The reptiles, and so the pond, are off to a quiet start to the year, as befits the ongoing holydays, and there was little to trouble the imagination this day below the fold ...
If the pond was going to pay any attention to events in Ukraine arising from the deeds of the sociopathic terrorist Vlad the Terrible, it wouldn't be the loose Loosely, it would be Luke Mogelson's evocative report in The New Yorker. Trapped in the Trenches in Ukraine ...
It was outside the paywall when the pond checked (though the pond can never be certain because it's a subscriber) and one of Mogelson's key points was the way that the fighting had returned to the model of the first world war, with trench warfare and grotesque ear and mind-shattering artillery duels (as the lead to the story suggested, Along the country’s seven-hundred-mile front line, constant artillery fire and drone surveillance have made it excruciatingly difficult to maneuver.)
That reminded the pond that it had recently caught up with the German re-make of All Quiet on the Western Front, well-made, designed to be depressing, and in the pond's case haunted by images of the pond's grandfather as a machine gunner in the battle of the Somme.
There were a few wonky notes for students of the war - the French began using tanks in 1917, so it would be unlikely that even raw recruits would have been startled by their presence in November 1918. And the effects of a gas attack were exaggerated for effect, and ditto flame throwers, but the essential truth - that the enormously vengeful and stupid Foch's refusal to allow an immediate ceasefire provoked even more deaths and casualties, and they continued right up to the eleventh hour of the eleventh day ...
Pershing was equally bloody minded but the French offered a wrinkle:
In total, 75 French soldiers were killed on November 11th but their graves state November 10th. Two theories have been forwarded for this discrepancy. The first is that by stating that they died on November 10th before the war had ended, there could be no question about their family’s entitlement to a war pension. The other theory, is that the French government wanted to avoid any form of embarrassment or political scandal should it ever become known that so many died on the last day of the war. (here).
The pond will settle for embarrassment at enormous, vengeful stupidity, and yet still the enormous stupidity continues, this time in the shape of Vlad the Impale, a war criminal par excellence ...
It's all too depressing, so the pond was vastly relieved when a correspondent sent along a link to an online auction showing that the parrot, aka Alan Jones, was letting go an abundance of sporting and entertainment memorabilia ... and what a sordid collection of detritus it was ...
Could it suggest tough times for the parrot? Or a clearing of the shelves before a final departure? Whatever, the pond was cheered for a moment ...
After all that, the pond supposes it should get down to its reptile studies, but here's the problem with that.
Wednesday used to Dame Slap day at the lizard Oz, and so at the pond, but the pond routinely banned Dame Slap during the latter half of last year for obsessively scribbling about the Voice and the Higgins matter ...
Still to be fair, the pond should give her a chance in the new year, and the splash was intriguing ...
Had Dame Slap joined Crikey in pronouncing the liar from the Shire the areshat of the year?
And in any case what was a dunce like Dame Slap doing pronouncing eye-watering gullibility and downright stupidity?
Was she at last apologising for the downright stupidity of donning a MAGA cap and swanning into the New York night to celebrate the ascendance of the mango Mussolini? Or was she renouncing the eye-watering gullibility that led her to follow "Lord" Monckton on the matter of climate science, or Jordan Peterson on the ways manly men could ingest enough drugs to enter a coma in Russia?
Whatever, the pond decided to give her a run ...
Still the pond had attempted a reconciliation and must plough on in good faith, though truth to tell, if Dame Slap starts rabbiting on about the Voice, there will be a strong temptation to pull the plug ...
And that's why this is likely one of the few times that the pond will bother with Dame Slap this year ... because even for the pond there has to be a limit to the eye-watering gullibility and downright stupidity on view, not to mention the almost sociopathic obsession with giving uppity, difficult blacks (and anyone sympathetic to the impact of a couple of centuries of systemic racism) a hard time ...
Oddly enough the pond was reminded of this when reading a cricket journalist, odd in that cricket and the pond are oil and water, but still Bharat Sundaresan recently scribbled If you think racism has gone away, think again: My experience at Australian cricket venues.
Luckily, the pond doesn't have to think again, it just has to read Dame Slap and the lizard oz ...
Bring back the bromancer and the war on China, the pond demands, so that he can marvel at the Chinese requirement here ...
Oh it's a darkly rich world of comedy, and so the pond was ready to sign off with an immortal Rowe ...
We can see what the Dame considers as ‘business leadership’ from her nominations of ‘legendary hardheads’.
ReplyDeleteDon Argus - it took NAB most of 20 years to shed the acquisitions engineered by Argus as CEO. The ‘Wiki’ credits Argus with impressive capital growth of the bank in his term, but the accounting for that was done essentially by adding the nominated asset value of those acquisitions to the balance sheet. After the relative international boom of the 90s waned, a lot of his purchases were revealed as basically clunkers with minimal scope for integration or economies of scale in his purchases. One suspects a few of the sellers regretted not offering him a special placement in a proposed float of Tower Bridged (if that is not a contradiction in terms!) along with their ailing bank.
Hugh Morgan - now here we have the classic Aussie business figure. Rocketed through the ranks of Western Mining, one of the youngest CEOs of a major business - and none of that was down to his father chairing the board during its earlier years.
During his tenure, Western engaged in many of the fine old traditions of the mining industry, including claim-jumping. As a ‘hardhead’ Morgan assured us that Native Title would put Australian sovereignty at risk.
On risk - Morgan regularly lectured we peasants about how mining corporations deserved all the lolly for their outlays in exploration, but what became its biggest venture - Olympic Dam - was proven up, almost to the last tonne of yield - by an expensive aerial survey of South Australian geomagnetic anomalies, paid for entirely by the SA taxpayer.
Morgan served a couple of terms on the board of the Reserve Bank - not being reappointed after one term because of the, er - ‘hardheaded’ things he was saying, but the Coalition reappointed him when they returned to the Treasury benches. Nobody can recall any particular contribution he made to real economic policy.
Clifford and (War on the Wharves) Corrigan have their own hardhead histories - but this just gets tedious after a couple of paragraphs, and our Dame’s listing is no more than tossing red meat to the ratbag right.
By golly Chadders, you're on a roll. The pond tends to take for granted that everyone knows about the likes of Hugh "dig it up, fuck it over, ship it off" Morgan, and Chris "send in the hounds" Curragain, but it's good to be reminded of these captains of futtockry and their records ...
DeleteOh and especially Don Argus - one of the truly greats.
DeleteBut what about John Prescott and BHP, Chad: anything to say about them ?
Funny you should mention, GB, but I had personal experience with Prescott, in an odd way. In the 90s, I was involved with a review of the environmental effects of shipping. At that time, BHP was a major operator in the declining, Australian flag, shipping industry, so we consulted with them. After one meeting, one of our group spied a large painting in the lobby of the BHP shipping HQ, and asked if we might use that illustration in our report. The then head of shipping approved.
DeletePrescott was then CEO, but had previously been head of BHP shipping. Which became obvious. We used the illustration widely, and, after ‘Iron Baron’ grounded on a hard bit of the Tasmanian coast, in ’95, releasing hundreds of tonnes of heavy fuel oil along that coast, by chance that gave BHP some good PR.
However - and a sign of how hopeless Prescott was as CEO. In my recollection, the company was losing about $1 million a week, with no sign of any plan that would turn that around. But Prescott had seen some of the reports for which we had used their illustration, and - the ship showed the older BHP logo on the stack. He generated copious correspondence with me, wanting to have the illustration doctored, for the ship to display the new logo; and the whole series of reports reprinted. The files on that grew to about 40 cm high. I am fairly sure he was the only person involved who recognised the old logo - because that part of the image (and I have just checked a copy on my shelves) came out as 2 mm by 1 mm.
I was careful in telling that story to friends for a few years - asking first if they happened to have shares in BHP, if so, they would not want to hear about this classic displacement activity, at a time when the company was heading into real peril. As it happened, it needed a succession of CEOs, sell-offs and mergers, to get it back into some sort of shape.
Probably even our Dame, or the person we believe still to be her companion, does not think highly of Prescott as either a ‘hardhead’ - which he was not, nor even a company administrator - which he was not. And yet, the processes of a company that had been successful for about a century, put that person in the top job. Oh, subsequently they swung the other way, with Marius Kloppers, but that is a whole ‘nother tale.
But does Dame Slappy know anything of that story ? And can she tell us just how much "the shareholders" had to pay for the privilege of funding it all.
DeleteAnd as for Kloppers: "He officially assumed the position of CEO on 1 October 2007. In 2009 his annual compensation was $US 10,399,589, of which $2M was salary and the balance was bonus." And "He was asked to retire as CEO on 1 October 2013..." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marius_Kloppers]
I wonder if Slappy could tell us all just how much that cost "the shareholders".
Just a few general Slappy comments to round out the day:
ReplyDeleteFirstly, it is now just under 12 hours until perihelion: 3:17am AEDT 5th Jan when we will be 147,098,925km from the sun. Which is why southern hemisphere summers are a little hotter than the northern hemisphere ones, and the winters a little bit cooler.
But anyway, back to the Dame: "It is impossible to feel sorry for the dunces who run some of Australia's biggest companies." Does that include Lachy ?
"They have systematically abandoned their friends along with founding principles in pursuit of popularity." Now Slappy would never do that: no, she would never abandon the likes of Monckton and Trump, would she. Not just for popularity, anyway.
"The problem is that shareholders end up paying the price for this growing corporate folly." Do any of us grasp that every single one of us on Planet Earth is either a direct or indirect "shareholder" in everything that the human race does ? All the money just gets passed around amongst humanity one way or another and that banks and governments just "print" more money as they see fit ? And that as "direct shareholder" payouts increase, the banks and governments have to "print" even more money which just keeps feeding inflation.
I ask again: has anybody noticed that regardless of what's going on in the economies of the world, inflation never stops, never ends ? Yes, it gets a bit more now and then, and even a bit less occasionally, but it's always with us.
"Maybe 2013 will be the year when shareholders finally tire of boards and management using company funds to advance personal political agendas." And "personal political agendas" have never, ever existed until now, have they. Not until these evil days of green left wokies running all of the corporations in the world.