The pond usually doesn't bother with pollies in the lizard Oz, lurking behind the Murdochian paywall and sending their messages out to the chosen ones, loons who thrust their cash into the paws of chairman Rupert, and never mind the poor buggers who might want to know what the pollies are thinking, without helping out the Chairman.
But Bid was out and about this day, clanking her chains, and the pond thought it might be useful to propose a competition - count the lies, distortions, exaggerations, misdirections and stupidities being fed to those who throw their precious cash into the Murdochian coffers ...
Surely a press release would have been more to the point, but then where would a competition to observe the ways of a dissembling Nat be?
Careful stewards of the earth? Well there's a bewdy from dig it up and ship it out Bid ... but let's see if she can keep tacking against the wind ...
Ah yes, the IPA, aka Gina's mob ... and because the pond is easily easily distracted, it was suddenly reminded of the IPA's chairman ...
Good old IPA chairman, what a hoot she is ...
Sorry, sorry, back to the competition ... but sadly just as Bid was really starting to get things going for her base - oh they're big readers of the lizard Oz in the bush, just ask Gina - she fizzled out ...
Yep, the planet's fucked, and the Bid 'spot the porky or pork barrel' competition will surely attract a few entries ...
Meanwhile, the lizard Oz editorialist felt the need to join in ...
Yep, the planet's fucked, and we'll do more than our fair share of fucking it ...
Sadly the pond's attention to Bid and the lizard Oz editorialist put some fair pressure on the pond's space and ability to focus on what the reptiles were saying ... so there must be a few honourable mentions before moving on ...
Dear long absent lord, simplistic Simon suddenly paying attention to Albo? And the Oreo on a lock 'em up campaign?
Well if the Oreo had cried out for a return of the death penalty - hang 'em high, hang 'em hard - the pond might have paid attention to the reformed, recovering feminist, but instead it decided it just had to go with the Caterist cry of freedumb ...
Say what? They stuck a lesser leak, a minor leak, something that might be considered a bit of a drip, just below the Caterist headline? Is that the only way they can get attention paid to his work? Seems that they shoved it everywhere, they even stuck it at the top of the digital page ...
And it's as funny as being hit on the chops with a fish in an elaborate government cash in the paw dance with the man who knows best how flood waters move in quarries ...
Oh it was pitiful, pathetic stuff, and the pond immediately regretted the choice. How much better it would have been to have a good hanging than cry freedumb ... especially as the Caterist can't manage the best of the US cries for freedumb ...
Freedumb hesitancy? Is that the best the Caterist can do? Really, he should learn how to cry freedumb with the best of them ...
Yes there's nothing like clogging up a hospital and wasting medical staff's time, not to mention resources, while crying "Freedumb" ...
But to be fair, there's a strong sense of triumphalism surging through the Caterist's veins ... let's hope, for all our sakes, that he lands on a ladder rather than a snake ... though given his way with flood waters in quarries, the pond was immediately alert and a tad alarmed ...
Indeed, indeed, if only the policies had been left to Sky News after dark, the Murdochians, horse paste, hydroxy and the like ... why, we'd have had the flood waters organised in a trice ...
And so to the last call for freedumb ...
The reckoning is coming? The pond hopes not, but when a fatuous prat blathers about pandemics and flood waters, who knows what reckoning might come? Stay safe, because the reptiles really don't give a flying fuck about safety, not when they can cry freedumb ...
And so to squeeze in the Major, who was at the top of the page this day ... as the reptiles all joined in celebrating freedumb ...
Dear sweet long absent lord, if he handles the state as well as he handles a beer keg...
Never mind, freedumb and squirting kegs it is, and so on with the Major ... who, it turns out, skipped his duties, went AWOL, and refused to serve in the trenches ... so the Major could enjoy his own self-satisfied brand of freedumb, a city man giving the local yokels the benefit of his wisdom, and a lashing of Leak ...
Oh fucketty fuck, not more fucking Bill Leak, from an unapologetic AWOL man at that ... (yes, in the regions they're very snarky about Sydney refugees turning up and bringing their diseases with them to the bush, and poor old Tamworth hasn't been immune, but if you vote for Barners, well really, what can you expect?) .
The IPA again? Fuck, they've got a paw in every lizard enterprise, and suddenly the pond realised it was in a gigantic reptile promo scheme ...
And how about that "try the 1967 referendum for starters"?
You mean we finally recognised that black people were actually human? How generous is that? Put it another way, what a dropkick fuckwit the Major is ...
And now back to more book promotion for the IPA, because it's the reptile way ...
Why on earth should the pond care what Leigh Sales thinks? Per the Major, she's a clueless twit, out of touch, and alien, if not alienated, as everyone at the ABC must be ...
So why's she suddenly the voice of authority? Well as aforeesaid, because the Major is a dropkick fuckwit and never for a minute does he try to reconcile what he's saying with some recognisable version of reality ...
Uh oh ... not that one back again ... but yep, here it comes, the indefensible defending the indefensible ...
Well the pond has carefully disabled that link, because it isn't in the business of promoting the IPA and its products ... and it remains unmoved by the Major's defence of that cartoon.
Try to ignore the offensive content if you can for a moment, and instead focus on the crudity of the representation, the heavy lines and the use of blacks, and the style of the caricature ...
It really is an ugly effort, and it reflects the way that Leak's technique declined in his later years ...
In terms of technique, style and impact, it really isn't that much different to Glover in The Bulletin in 1927 ...
Never mind, just time to finish up with a real cartoonist celebrating freedumb ...
As always, there's more Rowe here, and there's the dancing man at his wiki here ...
Senator Low-Bid McKenzie: "For over a decade the BCA, NFF, and MCA have all been arguing that we should not sign up because it would cost us too much.
ReplyDeleteCan you really ask us to sign up now unless we are guaranteed it won't?"
One thing you can really be guaranteed, Bid: if we don't all "sign up" and truly mean it, then it's going to cost us all way too much. Just get it through your vacuous head: not stopping rapid climate change has very high costs everywhere which we all, including your "regions", are already beginning to pay.
There's a nice analogy with Covid-19. Victoria is a case study all in itself but the other states that responded quickly all have the freedoms that the wingnuts are just talking about. In fact, they will lose freedoms when opening up occurs.
DeleteWest Australia has a big mining base but, for the love of dog, how can Tasmania be an outperformer? Big problems with secondary, tertiary and vocational education. Low value-add extractive industries. A badly underfunded health system. And yet here it is with people going about life pretty much as normal. Folk in SA and Qld probably are singing and dancing immodestly.
Calamity Jane is just a spear carrier for legacy industries needing to delay change but to do that she needs to appeal to the delusion among Nats voters that everything can remain the same if we choose not to manage a known risk. It's all a bit childish, head under the blanket stuff, but obviously a lot of people want to look away from the risk.
My only disagreement would be that it isn't a "risk", it's an iron-clad (just to keep Gina happy) certainty that is already happening. If we are both referencing accelerated climate change, that is.
DeleteYes I meant climate change, but the approach is serviceable for whatever vested interest group the reptiles are acting for - owners of stranded assets, businesses that cannot compete, small business owners who don't care about public health etc
DeleteThe pandemic is a good indicator because the consequences roll out quickly enough for the casual observer to see the connection. Same for the GFC or Brexit. With climate change the timeframe is long enough for the changing baselines and the other cognitive errors you refer to confuse the issue.
The odd thing is that the propagandists don't get more push-back when their narrative is just objectively wrong. Even Auntie and SBS seem to have been worn down by the constant repetition.
Murdoch is the most obvious explanation.
Apologies for diverting from the empty space in Low-bid's head. Forgive me further for quoting an "anonymous" source from twitter, but in an ocean of pithy responses to the Major's pathetic lament today, I did relish this from (gulp) @flakbattery:
ReplyDelete"Mitchell represents people that were raised and taught to believe their opinions are highly important and deserve respect at all times. Simply being ignored feels like censorship to them."
And isn't there a mighty swag of them - who just don't realise how very privileged their lives are. And are too self-centered to take a look around the world occasionally and take note of reality.
DeleteIt is a reasonable assumption that the content of Gidget’s contribution was assembled by some minion in the office of the Minister for Regionalisation. Well, for all we know, there might even be a department for Regionalisation, not that we have seen any evidence of one such, up here, in the electorate of Littleproud. Anyway, some minion came up with a methodology whereby you take the business lobby’s claim on jobs that would be ‘created’ - 195 000 to 2070 - and the IPA bids 653 600 jobs ‘at risk’ by date unspecified, but, oh, sometime in the future. Subtract one assessment from another and - a ‘net negative shortfall’ (suggesting the minion has qualifications in accounting, rather than economics) of 458 600 jobs.
ReplyDeleteBack when I was reviewing theses, my response to such slack statistical methodology - comparing numbers produced by unspecified methods, with no indication of error range - oh, why bother to go on - back when, my first assessment would have been to the student’s supervisor, to ask why such material had not been struck out before the manuscript was offered up to reviewers.
And this from a political grouping, supposedly great at ‘retail politics’ (whatever that is), whose response to almost all and any projections of a change in climate has been at the level of ‘Ah, the weather bureau can’t tell ya what the weather will be next Tuesday; how can ya have any faith in what they say about 28 years from now?’
Oh - and if you want a sense of how long 28 years is in politics - it is coming up 26 years since John Winston Howard was sworn in as Prime Minister of Australia.
The region that voted Littleproud to represent it is a big chunk of southern Queensland. The manifestations of climate change right now are producing substantial ‘economic impact’ in this particular region. It is too late to ‘protect’ this region, but it would be possible to reduce the seasonal impact of the actual change in weather, which would have much more benefit than doing what this coalition does - announce money, then challenge you to find ways to actually receive same. The more billions ScoMo and Josh announce, the more convoluted grow the claim forms, and the smaller shrink the hoops farmers have to jump through.
An electorate three times the area of Victoria with all of 103,000 electors. Who know, because they're the Cuntree party (yes, we remember), that they have the right to dictate matters for the rest of the electors in Australia.
ReplyDeleteAnd indeed, the IPA is going from very bad to very worse without even a blush of contrition. But then, when has the IPA ever been any different ?
Amanda Meade on Twitter:'News Corp has launched its Mission Zero campaign with a 16-page wraparound." https://twitter.com/meadea/status/1447333305687306243
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/search?q=%22News%20Corp%22&src=trend_click&pt=1447333305687306243&vertical=trends
Thank you Joe - Limited News going for 672 000 jobs; so, on balance (always trying to be balanced!) the bid is up a net 19 000 jobs on the IPA. Such precision.
DeleteTony Abbott asserted "Taiwan hasn't been ruled from Beijing since 1895".
ReplyDeleteI don't want to suggest Tony doesn't know his onions, but the Japanese army in Taiwan surrendered the island to the ROC - the Nationalists - forces in Oct. 1945.
So the then Peking once again ruled the island.
In any event when the Japanese surrendered to the Allies on Sept.2, 1945, they also accepted The Potsdam Proclamation, which abolished all previous treaties wherein Japan stole Chinese lands.
Well now in December 1949, Chang Kai Shek and about two mullion other mainland Chinese "moved" to Taiwan to escape Mao's illegal rebellion. And it worked to the extent that the mainlanders never managed to follow so as to complete the rebellion.
DeleteBut I would point out that Taiwan has a non-oriental indigenous population (initially displaced by the Dutch) - the people who really own Taiwan. But then to say that implies that the Aboriginals really own Australia, I guess, so nobody wants to admit it.
You are right GB, but for the purposes of international law, Taiwan was returned to
DeleteChina in 1945 and Abbott was wrong in his statement.
I hold no brief for the ROK, they were thugs and their corrupt army, as Truman
said, "couldn't fight their way out of a Shanghai whorehouse."
As for the displacement of native populations, is there a state on earth that
hasn't been guilty of that crime and also a victim?
The Prussians have been erased from history - good riddance to the Junkers class at least - and the territory split between Poland and Russia. The Copts in Egypt are
treated as 5th class citizens.
The Greeks in now Turkish Anatolia keep on the down low.
What they all once had is gone, the earth turned and time moved on,there is no route
to getting back what was theirs except thru unwinnable warfare.
To quote Rachel Goldstein(Catherine Clements)from Water Rats,
"There is no future in the past"
All that in no way excuses the horrors inflicted on the native populations by the Americans and Australians, their governments and people should be doing more forever
more. I am still waiting for the first US presidential candidate to campaign on
a massive aid program for the original natives. I won't hold my breath.
Quite so, JM, but my point was that the 1945 transfer of power was to Chiang Kai Shek, not to the rebellious Mao, so strictly speaking, if we still consider Mao's rebellion as formally illegal, Taiwan in fact owns itself especially after Chiang's "settlement" there (if we only consider the Chinese view of things).
DeleteHas there ever been anywhere a state that hasn't been guilty of over-running a 'native' population - by which I guess we mean the population that first occupied the territory since we're basically only truly 'native' to some part of Africa ? What appallingly little I know of history would suggest not - homo sapiens sapiens is approximately 200,000 tears old, or so it's estimated, and we only have some more or less reliable historical knowledge about our last 10,000 or so years. And the territories of the Neanderthals and Denisovans et al had been taken over by us a long time ago.
So it may be that areas such as Mongolia and Siberia are still occupied by their first settlers, as indeed Australia and America were until quite recently. But I can't think offhand of any others. And yes, there is no going back, is there, but indeed we should all be just a bit more decent to those we have dispossessed.