In which the settles for prattling Polonius and nattering "Ned" as the best way to induce an extended Sunday snooze...

 

The pond only had one take-away from Marina Hyde's latest outing, it being largely about football,  which for pond is roughly equivalent to translating Sanskrit, and it was this ...

Rupert Murdoch was recently said to be incensed that the Daily Star’s can-this-lettuce-outlast-Liz-Truss stunt went around the world, believing it to be classic Sun territory into which the paper had somehow failed to plant its flag. 
Perhaps consequently, readers are inflicted with near daily attempts to chase that dream. These have tipped into the advanced stages of something or other, if Friday’s headline “Walker’s Got Mbappé In Pocket” is anything to go by. 

On closer clinical inspection, this turned out to be a reference to a pair of jeans the Sun has had specially made up, which bear a leather label reading “KYLE WALKER JEANS CO” and which feature a printed image of Kylian Mbappé peeking out of the back pocket. I mean … guys? Is everyone involved in this idea OK?

Speaking of OK, does the chairman ever notice the lizard Oz, or its assorted band of hidebound, geriatric, moribund scribblers, and their constant attempts to outlast a lettuce?

This struck home with particular force for the pond when watching the painful, pitifiul attempt this weekend by Polonius to join the climate science denialists ...

For years, Polonius, realising he's not even a pimple on the bum of a climate scientist, has done his best to skirt around the topic, and yet this weekend he had a go at it ...

It's easy to see the trick here, with Polonius working on the meta-level of politics rather than science, and delivering a rough equivalent of the dog botherer's "climate alarmists" by resorting to "true believers" ...

"Believers" is what you deploy when you think science is a religion, rather than an ability to deliver replicable analysis and results. Belief doesn't really enter into it ... or at least into a typical dictionary definition ...

...the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.

Of course it's more than that, but it's not a matter of being a true believer if you happen to accept the science as it stands in relation to carbon dioxide emissions...

But you won't find Polonius contemplating the science ... that's the black snake that lurks in the outdoor dunny ... and so instead you get the silly old doddering codger referencing world famous climate scientists of the Major Mitchell kind, clutching their degree from Trump University ...

The entire point is to raise FUD to a level where it all becomes too hard ...or where any attempt to think outside the box is met with box lovers determined to keep things the way they are ...

But enough of domestic sagas, because there's even more talk of "true believers", as you'd expect from a lettuce or a one-time fellow traveller with B. A. Santamaria and fundamentalist Catholics of the DLP kind ...

Thanks to that training, some might say breeding, everything turns theological in Polonius's world ... and inevitably the theological obsessions he disapproves of, those dark satanic black masses with inverted crosses, take place on the ABC ...

Ah yes, the dangerous radicals who always take things too far...

Sorry, sorry, the pond meant the dangerous radicals who took things way too far, as in this Crikey story ... (paywall)

“CoalKeeper is dead,” Queensland Minister for Energy Mick de Brenni said after yesterday’s energy ministers’ meeting. “Angus Taylor and Scott Morrison’s CoalKeeper is dead.”

To which one might respond, best to drive a stake through its heart and decapitate it just to make sure.

CoalKeeper — or a capacity mechanism, to give it its formal name — was devised by Taylor and his appointed bureaucrats as a way to prop up unreliable and unviable coal-fired power stations, with the cost to be borne via higher energy bills, under the pretext of ensuring reliability in a system with a growing level of renewable power.

Despite opposition from the states — led particularly by Victoria — Taylor clung grimly to this lifeline for fossil fuels, even as owners of old, expensive coal-fired power stations began bringing forward their closure and openly ignoring him. By the time the 2021 election came round, a humiliated Taylor was lashing out wildly at power companies and threatening to force them to keep their coal-fired power stations running even if the power wasn’t needed.

The new government briefly flirted with allowing gas in the mechanism after it entered government, but in its final form announced yesterday by Chris Bowen, the “Capacity Investment Scheme” (CIS) will be renewables-only dispatchable power. It will operate under an auction-and-underwrite process similar to that already established by Matt Kean in NSW, enabling existing NSW tender processes, which are already underway, to slot into the new scheme and receive Commonwealth funding.

As Reneweconomy’s Giles Parkinson cannily noted, yesterday’s agreement locks NSW in even if NSW Labor wins the March state election and wants to backslide from Kean’s leadership on decarbonisation — perhaps under pressure from fossil fuel unions like the AWU and the mining division of the CFMMEU.

It can also be seen as the end of the first stage of repairing the colossal damage a near-decade of denialism and do-nothingism under the federal Coalition did to Australia’s energy infrastructure (punctuated all-too-briefly by Malcolm Turnbull’s unsuccessful efforts to make progress).

And so, but back to Polonius, still imagining that prime Angus beef is the way forward, what with him still being a true believer (there being no need to mention science in the company of methane-emitting Angus beef)...

Yes, money comes from coal and gas, so to get the money to fix the planet, you must fuck the planet by getting money from coal and gas, and then you'll have the money to fix the planet, though the planet will be comprehensively fucked, and so won't be fixed, but you wanted a virtuous circle of mayhem and destruction, and what better way to get one ...

The pond feels another Xmas song coming on ...

And so to another item the pond won't be covering. After her recent forays into comrade Dan territory. our Gracie has returned to the IR bee buzzing in her bonnet ...

The pond is well over reptile black bashing, the Higgins matter and IR, and unintended consequences, which since they haven't actually happened yet, are a kind of speculative science fiction ...

"Perhaps the crispest definition is that science fiction is a literature of 'what if?' What if we could travel in time? What if we were living on other planets? What if we made contact with alien races? And so on. The starting point is that the writer supposes things are different from how we know them to be. What if we wrote hypothetical scenarios showing how things could go badly wrong? What if they didn't go badly wrong? What if I spent my time fluff-gathering and navel gazing. What if arcane imagines of a hypothetical Geoffrey Robertson ruined the pond's day?" (Apologies, the original is here).

So instead of our Gracie, the pond could do its duty, and deliver a full serve of nattering "Ned", big enough to ensure that anyone with any sense would head back to bed for an extended Sunday snooze...

The pond should have warned that there are six gobbets in all, not peak "Ned" but still a bit of a climb, and those who started out hopeful, because the reptiles splashed on a minor league graphic (not the cult master in his prime), will soon have their hopes dashed ...

The pond should also have advised that "Ned" is in full Chicken Little mode, blathering about a fractured nation, as if the reptiles have had nothing to do with the fracturing, and as it it isn't obvious that his hysterical anxiety about the fracturing largely seems to have arisen from the way the Murdochians fucked up the Victorian election, and now are surrounded by a bunch of comrades they find truly terrifying...

The pond will probably slip in the odd cartoon to help "Ned" and demonstrate that his panic is probably not needed ... things are looking up, there's a movement to the centre ...

Oh good, that's good ...

"William brought the groceries," Aunt Amy said. She sat down wearily in the straightbacked chair beside Mom, and began fanning herself again. She wasn't really old, but ever since Anthony had snapped at her with his mind, something had been wrong with her body as well as her mind, and she was tired all the time.

"Oh, good," said Mom. Lollop went the fat peas in the pan.

Everybody in Peaksville always said "Oh, fine," or "Good," or "Say, that's swell," when almost everything happened or was mentioned--even unhappy things like accidents or even deaths. They'd always say "Good," because if they didn't try to cover up how they really felt, Anthony might overhear with his mind, and then nobody knew what might happen. Like the time Mrs. Kent's husband, Sam, had come walking back from the graveyard because Anthony liked Mrs. Kent and had heard her mourning. (That old cornfield favourite here).

It's just swell to keep on reading "Ned", it's really fine and good ... and never mind the funk he's always in ...

Ah the liar from the Shire, not even he can bring a smile to "Ned's" face ...

You'd think the reptiles having backed a winner of the SloMo kind would find joy in the consequences. It's all good ... even a lettuce can be good on a slow moving day ... but "Ned" is intent on putting on his black and white glasses ...

What a negative way of looking at it. 

No, not the decision to run a sinister snap of a Satanic figure in black and white, that's simply because the reptiles ran out of the colour digital ink that's needed to make the intertubes work ...

No, it's the notion that the reptiles and their Liberal lackeys are on the wrong side of history, when they're on the right side with Iranian theocrats, the Indonesian parliament and GOP reps who burst into tears like snowflakes while denouncing snowflakes in favour of SS marriage ...

It could be worse ... instead of all this talking of fracture of culture and politics, look on the upside ...

But no, instead of saying how it's all good, "Ned" is determined to head off to the lettuce patch, and moan and whine and wring hands and gaze at the sky with a sigh ...

Ah, the reptiles got the coloured digital ink back from the supplier, and suddenly they can do full colour again ...

It's all good ... though this portrait of "Ned" in Santa gear verges on the scurrilous ...

Meanwhile, it's back to the "we'll all be rooned" routine ...

Yes, yes, but it's all good, and there's so much winning ...

And then "Ned" has to go and spoil all the talk of the lettuce winning by showing the real reason for all the hand-wringing and the source of the reptile tears, though luckily they still had sufficient supplies of digital ink ...

Imagine how it would have looked if they'd run out of the ink again ...

 

By golly that looks sinister, almost verging on the demonic... and the similarities are unnerving ... and that's how to become a lizard Oz picture editor ...

And so on to the final gobbet, with the colour in the telly restored, the year somewhere around 1974 (though some might prefer the black and white of the Ming the merciless era), and yet another serve of lettuces and "what ifs?"

It's always a tragedy when people refuse to be sheeple. If only the people had followed the reptile lead, they could have been blessed with more of the liar from the Shire and that weird mobster lobster Guy in Victoria... and then we could have had more years of climate science denialism, culture wars and all the rest of it ...

Sadly all the reptile criticism and mockery and slander went for naught, and "Ned" is reduced to the usual Chicken Little handwringing and worrying that the sky is falling in, when all that happened was that this time around nobody listened to the reptiles ... and despite all their pleading, cajoling, and carrying on, their mob lost and they ended up being done by a lettuce...

Perhaps instead of prescribing for others they need to look around and see the sort of visionary leadership they can emulate... something from the Classic comics, if they find the original too long and difficult to handle ...

And speaking of what if, and it's all good ...