The pond was very slow off the mark this day. Yesterday was miserable in Sydney and today is already looking just as miserable, and getting out of a warm bed to tend to the herpetarium caught the pond at a low ebb …
And yet it was a bonza do-dah day for the reptiles, all glittery and shiny and with the very best on parade - the Major, the dog botherer, and so on - and so it seems utterly perverse to begin with the craven Craven, but variety is the spice of life, and why not a Catholic reptile on a Monday? Given that the human blood and the human flesh was devoured around the land yesterday, why not a follow-up treat? Especially given that the reptiles had offered up a splendid visual sacrifice, an illustration not up to the cult master's standards, but still replete with rich visual irony ….
Now before the pond could go on any further, it just had to do a google, in search of whimsy, and luckily landed on some sublime Mary fetishist comedy … and what do you know, it was the reptiles themselves wot delivered …
Yes, there are many other examples of the ACU carrying on like a pork chop, but this one was piquant for ex-Cathoics ...
A resignation? Pressured? Poor bugger for refusing to follow the company line and allowing the airing of an obvious truth, and refusing to follow the Orwellian Catholic line (how the pond loves to use Orwellian with gay gaiety, just like the reptiles in full featherless flight).
Oh whatever you do, don't step on the tyke trust in the delusional notion of a virgin birth … and so back to the preening pomposity of the craven Craven ...
Indeed, indeed, no doubt there's full transparency and full consultation …
Oh dear, well what the craven Craven says is true. Staff are expressly allowed to criticise the ACU, but if they're kept in the dark, what's from them to criticise?
What an astonishingly sensible way of going about business, and now perhaps a few more quotes (found here)?
Here's an irony: a craven Craven so up himself, while regularly scribbling for the lizard Oz, that he fancies him and his brood are more intellectually liberal than their secular counterparts ...
Oh for fuck's sake, everyone knows that Mary wasn't fucked by the Holy Ghost, she was fucked in the usual way and produced a child in the usual way … unless, wait, the pond was mistaken and The Exoricist was more documentary than drama …
And so to a favourite pond ritual, one involving the Caterist …
Now the pond agrees with the expert in the movement of flood waters in quarries, as it always does …
The pond abhors the printing of money? Where's the need? What's the point? You just hand out your paw, and the government gives it to you …
The pond just wanted everyone to remember that the expert in quarry flood water movement knows how to stick out his paw, and everything thereafter that he scribbles is suffused with rich irony, matched only by a singular incapacity for self-observation, self-awareness and self-reflection...
Well at the very least a dinkum treasurer might leave the Menzies Research Centre grants alone so that the Caterist might not perceive a conflict of interest …
Oh what fun it is and the pond apologises for only doing a screen cap of the tweet, and there's another tweet to follow, but why hare off on a tweet, when you can have the Caterist in full irony mode ...
Targeted assistance?
Indeed, indeed, and the pond and the expert in flood waters in quarries knows just where it would be a good place to start, he knows just the right target for some much-needed assistance …
By now, it's an ancient ritual, but one the pond loves to observe, a bit like those days praying to the holy virgin Mary, with a hail here, and a heil there, and the sneaking suspicion that she really didn't get visited and fucked by the Holy Ghost or some such mystical vision … not that the pond would write a paper on the subject and expect an A+ from the ACU's marking department ...
Oh what a vision that was, and how Ming the Merciless would have applauded those not ashamed to put out their paw for a little cash from an all-powerful state, because what better way to indulge a spineless and effortless lifestyle than to rely on the benevolence of the Department of Finance?
Okay, okay, the pond admits it's wielded the irony count with the subtlety and nuance of a sledgehammer this day, but what's the bet that such is the thickness of the Caterist's brick head that it bounces off into the void, while the cash remains firmly clutched in the paw?
As our hole in the bucket man Henry Ergas explained eloquently on these pages last Friday, the Menzies' decision to stick out the paw for a government grant is the key to Australia's post-war achievements …
But no, the pond won't run the grant gag yet again to wrap the irony overload up… why not instead an immortal Rowe, with more Rowe here… because as everyone knows Maggie and Ronnie Raygun also loved giving out grants to favoured pets … (and look at that other dispenser of grants, tucked up on the wall in the left hand corner, gone but never forgotten for his generous ways) ...
Oh he's truly witty that utterly Craven bloke, isn't he: "Some institutions have intrinsic qualities. Queensland is Queensland. Daniel Andrews is apoplectic."
ReplyDeleteWell, and after that gratuitous throwaway about Dan Andrews, what can be said about the "intrinsic qualities" of Craven, the reptiles in the herpetarium, and the Murdoch Press in general ? Nothing, actually. After all what can be said about featureless nothingnesses and total nonentities ? [Note Oxford comma]
Let us just consider Craven's definition of academic freedom: "the heart of academic freedom is the right to take a view with which your colleagues, and possibly the whole world, disagrees."
Ok, so if a uni employee, tenured or otherwise, were to pronounce that it's ok to rape young girls, or enslave people and work them to early death, then in Craven's opinion, they are fully entitled to the protection of "academic freedom". Ok, glad that's sorted so that Craven can continue with:
"This was the challenge with the Ramsay centres. They did not fit the dominant paradigm, which was once the subversive position." Yep, not a skerrick of doubt about it, the 'Ramsay centres' are victims of the most appalling academic repression ever experienced within the human race.
And having got this far, what can be said about the Cater that hasn't already been said many times ? Well here's one: Cater produced a small spark of rationality when he said: "Margaret Thatcher's projection that socialism would be exhausted when it ran out of other people's money proved to be a fallacy."
Quite so, Nicky, quite so; along with every other "projection" made by Thatcher, and also by Reagan just for completeness sake. Thatcher, and Reagan, understood absolutely nothing about economics and the reality of "money". They both appear to have thought that money somehow had a separate, inviolable reality, completely independent of society. It never seems to have occurred to either of them that as the human population increased, so did the money supply - and that this happened in so-called 'communist' states exactly as it happens in 'capitalist' states: both have banks and banks continually create more money.
And now that there are actually a few people who understand that, and now that even 'capitalist' societies have central banks, it is obvious that states can also create money. Oh boy.
So, maybe somebody should remind Josh Freudenberg of the wise observation about Maggie and Ronnie: "She promised to follow him to the end of the world; he promised to take her there."
In the meantime, we can all celebrate the death of capitalism:
The end of interest
https://johnquiggin.com/2020/07/26/the-end-of-interest/
Hallelujah for negative interest rates !
The funny thing about quoting Thatcher or Reagan is that, depending on which camp you belong to, it is either proof of success or failure that doesn't require further explanation.
DeleteI'm a bit the same. Both the UK and the US are mired in social and economic chaos that tracks straight back to these exemplars. Oz seems to be on the same track.
You could point out that problems were there already to varying degrees, but neither leader had any new ideas, just old ideas reheated, so what would you expect?
I'm not a fan of Michelle Grattan at all, Bef, but she did have something interesting to say a few days ago on the Conversation [ https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-pandemic-has-blown-the-tyres-right-off-that-old-coalition-debt-truck-143275 ]
DeletePandemic has blown the tyres right off that old Coalition debt truck
Well no, it hasn't really, and given half a chance Josh will have a newer, bigger, better set of tyres on that truck as quick as a wink. And the reptiles and wingnuts, together with a majority of the population, will sing his praises and thank God that they've escaped 50 years of crippling debt.
Where to find a chart of government debt? I know!
Deletehttps://twitter.com/MrKRudd/status/1286143907722457090/photo/1
The problem is that anyone who is in the least curious already knows but there doesn't seem to be a way to get through to the others.
Maybe we can slip it into MasterChef.
So, maybe somebody should remind Josh Freudenberg of the wise observation about Maggie and Ronnie: "She promised to follow him to the end of the world; he promised to take her there."
DeleteTouché GB........didn’t she close all the coal pits too?
We live in strange times....and Josh ain’t that bright on the policy front. When I heard his praise of Reagan /Thatcher the other day, I immediately thought of Brian Eno’s Blank Frank.
CA.
Blank frank is the messenger of your doom and your destruction
Yes, he is the one who will set you up as nothing
And he is one who will look at you sideways
His particular skill is leaving bombs in people's driveways.
Blank frank has a memory that's as cold as an iceberg
The only time he speaks is in incomprehensible proverbs
Blank frank is the siren, he's the air-raid, he's the crater
He's on the menu, on the table, he's the knife and he's the waiter
Wau, CA: Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno no less. And that one has all of 23,747 views on youtube ! I had heard of him, but ...
DeleteNice chart, Bef, and sort of gets the message across. The thing is though, that as best I can grasp it, the "conservatives" believe both of those things at the same time: the Labor 'debt' was, and still is, insufferable, but the LNP debt is eminently manageable despite being more than 4 times the Labor debt.
I can only put that down to 'theory perseverance' which is the idea that humans react to information (data) by forming a 'theory' to explain it, but that over time the memory of the founding data fades though the belief in the 'explanatory' theory perseveres.
Later on, different information may give rise to a different 'theory' that is contradictory to the first one, but because the information supporting the first theory has been lost, there is no mental trigger to notice that a person now believes contradictory things. And don't we all.
Well that's the 'nice' explanation anyway. The reality is probably that as usual, the conservatives are following the dictum that: "When we do it, it is holy; when you do it, it is evil". There's a lot of thinking along that line amongst the reptiles.
The Source cautioned me earlier today that the Cater was claiming a new talent - in economics. I did not ask her to send it to me, being fairly sure that Dorothy would make it available for our collective wonderment.
ReplyDeleteThe criticisms of ‘MMT’ that bounce around Limited News, Quadrant, probably Spectator, and certainly Catallaxy, do not exhibit any understanding of how - let us call it ‘money’ for convenience - is created in this country.
An eager child, reading only from the pages of those publications, might come to believe that there is a secret agency which totes up all the ‘stuff’ that is produced, or otherwise lands in Australia, and calculates, to the dollar, how much ‘money’ that represents. Well, an eager child, or assorted adults, claiming much more experience, and, often, tertiary qualifications, and who receive ‘money’ for writing for the couple of thousand readers of those publications.
The process is not secret. The Reserve Bank has steady output of speeches and articles by Deputy Governors and research staff which explain, in plain terms, just how it is done, and which bodies or institutions influence the production of jingly coins and shiny plastic ‘notes’ - and the other forms of ‘money’.
Perhaps the only secret is for the writers, particularly for Limited News, to keep that information from the accounts department, otherwise a bean counter might say ‘OK - why don’t we just ask the Reserve Bank if we can print some of their speeches and research papers?’ - and save several salaries.
Oh, funnily enough, I have not come across a speech by a Deputy Governor which gives most (any) of its content to accusing the ABC of being a communist front, or of working positively to unravel the very fabric of our society (or what admirers of Mrs Thatcher are to call it, after she told them there was no such thing). Perhaps that is the extra element that is needed, for one’s musings on economics to be accepted by the Flagship.
Chadwick
The wingnuts, and especially the reptiles, seem to believe that 'money' is somehow a 'real thing' in its own right, not just a creation of society (whatever Maggie might have thought that was). But having happily plowed through J K Galbraith's 'Money: Whence it came, where it went" back in the late 1970s, I was saved from such irrational folly.
DeleteBut even back in the days of faithful religious observance of the Gold Standard it was clear to even simple intellects that 'money' was a creation, and the means of 'creating' it was varying the price of an ounce of gold. Of course back in those days, the Mint still had to stamp the coins and print the notes, but hey, that's not hard.
Interestingly, as one of the major miners and producers of gold, the Australian Reserve Bank only owns up to having 80 tonnes of it. [ https://www.rba.gov.au/qa/gold-holding.html ] The USA, on the other hand, apparently claims 8134 tonnes of it. [ http://www.usfunds.com/investor-library/frank-talk/top-10-countries-with-largest-gold-reserves/#.Xx5y6BJS-00 ]
I have no idea what they (and the other major gold-hoarding nations) intend to do with it.
80 tonnes of gold is worth $6,974,800,000 at present. If we were to go on the gold standard, we would be a bit short of cash.
DeleteJoe - one of my entertainments back at the time of the GFC 'rumour', when a Sydney radio person had been encouraging a run on banks, was to ask people at social gatherings, how much actual cash was in circulation, per person. Most guesses were of amounts around $15 000. At that time, the per capita was around $1500 (it is about double that now - which prompts some interesting speculation - where are all those $100 bills?).
DeleteIf Mr Jones were as influential as he has always claimed, Sydney's banks would have had to close before midday. A couple had a brief emergency, but the system did not grind to a halt.
Chadwich