How cruel they've been, how unkind. I luvs ya all, and what do you get back in response?
A couple of wags at Politico scribbled ...
Twenty-nine days after it was launched, Donald Trump’s blog, once hailed by fans as his triumphant return to the internet, was taken down on Wednesday.
It was just less than three Scaramuccis old. Noah’s Ark had a longer run.
Others made a real Python meal of it ...
But surely the death of one blog is a tragedy, whereas the death of a million blogs is a mere statistic. Whatever, the pond feels the affair deeply, sensing its own mortality, and hastens to add that Loon Pond is just auxiliary to the broader effort to spread loonacy far and wide in the world ...
And so back to the solitary, lonely life of the blogger, with only the odd cartoon to offer a little light each gloomy day ...
Friday is, of course, our Henry hole in the bucket day. Last Friday, preparing for winter, the pond missed our Henry and his hole, and truth to tell, the pond was happy to stay none the wiser ... but today the pond is better prepared for a bleak winter, and nobody should attempt to cancel our Henry on a regular basis ...
Sheesh, couldn't the reptiles have picked a better snap for our Henry? Did they have to show the mountains of the moon, or the Martian valley in this case? Did they have to point out the ugly scarring of a once beautiful landscape? Well, it's beautiful if you grew up on the northwest slopes and plains ... or it once was, a bit like the Hunter Valley used to be beautiful ...
Never mind, the pond is always up for a bout of climate science denialism ... why, it might even keep our Henry away from the classics ...
Uh huh ... good old dinkum clean Oz coal, oi, oi, oi, done down by inferior substitutes. As for caring for the children, fie, fuck the children, it's the dinkum Oz thing to do ... after all, climate science is merely one of a number of competing religions ...
Yep, not a single reference to Latin or Greek, just a flinging around of a fancy "aporias" ... oh yes, our Henry is cunning in the way he slips in his astonishing intellect, as in the celebrated aporia whereby a Cretan declares all Cretans to be liars ...
Or perhaps whereby a climate science denying reptile declares all coal to be good ...
Indeed, indeed, fancy standing in the way of coal, fancy halting the relentless wreaking of havoc by dinkum Australian coal ... and even worse, fancy halting the chance to ship dinkum Oz coal to the devious Chinese.
Here, have another cartoon ...
At this point, the pond, being greedy, usually goes looking for seconds ...
Say what? They've sent a senior cricket writer to talk about the plague affecting the children? And Richo seems to have failed to have read that story about our Gladys's finances, as featured in the Nine rags ... no, not the $4 billion blowout in the metro rail project, but the yarn about the budget cover-up which only got recycled in exotic places such as The Mandarin ...
Never mind, the pond left the lizard Oz editorialist to mourn Benny, and went in search of other reptile titillations ...
Good old ABC, but then the ABC has never been the pond's ABC, and in any case, that's just an excuse to recycle a couple of Crikey stories ...
Of course it's hard to know which is more problematic. The ABC trying to hush the story, or SloMo thinking he speaks in tongues to an imaginary friend ... but if you were inside the paywall and did click on that Crikey story link, you'd get transported back to an even earlier Crikey yarn ...
Oh it's rich stuff, and there's more at Crikey, at least if you can get behind the paywall, but it's not really fair of the pond, because it's not dinkum reptile ... so for its seconds, the pond turned to the bromancer, as it often does ...
It's fair to say that this is just a token outing for the bromancer, a standard celebration of SloMo and the way he helped that deviant kiwi leftist back on the straight and narrow, ready to embark on the war with China ...
Say what? The United States is a democracy? Isn't it being primed for a Myanmar-style coup? How else will the Donald return in the pomp and grandeur expected in his August coronation? How else will the QAnon prophecy be fulfilled?
You see? The bromancer still manages to deliver, what with deploring climate change gestures and rhetoric, and getting agitated about ignorant Americans woefully unaware of the many splendid steps dinkum reptiles have urged the government to take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ... and to be fair, the government has responded in enormously responsible fashion ...
It never gets old and it's way better than the SloMo snap the reptiles used for the bromancer piece ...
You see, that's why the bromancer is a relentless giver. Even in a harmless meet and greet, the bromancer can be relied on for a good fulmination ... as if all the talk of the glories of western civilisation might induce some to see a racist nation led by a reactionary government that has done nothing on climate, prodded on by a Murdochian press featuring the likes of the bromancer and our Henry celebrating the wonders of clean Oz coal (oi, oi, oi) ...
Ah, yes, never mind the fucking of the planet, just deliver a little alliteration of the 'cacophony of caricature inaccuracy" kind, as if conjuring up the claptrap crap the reptiles regularly regurgitate ...
You know, the fustian bombast, bunk, baloney and bull about cheap applause on climate gestures ... because it's the reptile way ...
Meanwhile, it's not just the planet on fire. According to Rowe, with more Rowe here, there are arses on fire everywhere...
A poor effort from Henry today. Just a bunch of worn out tropes offered without even the effort to produce a new lie.
ReplyDeleteTacitus obviously offered nothing on the subject or he would know that Indonesian coal doesn't produce "far more" CO2 than good old Ozzie coal.
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/7136424/does-australian-coal-produce-much-lower-emissions-as-the-pm-claimed/
"If we measure CO2 emissions (against) units of (energy), then all coals are indeed pretty closely the same".
Of course, he could be talking about ash, sulphur, moisture and other contaminants but that doesn't fit with the rest of his argument.
Having lived in the Hunter Valley at one time it always pissed me off to hear that I benefitted from the mining industry.
The locals aren't always beneficiaries, just the opposite in fact. Workers often commute in from other areas so the wages get spent a long way from where the damage gets done. My neighbour used to commute around 80km each way from the urban fringe of Newcastle to Wambo near Singleton. It goes without saying that some of the local businesses are very vocal in their support for obvious reasons but it doesn't indicate popular support.
The areas adjacent the open cuts are a wasteland with air quality similar to the worst third world industrial regions. No one seriously expects the pits to be remediated when production ends.
The profits often leave the country with the cargoes. You can have a foreign owned mine loading ore on foreign owned rolling stock, going to a foreign owned port, loaded on foreign owned - - - you get the idea.
Even if the royalties are paid in Australia, they don't get spent locally, the locals see very little in exchange for the damage done.
Apologies for the rant but it worries me that some people buy this sort of propaganda.
"Henry today. ... without even the effort to produce a new lie."
DeleteYep, that's our Henry alright. Maybe somebody should tell him to read N.w Idea so he can get the idea.
However, his theme about how 'we've got to commit crimes otherwise somebody else will commit them instead - and maybe worse' is a truly great reptile/wingnut theme, isn't it. And yet they repeat it and repeat it as though it is a real winner.
I refrained from comment on Dame Groan yesterday, because, I suspect quite unknowingly, she had demonstrated a sound principle of economics - about people making choices about how they satisfy their needs and wants.
DeleteMuch of recent study in economics - popularised in publications like ‘Freakonomics’ - has looked at what the Dame displayed yesterday - that the choices that people say they make, and reasons for, frequently are not the choices they actually make, in secret. Or would have been in secret, except the Dame is not very smart, and Dorothy saw her hoist with her own petard.
Today we have our Henry. As I understand it, sub-editors having fun with minor headlines (or anything else to do with publishing a newspaper) have been efficiencied out of the complement of a newspaper office, so the attempt at a pun - of a decision on mining er - ‘undermining’ democracy may have come from the Henry. Whether it did or not, he does write ‘When the courts heed their (activists) call, our democracy suffers every bit as much as our children’t future wellbeing.’
It is a fair guess that the Henry’s main objective this day was to put ‘aporia’ in print, for the delectation of the learned elites.
Having ‘spent many years in Paris’, what he might have done was guide his readers through the writings of Montesquieu on what has become our modern understanding of the separation of powers, across a legislature, an executive and a judiciary.
Lots of scope for quotes in French there (Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu - to give him his full title - can be readily quotable) and the Henry might have discussed the Baron’s insistence that each of the powers must not venture beyond its own functions.
Within the theme that he has taken up from The Honourable Justice Mordecai Bromberg (who played for St Kilda!) - the Henry might even have discussed the Baron’s thought that, ultimately, the judiciary was the most important of the three powers that he defined. But, then - the Baron was a lawyer, wasn’t he.
Ah - a little late, but the site being coy again - or perhaps part of Covid caution?
DeleteAll Cretans are still liars, you reckon, Chad ?
DeleteThe trouble with the Holely Henry and the Duke de Montesquieu would surely be that invoking him would require some understanding, and not just quoting. Still, that would likely be marginally better than most, if not all, of the other reptiles who have neither understanding, nor good quotes.
As to Groan and what decisons people may actually make, I remember some time ago reading about some psych research into what people really believe versus what they say they believe. It kinda has an echo with Kahneman's fast and slow thinking: people tend to just take in simple ideas and beliefs which, if they can be induced to actually spend a few moments thinking about they will very often discard and go for more sensible ideas.
Which reminded me of a long ago acquaintance who maintained that when people espouse dvck-headed ideas and beliefs, don't try to disabuse them by shoving true information at them, but just courteously ask them questions to allow them to justify their pronouncements. It's amazing, he averred, how many when called on to actually discuss and think about matters, turn out not to believe a word that they've previously spoken.
Courtesy of a bit of a later mind-pop, it came to consciousness that a great many of our ideas and beliefs don't - come via consciousness, that is.
DeleteIt's like our 'native language' vocabulary, most of which we never formally learn - we just pick it up as we go along. An 'average' vocabulary is maybe 60,000 words: 20,000 or so 'active' (ie we use them regularly) and 40,000 'passive' (ie we basically know their meaning when we encounter them, but we seldom use them ourselves).
Now I most assuredly have never looked up 60,000 words in a dictionary so most of them were picked up 'in context' via reading and conversing. And so are a great many of our ideas and beliefs - as anybody would be aware by contemplating the 200,000 years (minus about 100 or so) that without books to learn from or regular schools to attend, nonetheless humans had beliefs and ideas, some of which were very passionately held.
But we can't access an internal list or index of the beliefs and ideas we hold, so if they are never raised and perhaps queried, we never consciously know that we hold them.
Such is life.
Talk about the American Democratics, and The Bromancer would like us to know that: "The liberal left in the Democratic Party conceives of a racist nation led by a reactionary government that has done nothing on climate."
ReplyDeleteWell yep, they've got that right then, haven't they. I guess that comes from having the likes of Michael Flynn and the CIA to advise them - they know, and can recognise, when they're being lied to. So when the Bromancer says: "This cacophony of caricatured inaccuracy led to one of the great atrocities in the US-Australia alliance at a previous G7 meeting, when Obama in Brisbane sandbagged the then prime minister, Tony Abbott, with an abusive, partisan and frequently factually inaccurate speech on Canberra's alleged climate failings." then that puts the N.w Idea folks to shame; none of them have the bare-faced brazenness that creates so illusional a set of lies. Comes from years of reptile existence with the 'survive at all costs' mentality that requires.