Of late, the pond has noticed that the lizards of Oz have increasingly become a colonial outpost for the WSJ and its loons, but sadly the pond can only run so many cartoons to deal with the situation …
Phew, it's a great relief to get that out of the way quickly, and with a minimum of words, but what of the domestic situation?
Well Killer Creighton is always out and about, but the Killer's incessant desire for money over lives can become tiresome …
Actually, the pond enthusiastically endorses the Killer's right to value his life and scribbling at tuppence, and is it wrong for the pond to suggest that now is the right time for him to cash in his chips?
But there was something about all those references to World War II that a decent columnist could make something of, and it was our hole in the bucket man, our Henry, who did the right thing, and abandoned all his Greek and Roman and philosophical references this day to do a panegyric to Ming the Merciless …
You see, Killer Creighton? What a right and proper reptile response, to forget these troubled times and drift back on a wave of nostalgia to the days of the picket fence … (never mind that the pond grew up with a cement brick fence around a cement brick house in good old Tamworth) ...
Migrants? Say what? How did they get into the story? Oh well, perhaps they were decent migrants, ones that forgot about being pesky, difficult furriners, and quickly learned to speak dinkum...
Yes, yes, not a Greek or Roman metaphor in sight, but the pond was wary, because in short, when our Henry says "in short", it's a sure sign he will continue to be prolix ...
Any wiser advice? Why actually, there could be, because nattering "Ned" was out and about this day, and "Ned" is always full of advice, at least when he can stop with the hand-wringing, the yowling at the sky and the scattering of ashes …
But first the pond must at least correct Henry's failure to fix the hole in the bucket with a classical reference, a job that must be done by the immortal Rowe this day …
More Rowe here, and so to "Ned's" natter ...
Oh dear, forget Ming the Merciless, that face looked grim and statesmanlike and solemn and dismal, and so just right for "Ned's" unrelenting tale of woe ...
But what of our Henry? What of Ming the Merciless? What of inspirational talk, and even - shudder - migrants?
Well the reptiles knew "Ned" was a downer, and inserted some videos, with an instruction "Watch the Video" (or be bored shitless by "Ned"), but the pond is merciless and uses screen caps to render such tricks useless … and so all we have is a graphic of Josh and the blowout ...
Oh the job of a reptile hagiographer in these nightmare times is a nightmare problem … and the pond became troubled, because its original mission had been to present the best of loonery and these days, the best loons were more likely to turn up on other sites, such as Crikey …
That's better, that's more like it, some classic grade A loonery, but sadly the pond must turn back to "Ned".
And yet again the reptiles clearly suspected that "Ned" was failing the task, because they inserted another "Watch the Video" which the pond skilfully disabled … because if you take your "Ned", you must take him straight, or the pond will start quoting some more from "The March of Patriots" and the triumphs of white Anglo-celtic Christian western civilisation, or at least little Johnny and Lord Downer, and then we could see ancient "Ned" in all his original loonery, but would miss his handwringing right at this important masked moment … (have the reptiles thought of using the phrase "would you like to know more?")
Just a thought, but as you can't "Watch the Video", why then you must "Read 'Ned's natter'":
Perhaps the pond has been too hard, perhaps the pond could allow at least a cartoon, one that Killer Creighton would love …
And what about another piece of loonery from Crikey?
It cheered the pond up no end knowing that Bob and the Betoota Advocate were as one, and the pond could down the last gobbet of "Ned" just like finishing off a light snack of woe and tears … the mighty inspirational Ming the Merciless long forgotten ...
And so to the one genuine and compleat reptile loon of the day, and the pond knew this, because the recovering, reformed feminist, known to all as the beloved, tasty Oreo, was in fine form … and the pond also knew this because the reptiles had given her the authentic stamp of approval by the cult master himself ...
The pond knew it had no hope trying to match the cult master, but why not at least give it a shot?
And so to the reformed, recovering feminist musings, which are of course designed to downplay injustices of the past, because while some might think this is a thing …
… the Oreo is simply incapable of chewing gum and patting the tummy at the same time, and finds it impossible to think about past racism and historical justices while brooding about the present injustices being done to slavers and white supremacists and Confederate flag lovers and all the rest of the brood ...
Indeed, it's shocking, outrageous stuff, the sort a recovering, reformed feminist shouldn't have to deal with … there are other, more suitable responses to hand ...
Yes, when you want a defence of ancient slavers, and Colston, remember to turn to a recovering, reformed feminist celebrating Xian faith ...
Now it would be absurd to hold all white Christians in Australia responsible for the slavery which has been noted in Australia.
It would be absurd to hold the Oreo responsible for leaving Australia off that list.
It would however be possible to note that the reformed, recovering feminist makes no mention of the presence of slavery in the lucky country, yet a simple use of the google machine can find any number of references …
How much easier it is for recovering, reformed feminists to berate Islamics and moan about Xians, than wonder how that brothel owner came to afford such a fancy car, always on display in Enmore road, and no doubt paid for by blow jobs …
Oh there are plenty of references on the google machine, as here, and here, and here, and the pond could have gone on endlessly, as might a recovering reformed feminist, but instead, the pond decided to go with the Oreo flow, or, if you will, the Trumpian tone ...
As for racism in this country, it seems that a certain cheese manufacturer has only just realised there might be an issue ...
Sheesh, has our Henry's dream finally come true? Has Coon cheese finally caught up with Tamworth in the 1950s? Oh how we laughed in the playground at our clever ability to make a wickedly funny pun.
Well the pond will leave others to ponder that mystery. The pond must face its own dire mystery.
How was it that the Oreo ever thought of herself as a feminist?
Yes, once she used to rage against live white men, and now she rages at Islamics, and cries for Xians, yet when it comes to slavery in her own backyard brothel, the Oreo has something of a blind spot …
What a pity she couldn't manage the simple task of chewing on ancient gummy statues, while imagining that everything is sweet in her own Western Xian pussy-groping backyard?
Not to worry, it's the end of the week, and the pond has a couple of cartoons left over, so here they are …
Oh the time of the golden mists of the Henry’s memory. ’The Menzies government - kept the average inflation rate to below 3 percent’.
ReplyDeleteWonderful things, averages. Why not give Menzies credit for setting THE Australian record for inflation rates? From the September quarter 1951 to the June quarter 1952 he managed to keep Consumer Price Inflation above 20%, with the stellar accomplishment for December 1951 of 23.9%
Oh - if you want averages, Menzies’ average for financial 1951-2 was 21.7%.
And, yes, since you asked - the best the dreadful Whitlam could manage was a full 6.2% less than that.
And while we are there - following that bit of discussion recently about the necessity for Whitlam to be run out of office in the interests of saving the economy - Fraser’s ‘administration’ did not get the rate back into single figures until December 1977, and none of them seemed to know how they got there.
But to return to the Henry’s golden mists - ‘making sure firms could readily obtain the labour and capital they required.’ Readers might guess from that that no firms required much capital in the early 60s, the time of the ‘credit squeeze’. Would guess, unless your family happened to be trying to run a business then, under what had been the usual arrangements for financing substantial items of stock.
Chadwick
But, butt Chad, you didn't mention one of the great achievements of Menzies/Holt: the "credit squeeze we had to have" back in 1961: the year both my father and me worked on the grape harvest (he in Mildura, me in Robinvale) thereby providing that necessary 'manpower' that our nation needed then. However, he was indeed an immigrant - having migrated to Australia in 1908 at the age of three.
DeleteOtherwise, is Henry, in his own way, just a little bit like the Oreo - once, but nevermore, an actual economist, or is he just a sad, senile old "never was" who has degenerated into writing paid agitprop for the reptiles.
I have never considered Menzies to be much of a thinker, but of course he is the wingnuts' holy hero: all good initially comes from him whereas only evil comes from those awful socialists and communists that he valiantly defended us simple Aussies from.
But thank you for providing us with some of those awful, heretical "facts" that the reptiles like to ignore and pretend never happened. I do have a small question, though: Holely Henry talks of GDP doubling from 1950 to 1965 and then goes on to add "It would be easy, but incorrect, to dismiss these growth rates as merely reflecting a global economic boom. In reality, with Australia's terms of trade deteriorating steeply [ooops, we've fallen off the sheep's back] and trade's share in GDP falling, foreign demand, far from propelling our economic performance, constantly weighed upon it."
But GDP is that thing defined as "the total value of goods produced and services provided in a country during one year". Now foreign trade basically isn't "provided in a country" so it simply isn't a contributor to GDP in any way much at all (excepting maybe the employment of a few local agents and clerks to administer it). It surely does affect that other prime measure: the balance of trade (imports are negative, exports are positive), but only significantly affects GDP if there is trade imbalance: more imports than exports actually decreases GDP and Australia historically has run a trade deficit in most years.
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BriefingBook45p/AustraliaTrade
It might be worth noting that the Australian population increased from about 8.2 million in 1950 to 11.4 million in 1965 - approximately 3.2 million increase in 15 years which would have mostly been due to working age immigrants and their families. Thus GDP growth even back then was significantly due simply to having more working age people in the country and not to any ingenious economic management. Plus, Australia made a lot more of its own consumption - not only houses and flats but machinery, cars and consumer goods such as radios and tvs, washing machines, refrigerators etc. as well - which reflected in the GDP statistics.
GB - the ‘Cambridge Economic History of Australia’ has a short introductory paper from Jakob Madsen on drivers of economic growth since European settlement.
DeleteIt includes a comparison of per capita growth of GDP for Australia, New Zealand, USA, UK, Argentina and Canada, because we had strong trade links with the UK, and the other countries had similar initial conditions to ours.
The lines run pretty much parallel from 1950 to 1970.
Madsen includes a graph of sectoral shares of our GDP. For 1950-70 the big increase was in services, which went from around 50% to 70%. Agriculture was in decline, and bumped along with mining at about 5% each for those decades, while manufacturing was starting to drop from a hump around 25%.
If we ever get back to a culture where people can chat in bars, you might win a few bets asking people questions like ‘what category provided the major share of Australian GDP during the Menzies period?”
Oh, the Henry did contribute to that volume, but I have trouble reconciling what he wrote for a volume of this kind, with what he assembles, apparently at random, for the Flagship.
Chadwick
Thanks for that Chad, whenever a reptile makes a claim you should immediately check (unless it's BAEconomics, in which case you can just assume it's false).
DeleteErr, mebbe Chad, but I'd have to find a bar in which people were both prepared to bet on such economic esoterica and yet ignorant enough not to know the answer. On second thoughts ... who knows; pride-filled ignorance is a widely available commodity.
DeleteBut I'm just a little surprised that services were already 50% in 1950 - though yes, I guess "we" (ie the post Industrial Revolution parts of the world) had been mechanising and then, as far as the technology permits, automating just about everything we could. I can recall a claim on a recent 'America in Color' episode about how much, for instance, Firestone's pneumatic tractor tyres had increased American farm output.
But the essence of 'services' is that they usually require significant human to human contact and so they have tended to resist both mechanisation and automation - but maybe now in the increasingly robotic and AI'd world, even services will finally succumb. Robot podiatrists anybody ?
Interesting point you make about GDP per capita, but of course GDP per capita and just plain old national GDP as a whole are quite separate entities - Australia has claimed record success because GDP had not decreased for two successive quarters over 29 years, but IIRC GDP per capita had decreased over several successive quarters many times over that 29 years.
Otherwise, what I think you are saying is that Henry did have some economic credibility once upon a time, but has pretty much surrendered it now in his 'superannuation' years. Which I think you have said before.
Apart from the Holely Henry harangue about how wonderful Menzies was, Nullius Ned the nullified gives yet another random ramble about nothing very much.
ReplyDeleteBut the Oreo is right on to matters: despite having never lived the life of a 'coloured person' in America and experienced their significant issues, nonetheless she's right into instructing them how to be: "Black Lives Matters protesters should focus on freeing living slaves".
Well of course they should: they should emigrate en masse to all the places in the world where there's even a smidgen of slavery and fix it. And only then can they go back to America and fix the problems - racism and discrimination - that they formed to oppose.
And that's why the Oreo is as she is: she has to fix every situation in the world where everyone except women are oppressed and fix that up; and only then can she home in on the oppression of women anywhere. And surely everybody knows that, don't we ?
The Oreo seems to be running the nirvana fallacy here. If we cannot perfectly resolve all problems of modern slavery we cannot even talk about historical slavery or it's legacy.
DeleteThere is also a staggering lack of equivalence between people dying in police custody and what amounts to a bit of property damage. Is the Oreo's life so protected that she thinks throwing a statue in the harbour will bring down Western civilisation?
It also seems like a very American obsession. It probably has some traction with US readers but there's very little disruption here and all the effort trying to link pandemic spread to protests has fallen flat.
I guess it is like 'fetch' - it's not going to happen.
Befuddled - good to see the Nirvana fallacy getting a run. Harold Demsetz generated a lot of good ideas, and discussed them vigorously but respectfully. This particular one - which, if I recall correctly, came out of some exchanges with Kenneth Arrow - is very useful; well, unless you have to churn out some column inches (I think that term is still used in the trade - like 'milestones') for the Flagship.
DeleteChadwick
Oh I dunno, Bef; I think the Oreo is just exercising her 'righteous power complex' and thus finding any "reason" to tell people how they should behave and how they should run their lives. Because she, without doubt, is omniscient about such things.
DeleteOf course throwing a 'nirvana solution' at people - and asking why they haven't managed to achieve it yet - can be a large part of that.
Befuddled, I hadn't heard of the Nirvana Fallacy before, as a result I only now understand "the perfect is the enemy of the good". Thank you buddy.
ReplyDeleteChad mentioned getting back to the bar culture.
If only Dorothy owned a pub in Tamsworth with her crew here as regulars.
I would happily sit at the bar and just listen as you mob dissected any stray
reptile foolish enough to come in.
GrueBleen wrote
"I'd have to find a bar in which people were both prepared to bet on such economic esoterica and yet ignorant enough not to know the answer".
I find that really amusing. A cousin of sorts to that bit of ancient Jersey wisdom that is handed down from father to son on one's 18th birthday:
"If you can't figure out who the mark is at the poker(or Life's) table, it's you".
Sadly, JM, there always is a "mark" at the table - at present I'm just a little bit afraid that it might turn out to be the whole, unholy human race.
DeleteBut don't ever mistake anything propounded by the Oreo - or indeed by any reptile - with "the perfect". Or even with "the faintly desirable" either.
Yeah, a DP pub in Tamworth and a daily beer or five to slurp; that'd be the life. Almost "the perfect" :-)