The pond really must stop waking up early and listening to the BBC world service - Afghanistan a complete and comprehensive disaster, and so many actors to blame as corruption confronts barking mad fundamentalism - we can all drink a beer from the hollow prosthetic leg of failure, and perhaps even score a meaningless medal - Syria an ongoing mess, Ethiopia in chaos, Israeli Arabs discriminated against and murdered, Greece ravaged by flames and record heat, Hong Kong ruined and a TV presenter waylaid by the malignant Chinese emperor's minions, and then, just as the pond yearns for respite and peace, the local news cranks into gear with fresh tales of Gladys's follies …
And then oh dear sweet long absent lord, the pond has to turn to the reptiles and deal with the likes of the hole in the bucket man.
It's true that on a scale of disasters, it's an extremely minor one, and the pond is grateful for that, but still, it's burdensome and irritating, especially as our Henry was determined to be particularly obnoxious this day …
Is there any way to start on an up note? Well a Melbourne friend with a deep sense of irony sent in these snaps …
Melbourne is open and Swanston street is alive ... alive, I tells ya ... at least as alive as the great days of On the Beach ...
There's nothing like a dose of irony to get the pond ready to tackle the day. Sure the 'roaches invaded Melbourne and did them down, but now we're all back in the same stinking, soggy mess ...
And now to business, and to climate denialist Henry ...
By way of preface, the pond should note that our Henry isn't even a bootlace on the Blundstone boots of science.
He is, in short, if the pond might put it in a polite, deferential way, a clueless fuckwit of the first water, so there's no actual point in engaging with him. There will be no science here, here no science ...
Rather, it's just a herpetological study ... a matter of observing the hole in the bucket man in his natural denialist habitat.
If he had an ounce of intellectual honesty, he'd just say that climate science is a hoax, a religion practised by secularists, that he's at one with all the other climate science denialists, and there's an end to the matter. It could all be done and dusted in a par.
But being intellectually dishonest, our Henry has to dress his denialism with a lavish display of pompous bullshit ...
You see? Not an actual word about science, and you wouldn't use his blathering to wipe a scientist's butt, and perhaps recognising this, the reptiles decided to insert at this point a click bait video of a suffering Scotty from marketing ...
Well the pond defanged that Sky News nonsense with an inert screen cap. If it wanted a break from Henry's bullshit, it would have turned to Cathy Wilcox, who has been running hot since her return ...
There's a loon rabbiting on about mythology in the lizard Oz. Quick, whatever you do, don't read the 'unprecedented' 'disaster movie' headlines ...
Instead let's all stay calm and continue with the bullshit denialism ...
What's ironic about this? Our hole in the bucket man's ideas are coming to the pond, not via some quintessentially theological concept, but by the full to overflowing, scientifically designed intertubes ... and if the pond can trust the science of digits, it sure as hell can trust the science of climate over the senile ramblings of a silly old loon.
Clearly the reptiles felt the same way because they must have thought that our Henry needed reinforcements, so they sent in a click bait video of the climate science denialist parrot ...
Again the pond rendered it harmless and inert; again the pond thought it might offer a Wilcoxian alternative ...
And so to the last gobbet, and it occurred to the pond that for all the ostentatious parade of book learning and an ability to wander through the past, our Henry was essentially a dim-witted man, sure in his own sense of self-importance, but clueless as to his fundamental ignorance, and his unwillingess to pay the slightest attention to what scientists might be observing and reporting on ... instead dismissing modelling with an airy wave of his hand, and getting on with the sort of nonsense he's comfortable scribbling about, thereby confusing climate science with apocalyptic millenarianism ...
How else to explain tosh that begins the next gobbet, with the claptrap talk of "clad in the trappings of science" ... as a cheap shorthand way of having to avoid dealing with climate scientists and actual science ... so that our hole in the bucket man might instead blather on about the apocalypse ...
It's impossible to conjure up the profound irritation that our Henry produced in the pond this day, but it must be roughly equivalent to someone in medieval times suffering from the bubonic plague, and listening to some fundamentalist loon that the only thing to fear was fear itself ...
If nothing else, it deserves a final Wilcox ...
Now what else have the reptiles got to offer in these end times?
Well yes, cue an unstoppable sense of despair, but in the middle of sundry crises, still with the war on the ABC, and from a light weight doofus of the pathetic Flint kind? Ah Jim lad, that it should come to this ...
The war on the ABC was at the top of the digital page too - how quickly the reptiles bounced back from their YouTube banning, how they continue on in their insouciant way ...
And lo, there was the ongoing obsession with New Zealand and its response to the virus, when the lizard Oz editorialist might have more profitably spent time wondering how much more fucked News South Wales might get before things get better ...
Well, the pond started the day by waking up to the latest dismal news from Afghanistan, so it might as well end this piece the same way with more dismal news ...
Clearly the reptiles could see where this was really heading, so they turned to a snap to ease the pain ...
Did somebody mention Herat? It's under attack?
Oh well, the reptiles , in their usual sloppy, lazy way, were running with an editorial that first saw daylight on the 11th August, (paywall limited) and in terms of current events in Afghanistan, that's light years ago ...
Did someone mention Kandahar?
There's many people and countries responsible for the mess - not least Pakistan, and not excusing the United States - but The Economist is in the grip of a serious delusion thinking that barking mad fundamentalists are going to be swayed by a few words from English ponces far removed from the battle ...
Yes, yes, we know all that, and yet here we are ... and all the pond can do is avert eyes, and turn to an infallible Pope for some discordant humour ...
Some forms of misery put other forms of misery into perspective ...
Ah yes, watch the horror movie video from the sidelines, twenty years ending in epic failure, and all the US government is concerned about is preventing the sort of PR disaster images that came out during the fall of Saigon ...
Afghanistan is fucked, and the planet is fucked - how good of our hole in the bucket man to play his humble role in the fucking - and instead of watching that click bait disaster porn movie, the pond preferred to end on a happier note with the immortal Rowe, with more happy Rowe here ...
That was a real gem by Holely Henry: the kind of rambling for which the name Whiffle Piffle was created.
ReplyDeleteBut hey, it's recently been postulated that good old Terra could support surface life - ie us - for maybe as much as 1 to 1.5 billion years into the future. Just imagine, another 1 billion years of a species that produces millions of Henry Ergasses every decade. And no matter how hard they try, they'll always die before they run out of bland stupidity to bloviate on about.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/01/earth-wont-die-soon-thought
I'd like to see that "Melbourne is open!" image framed a'la Morrison's "I stopped these" celebratory plaque.
ReplyDeleteThe Melbourne one could be framed for the Premier's desk, titled "Gladys did this".
Ah the plaques that could be made...
A double one for the Onion Eater and Peta with a healthy environment pictured, and a dedication stating "We Stopped This".
Aw geez, time to work out what takeaway we order tonight...
These days I prefer my takeaway for lunch, vc, and just throw a few veggies into the steamer for dinner. Plenty of time for leisurely digestion then without distracting from all those really beaut nighttime tv shows. So what did you order ?
DeleteNot much you can actually do about the Henry, is there?
ReplyDeleteWe know none of the earlier predictions of the end of the world failed - because there are billions of us walking around on that world.
The Henry does concede that that Christianity did generate the odd prophecy. Well, persons claiming to be Christians. There are many, right now, putting prophecy on the internet that Donald Trump will be President of the USA next week, and they will tell you that God told them that, t’other morning.
If the Henry did not want to give any credence to those who have studied the atmosphere of this world, and their concerns for what is happening to the climate that is greatly modulated by that atmosphere, he might have speculated on elements of basic biology - that humans are reproducing themselves to an extent for which there are no ancient records, no convenient ‘whattabouts’ to be gleaned from otherwise deservedly obscure bits of vellum, or chunks of rock, and each new human demands much more of this environment than their predecessors of even a century ago.
He might have speculated, as, inter alia (bit of fancy other language there - see, anyone can do it) the geneticist Chris Mason has recently proposed, that we do as other ‘social’ organisms do, when they sense they are at the limits of the carrying capacity of their local environment, and send part of the hive off to another environment. Mason does explain that the humans we send off to find another planet will have to have their DNA extensively re-written, but, well, y’know - technology not taxes.
The real value of proposals like Mason’s (‘The Next 500 Years:Engineering life to reach new worlds’ $49.99 at ‘Readings’, and probably other Australian booksellers. A delightfully old-fashioned price for a work set a long time into the future) is that, right now, we are on the best planet we know of, and, whaddya know - we are fairly well-suited to it. And it is still possible for many of us to have a pleasant life on it, if we could just apply a little of that intelligence we are supposed to have evolved (or which was seeded into us by our Creator - take your pick of its origins) to find a way to stop shitting in our own nest.
As others have observed - there is no Planet ‘B’, and, apropos Mason’s thought that we have some kind of duty to maintain our lineage (or the lineage that we will need to seek out Planet ‘C’) - nothing else sentient will miss us when we go. Depending on what takes us out, the neurotically dependent species that some of us keep as ‘pets’ will readily revert to their original genetic makeup, to continue their own work in reducing world biodiversity, or that part of it that survives a hotter planet Earth, but that’s it.
Nah, much better to settle back, and smile at the silly, superstitious predecessors. After all, if they were so wrong - what makes these atmospheric scientist wallies think they know anything?
The NASA scientists reckon that the bunch of galaxies and other space objects that our telescopes enable us to see are about 13.7 billion years old. Planet Terra (aka "the Earth") is about 4.54 billion years old - about 1/3 the age of our "universe" - and good old Homo saps saps has been around for about 200,000 years (though some think for maybe 300,000). So really, we haven't even been around for the blink of an eye as these things go.
DeleteSo, are we the only ? If you look at all the chance happenings that formed Planet Terra and gave it the chemistry, the atmosphere and the overall climate that it has, and has had, then it wouldn't be at all hard to think that indeed we are quite alone in that small corner of total existence that we call "the universe". After all, 4.5 billion years to finally produce us and the whole catalogue of "life" (if one considers viruses "life").
Just think, cellular life first appeared about 3.8 billion years ago (about 750 million years after Planet Terra formed), but they were single cell prokaryotes. (cells without gene holding nuclei). And then eukaryotes - cells with nuclei and mitochondria - evolved about 2 billion years ago and kicked off the 'complex life' evolution that produced us just that vanishingly short while ago.
And now we are doing our level best to end it all within the next 100 years, and maybe even, with luck, produce a second Venus. Hoo boy, them "gods" knew what they were doing when they created us and then had their faithful expound theories of total destruction. But only of life, not of "the universe" which probably still has an appointment with "heat death" in a 100 billion or so years.
What an adventure, eh ?
oh - now that I look at it, better to write ' We know none of the earlier predictions of the end of the world were true'.
ReplyDeleteNo, they weren't actually "true" as such, Chad, but neither did they "fail" either: they brought in, inter alia (ooops) the believers with their contributory tithes and lives and that's all that can be reasonably asked for.
Delete