The pond knew that there was a vast international conspiracy going down involving the Vatican, but for months has studiously ignored that which had fixated the reptiles ... until now, because things are so dire in the holiday season, and let's face it, all the excitement is elsewhere, watching an entire country melt down ...
At last however the pond had to pay attention, with a report this day by the bouffant one who has been handling the affair, which is to say the vast international conspiracy, for the reptiles ...
Indeed, indeed. As the pond understood the conspiracy, Vatican funds had been used to corrupt, or perhaps entirely pay for, the Victorian police, the Victorian judicial system, and quite possibly the entire Victorian government, and certainly bribed all witnesses involved in the trial of the Pell ... or some such thing, and it was all terribly unfair, and the fix was in, and that's why money had flooded into the country ...
Say what? To date, there has been no evidence produced to show any Vatican money was transferred to influence that trial ...
That's it? That's all she wrote? Zip, nada, nihil? The pond could have stayed on holidays or at least stayed abed, resting, knowing that the Vatican is deeply corrupt, but not in the way the vast international conspiracy would have it ...
And so to the chore of the day, inevitably involving the study of flood waters in quarries with the Caterist ...
Oh, wait, is it just the Caterist promoting the ABC and iView and Killing Eve, a show the pond has avoided watching to date?
Might as well have been, because it'd be more sensible than yet another tedious Caterist outing in the standard reptile/lizard Oz/Chairman Rupert approved attack on the ABC ...
There used to be an old saying, derived from a Bruce Springsteen song, 57 channels and nothing on ...
I bought a bourgeois house in the Hollywood hills
With a truckload of hundred thousand dollar bills
Man came by to hook up my cable TV
We settled in for the night my baby and me
We switched 'round and 'round 'til half-past dawn
There was fifty-seven channels and nothin' on
Well now home entertainment was my baby's wish
So I hopped into town for a satellite dish
I tied it to the top of my Japanese car
I came home and I pointed it out into the stars
A message came back from the great beyond
There's fifty-seven channels and nothin' on ...
In Australia, those lyrics transferred easily to Foxtel. Squillions of channels, and nobody to watch Sky News and its nightly parade of loons.
These days you could include Netflix. Just one channel and squillions of content, and not a show worth watching, unless you happen to be a deeply traumatised older woman and wondered what happened to George Clooney and found him alone on earth in a bundle of tosh (until the usual happens) ...
But there's your Caterist singing a song that's been around since 1992 ...
And there's what's deeply weird, as might be expected from a Caterist expert in the movement of flood waters.
It seems that the ABC is completely useless and does no harm to anybody, and is watched by only a few up against the mightiness known as Foxtel (please, no snickering), and yet at the same time, it is competitively ruinous and should stop it before it goes blind, and should stop competing against commercial news services, because you know, Sky News is deeply fucked, and come to think of it, so is Foxtel ...
What a predictable Murdochian hack and slut he is (the pond is still working on reclaiming the word), and with the logic to match, but at least the last gobbet is to hand ...
Another blank cheque?
But we know all about blank cheques. How the Caterist loves them ...
Conduct roundtables, lectures and seminars and scribble furiously for the lizard Oz about the ABC's blank cheque?
It doesn't get blanker than that ... why not just get back to studying the movement of flood waters in quarries, or perhaps do some more expert climate science? You know, in the spirit of roundtable blank cheques ...
And so to the most tedious chore of all ...
In all this, will the swishing one mention the role that Fox News, the Chairman and News Corp and its barking mad loons played in the whole sorry affair? The pond suspects the Switzer will discreetly step past all that ugliness with a discreet swish ...
But at least there's some spacing between the cartoons right, it's not just a shameless filling up the void with cartoons, there's also gobbets to hand, filling in the gaps like rapid drying spakfilla, chunky bits of meaty swishing goodness ...
Indeed, indeed, he took vast steps towards the epic fucking of the planet, but why would a Switzer worry about that ... and why would he bother to mention the enabling by Fox News, the Chairman, News Corp and all that ...
And now all that remains is to remember that it's always been a two way street between reptiles and the ABC, a love-hate relationship with defectors and traitors. There's Speersy and Karvelas going one way, and here's Switzer of the National going the other way ...
Actually if that last line had read "Fox News support for Trump's unhinged and self-serving attack on the legitimacy of the US government represents a new low", the pond would have been startled and unnerved and might have had to apologise to the swishing Switzer.
As it is, the pond congratulates him on performing passingly well as a coathanger and seafood extender for a hanging and a serving of a few cartoons ... and so here's a few more ...
Hi Dorothy,
ReplyDeleteOne wonders if all the cray cray going on in D.C. is just a result of boredom?
https://nature.berkeley.edu/garbelottoat/wp-content/uploads/brotherton-2015.pdf
It’s as good a theory as any considering what’s going on. Why not dress up as Sitting Bull with US Flag face paint and attack the Capitol building? It might at least dent the overwhelming sense of ennui during COVID-19.
And who knew that there was a Boredom Proneness Scale?
DiddyWrote
Interesting, DW; especially the bit about: "The growing body of research has begun to reveal personality factors associated with conspiracist ideation, suggesting there may be a ‘conspiracy-prone’ personality type (or types)."
DeleteNow for mine, if you are into psychobabbly-stuff, then anything you can't explain just has to be "a personality type (or types)" and hence that "conspiracism is associated with openness to certain types of unusual claims."
Personally, I've found that it's much more commonly associated with closedness to certain types of useful and valid claims - mainly the rational, sensible, logical and scientific ones. But then, by and large, aren't we all ? As Kahneman explains very clearly, life is way too short to tackle every little matter that arises with "slow thinking".
So they just tell us and we believe them. We just do. Especially about glass:
https://newatlas.com/materials/liquid-glass-new-state-matter/
Well, "clarification" from the highly dubitable Dennis: "In October, The Australian reported Vatican investigators were examining at least four transfers [Oh wau, four transfers, not forty-thousand] from the Vatican secretariat, including two from Cardinal Becciu between 2017 and 2018 [Oh wau, a whole two at the incredible rate of one per year] totalling $2m [Just $2 million, not $2.3 billion ?] to a company in Melbourne [oh wau, to a "company" and not to a person ?]. To date there has been no evidence produced to show any Vatican money was transferred to influence that trial."
ReplyDeleteSo, lets get this very straight: not $2.3billion in more than 40,000 transactions over 7 years at an average of $57,500 for each of 15.6 transactions per day and "no evidence produced" about attempting to "influence that trial". Now isn't that just par for the course from a representative of the mob who invented the Vulgate ?