Lately the pond has taken to scouring the digital front page of the lizard Oz, looking for the newly announced and hailed by idiots Murdochian approach to climate science ...
And yet there, right below the lizard Oz contributor who occasionally moonlights in a political role, right in plain sight, was the joyous news that fraudulent climate denialists could keep on keeping on, and the Bjorn-again one was once again slouching towards Surry Hills ...
As if in the new utopian world where the Murdochians allegedly went with the science, there could never again be room for Bjorn-again moments assuring the readership that all was well with the planet, things were getting safer, and never you worry about any of that ... and done, it has to be said, with remarkable brevity and the aid of a few snaps of the disaster porn kind...
Oh the pond can match that snap with a cartoon ...
But back to Bjorn, and, it has to be noted, another snap offering comfort and reassurance ...
Indeed, indeed, people die in their basements in New York, but it's all good. Everything's business as usual folks, nothing to see here, move along, just some faux Bjorn statistics ... it's just New York wanting to prove yet again that it's the biggest and the best and way ahead of everywhere else ...
Always with the firsts New York? The biggest and the best? Nathan's as an example of fine cuisine? It really can get a little tiresome ...
Phew, talk about an urgent need for soothing words from the Bjorn-again one ... but what was remarkable was how feeble was the effort, and the way that this time the reptiles used disaster porn photos to bolster the piece, and even more bizarrely imported it from the WSJ ...
That's it? That's all the Bjorn-again wrote?
And somebody should have spoken to the lizard Oz editor. Why all that disaster porn, when surely we should have seen sunny skies and smiling people? Because everything's for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and trust the Bjorn-again one to explain everything ...
Of course even those few words and faux data sent the lizard Oz readership into a barking mad frenzy in the usual way, howling at the climate denialist moon, and as a pond reader said they rarely saw this action in nonsense, not being a subscriber and not having downloaded a paywall breaker app, the pond decided it would append a few examples at the bottom of this post ...
Meanwhile, it was time to go off with the doddering hole in the bucket man ...
What rambling nonsense is this? Where to start? The notion that Rome at any point resembled a democracy? Machiavelli as an astute observer of the dangers of tyranny, when his very name is used to evoke the most cynical behaviour of apparatchiks ...
And what's the bet, coming as it does from a complacent elderly gentleman, that not a word will be said about the way that the Taliban is alive and well in the United States, and there's not much room between a fundamentalist Xian and a fundamentalist Islamic?
Never mind, on with our Henry ...
Oh yes, it's been a splendid triumph, and happily it turns out that the Islamist talking points have recently been defeated in Mexico by its Supreme Court.
But across the border? What of the Islamic creed in the United States? Why, it's flourishing ... and the pond hasn't even got on to the gerrymandering, voter suppression, fake audits and the rampant abuses offered by billionaires ...
The pond realises that cartoons aren't much of an argument up against the astonishing learning and erudite references of our Henry in peak form, but then whenever the pond reads our Henry it has the curious sensation of watching that yarn about blind men discussing an elephant being acted out ...
Luckily that curious sensation has just a short gobbet to go ...
Oh indeed, indeed, and the lizard Oz may go on publishing the Bjorn-again one, and science might flourish up against the benighted Islamics, and science is certainly at a peak in the United States ...
And so to another curious sensation ...
Reading the lizard Oz editorialist this day, the pond thought it finally had discovered what it must have been like to read Pravda in its hey day ...
It's gold standard Gladys, bjorn yet again in the reptile mind ... and there's just time to slip in a celebratory Rowe, with more Rowe celebrations here ...
It's always the detail that gets the pond ...
But back to the finishing off of that read of Pravda in its hey day ...
Yes, once the reptile killing fields have put the health systems under the hammer, the BAPH states are sure to want to follow ...
And so to that promised reptile reader response to the Bjorn-again one.
A few words of warning, as these are only offered to readers who refuse to get the app that breaks the lizard Oz paywall ... and rightly refuses to pay for the pleasure of reptile company.
The pond capped the comments as they came. There are a few heretics amongst the Bjorn-again lovers, but the pond didn't attempt to tamper with the phenomenon, just set it down, knowing that there was an almost endless supply of this madness available on a daily basis for anyone wanting to howl at the moon with your average reptile climate denialist ...
Oh there'll be talk of hoaxes and denialism thick on the ground ...
Weird shit huh, and so the pond reached for a final cartoon, even if it's the usual masculine image of men in white coats ... the pond will allow it, because the bible ...
"Michael" in the comments below the editorial in The Age today. Could he be a commentere here perchance?
ReplyDelete"For over a year, I subscribed to and read The Australian, mostly articles about climate change. I also spent the same period of time reading up on climate science and the economic benefits of a green economy for Australia. Each day, I would offer my opinions, arguments and evidence dispassionately in the comments sections.
Very few people ever liked any of my several hundred comments, but many readers felt compelled to correct me, to point out that there is no scientific consensus and that scientific organisations write what they need to write to secure funding. Besides it's all too hard, it's not worth the effort. Did I know that Australia only contributes 1.3% of the global carbon emissions? Did I realise that the 2019/20 bushfires were not unprecedented?
All of this is coming from somewhere, of course. Have a read of any articles in The Australian on climate change by Chris Kenny, Chris Mitchell or Terry McCrann, for example, and you quickly realise who is feeding the frenzy.
I was always amused by these journalists' frequent readiness to disdainfully dismiss the views of the vast majority of climate scientists around the world but to grasp hold of anyone, regardless of their dubious scientific background, who shared their ideological bent. It was sad and desperate stuff, but it puffed up their view that they could see, from their armchair, what mainstream science couldn't.
On several occasions, those sharing their thoughts in the comments section offered me the unsolicited advice to go off and have a read of one of those writers lurking on the periphery. Often, I did, but I also read the peer reviews which was even more interesting.
Sometimes, I didn't need to search far for these writers they recommended because they are often given voice in the pages of The Australian. I clicked on the homepage for The Australian earlier this morning and one of the key opinion pieces is by Bjorn Lomborg. This time I won't read, yet again, about how climate change is not really a problem, Bjorn.
No evidence yet that The Australian has changed its tack on reporting climate change and no risk yet that I will be tempted to part with $40 a month.
Sadly, the most impactful thing I have ever done for the climate change movement was cancelling my subscription to The Australian."
He'd somehow have to have heard of the Pond to become "one of us".
DeleteHmmm. Now my alzheimered brain can't/won't recall how I first heard of DP and the Pond. It was a long time ago though.
Forty bucks a month!? Who knew fucking the planet would cost so much?
DeleteThese days 'The Age' costs $3.60 per issue, or $25.20 for a full 7 day week (only $3.60 for me though because I only buy Thursday's). Once upon a time, The Age might have been worth $3.60 a day, but back then it only cost 40c.
DeleteSo who's going to pay for The Age now ? More people than pay for the Herald Sun, apparently. What does the SMH cost now ?
It wasn't so very long ago that Bjornagain was lecturing us about how global warming was saving a few tens of thousands of lives per year of people who, in the future, wouldn't die of cold because we were overheating the planet instead. Of course he didn't calculate how many additional lives would be lost to increased heat because of global temperature rise and he didn't tell us why we just don't call in the Op-shops and provide all the people in cold climate areas with free warm clothes.
ReplyDeleteBut that's Lomborg for you.
And now he wants to tell us that technology and infrastructure is saving us from floods. Wau. But he hasn't calculated the total expense over a thousand or two years to add it to the overall cost of doing nothing about climate change/global warming.
I wonder why not.
So, Holely Henry would like to tell us: "When Australians woke up on September 12, 2001, to images if the twin towers collapsing ..." Hmmm. Now the time difference between New York and Australian Eastern time is that we are 14 hours ahead of New York. So, if we "wake up and turn on the tv" at, say 7:00am EST on the 12th, then the time in New York is 17:00 one day earlier - ie the 11th.
ReplyDeleteNow actually: "The first tower to be struck was the North Tower at 8.46 am (Eastern time, 1.46 pm UK time), collapsing almost two hours later at 10.28 am. The South Tower was hit at 9.03 am Eastern Time, and actually collapsed first at 9.59 a.m." Now New York 10:28am + 14 = 00:28 am on the 12th in Australia.
https://theoneworldnews.com/americas/when-were-the-twin-towers-built-and-what-time-did-they-collapse/
Fair nuff, nobody in Melbourne would still be up and awake at 28 minutes past midnight (there's nothing open after pub closing at 10:00pm anyway). But what about Sydney ? In the Aussie city that almost never sleeps surely lots of people would have been watching the tower collapse as it actually happened (well, maybe a second or two later because of electronic signal transmission time).
But not me, of course, so fair enough, HH, most Australians wouldn't have seen the collapse until they turned on the telly to watch over breakfast (just as well a bowl of Weeties and milk only takes about 90secs in the microwave).
And apart from that, did HH say anything at all worth reading ? How about this: "As the devastating scale of the attack sank in, it became clear that a war was under way against an enemy whose goal was the destruction of the west and its civilisation." Oh wau, that's just really shocking, isn't it.
Now apparently, 2977 people were more of less directly killed in the 9/11 attack. In comparison:
"America’s 20-year war on terror has killed up to 929,000 people and cost over $8 trillion: report"
https://www.nationandstate.com/2021/09/06/americas-20-year-war-on-terror-has-killed-up-to-929000-people-and-cost-over-8-trillion-report/
Not bad, eh: that's 929,000 to 2977 or 312 to one. No problem with that, is there ?
But that's only one instance out of many:
List of modern conflicts in the Middle East
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_conflicts_in_the_Middle_East
So, exactly whose "civilisation" is being destroyed ? Do we all remember how Iraq came into existence ?
The pond did actually see it on the telly and remembers discussing it the next day with a shocked gung-ho American, but it's hard to see how the gung ho worked out well, what with Pakistan a rogue state, Afghanistan a fucked state run by a terrorist gang, and assorted other follies along the way, not least a country brought into being by the British doodling on a map ...
DeleteAs he complained fairly comprehensively in a letter to his wife: “Confound the silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass!” There seems to have been a hint of fascination in the midst of this disgust. If so, it would have fit with the general predilections of the British, who were fixated on androgyny in the most alarming way. (Their slang word for Arabs was Frocks, a means of feminizing the colonial subject that was not quite congruent with the manly skills they were otherwise demanding from the desert warriors.)
Determined to disprove and outlast the Sykeses of the world, Bell made Baghdad her permanent home, helped to organize elections and write a constitution, drew some rather wobbly borders with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, founded the Iraq National Museum, and wrote a study, “A Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia,” that compares well with the best of the Victorian “Blue Books.” She also nurtured and cajoled King Faisal, who founded a constitutional monarchy that lasted from 1921 until 1958—impressive by regional standards. (Faisal was of course a Sunni Arab; the Kurds and the Shia had both proved too turbulent to be trusted with stewardship.) So, was all her effort at nation building a romantic waste? T. E. Lawrence, who was perhaps envious, partly thought so. After learning of her death, he wrote:
That Irak [sic] state is a fine monument; even if it only lasts a few more years, as I often fear and sometimes hope. It seems such a very doubtful benefit—government—to give a people who have long done without.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/06/the-woman-who-made-iraq/305893/
Just one more of the estimated 108 billion Homo Saps Saps estimated to ever have lived that I knew not, but there had to be somebody, I guess, with just a tad more brain than Churchill or T E Lawrence to actually make things work. So thanks for that, DP.
DeleteIn referring to the Morant Bay rebellion, our Henry passed up the opportunity to show the Australian link to the worst of those events, and the legal wrangling that followed, through the Governor of Jamaica, Edward John Eyre.
ReplyDeleteThat is the same Eyre who was an accomplished explorer of southern Australia, although always one with the scent of money in his nostrils.
At age 33 he received a reward of sorts, being appointed Lieutenant-Governor of the South Island of New Zealand. Before he was 40, he was Governor of Jamaica.
In Jamaica he mixed almost exclusively with the white colonists, whose interests he supported. Otherwise, ‘governed’ largely by physical punishment, and steadily rolling back any semblance of democracy - jewelled or otherwise. His brutality brought on the rebellion, which was followed with hanging of former members of the local legislature - convicted through court-martial.
If you with to search for some of the Henry’s ‘jewels’ from Eyre’s reign, you can find summaries in the ‘Wiki’. It is interesting to see who joined committees in the UK either to seek action on Eyre, or to defend him. There is much more, in various other biographies, on events after the rebellion.
Eyre’s costs were covered by the British Government of the day, which also awarded him the pension due a colonial governor, which allowed him to live until 1901.
Practically nothing of the entire episode shows the British Government, and many of the intellectuals of the day, as being in any way committed to a ‘jewel of democracy’.
A not entirely unfamiliar story of the times, I guess, Chad, though one I'd never encountered ere now.
DeleteBut then a nation that had 4yo chimney sweeps once upon a time is not a place to give any reverence to. Or expect any decency from.
Fascinating stuff on Eyre. The pond once made the mistake of traveling across his peninsula with wine bottles in the boot on a stinking hot day ... what a desolate landscape it was, what a potent smell.
DeleteSpeaking of the jewel of democracy, diversity, meritocracy and inclusion, the pond really should have included a reference to Marina Hyde's recent opening gambit:
One of my favourite modern curiosities is the “diversity and inclusion” page on the official website of the British royal family. “We are proud to champion diversity throughout the organisation,” this auto-satirical cri de coeur runs. “We employ and reward the very best talent, regardless of gender, race, ethnic or national origin, disability, religion, sexual orientation or age. And that’s how we seek out future potential too, recruiting from the widest available pool. Our approach to recruitment and selection is fair, open and based purely on merit.”
On what, sorry? If your reflexive response to this is to cackle “BUT YOU’RE LITERALLY A HEREDITARY MONARCHY, YOU MAD BASTARDS”, then please: just relax. Simply allow the sentiment to splash on to you, like royal urine into a sample bottle that a valet is holding, and realise that we live in times where “diversity” can mean whatever the firm talking about it wants it to mean. In this case, a commitment to getting more black servants. (You may recall that the House of Windsor did have one mixed-race senior manager, but she and her husband left the organisation last year to take up a position with Netflix.) So yes, it doesn’t matter that this “firm” is one where – by law – you only get the big jobs because of who your parents are. As for that bit about “recruiting from the widest available pool”, you should simply read it as a reference to having made a mildly concerted effort to finally stop interbreeding with their cousins. “We would never want a certain type,” this advanced bollocks insists. “The key is to be individual and different.”
Ah yes, Hyde does democracy better than a sausage sizzle...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/07/prince-valet-saudi-billionaire-charles-michael-fawcett
GB and DP - Edward John Eyre was the son and grandson of clergymen of THE church. He and Anthony Trollope were born in the same year, and Eyre's early life can be easily interpreted through some of the 'Barset' stories.
ReplyDeleteThis one’s for the Spandau Ballet fans.
ReplyDeleteTruth
Ha ha ha hah hey
Ha ha ha hah hey
The truth
Muddles everything
He just wants lies
Whatever we write
For him
We made a deal
With you know who
Now there’s no sound
From our souls
They can’t be found
We are the bigots
Of the world
Fake news is
Our daily bread
We never find it hard
To write the next lie
We don’t want
The truth to be said
Ha ha ha hah hey
We don’t care
Much for truth
Ha ha ha hah hey
We don’t care
Much for
Truth!
Brilliant - thanks Kez. Every bit as good as I hoped it would be!
DeleteCheers Merc!
Delete