The question some people might be asking is, "is it better to go see the dentist in an early morning appointment, or is it better to read the lizard Oz of a morning and blog about it?"
Perhaps the pond could suggest a few clues as to the answer. The dentist is a kindly man, and gives shots to numb the pain, and the result is for the better.
The reptiles, on the other hand, are reminiscent of a Mengeles-inspired dentist, doing deep drilling, smirking with satisfaction at the howling pain produced by each nerve strike, while chanting into the ear in deformed Marathon man style, "you're never safe, you're never safe."
The reptiles, on the other hand, are reminiscent of a Mengeles-inspired dentist, doing deep drilling, smirking with satisfaction at the howling pain produced by each nerve strike, while chanting into the ear in deformed Marathon man style, "you're never safe, you're never safe."
The upshot is that the pond will take another day off on Friday to see the dentist, knowing it will be more fun than the reptiles ... and meantime, look at what they did today while the pond was in pleasant company.
Oh fuck, not Dame Groan going on about comrade Dan yet again. Dear sweet dentist, perhaps extract another molar so the pond can avoid the experience.
And right alongside Dame Groan was the bouffant one … doing his usual SloMo suck ...
How the reptiles love their public displays of onanism and fellatio, so much sucking up, so little time, but luckily Dame Groan had come up with a useful new slogan for the pond: the bungling state of the lizard Oz, the bungling state of Shanners …
The pond admits it didn't pay much attention to the original story … modelling being what it is, and lizard fear-mongering being what it is ...
But what fun it was to visit Media Watch here … and see the depth and extent of the bungle about the alleged bungling state ...
The trouble of course is the reptiles are so intent on doing down comrade Dan that these days if someone spotted an alien space ship, likely enough the issue would be sheeted home to comrade Dan … another failure in a failed state… but in this case, there's not a shadow of a doubt as to the bouffant one being caught out … in spectacular fashion ...
As for Shanners response, it was blithering and gibbering nonsense of a kind which reminded the pond of that crazed dentist saying it isn't safe. It really would have been better if he'd just hung a sign, or at least an albatross around his neck, saying "guilty as hell" and "a bigger bungler than Dame Groan's bungling state" ...
Blather of the most mendacious and defensive kind, but it's hard to cover up a bigger bungle than anything Dame Groan's bungling state might manage …
Well the pond hadn't intended to relish Shanners' folly so much, but when you've only got gums, you may as well savour the flavour …
It seems almost pathetic then to offer as a bonus a little tidbit from Killer Creighton ...
Happily, Killer is in his usual state of vexed gloom, and there's nothing to lift the pond's spirits than to hear the gnashing of reptile teeth ...
Freedom boy wrote a book, and he's worried about vulgar youff, and still the virus hasn't killed enough old farts off so that their homes might be redistributed to their young 'uns?
Is it any wonder that Killer is gloomy, but right at the end of the next gobbet - teaser alert, Saturday matinee hook - the gloom goes over the top and far away …
You see, it's not just youffs turning to radical thinking, you know, food, a roof over their head, a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, benefits and holidays and such like …
No, it's Freedom Boy's desire to get rid of super, in lock step with the IPA and all the rest, because it's always irritated the heck out of the reptiles and their overlords that union super schemes are infinitely superior to that offered by the grasping, greedy private sector ...
You know, last century assorted generations got over various epidemics, including the wrongly named Spanish flu, and a couple of world wars and such like, and now the snowflake reptiles are carrying on and sobbing into their porridge about the horrors we're facing … and poor old Killer wipes the tears from his eyes and blows the remaining fragments of froth off his warm beer and trots out the suggestion that free-market societies will give way to state-managed socialism, and Karl might rulez …
Stupid reptiles. If only they'd thought of the consequences of capitalism out of control and screwing workers and the vulnerable for the pleasure of Gina's mob and other folk at the rich end of town … but they didn't, did they? They thought the good times would roll on forever, apparently unaware that each time you step out of the house, if you have one for the stepping, at some point the under toad might get you …
It was Walt’s fourth summer at Dog’s Head Harbor, Duncan remembered, when Garp and Helen and Duncan observed Walt watching the sea. He stood ankle-deep in the foam from the surf and peered into the waves, without taking a step, for the longest time. The family went down to the water’s edge to have a word with him.
‘What are you doing, Walt?’ Helen asked.
‘What are you looking for, dummy?’ Duncan asked him.
‘I’m trying to see the Under Toad,’ Walt said.
‘The what?’ said Garp.
‘The Under Toad,’ Walt said. ‘I’m trying to see it. How big is it?
And Garp and Helen and Duncan held their breath; they realized that all these years Walt had been dreading a giant toad, lurking offshore, waiting to suck him under and drag him out to sea. The terrible Under Toad.
Garp tried to imagine it with him. Would it ever surface? Did it ever float? Or was it always down under, slimy and bloated and ever-watchful for ankles its coated tongue could snare? The vile Under Toad.
Between Helen and Garp, the Under Toad became their code phrase for anxiety. Long after the monster was clarified for Walt (‘Undertow, dummy, not Under Toad!’ Duncan had howled), Garp and Helen evoked the beast as a way of referring to their own sense of danger. When the traffic was heavy, when the road was icy – when depression had moved in overnight – they said to each other, ‘The Under Toad is strong today.’
‘Remember,’ Duncan asked on the plane, ‘how Walt asked if it was green or brown?’
Both Garp and Duncan laughed. But it was neither green nor brown, Garp thought. It was me. It was Helen. It was the color of bad weather. It was the size of an automobile.
Beware the Marxian under toad, Killer, beware the boring beyond measure under toad Dame Groan, you might send readers to sleep and they'll step in front of a bus, and most of all, beware the modelling under toad, bouffant one, because graphs and charts and such like should be treated with caution. The pond should know, sending out reptile swill into the world each day, not quite comprehending the enormous damage it might be doing ...
And now, it being a light day, the immortal Rowe offers another under toad, as the poor fuckers in Hong Kong go down like flies, and all that reptile talk of the war in China keeps on turning out to be just the hot air of idle imitation dragons … (with more Rowe here).
https://twitter.com/joeldeane/status/1292950577140232192
ReplyDelete"I have a new favourite science fiction writer. Dennis Shanahan! "
DeleteYes, very witty; though personally I would be most satisfied if that was his one and only. But it won't be, will it: "You just tell them and they believe. They just do". And that's a "mental construct" that all reptiles believe, yep, they "just do"
"Dennis Shanahan's reply to @ABCmediawatch. Avoid if you have a weak bladder."
Or if you've got a strong one - don't want too much of a flash-flood.
Oh, reading the reptiles every day with DP's fine commentary and lots of illuminating comments - could life get any better in any possible way ?
@trainsandtrams - "You would have to think that Shanahan has done a Simon Benson here - just uncritically reproduced something fed to him by a Coalition staffer who claimed that it was sourced from the Victorian Government.
ReplyDeletePlausible deniability for the Libs.
Egg on face for Denis."
Yeah, sort of fascinating in a perverse way to speculate on who might have fed it to Shanners. His repeated bit about how "the graphic image on the front of the Australian was not a reproduction" is strange: does Shanners want to claim that somebody fed him the model and the data - including Paul Sougleris's typo error - and that Shanners then used his world renowned skills to run the model and appropriate the graph ? Which, BOC, he "reproduced" into the Oz Flagship, didn't he - there being no subbies or other "interns" to do it for him.
DeleteFascinating. Also clearly utter nonsense .... well, to anybody not already a true "believer" anyway.
In the years of great explorations, maps of lands newly 'discovered' by explorers from Europe were a lucrative business. Naturally, folk who did not have the inclination to die from 'fever', or scurvy, or a well-placed arrow, did quite well out of copying maps. A few changes in colour, a few insertions of 'here be dragons', and pass it off as your own work. The cunning cartographers for the genuine explorers responded with 'map spoiling' - changing part of the course of a river (which was a popular one) or re-positioning a prominent landmark was sufficient. The thief of intellectual property knew no different, but the producer of the genuine chart could show that the copy was just that - a copy. This could even be revealed when the genuine explorer released a 'corrected' version.
DeleteSeems that Paul Sougleris has created 'graph spoiling' - to very good effect. More power to the power of his random errors.
CHadwick
And when you compare the map "copiers" with all those who suffered and died to collect a world full of taxonomic data for Linnaeus, it is truly deplorable and exasperating.
DeleteSo many, many deplorables in one species.
Dame Groanie: "A new slogan: the bungling state"
ReplyDeleteWell yes there are a few about aren't there: USA, Brazil, Mexico, UK, Sweden ... And the Australian Commonwealth Gov which doesn't yet seem to know that it has responsibility for Aged Care Australia wide and thus something that it, and ScottyfromHorizon, should be acting very responsibly about. But don't wait for the reptiles to acknowledge that, they'll simply claim that the C'wealth Gov wouldn't have needed to act "responsibly" if the evil Dan the Anti-man Andrews hadn't "bungled".
But then we already have Shanners the Mighty Graphing Man to tell us just how innocent and undeserving of any blame SloMo and the gang is. And he's told it to them, and according to SloMo's approval rating in the polls, they just believe.
Anyway, there's a fair sort of read about it here:
DeleteTensions rise on coronavirus handling as the media take control of the accountability narrative
https://theconversation.com/tensions-rise-on-coronavirus-handling-as-the-media-take-control-of-the-accountability-narrative-144195
Talking about "the bungling state" how's this from Rolling Stone:
Delete"In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world."
I guess it's just the way people use words, but I would have reckoned that it really displays American "exceptionalism" graphically. Apart from a very few cases when Americans had true exceptionalism thrust upon them (WWII, maybe WWI, the moon landing) America has been exceptionally bungling all the way along. Especially Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19-end-of-american-era-wade-davis-1038206/
The Killer C: "Coronavirus to reshape the Liberal Party"
ReplyDeleteNow since it's apparently the season for blame trips (isn't it always, especially if you are a reptile) I have to confess to a personal failure that has stood for many years; I completely misunderstood the meaning of "libertarianism" - silly me, I thought it actually had something t do with "liberty". But now, with a little bit of help from Billie Bragg and a lot from reading the Killer C, I have finally come to understand that actually, it's all about immunity and impunity.
Immunity in general for anything you think or say (and with reptiles, it appears that thinking and saying are mutually exclusive) and complete impunity for anything you actually do. And any place that doesn't achieve this essential duality is clearly guilty of thought and speech suppression and the abominable 'cancel culture'.
And here is a very clear statement by Killer C that illustrates this:
"The fading of liberal philosophy, centred upon limited government and individual rights, should be cause for alarm. Without such ideas democracies can become stupid and vicious. Incredibly, serious people are debating whether COVID vaccine should be made compulsory."
So, above all, Killer C wants immunity for his lies and impunity for refusing a vaccine so that he and many other people can go freely about infecting others and causing suffering and even death. Yep, that's the true spirit of "libertarianism" right there.
Oh, and you wouldn't reckon that "Liberal (as in the Menzies Party) philosophy" was just about one modern human lifetime old, would you. You'd think it has been part of Western (Judeo-Christian) Civilisation for at least 2500 years, wouldn't you. You'd never think that one of its founder nations had believed it necessary to exercise 'cancel culture' on its own citizens and execute the likes of Socrates for "impiety" and "corrupting the young". Or that an Xian "church" would murder an Englishman for the appalling crime of translating the bible into vernacular English. And they had such "limited government" back then: a king (or equivalent) and a few courtiers and nobles and that was it.
I suspect Menzies called his creation 'Liberal' for the same reason that a certain chemicals manufacturer painted one of it's sheds visible from the Pacific Highway a nice green with a mural of native birds on the side. Those not inclined to observe closely would not recognise it's true nature.
DeleteA lot of time can be wasted trying to understand what terms like liberalism and libertarianism actually mean only to find that they are useless in understanding the loons.
The main thing is that sitting atop a mountain of privilege it's easy to say people are free to act as they please. The fact is that your wealth, housing, health and age all affect your ability to exercise the freedoms Killer is talking about.
If your freedom to do something infringes on someone else's freedom, let's say to stay alive, it starts to look like a privilege not a freedom.
If we were talking about the freedom to drive on the footpath or piss in the municipal water supply no one would have any problem understanding their societal obligations (maybe not Killer) but more complex issues just escapes the bone-heads. If they cannot immediately understand the problem they assume there is no problem to address.
Yeah, all they want is their unchallenged immunity and impunity - not that they'd ever admit that, or even realise it.
DeleteWithout ever having researched the question, Bef, I always thought Menzies named his party after the Pommie Liberals (defunct since early 1900s IIRC); Robert Gordon being such an Anglophile (woops there's another Anglo- word).
BTW, thanks for that Rolling Stone link, in a smallish way it puts me in mind of a description of chess: "An ocean in which an elephant may bathe and a gnat can drink". Lots more cherry-picking could be done there.