No point in beating about the bush today, time to dive straight in, no time to waste, the dog botherer is in ranting mood, and when he cranks up, really fires and gets going, it's always a bit like that Oscar Wilde rocket ... a fine spluttering and then the mud. From the get go, the dog botherer was on song ... as soon as a bonkers spouter accuses others of spouting bonkers stuff, you know it's going to be a bonkers spouts fest ...
Fine words, fine thoughts, deep philosophical understanding - strangle the pond in the shallow waters before we get too deep - but as the pond gazed at that opening, a rant at a royal with the pond wondering at the rant and the royal, it already it felt it had wasted more than a moment, and would go on to waste more, and sure enough ...
Yes, the reptiles seized the moment to insert a video.
WATCH THE VIDEO. Help the clicks. Feed the reptiles.Waste your life. None of it means diddly squat - the dog botherer especially - and yet here we are ...
The entire point of the dog botherer rant sold down the river by an invitation to help with the clicks and watch the Royals.
Never mind, it's time to move on from the royals and soon enough the dog dog botherer will pivot into angry old man rant, wherein it's all the fault of the millennials ...
Or they might think that the dog botherer is a fuckwit, and wasting time with him would be utterly insane, or perhaps just inane ... rather like the dog botherer's son ...
Kenny is a staunchly neo-conservative, anti-progress, anti-worker defender of the status quo. He is an unrelenting apologist for the Liberal Party. He was one of Alexander Downer’s senior advisers at the time of the Iraq War. He’s been known to argue for stubborn, sightless inaction on climate change. He spits at anyone concerned with such trivialities as gender equality, environmental issues or labour rights from his Twitter account on a daily basis. Recently, he characterised criticism of the lack of women in Tony Abbott’s Cabinet as a continuation of the Left’s “gender wars”. He is a regular and fervent participant in The Australian’s numerous ongoing bully campaigns against those who question its editorial practices and ideological biases. The profoundly irresponsible, dishonest, hate-filled anti-multiculturalist Andrew Bolt has recently referred to Kenny on his blog as “a friend”.
And it’s a jokey picture of a bestial embrace that I should be afraid of discovering online? (Junkee here)
By golly the pond loved that rant, but there's one problem with it of course. The dog botherer routinely made such a fool of himself on Twitter that he had to give it up, and he's brooded about it ever since, and no doubt there'll be more brooding ...
Actually at this point, the pond wondered if the dog botherer himself ever did much hole digging or fence mending or farming ...
That coffee machine for starters ... and that book ... andthose paws look like they spend much of their time in a TV studio or pounding on a keyboard in an agitated state fueled by too much coffee ... and so to the obligatory mention of virtue signalling - here disguised as "virtue-signals", and climate alarmism, and sure enough, the fear and loathing of Twitter ...
Uh huh, and even more tragically, there's not a dog botherer on Twitter because of a lack of impulse control. But that's what's needed for a decent rant, so let's have a final burst ...
Pure undiluted chip on shoulder resentment, a dog botherer classic, all heat and envy and no light, and in the end perhaps a dawning realisation by a luddite dinosaur that the young inherit the earth, whatever the condition it's left in by previous users and abusers of the dog botherer kind, and there's sweet fuck all to be done about it...
And so on to another ranter in fine ranting form ...
Killer Creighton has steadily moved up the pond's reptile ranking chart ... and who better than expert scientist, the Killer himself, to announce that all science is bunk?
Indeed, indeed, torture a reference to the Woodstock music festival enough, and you can produce nonsense sufficient to satisfy Killer's ideological priorities (and his deep, traumatised fear of masks) ...
Indeed, indeed, and it's a shame, a real shock, to discover that our Killer has been brutally silenced the entire time he's urged on the killing fields ...
One thing's certain from all this. If it's Killer writing, it isn't science, and if it's science, it isn't the Killer writing ... compare and contrast:
Killer: During the second one in the late 1960s, which, on today’s US population, killed the equivalent of 300,000 Americans, far from locking people down, 400,000 people attended Woodstock festival, where “staying safe” was unlikely top of mind for many.
Reuters: Joel Rosenman, co-producer of Woodstock, told Reuters via email:
“Woodstock was not partying in defiance of pandemic containment measures, because at the time of Woodstock, there was no pandemic, and there were no containment measures to defy. In the months following the December-January peak of the pandemic, the flu all but disappeared. By mid-‘69, any preoccupation with the virus had given way to widespread unconcern. Media coverage had dwindled to virtually zero. As far as the nation was concerned, the pandemic was in the rear-view mirror. It was during this time, not during the pandemic months of the previous winter, that my co-producers, John Roberts, Artie Kornfeld, Mike Lang and I created Woodstock—without so much as a thought about ‘pandemic.’ It wasn’t until the next flu season, several months after Woodstock, that we all found ourselves in a horrifying déjà flu.”
And so to finish with what the pond likes to call the "Ned" Everest challenge. Just making it to the end of a "Ned" piece is a triumph of perseverance over wisdom ...
As a bonus, it seems that the reptiles are aware of the risk of tedium, and have turned back to illustration, though the cult master is still sorely missed by the pond ...
Around this point some might ask why "Ned"? Why not some other reptile blathering on about Fortress Australia? They'd probably be shorter ...
... but it takes guts to stay the course with "Ned" ...
At this point, the reptiles knew what was needed ... a photo of men in a lab ...
It reminded the pond of an ancient time when it was dealing with Japanese executives about how to represent a scientist. The Japanese executives insisted that white coats must be worn at all times, which would have looked remarkably silly ... but how else was the audience to know that they were being presented with expert scientists?
Sorry for that distraction, the journey is difficult enough already, and so back to "Ned" ...
Indeed, indeed ... and just to reinforce the point, there was another scientific looking dude inserted into the story ...
Perhaps he would have looked more comfortable with a lump of coal in paw?
The pond thought a different sort of illustration might help with the journey ...
The problem of course is that the reptiles hadn't bargained on things turning out this way, and "Ned" - along with Dame Slap, Dame Groan and sundry others - has been traumatised. How bad does it get for "Ned"? We shall see, but there's still a long road ahead, fraught and dangerous ...
Indeed, indeed, but eventually we will get to a deeper trauma ...
The truth is that the reptiles are confused. Killer on one side, urging on the killing fields, "Ned" on the other, wringing paws and sighing "what to do, oh what to do" ... and here's where it really starts to unravel ...
See that? Such is "Ned's" despair that he should end with Anthony moaning and whining. But it gets worse. Poor "Ned" spends the last two pars tossing in more Anthony, without a right of reply, without any answer, just the raw critique left lying there in the reptile sun ...
And there you have it ... the reptile dreaming in tatters, fiscal wrecking going on, a lack of a big-picture vision ... or even the overall picture that it's better that a few die so that the rest can fly with Virgin ...
But let us not end with the overall picture, because the immortal Rowe was on hand to deal with another matter not covered in this reptile survey this day ... with more handy Rowe always available here ...
Doggy Bov: "Remember how they destroyed the entire greyhound racing industry overnight ...?"
ReplyDeleteQue ? Well greyhound racing was certainly closed down in Tasmania by the pandemic, but:
"Australia is one of only eight countries in the world with a commercial greyhound racing industry — Australia is by far the biggest. "
https://animalsaustralia.org/issues/greyhound-racing.php
Does anybody have the faintest idea what the Bovvy Boy is on about ?
Troy Grant was the only casualty in the shutdown.
DeleteA couple of the in-laws are in the industry (they do rehome or keep the retired ones) including an administrative role in NSW and they saw it as not much more than a blip on the radar.
Thanks, Bef. Afterwards I did have a minor mind-pop (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mind-pops/) about Mike Baird in NSW.
DeleteIt must be my day for mind-pops, here's another:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLQ0biK-ZgA
Sorry.
If the ‘Killer’ wishes to cherry-pick, it would help if he could recognise what was a good cherry.
ReplyDeleteHe draws on the ‘American Institute for Economics (sic) Research’. An institute with a high-sounding title. Not easy to find under that name, but an ‘American Institute for Economic Research’ pops up, and, yes, amongst its ‘Senior Research Fellows’ it counts one Phillip W Magness.
Phillip W identifies himself as an ‘economic historian’ - which allows him to assert extreme libertarian opinions on just about anything, because the AIER is so far out on the libertarian right that many other ‘think tanks’, who claim to be broadly of the same inclination, are making efforts to distance themselves from much of the thinking that seeps from that particular tank. The ‘Wiki’ has interesting detail on the origins and attitudes of the AIER.
But, for ‘Killer’ - rather than go to the trouble of attempting to dismantle the work from Imperial College (there’s probably a bit of difficult maths in there) - quick trawl of the more dubious ‘think tanks’ offers up some spiny quotes.
Admittedly, he did start out citing Ronald Coase. I suspect that is the only part of Coase’s work he is at all familiar with, and, even at that - the words that Coase wrote down are ‘if you torture the data enough, nature will always confess.’ They are contained in a lecture Coase gave in 1981 ‘How should economists choose?’, which has been reprinted several times, in different books. So, if the ‘Killer’ is not familiar with Coase’ actual quote - can we assume he is not familiar with that lecture - which might have helped him to, uh - choose a defensible position on management of pandemic.
Meanwhile, parts of this country have a plague of mice. Which demonstrates the rates at which populations of organisms can grow, when there is food, opportunity, and no effective control on that proliferation. But mice take several weeks to produce the next lot of offspring, perhaps 6-10 at a time. Viruses - much shorter generation time, many more copies - but the principles are no different, and the equations can be run on your laptop, if you really need to convince yourself.
We've domesticated the felines too well, Chad, that's why only the feral ones are any use:
ReplyDeleteCats at work: US city uses 1,000 feral felines to fight rats
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/5/12/cats-at-work-us-city-uses-1000-feral-felines-to-fight-rats
That's Chicago. But even the ferals are a bit suss nowadays.
As to good ol' Killer, well he's just a very much lesser Henry. Henry, as you have pointed out from time to time, is wont to quote some obscure reference that he alone has read and, of course he has taken, and believed. every word literally. So no, I don't reckon the Killer would really have read a single word of Coase - or if by some misadventure he did, he wouldn't have understood a single word of it.
But that's the reptile way: they can always find somebody - even if only a nobody - to quote. And given that, as I may have pointed out before, nearly 130million books have been printed since the type started moving back in 1455 until 2010, there's isn't much that somebodies haven't already commented on in erudite depth.
"A surgical mask in a park..." writes Kenny.
ReplyDelete"Department of Health data shows confirmed flu cases have fallen from more than 300,000 cases last year to a meagre 21,215 this year. “We were on track for a normal flu season or potentially a severe season until the COVID restrictions were implemented,” Dr Khorshid told The Australian newspaper.
“It is important that we build on this number and try and keep influenza cases under control next year and beyond.
“If we learn the lessons of high vaccination rates, improved hygiene and a level of social distancing, including wearing masks in public when unwell and not attending work unwell, we could see a lasting improvement in influenza rates and deaths."(https://ama.com.au/articles/flu-deaths-plummet-during-pandemic)
So, masks not only help in minimising Covid.
Kenny, continued:
"The digital millenials would not know how we get fish into their sushis" but presumably his toddler was told that the cattle were being taken off to be killed. Perhaps he was even taken along to witness the process.
And Ioannidis, how would he know that most research findings are false? How did he check?
In the early days - about a decade or so ago - I was much in favour of Ioannidis because he was making serious criticisms of the whole process of science publishing, and especially of so much publishing being in the hands of 'for profit' organisations which tended to skimp on review but also on the process of 'peer review' itself.
DeleteReview by self-nominated 'scientists' who really didn't have the time, and often lacked the knowledge and skills, to make serious assessments of a veritable flood of scientific 'papers'. I thought he was pretty much on the ball with his criticisms and a lot of so-called 'science' was little short of opinionated opinionism, and unfortunately that's still very true.
Less true in the 'physical sciences' (physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology etc) but still the 'review' process wasn't working properly there, either.
But then, Ioannidis turned out to be a arrogant sod, convinced or his own infallible accuracy, and we lost a serious commenter on science and gained an arrogant ponce. He's still right about most of the 'mental' sciences though (psychology, sociology etc) and about the pretend sciences (eg economics) and sadly about the medical sciences (how many actually useless if not outright harmful drugs and treatments are claimed to be 'scientifically proven').
So, still lots of problems, and now we know that Ioannidis is one of them.
The only sensible thing to be said about the Doggy Bov, is that he provides a serious judgement on the people who hired him. And not counting the reptiles, that's principally Alexander Downer and Malcolm Turnbull. Says it all.
ReplyDeleteDo love his take on Prince Harry and Meghan, though: "Hypocrisy matters; like living the life of inherited privilege and then claiming victimhood..." That Harry had no choice as to the life he was born into, that nonetheless, he did serve his country willingly and well, and that Harry has actually rejected his life of "born privilege" is forever beyond the ken of Kenny. Not that I'm altogether in favour of Harry, but I can at least understand that the "privilege" he was born into has its costs in human terms.
Then we get to a lovely act of "attribution and projection" from Doggy Bov (a characteristic trademark of the reptiles): "Like Harry, they [millenials] have strong opinions about quandaries they do not understand, spout slogans about documents they have never read, and frame their positions on issues according to what others will think it says about them." Yep, just a perfect description of the Boverer himself; well done again, mate, you do Strop proud.