the chocolate ration revised, so more resources can be directed to attracting overseas investors to come and take more of our minerals?
Finally to the statement on ‘what infection rate we can live with’, which demonstrates just how much intellectual effort the editorialist did not put into cutting and pasting this collection of homilies. By inference, the ‘we’ does not include citizens of the wrong age, or with any of those inconvenient pre-existing conditions that make it so much more difficult to ‘live with’ this virus. Nope, not even those folk who, far from being idle, worked so hard at getting out the minerals that provide our prosperity, that their lungs are seriously compromised.
Other Anonymous
As little computing power as a child's toy ? Aww, c'mon OA, the IBM System 370 was certainly big and cumbersome by today's standards - which we've only arrived at because of the huge success of old mainframes - but they did the job.
DeleteIt was my "privilege" at one time to have been the data base administrator for Medibank, and we thought the big, multi-CPU System 370 was just the ants'. Why, the Medibank database was all of about 350Mb back in 1975/76 !
Beautiful review of the reptile MO right there OA.
DeleteThe Ed. particularly, is always the master of the good cop- bad cop routine while beguiling us to always remember that there is nothing worth considering except BAU......with a splash of steroidal motivation to maintain that muscle mass. Oh......and how good is Scottyfrommarketing, of course!. Cheery Anon.
GB - I trust it was obvious that I had (still have, in the case of that original medibank project) great regard for the people who got those 'big and cumbersome' gadgets to do what they did. This is not to set off a nerd dialogue, because my work at the time was processed on CDC/Cyber units, but there were several layers of people between me and the printout.
DeleteOne of my erstwhile colleagues has a son who, for his post-grad, had to extract data and analyses from an old mainframe. As word got about, he found himself in such demand to 'wake up' other old mainframes/programs that that was becoming his career path. It paid well, but ultimately was not what he wanted to do.
His father and I found it interesting that there was such demand, but it showed that people realised that they would better understand what they were doing on the current 'state of the art' equipment if they could reconstruct how they got there. Which takes me back to your 'we've only arrived at (that) because of the huge success of the old mainframes.' Thanks for that comment.
Other Anonymous
No, I was just bantering and indulging in a little nostalgia, OA (and no, it never was). I spent quite a few years (1973 - 2008 inclusive) working on IBM and IBM 'compatible' (ie Fujitsu) mainframes and watched them evolve from the old, but truly classic, IBM 360 (on which the central Pharmaceutical Benefits System ran and on which I learned the DBA trade) which could manage all of three TSO (Time Sharing Option) sessions concurrently and which operated with the old 'washing machine' disks: about 26 Mb per physically removable disk pack (yes that is 26, not a typo, the whole computer could be backed up on one 800ft tape reel) which were about 0.6m in diameter and practically took a small crane to lift out of the drive well. And if the system had to make a lot of head 'seeks' in a very short time period, the disk unit would start 'walking' across the floor. And they were like very big 'washing machines' so a disk unit 'walk' was impressive.
DeleteOh yes, those were the days :-) But by the time I retired, the mainframes were much smaller and very much faster with huge main memories and a heap of disk storage, but by then there were also 'midrange' (which once used to be 'standalone' mini-computers eg DEC and Wang before they went kaput) and large Microsoft systems as well - all packed into the one computer room. And IBM's DB2 and Oracle had just about replaced IBM's IMS on major applications (and C had largely replaced Grace Hopper's COBOL).
I must admit that towards the end, I felt a lot like your colleague's son must have.
Now that my slow old memory has had time, I am reminded that Bureau of Stats had some very large (almost like the control deck of the Enterprise) CDC computers from an early time (1964):
Delete"A CDC 3600 mainframe computer was installed for statistical processing. At the time it was one of the biggest in Australia, with 32,768 words of memory, about 20 MB of disk storage and a number of magnetic tape units."
I think I might even have seen that beast on a visit to Stats computer room with the very high ceiling covered in Playboy centrefolds.
Great fun, GB, the pond is pleased that the Other Anon set you off …and what fun the Other Anon's contributions have been of late ...
DeleteOh I'm pretty easy to set off these days, DP, but then I guess I always was.
DeleteYair, commenters come and go over the years, I suppose (whatever happened to your American fan, Jersey Mike, I liked his stuff too) but OA has been good value, and just a little different.
And honesty compels me to say that some of the Stats computer room ceiling art was probably Penthouse. There was a lot of room up on that ceiling.
Well, well, well: I had never expected to be so privileged in this short life as to be given detailed instructions by the Lord High Editorialist as to how to organise our lives and our world. Thanks be, eh ?
ReplyDeleteTalk about reptiles claiming knowledge, qualifications or skills that they simply don't even come close to having ... As an example of his unparalleled knowledge and wisdom, take this: "Harsh restrictions on movement and gathering, working from home or not at all, and social isolation have put the economy into idle." (Where are those hands now, JC ?)
Waddaya know: the economy is in "idle". Oh well, GDP this quarter and next will be very close to zero then, won't it. Nobody's doing anything because the whole economy is in "idle'.
So, we had to wait over two thousand years for the follow up to the sermon on the mount, but now it's finally been laid upon us and any intimations of doubt or any hint of [shudder] disbelief will be met by permanent excommunication from the holiest of herpetarium orders.
Truly, that pile of excrement could only have been written by a well entrenched sociopath. The Doggy Bov maybe ? Any other suggestions ?
What a relief to get on to the Savvy Sav. I thought she was doing an ok job of sympathetic criticism of SloMo, but now she's done her own "snapback" to a state of "team loyalty". Not worth much time or attention really, but I did enjoy this one: "Barnaby Joyce reckons higher taxes will have to pay for it all and it's impossible to argue with that."
Of course it's impossible to argue with that; it's always been impossible to argue with rampant idiocy and ignorance. And in any case, it's impossible to argue in any way at all with Barners: he's never heard anything about reason, logic and epistemology.
Oh well, another day, another feast of reptile dumbfvckery. And months more to go.
Not far into reading the Ed. my immediate thought was, hmm........Crosby/Textor.
DeleteI think it was the opening par about people ringing the radio to see what day it is!
The joker said never start with the head, it makes you go fuzzy.
Re: Savva shouting in unison with man shouting at clouds Barnaby, an anecdote from my daughter, an accountant with a boutique type firm and who has been home working 14/15 hour days since March, and between Zoom conferencing and replying to emails from clients claiming. “She needs to have their back” she tells she was talking with a Canberra colleague, a Jericho type boffin who had been crunching data, charts, histories and current spends etc madly, and came up with a 14% tax shortfall.....or some such descriptor. I know zero about chaos economics, but there is no such thing as a free lunch, so someone is gonna have to pay. This got me thinking of reptile fears and lawyers and other people’s money. Cheery Anon.
https://youtu.be/35rErQtJ6uA
TAANSTAFL, you reckon, CA (an acronym formulated by Robert Heinlein, author of 'Stranger In A Strange Land'). And of course, there isn't - even back in our hunter-gatherer days, you had to get up off your behind and go hunt or gather (ever wonder why homo saps is the only species with a behind especially evolved for sitting on ?)
DeleteA 14% tax shortfall ? Shortfall against what - taking the budget back into 'black' again ? Over what timeframe ? And since we've discovered that neoliberalism is just another form of 'voodoo economics' what now ? And if you can defer paying back a debt until after you've snuffed, is that a 'free lunch' ?
You know back in the days of Howard/Costello, they did virtually pay back all the federal debt, only to be met with howls of protest from professional financial 'advisors' because they had removed a safe, protected source of investment for their clients (I'll try to find a link for that, but a quick attempted Google wasn't a big success).
So, as it has been expressed from time to time, "it's complicated". Especially when the interest rate is virtually zero, so we can borrow a whole lot of money, virtually for free, to pay off the debt that is still relatively high interest, then wait until GDP growth combined with inflation devalues the debt progressively.
Is that a 'free lunch' ?
It sure is complicated GB, especially to one who only passed high school on the condition he didn’t return.
DeleteWhere this current kicked off it’s chair neoliberalism ends up, who knows. I would presume those at the bottom of the heap will suffer more than those nearer the top. Time will tell.
Thoroughly enjoyed the pointer to Robert Heinlein and Stranger in a Strange Land (never much into SciFi) and further along on to Grok .......and computer culture and the language and protocols. Truly a world akin to Science Fiction for computer dummies like me, but it put your previous comments into some context. Ended up down the rabbit hole of jargon, Lisp, programming language, cURL, etc, etc, even to garbage collection.
That was the nearest my computer skills applied.... I worked for a time in a waste transfer station and after hours, I made a good penny dismantling huge mainframes for scrap. They seemed to be getting thrown down the tip at a rate that defied belief during late 80’s - early 90’s. Non the less....you obviously Grok GB. :))
Cheery Anon.
Ah well, the 80s and 90s were turning point decades, CA. For a while, the two great 'survivors' of IT were IBM and Microsoft. In the earlier years, computing was referred to as "IBM and the Seven Dwarfs' where the seven dwarfs were: Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, General Electric and RCA (plus the British company ICL) and also the main 'minicomputer' makers: DEC, Wang, Data General and Sun. And there aren't many of them left, and even IBM is more than a little shaky nowadays. So lots of 'Seven dwarfs' machines plus older minis and even a fair number of IBM mainframes went out into scrap back then. And most of the scrapped mainframes would have been of the older, more cumbersome and power consuming varieties. I'm sad to hear they were actually 'scrapped' in the sense of being tipped.
DeleteSo we're down to the two 'major succeders': Microsoft and Apple.
And here's a small anecdote: when IBM established a computer 'farm' in Ballarat, what was unique about the place ? It was (then) the only known location where the computer room had to be heated. Only in winter, of course. :-)
As to scifi, Heinlein was a sexist, racist dvckhead, but that one book was eminently readable and 'grok' has entered the world's languages. If you ever do decide to read a bit more, I can recommend Pohl and Kornbluth's 'The Space Merchants', Hal Clements' 'Mission of Gravity' and Arthur C Clarke's 'Childhood's End' (or his 'Fall of Moondust' if you prefer more sciency scifi).
All my dwarfs were from Burroughs, almost exclusively, as they were local(St.Kilda). Literally truckloads after truckloads over the years. Much newly manufactured/boxed and dumped, although the mainframes were recycled right down to, and including the castors and all the circuit boards were sent to recyclers in Germany while it lasted.
ReplyDeleteI’ve always been intrigued by some of the waste factors that have evolved over the last 50 years and always found recycle/reuse systems after a bit of hunting around, but now is very different. Once the chains are broken, the story is very different. And thanks for the book tips! .....and nice work flushing Jersey Mike out GB! :))) Cheery Anon.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/09/us-coronavirus-outbreak-agriculture-food-supply-waste?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Burroughs made some very good stuff once upon a time. It eventually merged with Univac to form Unisys which I think is still in there making and selling (I've been out of the field for a while now so I'm just not up to date).
DeleteThe Guardian article is interesting: what happens when a highly interconnected and 'optimised' system suffers a break in its continuity. Whole new lines of demand-supply need to be formed quickly. Will it all work out ? Not a hope.
The scifi I recommended is all old 1950s, 60s, and early 70s stuff. I gave up reading it then so I know nothing much about the more modern writers. I think Harlan Ellison's 'I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream' was one of the last I read (it was 1967). I did also read Ursula K LeGuin's 'The Dispossessed' many years later (it was 1974). But the ones I recommended are, I think, readable without being revolutionary (perhaps I will get to 'The Left Hand of Darkness' one day - maybe right after I've finished reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations' :-) ).
Yeah, good to see Jersey Mike is still with us.