That anxiety, that trauma was evoked by one panel in a triptych by Fiona Katauskas ...
Meanwhile, the determined to be quaintly irrelevant ancient one rabbits on in his interminable way, a way that has become far too familiar to the pond ...
There's no doubt Ukraine will find much to learn in this astute study, and Vlad the Terrible himself will appreciate that even sociopaths can gain much insight from the ancient Greeks ...
Why it's likely relevant in all sorts of matters ...
Sorry, the pond is finding it hard to stay with our Henry this week, having spent far too many years studying history and emerging none the wiser ...
Speaking of that, the pond was forced to
turn to a Rowson to evoke the unspeakable horror of recent days ... though he had more of an Inquisition take on things, and the pond isn't yet ready to deal with medieval times ...
But happily that torture has ended, and now there's just a short gobbet of our Henry to go ...
As for Victory, there is much the hole in the bucket man could learn from fighters, not quitters ... bye ...
And so to a novelty item at the lizard Oz. Someone peddling nuking the country as a solution to all that ails us ...
The pond is, of course, being post-ironic, because such yarns keep turning up, sometimes on almost a daily basis ...
As usual, the pond likes to check up on the credentials, which could be found
here ...
Forget the Hon ... he has a brief wiki listing
here, back in 2019 giving up politics for a senior position with Australia Post, top notch credentials for nuking the country ...
Your correspondent for the day had this team entry ...
And with all that established, it's time for another gobbet of nuking goodness ...
What surprised the pond in all this talk of nuking the country was that the correspondent's web site seemed to suggest that hydrogen was all the go ...
Memo to team, update site to reflect the way that nuking the country will sort everything out ...
A Plan B that at least considers nuclear energy?
All that bang, and then to end with a whimper, an "at least considers"? Oh Pericles, Pericles, what have we here ...
And so to a pond treat, because nothing has been genuinely eccentric so far in this post. Henry has always been Henry, and nuking the country has become a favourite reptile meme ever since the reptiles realised that climate science might be a thing, and they needed a new way to spread FUD.
Cackle-headed Claire decides to go the medieval witch route ...
Um, actually Claire, there are still people who gather each Sunday to devour human flesh and drink of human blood, and are thought to be normal members of society ...
The pond could go on and on about that ... there's the gold plate mob, the E-meter loons, the Hindu cow thing and so on, and the quest for salvation in Tories or MAGA types, and Tuckyo Carlson's latest documentary, which is weird even for him ... per the
Daily Beast (possible paywall) ...
The pond loves bro science and commends it to all interested in nuking the planet.
Meanwhile, the medieval cruelty continues ...
Sorry, sorry, the pond is a trifle distracted, what with so many soy globalist conspiracy distractions to hand ... back to cackle-headed Claire ...
Indeed, indeed, but thankfully the fix is an easy one. If cops just go back to kneeling on necks for nine minutes, or until life is extinguished, the problem with the murder and crime rate will simply vanish, and the pond can turn its mind to contemplating the infinite wisdom of the infallible Pope ...
A woke yoga mat? That's possibly more dangerous than the soy globalist conspiracy ... and meanwhile, there's just a gobbet of the cackling to go ...
Indeed, indeed: "cascades that promote right-wing causes ... tend not to affect mainstream cultures."
Tell that to the MAGA mob and the storming of the capital and all the rest of it, and if you happen to be a little Englander, the delusion of Brexit wherein all your current woes began ...
The pond wondered why it settled for the kind diminutive "cackle-head" when "fuckwit" would have been just as appropriate.
But now as we're speaking of establishing a new equilibrium of the kind established just after the printing press - the kind that might be seen in the wars kindly listed by a wiki here for the 15th-17rh centuries and so on up to two world wars in the twentieth, because lordy lordy. did the printing press establish an equilibrium, or what ... (and if you want real comedy about the notion of the benefits of printing presses, take in Jim Waterson's Rightwing papers backpedal after helping Liz Truss reach No 10).
And now, speaking of a lack of equilibrium, let us end by turning to the dangers of taking a biking on the wild side, and of doing a Marlon Brando imitation, thanks to the immortal Rowe ...
It’s a long, long time since I studied Thucydides for Year 12 Ancient History, but I certainly don’t recall it being as deathly dull as Our Henry’s musings make it appear. I recall my teacher as being a pretty bright, enthusiastic person who managed to make the period and relevant works come alive; I suspect that if I’d had Henry standing at the front of my class I wouldn’t have lasted past the first week of Term 1. And while, like many great works of history, you can draw certain parallels between Thucydides and recent events, you can also stretch the comparisons too far - and in far, far too much detail, as is the case here.
ReplyDeleteThe pond was among the last of the cohorts to study Latin in high school, and frankly grinding through Ovid in his original tongue now sees like a marvel of intellectual excitement up against the hole in the bucket man (like you, there was an enthusiastic teacher involved, who used to battle to inspire his students)
DeleteThe Henry doesn't offer much actual challenge any more. He is becoming more and more like the evangelists - always with strident American accents - who used to come on to country radio stations from about 11 PM, and spend half-an-hour working over a sentence from something like Habakkuk, but which had uncanny relevance to the issues and events of that day. Well - the talk would have been recorded in the then slightly more United States, and posted around the world on (I think) vinyl discs - I am talking 1950s, so it was of little matter from or for what date the prophet was offering his interpretation.
DeleteThe Henry seems to be claiming the same capacity to know what the person was thinking, those couple of millennia ago, as the radio prophets - and there are no real grounds for a challenge to that, as 'The Life of Brian' regularly demonstrates.
A monotonous reptile named Ergas
DeleteOf ignorance endeavoured to purge us
But this fossilized geek
When quoting in Greek
In a sea of ennui would submerge us
Oh yeah, Herbert W Armstrong and 'The World Tomorrow', Chad. Yair, them were the daze.
DeleteGot it in one, Kez. Thank you.
DeleteGB - and Johnny Standley, who we have cited here before
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnGQiSfS8XA
I think that Herbert’s son Gardner Ted Armstrong eventually took over “The World Tomorrow”, along with the family, Church, in some sort of hostile takeover. Their magazine “The Plain Truth” used to be a stalwart of giveaway racks in public places back in those pre- “Epoch Times” days.
DeleteJimmy Swaggert was another American fraud - sorry, evangelist - I remember infesting Australian country radio in the 1970s. I’ve occasionally wondered whether broadcasting these clowns helped the local stations fulfil a religious broadcasting quota, or whether they were actually paid to run the shows. Possibly both?
Edward Lear would be jealous Kez, and as for that mention of Garner Ted, the pond was filled with nostalgia.
DeleteElmer Gantry has always been a favourite pond movie, and so the pond took to listening to Garner Ted on drives from Adelaide to Melbourne. He usually turned up around Nhill, a name which over estimates his intellectual content but he always had an Elmer quality to his spruiking and his relentless quest for donations.
The pond once heard a rumour that they paid country stations cash in the paw, but could never verify it.
Here's 'Harold' at an OTR site:
There was an American(?) evangelical crowd that used to have their
programs played at "preferred times" at country stations across Australia.
Can't remember their name, but do remember their incessant spruiking for
donations to help their work. I think they gave a Sydney address as their
Australian headquarters.
One station manager told me that that the money this organisation paid to
have their programs broadcast covered the announcer's wages each night,
and for every dollar they spent getting their program to air, they picked
up three times that amount in donations.
https://aus.radio.broadcast.narkive.com/20OUIu5J/mal-garvin-receives-lifetime-achievement-award
By coincidence, last night I happened to finally see “The Witch”, a 2015 film set in early Colonial America. It set out a pretty good case (the occasional murder of innocents aside…) as to why why becoming a witch, and “living deliciously” might be an attractive alternative to being a young woman living a brutal subsistence lifestyle in an isolated, patriarchal society of fundamentalist religious fanatics.
ReplyDeleteI’m therefore a mite surprised that Claire writes of the Malleus Maleficarum in such a disapproving tone. Surely it was simply a defence of traditional Western values of its time, and therefore the sort of guide one would expect expect to have the wholehearted support of Reptiles?
I’m not sure whether it’s just increasing desperation, the growing QAnon influence in the Right, or the ingestion of ever- more toxic doses of Kool-Aid, but the Reptiles’ sources of literary inspiration are becoming ever weirder. Once upon a time they were mostly limited to flat-earth economic texts, reactionary political and military strategy publications and reports issued by fossil fuel and nuclear power shills masquerading as think tanks. Now, however….. at this rate, it won’t be long until the Lizard Oz is regularly citing the works of L Ron Hubbard, Richard S Shaver (whose “subterranean races” theories are a perfect fit for QAnon), Immanuel Velikovsky and George Adamski as authoritative works.
How soon before Claire agrees with sensible people of the Lara Logan kind?
Delete“It’s really interesting because we live in a moment where you can see all over the place that this administration is desperate to incite some kind of event,” she declared. “Incite people to act that will prove the lie of white terrorism and white supremacy in America today and give them an excuse to crack down. They need a Reichstag fire.”
After invoking the Nazis' rise to power and agreeing with Bolling that asylum-seeking migrants are being treated better than American citizens, Logan then insisted that she had proof that there was a worldwide plot to fully implement the “Great Replacement” theory in the United States. (The racist notion, which has now made its way to mainstream conservatives and Republicans, asserts that liberals are trying to “replace” white voters in Western countries with compliant non-white immigrants.)
“Meanwhile, these people are coming in freeloading, so you divide the population, and then you conquer them,” Bolling exclaimed, invoking the theory. “Then you get them to agree, get your side to agree, to give these people voting rights. Then you never, ever, see a conservative holding office again.”
Logan, of course, took it several steps further, repeating an unhinged claim she made on Newsmax’s far-right competitor One America News last month.
“And you’re 100 percent right, Eric, but you know what? It’s even bigger than that,” she replied. “Because I spoke to a man who was actually holding the documents in his hand. He told me about it, right? He said he infiltrated the global cabal at the U.N. level, right? And one of the things that he was able to tell me about, from his own personal experience, what he witnessed himself was these documents that showed the time there is a plan, and this was several years ago.”
Logan continued: “The plan was to infiltrate 100 million illegal immigrants, and at that point, there were already 40 million, and these people would dilute what they called the pool of patriots. Their words, right? And they would not be taught that America is a great country and trained to sing the national anthem with pride, and so on and so on. They would be taught all the negative things that we’re told about the U.S. today that our own children are taught.”
But the former Fox Nation host wasn’t done—not by a long shot.
Saying this all “ends badly for some,” Logan said that people of all faiths have told her “this is a spiritual battle” before evoking her own Christian faith, noting that she believes that “the fallen angel, otherwise known as Satan, doesn’t get to prevail in the world.” She also brought up the “End Times,” adding that “if you fight for God, God will fight for people.”
After framing the issue of immigration in apocalyptic Biblical terms, Logan sure seemed to accuse so-called globalists of blood libel, which is a longstanding antisemitic canard used to persecute Jewish people. Recently, the myth has become a pillar of the crazed QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims a Satanic cabal of pedophiles that drink the blood of children is secretly running the world.
“God believes in sovereignty, a national identity, of the sanctity of family and all the things that we’ve lived with from the beginning of time,” she proclaimed. “And he knows that the open border is Satan's way of taking control of the world through all of these are people who are stooges and his servants.”
Lara Logan Returns to TV as a Right-Wing Heroine at Sinclair, Condemning ‘Moral Cowards’ at CBS
Logan added: “And they may think that they’re going to become gods; that’s what they tell us. You know [Yuval] Harari and all the rest of them at the World Economic Forum? You know, the ones who want us eating insects, cockroaches and that, while they dine on the blood of children? Those are the people, right? They’re not gonna win!"
https://www.yahoo.com/news/lara-logan-goes-full-qanon-170125031.html
Of course "cascades that promote right-wing causes ... tend not to affect mainstream cultures."
Sounds like Logan has all the attributes needed in a News Corp columnist, DP. While she’s ex-Fox News, the Murdoch’s have been at pains to stress that Fox and News are seperate entities (for now….), so surely that wouldn’t present any impediment to her joining the Lizard Oz.
DeleteIt's truly sad just how many that can be said of: "has all the attributes needed in a News Corp columnist".
DeleteI'm beside myself with the anticipation of countless columns from the usual suspects outraged that Greens senator Lidia Thorpe has faced any sanction for a secret relationship. Just like Gladys, the howls of wrong doing will be cacophonous
ReplyDeleteWill Simon “no conflict of interest” Benson be chiming in?
DeleteThe pond will be bitterly disappointed if he doesn't BF. There's no point in having a conflict of interest if you can't berate others for conflicts of interest. It's a meta conflict of interest syndrome.
DeleteBut it hasn't been proven in a court of law, so Slappy at least must be fully on her side.
DeleteHere we go again: Holesome Henry would like to instruct humanity in the "wisdom of the Ages":
ReplyDelete"They [like the Spartan general Brasidas] are most of all immune to 'expensive hope' - mankind's habit of 'carelessly longing for what it desires, using sovereign reason to thrust aside what it doesn't fancy'." Hmmm. Ok, no more living in hope or even just being a tad optimistic. Listen to Henry and be as pessimistic as you can because that's the way it always turns out. Goodoh.
Then we have The Great Gibbons who would like to lecture us about how we should be showing 'expensive hope' in respect of "new nuclear technologies such as small modular reactors" which aren't new: in one way or another they have been around for a very long time:
The forgotten history of small nuclear reactors
https://wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/872-873/forgotten-history-small-nuclear-reactors
"As it happened, the AEC (predecessor of the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) was keenly interested in small reactors. Starting in the 1950s, a number of civilian small reactors were proposed in the United States, and eventually 17 reactors with power outputs of less than 300 MW were commissioned. None of them are in operation today."
And in any case, have I ever mentioned that they aren't actually "modular"?
Last, and maybe least: Our Claire: "crime started to increase after Floyd's death and corresponded with police pulling back from known crime hotspots. Police appear to have gone on strike in response to nationwide anti-police protests." Oh yeah, just what you'd expect isn't it - so "the BLM movement may have led to the loss of black lives." Yeah, right on, as any reptile can tell you, making protests about serious wrongdoing always leads to the wrongdoers committing murder for which only the protesters are actually guilty.
I should know better but it's hard to resist when a dimwit like Claire starts throwing around statistics.
DeleteGeorge Floyd died 25 May 2020, the low point for homicides per 100,000 in the US was in 2014.The increase after Floyd's death was actually less than the previous year. There are some charts attached to this offering if pictures help (they do for me).
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myths-and-realities-understanding-recent-trends-violent-crime
Unless you subscribe to the Angus Taylor school of statistics there is very little to link the trend to BLM. Most of the discussion on the interweb starts with Covid, the strained social fabric or the general hysteria drummed up by people like Claire.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/11/us-murder-rates-stayed-high-last-year-but-trend-may-be-reversing-.html
"That big increase “was a complex combination of factors related to or potentially exacerbated by the pandemic but not inherently the pandemic itself,” said Jeff Asher, co-founder of data consulting firm AH Analytics."
"The pandemic “placed the individuals who are at the highest risk of violence under enormous pressure, and they were already under pressure to begin with,” said Thomas Abt, senior fellow on the Council on Criminal Justice. “At the same time, it put the institutions that are responsible for engaging those individuals — law enforcement, courts and community based workers — all under tremendous strain as well.”"
Perhaps some educational institution could use the Cackle-head's work to demonstrate confirmation bias.
Actually, Cackle might want to explain why the biggest increases were in "law and order red states" - looking at you Texas!
DeleteThe Angus Taylor school of statistics?! How do you enrol in that one, or is ignorance free?
DeleteYes, ignorance is ever free, and always very costly.
DeleteNow that's just a bit of a Weekly Beast:
ReplyDeleteABC news staff hit back at Media Watch over coverage of trans issues
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/oct/21/abc-news-staff-hit-back-at-media-watch-over-coverage-of-trans-issues
We can all go back to watching the ABC in our off-moments again.
Ever thought that superhero films just aren’t Right Wing enough? This clown and his backers certainly did - and lost a bundle in the process -
ReplyDeletehttps://www.rawstory.com/rebels-run/
(The bloke behind the project, Vox Day, has a pretty slimy reputation in the world of SF and. fantasy, including trying to ballot-stuff the major awards, the Hugos, a few years back because he and his cohorts considered the field had become too “woke”. They failed spectacularly.)
The pond is a bit Kermode when it comes to superhero films ...
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XS8MFz9LCY
Fans of the Rock should approach with cautions ...