The pond is tremendously delighted to announce that it won the top gong, "Blog of the year in the category of herpetological studies", in this year's pond awards.
The pond is also pleased to advise that it won the Junior Woodchuck Trophy for best blog at just about everything.
Some might wonder at an awards ceremony which featured the pond as judge, jury and lord high executioner, but it's just in the fine tradition established by the reptiles themselves of scooping the pool, celebrated last week in the Weekly Beast:
There’s one thing guaranteed at the annual “prestigious” News awards for journalism. A News Corp Australia journalist will win every category. Judged by News Corp editors, and usually attended by Rupert and/or Lachlan Murdoch, the in-house awards will be handed out across company mastheads at a gala ceremony on 8 November.
Modesty almost made the pond not mention that Dorothy Parker won the "most breezy personality" award, ahead of Marina Hyde!, as well as scooting off with the "best pen name assumed in honour of a literary figure."
So what will the Junior Woodchuck Trophy winner be scribbling about today?
No, it won't be about cheering on Ukraine, though the pond does it every day; nor will it be about the sociopathic dictator Vlad the Terrible, though it deplores him every day. Nor will it be about celebrating the bravery of Iranian women and girls, though it should be shouted from the rooftops every day. Nor will it concern the narcissist dictator Xi, embracing Mao-like powers, though the pond can't stand the wannabe fascist strong man ...
Nor will it feature Trussterfuck* Trussonomics (*patent-pending Crace and others) and in any case that is best left to experts in the field
Instead the pond will turn to the lizard Oz award-winning sociologically wise columnist, famous for winning the "Best engineering study of the movement of flood waters in quarries" and the remarkable "Best grifter at conning cash in paw from the federal government"...
Regular readers will experience a strong sense of déjà vu, which is to say a sense of having been here before, but what's the point of being a herpetological expert, if you aren't up to the task of handling reptile scat and spoor marks?
Ah the usual shot of Satanic windmills to get things going, and then on with the usual, with more than a whiff of climate science denialism in the air ... and if you made it to the usual Jeff Dimery FUD, have you thought about promoting yourself?
Not to worry, you'll need the promotion, there's a lot more of the same ...
And so to the final gobbet of fearless fact-checking from somewhere out past Blacktown ...
Yes, yes, the planet's fucked, much like a flooded quarry, but there's an upside. The Caterist's farts didn't feature the sort of cow farts that are going to turn us all vegan ...
An infallible Pope never gets old and the pond was pleased it hung on to that one because it knew it would come in handy...
Meanwhile, did the pond speak of a strong sense of déjà vu?
Get ready for a system overload, because the Major is also out and about, sounding like Nick Caterist's pet parrot ...
Ah there you go, he's not known as a Major Mitchell for nothing ...meanwhile, speaking of those the Major loves to hate, and environmental evangelism and all that jazz, there was this recently in
the Graudian ...
And so on and so forth, and what's not for a Major to love about that? Kill 'em all, the long, the short and the tall ... and don't forget to use coal when doing the frying ...
How could the Major possibly give up on his deep, abiding love for clean, dinkum, pure, innocent, virginal Oz coal?
Yes, because the Major and a Mao-like dictator have exactly the same mindset - coal, coal, and yet more coal, and then still more coal - and if you've made it this far, you're in line for a commendation ...
Let's not forget the Kirribilli and Surry Hills troop ...
Still, be kind, the Major has made no mention of cow farts, which only a week ago were extremely fashionable ...
And so to the closing gobbet ...
And as the pond scribbles, the rains come down, and the floods continue around the land, and apparently everything is normal in the reptile world, which has only a dim connection to the planet ...
Finally did the pond say it wasn't going to mention a Mao-like dictator? Another broken promise, because, just like the reptiles, the pond knows how to break promises and frack the truth ...
Sure it means that another Kudelka is left dangling in the void ...
... but there was a bonus to hand and it was the bromancer, and as the pond spurned the bromancer's last effort, it felt the need to plunge in this time...
Ah, soaring platitudes and boilerplate rhetoric. If only the pond had that to hand, so that it might have featured in its Caterist and Major Mitchell coverage ...
But at least the bromancer seems to have recovered his equanimity, calm and composure. Confronted with Vlad the Terrible waving nukes, the bromancer turned jellyfish, but now his treatment of new emperor Xi seems almost benign ...
Xi is no Mao? You could have fooled the pond. A more sedate private life, and perhaps not using tea as a form of toothpaste might prevent dental work, but he surely conforms to the old rule that the new emperor is pretty much like the old emperor ... and it was Mao that was just a wayward, eccentric emperor ...
Over more than two millennia, the emperors of imperial China were the focal points of the state and of the public’s veneration, and the central figures in a Sinocentric system of foreign affairs. As the Chinese empire is rising again, so too is a new emperor. China’s current ruler, Xi Jinping, will likely be elevated to similar stature at the 20th Communist Party Congress in Beijing, which begins next week. These political gatherings, held every five years, are used to finalize the lineup of the party’s senior leadership, revealing to the nation and to the world the victors of backroom wrangling and brass-knuckled competition. This time Xi, the Communist Party’s general secretary since 2012 and the country’s president since 2013, is widely expected to deviate from modern precedent and claim a third term. That would put him in charge until 2027, but he could very well rule indefinitely.
If events unfold as anticipated, Xi will emerge from the congress as the most commanding figure in Chinese politics since Mao Zedong, who ruled almost unchallenged from his founding of the People’s Republic, in 1949, to his death 27 years later. Yet the event will be more like a coronation than a party conference.
Although comparisons between Xi and Mao are inevitable, China’s leader today resembles, in many respects, more of an imperial emperor than a Marxist revolutionary. Mao wished to overturn the established order, both at home and abroad, and fomented political and social upheaval to achieve his goals. Xi’s agenda is much closer to imperial China’s. He intends to restore the nation as the dominant power in Asia at the core of a new Sinocentric system, similar in nature to the position it held in the region under the dynasties... (Michael Schuman, The Atlantic)
The emperor is dead, long live the emperor, and King Chuck the talking tampon too ...
The colourful one-man dictators who sadly abound in our time? Been there, done that, per the NY Times ... and the pond knows who the fellow travellers and enablers are ...
And now the pond must break another promise and end by celebrating plucky little England and the Trussterfuck, if only because the immortal Rowe went there ...
It's always the details that delight ... kindly tirez sur le pianiste, and as for that sodden rat in the water ...
Looks like the order has gone out to release the kraken in defence of the gas industry. Requires some convoluted logic however to argue that price hikes caused by high gas prices are somehow the result of investment in renewables. Seems like rather the opposite, high gas and coal prices are driving renewable investment.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.rystadenergy.com/news/renewable-projects-payback-time-drops-to-under-a-year-in-some-places-capital-inve
“Capital investments in renewables are set to outstrip oil and gas for the first time this year as countries scramble to source secure and affordable energy. Investments into renewables are likely to increase further moving forward as renewable project payback times shorten to less than a year in some cases.”
Meanwhile, in Girtby PV sales have gone through (on?) the roof since Dimery’s comment. Just seems like the market working to me but how the reptiles hate it!
And talking about PV in Girtby, just to show how well NickyC researches his pointless tirades, consider this from him:
Delete"It will require more than 22,000 500-watt solar panels to be installed every day for the next eight years, 2.4 for every man, woman and child in total. New solar farms would cover an area dozens of times larger than the Melbourne CBD." So, at 22,000 every day for 8 years gives us: 22,000*365.24*8 = 64,282,240 panels. And yes, if every single one of them was laid out horizontally over flat ground, that would be quite an area. But of course they won't: a great many of them will simply be installed on the top and sides of existing buildings, taking no 'additional' area at all.
And even on new 'solar farms' the panels will not be installed horizontally, so that the surface are 'covered' is less than the area of the panel. And the panels will be mounted on legs so they are up in the air allowing domestic animals (cows, sheep, goats etc) to graze around and under them, and be at least partially protected from strong sunlight. But then I guess you can't expect a simple minded chap like NickyC to think of, much less report on, stuff like that.
The thing about the type of thinking that Nicky exemplifies is that it has a couple of default assumptions built in. One is that the current arrangements are somehow managed and benign as opposed to the new proposal that is full of risk and uncertainty (oo - ahh scary).
DeletePutting aside the consideration of cooking the planet with attendant casualties in the billions, just look at the waste stream from the average coal plant - go to google maps, turn on satellite and search for any power station, Eraring, Liddell or whatever - there's a nice ash dam nearby containing some of the 12 million tonnes of fly-ash produced annually. If you search a bit further you will probably find an open cut that feeds the beast.
If you think that any of these sites will be remediated by the owners consider the Ranger clean-up as an example - not a hope!
I have said from time to time, Bef, that a basic reptile belief is: As it is now so will (and should) it always be. Or: the status quo is holy.
DeleteAt least in part it represents the basic wingnut belief that even if "climate change" (aka "planetary heating") is happening, it is and will remain mostly benign. We get that from all the reptile climatarians all of the time.
Congratulations on the awards, DP! They’re well-deserved, and certainly knock the “Bogan Walkleys” into a cocked hat.
ReplyDeleteThe mention of the Junior Woodchucks brought to mind their creator, the late great comics creator Carl Barks and his work. Specifically, I found myself wondering wherever there were any real-world counterparts to his greatest creation - Scrooge McDuck, the world’s richest duck. After all, Scrooge is fabulously wealthy, owning controlling interests in industries all over the world. He’s a ruthless skinflint who frequently involves a number of family members in his operations, keeping them firmly under his control and paying them a pittance. Is that reminiscent of any actual rich folk?
Then I remembered that despite his hard exterior, Scrooge has occasional traits of compassion and even generosity (though he usually keeps them well-hidden) and generally plays by the rules. Although burdened by a couple of family boofheads (nephews Donald Duck and Gladstone Gander, though the latter is cushioned by his fabulous luck), Scrooge does have several highly intelligent and capable relatives, great nephews (and Junior Woodchucks in good standing) Huey, Dewey and Louie. Further, while Scrooge’s business empire is vast and varied, I don’t recall any stories in which he had extensive media interests; nor does he appear to use his wealth and influence to further his own political and social views and interests (I accept that this last point is a matter of some debate - see Ariel Dorfman’s Marxist analysis “How to Read Donald Duck”). So I’m not sure is there are any real life equivalents.
On the other hand though, there is another character - Scrooge’s great rival, South African Flintheart Glomgold, the world’s second- richest duck. He has all of Scrooge’s greed, ruthlessness and miserliness but lacks any of Scrooge’s redeeming features, considering only his own interests, is happy to cheat his rivals and has indulged in some extremely questionable tactics in his quest to become the world’s richest duck. Glomgold’s family connections and any media interests are never explored in the original Barks-created comics, but he nevertheless clearly has some traits in common with at least some influential figures in what we laughingly refer to as “the real world”.
Someone South African ? I wonder who that could be.
DeleteWell GB, I was thinking of the colonies in a wider sense…..
DeleteThe pond remains tremendously loyal to Carl Barks and still gets out a comic on occasions, especially the one about square eggs in Lost in the Andes ... or the legendary adventure in Itsa Faka ...
Deletehttps://scrooge-mcduck.fandom.com/wiki/In_Ancient_Persia
Since reading the reptiles, the pond has realised that Itsa Faka is real ...
Well, just wonderful: only the 5th city in the world to do it:
ReplyDeleteMelbourne now has chief heat officers. Here’s why we need them and what they can do
https://theconversation.com/melbourne-now-has-chief-heat-officers-heres-why-we-need-them-and-what-they-can-do-192248
“In Melbourne, deaths begin to rise when the mean daily temperature reaches 28℃, with hospital admissions for heart attack increasing by 10.8 per cent when the mean daily temperature reaches 30℃. When the average temperature is higher than 27℃ for three consecutive days, hospital admissions increase by 37.7 per cent. This suggests that even a small reduction in temperature during a heatwave will reduce the numbers of deaths.”
https://resilientmelbourne.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/LivingMelbourne_Strategy_online3.pdf
Box 4: (p 16)
First up, might I endorse the advance of the Junior Woodchucks, always a worthy activity for the civic-minded.
ReplyDeleteI do observe an interesting divergence in attitudes to managing emissions from livestock - particularly cattle - between the political party which claims to represent cattle producers (the Nationals, for readers who may not have kept up with these things) and many of the actual producers. Individual production companies, and their commodity organisations, are putting out statements that, already, they are making progress in reducing methane emissions, and are quite confident of meeting the target which is still under discussion with the Federal Government. They are doing this mainly through adjustments to feeding formulations, including additives that help change the biome in the cattle, because the constituents of methane, can be digested differently, to increase the yield of meat.
This is consistent with the adage in waste management in many industries, that too often waste is an unrealised profit opportunity.
But we still get - not even the nominated spokesfolks for the Nationals, but Barnaby, on 'Sky' over the weekend, groping for a catchy, folksy, saying (he still hasn't realised that people who are known for their folksy sayings either spend a lot of time composing them well ahead of interviews, or, as famously in the Joh Bjelke-Petersen case, employ writers to work up such sayings. In fact, for many of Joh's supposed folksy sayings, there is no recorded evidence that he ever actually said them - his press secretary, Allen Callaghan, often gave them to favoured reporters, assuring them that Joh had just said, what Callaghan had drafted and polished).
So we have Barnaby, short of inspiration, gesturing at large animal, asking if he is supposed to put a cork in its butt or a bag over its head, and predicting that Australians will not be eating beef within a few years. Not that Barnaby indulges in alarmist talk - nope, that is the province of those dreadful 'climate alarmists'
Fortunately, people who are in the business of producing beef, without the subsidy of a parliamentary salary, are just getting on with converting their waste problem to merchandisable meat.
Ofering wise, or even just barely sensible, advice to the Barners is surely a great w.o.f.t. Chad. "...for he's a country member." "Yes, we remember."
DeleteAs to "not eating beef within a few years", well we all recall that Lisa Simpson became a vegetarian in October 1995, and it hasn't done her any harm.
As to waste and profit, I happily recall visiting the Port Pirie smelting works back in, oh, 1956 and going on the guided tour and being informed that when the Germans offered to buy the mountains of post-smelting ash a few years beforehand, the very clever smelters smelled a dollar or two (or actually a quid or two back then) and decided to try reprocessing the 'waste' only to find that the additional metal extracted paid for most of the smelting cost leaving the initially smelted metal as almost pure profit (they didn't reduce their price though).
So it goes.
The return of The Major: "Many in the environment movement seem unaware of the potential environmental cost of making the billions of solar panels and millions of wind turbines the world will need if it is to rely on renewables." And the Maj. Mitch doesn't even begin to grasp the difference between a "one off" and a much lower level continuance. It will only be once that "billions of solar panels and millions of wind turbines" will be needed, thereafter it will be a much lower rate of working replacement, whereas digging up and burning coal (and gas) is forever and increasing while Planet Earth gets hotter and hotter by the year.
ReplyDeleteOh, but, Mitch. informs us: "the limited lifespan of such products and the need to replace them every 20 to 25 years, bury the waste ..." Well maybe, but:
Australian research finds cost-effective way to recycle solar panels
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/16/australian-research-finds-cost-effective-way-to-recycle-solar-panels\
So adjunct-reptiles like Bjornagain keep telling us we must develop new technology but when we do, the reptiles simply ignore it and carry with the same old same old.
So, lastly: "for Forrest's plan to be commercially viable, he would need power priced at 2c a kilowatt hour to produce hydrogen for the government's target price of $2 a kilogram" Yeah, maybe but why must the cost be so low: mainly because fossil fuel miners and burners simply aren't charged for the growing environmental damage they cause and the government subsidies and consumer overcharging that they get away with. Can't expect a reptile to know or acknowledge that though, can we.
Somebody has to acknowledge the contribution of the Bromancer:
ReplyDelete"Xi is no Mao, but he has concentrated more power in his own hands than any single Chinese leader since Mao." Oh dear, nobody could have foreseen that, could they: that Xi totally desired being "the Son of Heaven" and ruler for life ?
So all we can say is that "institutionalism that Deng Xiaoping built for the Chinese leadership and state to prevent a madman like Mao Zedong ever coming to power again." lasted a whole 24 years (Nov 1989 till when Xi became the ruler approximately 10 years ago). Not even as long as Mao ruled for or Xi will rule for.
Another mention of Mark Mills, with the Caterist touting an “influential” paper by the Manhattan Institute Man. He doesn’t quality just how the work is “influential”, though. Simply by providing yet another spurious source for Reptiles to cite in their ongoing war against renewables? Or has it informed the work of that reliable gauge of public opinion, Compass Polling (“We deliver the results you/we want”), who appear to be particularly active of late?
ReplyDeleteIs Mills ready for elevation into the reptile pantheon? Should Compass Polling take a sample poll to confirm it?
Delete