As they always seem to do on a Monday, the reptiles were playing with a full deck, and all the pond's favourites were out and about, and so there had to be a culling, with the Oreo biting the dust, the bromancer disregard - because the war on China is going tremendously well, thanks to the reptiles - and the Major consigned to the minor league for victim blaming of the most insidious kind …
Instead the pond settled for the sort of easy meat that the likes of soft-headed wombats of the Caterist kind provide …
The Caterist is, of course, treading a very familiar path, following the footsteps of Dame Slap and just about every other reptile at News Corp in the past few months ...
It's around this time that the pond usually resorts to Crikey, though it doesn't like to take too much from a mob struggling to survive …
There's a lot more of course, and the pond has include in the screen cap a Crikey link, which will require a sub to access … but now it's time to return to the Caterist, carrying on, and declaring none of this to lizard Oz readers ...
Now the pond can understand the reason why the Caterist might be upset with lawyers …
And there's a lot more of that at the Graudian, and at least the pond can provide a link here … and now to a final gobbet ...
Well he's shown the Chairman his servile spine yet again, and no doubt the snouts will stay in the trough at the Menzies Research Centre ...
Next up is a pond favourite, though the reptiles did Bella the disservice of not even bothering with a photo thumb, but instead offering the standard sign of """ reptile laziness …yet they clearly had a thumb on file ...
It's a fairly standard Bella outing, by which the pond means it's vintage Bella bitter …
One of the greater glories of old school reptiles is the way that they manage to glorify Anglo-Saxon (with a dash of Celt) Western Civilisation, and empires and such like, yet at the same time, manage to insist that none of this involved racism, or a sense of superiority, nor a return to Kipling's white man's burden …
It's a tremendous feat of double think, and yet there's no need to go to the current bout of troubles to remember that the British empire was built on the notion that whites and white culture were inherently superior (ditto the rest of the European powers, but let's stick with the Brits) … and while Cecil Rhodes might be a hero to the onion muncher, he was a classic example, and so was King Leopold andy so was Winnie …
Cue The Independent way back in 2010 …
Well yes, there's nothing like shooting a few savages for sport, there's been the odd bit of sport down under go, and if you want that life in pictures, you can head off here, but the pond is content to do a little more reading ...
And so on, and of interest to any historian interested in a balanced picture, as they used to say, or perhaps the overall picture, but our Bella isn't much interested in overalls …
Ah, the scientific method! Just so long as it doesn't include the climate science method, which as everyone knows is a UN contrivance to establish world government by Xmas …
And now to a bonus, which the pond must call out as TMI, way TMI …
Dear sweet long absent lord, has there ever been a more terrifying sight? Did the dog botherer do sinister leers at the camera from the time he was a tot?
As for the content, it's nostalgia dressed up as desperation …
Of course none of this mentions the way that News Corp swept through regional newspapers like a plague of locusts, snapping them up and devouring them, and then when the times turned sour, spitting them out again … and once again, the pond has to revert to Crikey, which has spent quite a bit of energy tracking the fate of regional papers … and the insidious, perfidious ways of News Corp …
None of this troubled the dog botherer, intent on another TMI moment … glowering out at the world like some long-haired crow-eater hippie ...
Of course none of this nostalgia has much to do with the harsh realities of the internet, and the even harsher realities of News Corp.
The pond's relatives in Tamworth long ago gave up on the Northern Daily Bleeder, and when its paywall swung into action, they swung out, and so did many others, and while down in rural Victoria for Xmas, remembers the local tribe treating the pond as an eccentric for actually reading a tree-killer local paper … as if anything existed outside the world of the portable screen …
Ah the shares went up. Tough love and tough titties, as they used to say in the bush, where sexism always served alongside racism of the Major Mitchell kind ...
Well there's more at Crikey (those links aren't hot, it's only a photo cap), and there's a final dose of self-serving nostalgia from the dog botherer ...
And so much for local journalism … the stories that they never published… which is perhaps why country folk have always liked the bush telegraph and perhaps now prefer it to the corporatised sameness of paywalled regional News Corp rags … and besides, there's the intertubes now … and the nostalgia of far right loons of the dog botherer kind shouldn't obscure the role they played in destroying trust in the media, or the sense that it was worth even a lousy little sixpence ...
And after all that, why not a statue, with David Rowe going into the statue business, with more elegant artefacts here…
'Racism of the Major Mitchell kind" - a racism most notably demonstrated - and widely reported - by KAK.
ReplyDeletehttps://indigenousx.com.au/was-kak-really-cleared-of-racism/
Black violence on blacks is what every racist trots out to justify their racism, whether with policing or harsh sentences, or condescending to indigenous people by explaining how they really needed help from their white caring overlords, and damned if the pond was going to go there on a Monday ...
DeleteAh nostalgia. I was aware of 'The Murray Pioneer' at the time of which the DB writes, although quite unaware of his emerging talent. The locals with whom I had contact referred to it as the 'Murray diarrhea', but that title almost certainly preceded his arrival. It was otherwise typical of country newspapers in South Australia; extensions of the 'country' rump of the 'Liberal and Country League' that had expired as a title in the 70s.
ReplyDeleteChadwick
These happy little days and ways that come and then pass quite unknown to the rest of us.
DeleteLove the name, and nice to know that nothing changes across the wide brown land, from Loxton and Berri to Tamworth. When the pond spent time in Adelaide, the Advertiser was notorious for taking its marching orders from North Terrace, and that was before the chairman ditched The News and made it a one newspaper town to match its one horse, one dog botherer status ...
DeleteWau again, DP: that was some stentorian, strident Sunday now followed by a mumbled, mucky Monday. Just fancy: Cater, D'Abrera and the Doggy Bov when he was just a juvenile hairy pup.
ReplyDeleteThough I was right on with the Cater when he essayed: "That noble aim [affordable justice] has been corrupted by the profit motive." Just think of that: a Murdochian reptile preaching passionately against the rampant evils of capitalism.
Then there's Belladonna preaching against the evils of racism whilst exhibiting all the symptoms herself. But then, that is the reptile way isn't it: rabid attribution and projection of their own clearly visible failings onto their evil class enemies. It's a way of existence for them.
So that's why we get the juvenile, well-haired Doggy Bov telling people to do everything they possibly can to save all the local newspapers that Doggy's employer is busily destroying.
Just another pleasant valley SunMoon day.
The pond was deeply worried about replicating those photos of the dog botherer and starting a mass panic amongst his followers ...
DeleteI'm sure the Pond has seen this already
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/harryson_b/status/1271869966627663873?s=20
Maybe this is how history will treat them
https://twitter.com/L1I9N6K4/status/1271709330446839809
Some interesting comments by KRudd and Hewson to that first link, Bef.
DeleteNow it has BF, ta, should really spend more time with the high comedy and onion munching that Twitter offers ...
Delete“Ah, the scientific method!” The latest NYRB has a review of a history of the “Scientific Method”. It seems to have been invented by Popular Science Magazine in the 1880’s and was really just a slogan. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Scientific Management “promised great increases in output if companies were run according to the scientific method”. The reviewer calls it “a feat of branding equal to “diamonds are forever” or “Coke is it””.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, writers like D’Abrera revere it as the only path to truth, even as they deride actual scientists who don’t use it but find out things that are not welcome – like climate change.
The article at the top left by Steve Bracks must be interesting. If it is true,the stuff Bernard Collaery has uncovered about East Timor and helium would have to be one of the greatest swindles in Australian history. I suppose I’d better not say too much for fear of facing a secret trial.
Frederick Winslow Taylor: now there's a name I haven't heard anything of for just a few decades. About the only thing of his I remember was his ground-breaking investigation of how to most efficiently move a heap of muck (left after some metallurgical processing as I recall): he had the Swedish labourer try several methods only to finally settle on just shovelling the muck over his shoulder to form a new pile a couple of metres further on, and repeating that until the muck all reached its final resting place as part of a very big pile of accumulated muck.
DeleteExponent of and passionate believer in 'the one best way" to do anything and everything, he tried via 'Scientific Management' to use that approach to increase the wages of workers by increasing their output. It didn't work though, because the wage increase was, as set by the capitalists of the era, always proportionately less than the productivity increase, and because there's almost always several close to equal ways of doing things, especially manual labour. And doing one thing repeatedly both bores people (so that their productivity declines over time) and contributes to 'repetition injury'.
But the most memorable thing about Taylor was his two famous partners: Henry Gantt (inventor of the Chart) and Lillian and Frank Gilbreth - stars of 'Cheaper By The Dozen' and inventors of the 'therblig' - the 'unit of physical work'. And I put them in that order because it's generally believed that Lillian was the brains of the pair who very successfully continued their consulting work after Frank died fairly young.
Aah, nostalgia - it gets better all the time.
And all of that then brought up Elton Mayo (born in South Australia) and his work at the Western Electric Hawthorne plant and the origination of the Human Relations school of work management.
DeleteIt just gets better and better, doesn't it.
Now this says it all:
Deletehttps://www.newscientist.com/article/2244111-tom-gaulds-diagram-of-the-scientific-method/