The pond was shocked and appalled to see the company that the Major was forced to keep as he kicked off the reptile week of climate science torture ...
Not only was there a piece by the quaintly named Prince of Wales, the reptiles couldn't even manage to dig up a pic of Prince Chuck, so he was awarded the reptile mark of Cain, """.
And next to Chuck was Mathias, gone full European, and never mind the rampant hypocrisy and stupendous irony involved ...
And only then came the valiant Major Mitchell, though at least the reformed, recovering feminist, the Oreo, had his back, or at least his bottom.
Poor Major Mitchell, and his squawking sounded even more hollow and predictable than usual ...
Sheesh, such is the poverty in the reptile graphics department these days that they're forced to run with a hagiographic snap from the PMO ...
Pathetic, and yet indicative ...
That blather about targeting the young reminded the pond of a piece in the essential Weekly Beast last Friday ...
Poor Major, he's about as relevant as a Facebook posting when it comes to appealing to vulgar youffs. Who scribbles about the Continent these days, except perhaps as a way to begin a joke about the incontinent?
But credit where credit is due, the Major holds to the eternal flame of pink batts, because that's about all he's got when forced to keep company with Prince Chuck and neo-carbon pricing Cormann ... but then came the real comedy stylings ...
The Bolter, petulant Peta, the dog botherer and the parrot? Oh it's desperate times for the Major, but the pond has to admire his comedy stylings ... and so it was inevitable that the Major should have moved on to another in the reptile pantheon, one Judith Curry ...
It's been awhile since the pond thought of Curry, but back in the day she was a DeSmog star ...
And so on, and on, but back to the Major for a final gobbet and a star rising in the reptile ranks ...
And yet for all the Major's heroic efforts, there he was, shoulder to shoulder with Prince Chuck and Mathias.
Oh the agony, oh the humiliation, and only the reformed, recovering feminist, the Oreo, standing below him, admittedly a world-recognised climate scientist, though the pond should note that a google will produce hints that even Oreos are feeling the heat ...
But not our Oreo, she's stamping her foot in approved recovering, feminist way, and demanding to know what it's gunna cost ... as if it was an actual plan, with actual modelling and actual outcomes ... that's the extent of the Oreo delusion ... she really thinks that SloMo and beefy Angus might do more than piss cash into the pockets of their mates ...
The pond should note at the get go that the reptiles thought that the Oreo piece was best thought of as a clothes horse, so they hung assorted click bait videos off the rack.
The pond safely neutered them, but included them to provide evidence of typical reptile distractions ...
Is it wrong of the pond to take a sidestep and note that poor old beefy boofhead Angus and SloMo aren't exactly the right people to provide a costing?
SloMo has been somewhat distracted. He's already been in the wars with the perfidious French, with a "he said, he said" routine ...
Oh it's a right old stoush, though the reptiles did their best to put a smiley face on it - SloMo saving the world's poor - while taking their usual cash in the reptile claw from Clive for their tree killer edition ...
Sorry, but the pond does love to see how the reptiles sell their souls for a little of Clive's cash in the reptile claw ...
Back to the Oreo, doing her Clive impersonation... and wouldn't you know, there's also a click bait video featuring SloMo ...
Is it time yet to talk about the possible damage that a person-produced changing to the planet's climate might produce ... and the likely costs?
Of course not, this is the Oreo, driven mad by memories of her feminist days, and now reduced to blathering about champagne socialists ...
It's time we saw the fine print? From beefy boofhead Angus? So that's what a reformed, recovering feminist's fantasy life looks like ...
And now, having wasted far too much time on The Major and the Oreo (is that a movie title or what) ...
... the pond would just like to slip in a Caterist, possibly to check up on the movement of flood waters in quarries or the flow of government cash to the MRC, but more likely to see some standard reptile sport, comrade Dan bashing ...
So far, so good, a snap of the fiendish comrade Dan, though the pond must fault it for failing to capture the ogre at his most demonic and satanic ...
And it goes without saying that it's a little too early in the morning for suggesting a stiff drink as a way of coping with the beast slouching up Collins street ...
No, the pond must do this one cold sober, and get it over with quickly ...
Indeed, indeed, just as the latest infection to haunt the state coming from gold standard Gladys's state should surely be overlooked ...
And so to a little more overlooking, remembering that as the Caterist was typing that with one hand, another hand was being held out for centralised government's cash in the paw ...
And at that point the pond should interrupt with an ABC RMIT fact check ...
Indeed, indeed, but SloMo's mob were slow to react, except when it comes to handing out cash in the Caterist paw, always a handy strategy if you want the right things typed ...
And that's the end of the start of a new week, and what better way to begin than in the company of a sordid hack with his grubby paw outstretched for more government funding?
But the pond always has the immortal Rowe as a consolation, with more always to be found here ...
The pond thought about trying to decode the meaning of the role SloMo was playing, but then thought 'oh what the Peck' ...
That pic on the front page of this morning's Oz sure has a touch of the photoshops about it. A gathering of Four of the Seven Eyes or some such bullshit. No doubt Scotty No Friends is, as usual, talking to the air.
ReplyDeleteSo Chairman Rudd wants a Murdoch royal commission? Then why did he squib so many decisions affecting Murdoch when he was PM? Pink batts was one of the first; after some dodgy practices came to light and workers died. In the face of a Murdoch pile-on, what does Rudd do but go to ground and strip the hapless Peter Garrett of any responsibility for the program!
ReplyDeleteLet's go over that again. The rate of accidendds and deaths during the pink batts saga was actually lower than usual. Which to me is entirely indicative of an industry in crisis. Rudd should have ensured that the industry had the reegulatory strength to overcome any such criticism. Instead he caved in to Murdoch and the rest is history.
FFS Abbott even had the temerity to call a royal commission into pink batts. What a waste of time and money.
Some comments from the reptiles' favourite media source, the ABC:
Delete"The royal commission into the pink batts program reveals the need for well-resourced government departments, not gutted shells only able to dish out money to the market, writes Jean Parker.
Eight weeks of hearings have revealed the picture of a worthy program turned lethal by a lack of public service capacity, and by the decision to outsource an inherently dangerous program to the market.
As his father recounted in the Commission on Friday, the first worker killed in the HIP, 25-year-old Matthew Fuller, was employed by a telemarketing company run by two bankrupts and an Irish guy "in from off the street".
Matthew's employers were one of 10,000 companies that sprang up to take advantage of the HIP. Qualifying as a "registered installer" under the HIP meant you were able to "supervise" an unlimited number of subcontractors and employees."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-21/parker-lessons-to-be-learnt-from-the-pink-batts-disaster/5466762
In short, just the usual private enterprise stuffup exacerbated by the usual government/pubserve stuffup. If the Ruddster had thought for a moment or two, he could have come up with a truly Prime Ministerial pronouncement: "I didn't hold a hammer - or whatever tool an untrained pink batter uses."
The Cater - not just reduced to citing Sharri (the almost endless cycle of Sky quoting Fox - particularly Tucker - who is referred to in 'opinions' flying from the Flagship, which are then presented to viewers of Foxy friends - as proof that the current stupidity in the US is supported worldwide, cue Miranda ) Nope, the Cater has to abandon any pretence of analysis in his contribution, and writes that Sharri 'makes a convincing case' in her book. Three possibilities there - (1) - like the Donald, the Cater still 'looks forward to reading it' (2) - he has read it, but does not recognise the literary constructions that convert hypotheses founded on speculation coming from unidentified sources as incontrovertible fact or (3) - he will write anything to continue to receive Rupert's EFTs.
ReplyDeleteEver since the order went out to the reptiles to switch from 'outright denial' to 'delay as long as possible' I have been waiting for Vaclav Smil to pop up in the opinion section.
ReplyDeleteWhy is a guy like Smil useful to the reptiles? Because even very bright people with the right motives can become useful idiots in some circumstances.
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/11/13/what-does-bill-gates-favorite-energy-guru-vaclav-smil-get-wrong/
Lots of useful observations there but this one particularly rang a bell. "Smil doesn’t seem to understand renewable economies of scale, or to weight it heavily. This is understandable, as few people have direct experience of horizontal scaling — building more smaller things in parallel — and most energy analysts who were experienced dominantly with vertical scaling — making individual generation units bigger — got it wrong too. Look at IEA’s long history of failed projections on wind and solar growth over the past 20 years, something that they are finally starting to get right. People who like nuclear energy tend to think of the number of wind turbines and solar panels as a weakness, but it’s actually a massive strength."
Put simply, people have a stereotypical idea of how things work and often don't seem to recognise what's actually happening. Technology transitions in our lifetimes haven't really happened in a gradual, linear fashion. Mobile phones, computers and internet were all developed and basically sat still for a while until all the pieces suddenly fitted together and growth went exponential. Now they have all basically converged and any move in one automatically flows through to the others.
Just in case you know someone who would be more inclined to watch a video rather than read a lot of words
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vInH3MqiaC8
Yeah, yeah, I know Mr Hadfield should consult Dorothy over the matter of leopards and spots.
Moore's Law, Bef. Things change with increasing rapidity, if they change at all. And talking about things that don't change:
DeleteMicrosoft once again overtook Apple to become the world’s most valuable company
https://qz.com/2081809/microsoft-is-poised-to-overtake-apples-market-cap/
Funny thing is that for about the last 15 years of my professional life, the "conventional wisdom" was that MickeySoft was "gone" and would be closed down next year. But "Well, it's not quite the conflagration I'd been banking on. Never mind, lads. Same time tomorrow."
I know jack shit about IT but I was always amazed that Mr Gate's clunky software became an industry standard. All the things you didn't want were cluttering up the screen and everything you wanted was hidden under options/security/personalise or some such.
DeleteMr Job's software seemed to follow much more logically. In fairness, a friend points out that it's designed for idiots and therefore matches my skillset.
Ah, well over quite a lot of my IT career, I used MickeySoft because most organisations used the MickeySoft operating system on 'IBM PCs' and the Apple software didn't run under Windows back then (does it now ?). But I never had any problem with it - the subset that I used was always pretty simple. I still use MickeySoft Outlook for email, calendar and personal and contact information (the 2007 version :-).
DeleteThe thing was, though, that if it wasn't for the IBM-Mickeysoft set, we'd have been stuck with the locked in, can't change anything or add anything Apple hardware crap. And a whole industry of very useful addins would never have formed. And then maybe Apple would never have created USB to finally allow people to add useful hardware into the otherwise closed Apple systems.
Befuddled - there are parallels in water management. The move from State 'Pipes'n'Wires' agencies to alleged 'private enterprise' did not see engineering planning change. It was still focussed on the big dam (even though most sites near cities and towns had been taken) supplying populations of millions, with the waste gathered down to a couple of big treatment works. What helped to maintain this thinking with government was having merchant banks - and Macquarie has been very successful at this - offering to take the financing of big structures off the government budget. The treasurer could then pretend that he (haven't been a lot of female treasurers, and that may be part of this process) was bringing the budget into balance, when, in fact, he had increased the cost of the project because the funding had to be raised anew, often in as little as 5 years, with a fat fee for the merchant bank for, um, 'finding' said finance.
ReplyDeleteOne person in the former 'E&WS' in South Australia was virtually hounded out of the department for showing, quite conclusively, that Adelaide could sustain itself with the water that fell within the city boundary, and costs would be greatly reduced by having local storage, with relatively short supply lines, and wastewaters collected and treated locally - with a high incentive to reuse those waters. This was certainly the case for new suburbs - a major problem with large wastewater works is that they are too readily contaminated by industrial discharge, which makes it difficult to use that water for local amenities.
You know that the true believers can't stand the heretics, Chad. That is why Cormann will never, ever mention how he helped defeat a "carbon tax" in the time of Gillard (and she was a female to boot ... literally).
DeleteBig companies have internal empires run by folk who have spent an entire career doing things in certain ways. Where I worked a sort of turf war based on different technologies was waged for years.
DeleteBuggers me why we have such reluctance to using urban runoff and recycling wastewater. The former helps solve a problem with siltation (at least where I live) and the latter passes with remark in most of Europe
"without remark"
DeleteBefuddled - yes, organisations tell you they are ever looking for new and better ways to do things - but they don’t, because of internal resistance from senior personnel. In my observation, the response to most ‘new and better’ ways is ‘if it was any good, we would have done it already’.
DeleteOne of the (too) many councils in greater Adelaide, Salisbury, under the guidance of an outstanding council engineer - Colin Pitman - harvested stormwater to reduce runoff and pollution, re-create wetlands, enhance amenities - every good thing, including having a nice little earner for the council selling water clarified in wetlands to local industries.
It has been going for 30+ years, is absolutely proven, and Colin has been quite generous in sharing his knowledge and experience.
Those projects have received worldwide acclaim. Just insert ‘Salisbury Council Colin Pitman’ in ‘the search engine of your choice’. But - prophets without honour - the one area where virtually none of these benefits have been taken up is - the rest of Adelaide. So many other councils, while proclaiming their deep commitment to better budgets and suchlike - have no trouble passing up the opportunity to add a couple of $million a year from selling industrial water - to say nothing of its value in attracting industry that all those ‘economic development officers’ that clutter up so many council offices, now give ‘workshops’ on.
Well talk is cheap, Chad, so talking about being a good council is easy, but actually being a good council is hard. Ditto State and Federal parliaments. Besides, never ever do anything you might later get blamed for.
DeleteAnd there just doesn't seem to be anything we can do about it since the vast majority of "voters" really pay very little attention to their world and have no idea what might be done to improve their lives.
I keep thinking about both the 'capital gains tax' reductions under Howard and the continued abomination of 'negative gearing' and, of course, ultra-low interest rates imposed by ignorant Reserve Bank folks - all of which is making buying a house increasingly impossible for increasingly more Australians. But vote for Bill Shorten because he was going to reduce or reverse a lot of that ? Well no, because he's a Lab and it's the Libs who know best how to run the economy.
"The combination of negative gearing and the capital gains tax (CGT) discount is distorting the Australian residential property market, encouraging speculative behaviour and being used by predominately high income households as a tax shelter."
https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Top-Gears-How-Negative-Gearing-and-CGT-benefits-top-10-per-cent.pdf
Quite a Monday: we have the three unwise clowns: Maj. Mitch, Oubliée Oreo and Nick the Cratered. Now in an attempt to be just a tiny bit erudite, I looked up the synonyms for "unwise" and here's the list:
ReplyDeleteinjudicious, ill-advised, imprudent, foolish, silly, ill-considered, ill-judged, inadvisable, impolitic, incautious, indiscreet, short-sighted, misguided, foolhardy, wrong-headed irresponsible, rash, hasty, overhasty, reckless, thoughtless;
and you know, I couldn't choose between them for the Monday goonies - they all apply.
Anyway, Maj. Mitch surely has an obsession with Rudd's HIP, doesn't he. Almost as much of an obsession as he has with Manning Clark's Lenin Medal. And he's equally untruthful about both.
But just for some background, a comment from Wikipedia:
"The insulation program covered 1.2 million homes and it has been estimated that by 2015 it will have produced savings of approximately 20,000 gigawatt-hours (72,000 TJ) of electricity and 25 petajoules (6.9×109 kWh) of natural gas savings. All installations were conducted by private contractors as selected by home owners."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Efficient_Homes_Package
Only 1.2 million homes ? That's just a weak piss into the wind. No wonder the Maj. is all upset by it.
So on to the recuperating anti-feminist, the Oreo. Apparently she reckons that "we deserve to know the cost of green new deal". Well, tell you what, Oreo, I'll go along with that just as soon as you demand to know the cost of not implementing any "green new deal". Oh, I know, that would be zero, wouldn't it because the climate isn't changing, is it. And being a bright young thing, Jennifer has maybe somewhere between 40 and 60 more years to just bask in the warm sunshine.
Last, and always least is the craterous Cater who has this to spout: "It is almost 20 months since Daniel Andrews declared a state of emergency by invoking hitherto untouched powers in the Health and Wellbeing Act." Well there ya go, if Dan had just invoked those powers often so that they were no longer "untouched", it would all have been ok. And we Viccies would have had lots of practice and learning about how to handle pandemics, albeit imaginary ones.
Then Nick tells us that it was/is a "piece of sloppy legislation passed by the Victoria parliament in 2008." Which means it was enacted by John Brumby, so no wonder it was sloppy. But then, Brumby was replaced in 2010 by Ted Bailleau who was in turn replaced in 2013 by Denis Napthine. And neither of them thought to clean up this "sloppy legislation" ? Oh shame on them, shame ... and thanks to Nick for drawing our attention to their shame.