In which the pond says farewell to freedumb ...

 

 

This week the pond received a final renewal notice for its subscription to the tree killer edition of The New Yorker.

It was dated the 8th November 2021, with a request for an urgent response no later than the 8th December. 

Hmm, getting the notice on 3rd February 2022 was a bit like one of those lost messages from the second world war discovered in the sorting office and forwarded to the recipient long after it mattered. 

On the very same day last week, the pond received three November issues, full of timely and relevant information regarding November's matters.

Back in the good old days, the pond would receive the tree killer edition the same week as the date of issue, even if there was a cheat involved, because the street date was always a week ahead of itself. 

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and it's no fault of The New Yorker. It's been even worse for The NYRB, and that's more of a pity, because the broadsheet style presentation made reading it an exercise in nostalgia. It was the pond's last connection to print, and now, back copies apart, it's gone.

What's that you say? It's just a first world carry-on, and if Donald Trump's lackeys hadn't killed the US postal system, someone else would have done the job?

Most likely, but the pond just wanted to shed a little tear, have a little sob, as it feels this weekend that its freedumb is fast disappearing and soon it will be sucked back into the reptile maw ...

So this is by way of a reminder that there are other ways to view the world than through a reptile lens, and some might even cost money. 

The pond, of course, had long ago made digital arrangements regarding The NY and the NYRB, and isn't above recommending a payment for local news ...

But which one? Here it gets tricky ... because this morning when the pond got up, the Herald was still asleep ...

 

Dear sweet long absent lord, talk about missing the boat, and throwing in a bloody Hartcher to add insult to the injury ... where's a Keating when he's urgently needed?

Independent always? Oh go tell that to Peter Costello ... how can anyone pay for such a bunch of lazy sleepy heads?

At least L'Age was awake and led with the right story ...

And what of the colonial invader, which somehow managed to give away the drum, the good oil, so to speak, for free, albeit with many begging notes and pleas, and reminders of the number of visits ...

 

 

Right on the money, and with a better photo than L'Age ... and instead of a Hartchering, a story about frustrated, frazzled floozy heading past his 'use by' date, though the pond doesn't expect him to be able to see where it is on a carton of milk ...

Naturally the pond dipped inside, though the text is freely available for all ...

 

 

Oh it's too rich, a professional liar calling out another professional liar, two lying peas in the same pod, and this as assorted rats slink away from lying BoJo's listing ship, and northern Ireland is in deep doo dah, and yet the pond was drawn into the further irony ... albeit a repetition of the bleeding obvious ...

 

Dear sweet long absent lord, that last paragraph is exceptionally rich ... talk about a bad day at the office, and meat and two vegies, with horseradish ...

Oh Tamworth, Tamworth what a heartbreaking town you are, with your stock yards and your vistas ...

 

Sorry, that's the only new content the pond is going to throw into the mix in this post ...

You see, just now the pond has done a classic Sky News exercise, devouring the headlines, and getting a couple of talking heads to rabbit on about someone else's content ...

In the same spirit, yes, the pond understands that the venerable Meade's weekly study of reptiles is freely available for everybody to read in the Graudian on a Friday. 

But the pond pond learns some fresh nugget each time it visits, and the pond would like to share the nuggets that most impressed this week.

Suddenly everything about what's wrong with the oscillating fan was revealed to the pond in an ecstatic vision:

It was a milestone day for the political academic, who was dubbed “the work experience kid” when former editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell hired him as a columnist at the Australian 13 years ago, praising him as “the next Paul Kelly”.

It was Major Mitchell's claw wot did it? Say no more.

Then came more news of the oscillating fan, laden with balanced irony (and possibly balanced vitamins too):

...When PVO didn’t appear on his usual commentary slot on RN Breakfast on Thursday many wondered: had the ABC dumped him in light of the allegations?
Well, no, but he has been dumped. The new RN host, Patricia Karvelas, has replaced Van Onselen with Guardian Australia’s Katharine Murphy. Weekly Beast understands the decision has nothing to do with the lawsuit, or his much-maligned column about the former Australia of the year Grace Tame. PK’s new team wanted more gender diversity; and will now have three male and three female commentators over the week: Michelle Grattan, Phil Coorey, David Crowe, Murph, and Samantha Maiden and David Speers on Fridays for a look back at the week in politics.
 

But of course this day he's out and about as shameless as ever in reptile la la land ... primping and preening ...

Not a hint of the oscillating fan's woes, and nary a sign his thumb snap could be updated to something more interesting ...

 

 

Heck, they could probably salvage a good one from this ...

 

Sorry, sorry, back to the venerable Meade where Simpleton Sharri revealed a deep affection for fundamentalist Hinduism, ever ready to help out barking mad pollies of the Modi kind:

Sharri Markson was so “deeply honoured” to receive flowers and a “generous personal letter” from the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, she shared it with her followers on Twitter.
In her book What Really Happened in Wuhan, and on Sky News Australia and in the Australian, Markson argued that a Wuhan Institute of Virology staffer could have been accidentally infected with Covid-19 and carried it outside. She also raised the possibility that the institute’s research is not just to “stay ahead” of possible future pandemics but to engineer viruses as potential bioweapons.
Markson’s reporting on Covid’s origins got particular traction in India, where the bioweapon theory was a defence against the government’s mishandling of the country’s collapsing health system.

Sorry, you have to see the actual tweet to fully understand the true hideousness, but the pond must leave some things to the venerable Meade.

As to the lizard Oz's astonishing ability to skew graphs, the pond had already seen them, and seen them sent up, as in this tweet, but then the venerable Meade provided the antidote to sundry conspiracy theories doing the rounds. 

As usual, always go with the muddle, or to put it less politely, the fuck-up known as the lizard Oz:

While conspiracy theories abounded that the Oz had tried to make Albanese’s support look smaller, the explanation is likely to be more mundane. The pie chart graphic used by the Oz has stayed largely the same for months so some genius just changed the numbers without adjusting the size of the slices, distorting the proportions. The Australian was quick to delete the posts.

Ah, you can never delete the full to overflowing interubes, and in any case, the pond suspects that the mistake was enhanced by the phenomenon known as "domestic blindness", the ability of men to ignore the filth around them, and do nothing about it. 

The pond suspects that some reptiles looked at the graphs and thought they were pretty much to be expected, like that bunch of beer bottles on the kitchen table. Everything was hunky dory, and SloMo was as usual in the heavens speaking in tongues to his heavenly father, and let's do it, let's do it live ...

And lastly in the venerable Meade, there was this, showing why the pond would rather puncture its eardrums than listen to fuckwits of the Kyle kind:

“This is not real news. If this is the news just go on the TV and radio today and say ‘no news is good news’. Don’t make up fictitious bullshit drama over nothing.”
When Jackie and Brooklyn argued that it was newsworthy, Sandilands labelled her an idiot and told the newsreader his career was “over”.
“We don’t have to run around every time some cocksucker from the ABC asks a question,” Kyle said, apparently missing the fact it was Ten’s Van Onselen who asked the question.
“Fuck this joint,” he said. “Do the show by yourself. What a fucking show it will be.”

All in all, a splendid read, and we're only into February, and election hysteria has yet to arrive in full force …

Now the pond would like to point out that it isn't agitated by Kyle being a potty mouth. The pond is just as inclined to pottiness, it was more that Kyle was simply fucking clueless ...

Speaking of a potty mouth, the keen Keane at Krikey also opened with what once passed as a swear word.

As this is likely the last post before the pond gets sucked back into the reptile maw, the pond would like to hand out one last gong, and that's to the keen Keane for providing an astute study of the caring Xian mind at work in thought and deed.

It's behind the paywall at the moment, but it's full of a rage and fury the pond thought righteous and justified ...

A taskforce? A fucking taskforce?
That’s the response from Scott Morrison and Health Minister Greg Hunt to the unfolding disaster that’s killing hundreds of seniors, has locked down tens of thousands and has left the sector with only enough staff for 75% of the shifts required.
The plea from the sector for the Australian Defence Force to be sent in to help offset the staff shortages that have left many isolated residents without basic services continues to be ignored. At least Defence Minister Peter Dutton signalled this morning that it could happen — undermining the prime minister’s rejection of the idea two weeks ago.
The “taskforce” wasn’t even announced yesterday by Morrison or Hunt but by Department of Health bureaucrat and chief medical officer Paul Kelly, who “committed” to “setting up a specific taskforce in the department to look at that and to do everything we can to get more detail about the issues”.
So a bunch of bureaucrats from the same department that has presided over two botched rollouts, the rapid antigen test debacle and the unfolding carnage in aged care will “look at it” and “get more detail”.
Such a pointless reaction to most policy challenges would be laughable. In this case, as the death toll mounts in our nursing homes, it’s sickening and enraging.
And increasingly it looks like a wilful negligence that speaks of a decision to let people regarded as expendable die — after all, Hunt and Morrison have insisted this week, most of them were going to die anyway.
Why are Morrison and Hunt unwilling to do anything significant about the aged care disaster? Surely even the political cost would be enough to force a government obsessed with appearances to take action?
In fact there’s a horrific political calculation — one that most politicians understand — at the heart of their refusal.
While everyone remembers Bronwyn Bishop and kerosene baths from the 1990s, that scandal was atypical in forcing a government to intervene in aged care.
Aged care generates headlines and induces plenty of hand-wringing and complaints — that’s why so many dozens of reports have been written over the decades — but doesn’t shift votes significantly. That’s because, at any one time, there are only a small number of households exposed to what is happening.
This is the horrible maths: at the moment there are about 240,000 Australian aged care residents. They’re not evenly distributed, of course, but for argument’s sake assume that the households they’re from are distributed across Australia — that’s across 150 electorates. That’s about 1600 households in each electorate.
More than half of those already don’t vote for the Coalition, and are unlikely to shift. The number of Liberal-voting households affected by aged care issues is probably about 700. So maybe 1400 people might be in a position to change their vote in anger at what they’re seeing. Then factor in nearly half of them are in seats already held by Labor.
It’s a crude portrait, and the parties would have their own polling showing in much finer detail which seats where aged care will be a real issue. But it illustrates how the transient nature of aged care means people are exposed to it for only a limited time and then move on.
But the 1990s scandal also illustrates that when aged care does break out from being an electorally limited issue and starts dominating the political cycle, it can wreak havoc on governments.
As the death toll mounts and the government’s disgraceful negligence becomes more apparent, that may well be the fate of Morrison and Hunt. The ADF should start preparing for an intervention.

Sorry Bernard, they're not going to use the ADF, not if the caring Xian has his way ...

Imagine that! The mutton Dutton more concerned than the speaker in tongues, blathering on about the compassion of Xians ...

Could it get any worse? 

Well yes, the pond will soon enough be sucked back into the reptile maw, and will have to cut down on visits to places where you can find useful, invigorating reads, and besides, we could be having nighmarish Boschian visions like the poor old Poms, though it does make Rowson worth a regular visit ...