You could have knocked the pond down with a feather - save the nuking subs for later - when it read this outing in Crikey ...
Seven bucks a month, to be told the lizard Oz is credible and transparent? Full marks for labelling this firm the "misinformation firm" in its header ...
There's more misinformation in that assessment than the pond can deal with ...
The one the pond particularly loved was "avoid deceptive headlines", when the lizard Oz is routinely full of it, with Wednesday's "Our Freedumb Fleet" just one recent remarkably egregious example ...
Sure the reptiles have settled a little today, blaring out yet more about the Lehrmann matter ...
... but still, the notion that the reptiles have suddenly discovered uni students, or even more preposterously, care about young people and their problems, is simply preposterous, a desperate attempt to pretend they don't have an aging demographic for their readership. It is, of course, a way to club the feds, as if the debt bomb only went off today, when the reptile pack has assiduously been building a debt bomb for years ...
And so to today's commentary, where opinions routinely lack transparency and credibility ...
The Mocker still hanging over from Thursday?
What a depleted rag it is, and look there's the meretricious Merritt doing his usual thing about the voice, and there's a poor possum who thinks that scribbling behind the paywall might make a difference to reptile coverage ...
Sad really, the poor possum doesn't realise she's in the home of the fearmongers, and is thereby helping their cause ... and that of the meretricious Merritt and the rest of the reptile pack ...
Meanwhile cackling Claire was still banging on about Keating, apparently unaware that Malware had chimed in ... like the NBN-fucking Johnny come lately he's always been ...
The pond only mentions Malware because there was this
delightful infallible Pope out and about ...
Of course Malware is persona non grata in reptile la la land, as is Robodebt ...
Does "transparency" mean never covering or even mentioning a major royal commission, even when a mortal enemy offers informal, consensual and collegiate evidence?
Well the pond doesn't have to pay seven bucks for an answer ...
Reluctantly the pond turned to the US version of a Bolter for a distraction ...
The pond has a keen contempt for Bolton, not helped by this being a rehashed reptile import from the mother lode ...
The only reassuring note? The WSJ illustrations are as pathetic as those of the lizard Oz ...
As for the rest, this bolting Bolton is apparently unaware of Ron DeSanctis, the isolationist GOP, and the rest of the pack of quislings and lickspittle lackeys ... but the pond has been to that well too many times to dwell on it or get knickers in a knotted twist ...
Back to the Bolted-on one, still suffering from the delusion that he might make a viable Presidential candidate, and so is intent on sounding Presidential in the Teddy Roosevelet style ...
What gets the pond about this Bolton is the way he actively stood by doing nothing while the mango Mussolini did his best to boost Vlad the impaler.
It's a syndrome Charlie Sykes identified, though he was skewering Paul Ryan...
Bolton was a classic case study of self-important, delusional "in the room" syndrome ... per Sykes on the wretched Ryan ...
The right’s political culture now relies on this hive-mind rationalization that masquerades as a philosophy: That you can serve the greater good by staying silent — in the room — and therefore relevant.
Some of this is just simple moral cowardice; a lot of it is grift, but it’s not just Paul Ryan. In-the-roomism is a deeply internalized ethos — or perhaps anti-ethos — that has shaped the Republican party’s serial compromises, capitulations, and sellouts.
In this mindset, speaking out or taking a stand is foolish, because it means you lose your place at the table and your leverage. (Just look at what happened to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger!) It’s the story that conservatives have been telling themselves for years now, and you can find it in virtually every corner of the right’s interlocking ecosystems.
And yet still the Bolton thinks the walrus Bolton matters ...
Where does "in the room" syndrome lead you? Well you can deliver
little bon mots about how things might have been worse ... as you try to exorcise your relevancy deprivation syndrome ...
Yet back in the day, or at least back on 28th June, 2018, Bolton was one of the facilitating clowns in the clown car ...
And that's why the pond has no time for this pathetic "in the roomer" coming late the scene of the quislings, lickspittle lackeys and fellow travellers ...
Yes, blame the mendacity of the GOP and Ron DeSanctus and the whole pack of fellow travelling ratbags on jolly Joe ...
But if the Bolted on author of GOP denialist bullshit, that panderer to the mango Mussolini in his "in the room" days can just shove it, Jack, that leaves time for an outburst by the reliable hole in the bucket man ...
Here the pond must interrupt with a personal anecdote. During its time in Alice Springs, the pond was astonished to see Aboriginal artists being shamelessly ripped off by white gallery owners.
There was no blather about merit, the policy was everyone for themselves, and fuck the hindmost.
Of course Aboriginal people have a different relationship to proximity to land, which is to say dirt, but there's nothing in a love of land that says Aboriginal artists should live in hovels while gallery owners live the life of Riley ...
As the late artist Sally Gabori is feted in the top echelons of Paris, a heated debate is swirling in Australia about the art centre boss who stole from her – and whether the paintings he dishonestly sold should be handed back to her family.
None of this troubles our hole in the bucket man, because that's the ancient western civilisation way ...
At this point, for no particular reason, the reptiles featured a woman looking at a painting ...
What the fuck has that got to do with anything?
Oh wait, it is a passing fair imitation of our Henry looking at his navel, and discovering an epic amoutn of fluff ...
And then, just to rub it in, the reptiles offered up our Henry talking about Gabori, and a snap of the artist ...
But there's the rub. There's the rip off, there's blithe Henry full of his usual bullshit ... and meanwhile ...
...Community-run art centres are meant to be safe havens for remote Indigenous artists, places where they’re shielded from exploitation. Art centre artists generally receive 50 to 60 per cent of the sale price of their works, with the remainder going to the centre to pay for materials, documentation, travel and other expenses such as staff and rent. But Evans siphoned the money for those 176 works into his own bank accounts.
Gabori was not the only artist he robbed: he dishonestly sold the artworks of seven other women too, including Gabori’s daughters, Amanda and Elsie. But Gabori was the most celebrated of the artists and, as Evans himself acknowledged in court, she accounted for 90 per cent of the centre’s sales.
Gabori was prolific, producing more than 2000 paintings in the last 10 years of her life. But not all of these were considered suitable for sale. Beverly Knight, in consultation with Brett Evans, had set aside paintings deemed low quality or too experimental to be sold. It’s not unusual for a primary dealer to control when and how an artist’s work will be sold, strategically releasing artworks for sale as a way of protecting an artist’s status and market price.
Gabori’s lesser quality paintings were stored in a shipping container on Mornington Island, where they were to remain until Knight determined what to do with them. But that container proved too much of a temptation for Evans, who sold the works in it cheaply. What he did with the money is unclear. There are rumours he gambled it away.
Evans claimed Gabori gave him the paintings in gratitude for all the work he’d done for her over the years. The court rejected this story. It found that from August 2011 to September 2014, in the final years of Gabori’s life, Evans faked invoices and certificates of authenticity, so that buyers thought they were paying the Mornington Island art centre for Gabori’s works, not Evans himself.
In February this year, aged 62, Evans was sentenced to four-and-a-half-years’ jail with a non-parole period of 20 months. He pleaded guilty to all 35 charges, sparing a lengthy and expensive trial. The court ordered him to repay the $421,378.20 owed to the artists and art centre, but that hasn’t happened. Many doubt it ever will.
And there's your treatment of Aboriginal artists that should be weighed in the balance, because it's not exceptional, it just happened to veer into the explicitly criminal that time ...
And so on and on ... our hole in the bucket man could have offered something on the many failings of capitalism, and the way it mistreats and rips off Aboriginal artists, but instead we cop a serve of sentiments which, not to put too transparent a point on it, are breathtakingly racist ...
But at least the pond can turn to the
immortal Rowe to get back to where it started ... full speed ahead, Cap'n ...
And just to complete the picture, there was this from
The Shovel ...
Talking about Cackling Claire, she proposes that "A key factor of rationality is the ability to update one's beliefs in light of new evidence." Wau, that's almost getting to the wisdom incorrectly attributed to John Maynard Keynes: "I base my belief on the evidence; when that changes I change my belief. What do you do ?".
ReplyDeleteSounds good, doesn't it, but it doesn't seem to have got through to Claire at all: "Kevin Rudd's attitude to China reflects this ability, whereas Paul Keating's does not." Yeah China in Rudd's time wasn't anything like it is now, was it. After all, Xi Jinping didn't get to be Emperor of China (aka Son of Heaven) until about 2013 just when Rudd was finished.
But then, Tiananmen Square was in 1989, right in Keating's time. If Keating couldn't understand the nature of China back then, he certainly won't understand it now. So no change for him to make, really, because his 'evidence' has never changed.
Suppose we assume the Chinese are irremediably evil and conflict in the short term is inevitable, we are still left with question of what is the best course for Australia to take?
DeleteNot sure three subs in the 2030s and five more in the 2040s (if ever) is the most obvious solution. I also need answers to all the other questions about the actual role, not military porn depictions so loved by the Bro, but the actual deployment plans for the assets.
To me they don’t look like they are intended for territorial defence or protection of trade routes, they look like part of the US order of battle that just happens to be funded by a vassal state.
Digressing a bit, it’s worth remembering how different attitudes were a few years ago
https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/how-australia-blew-its-future-gas-supplies-20170928-gyqg0f.html
“As world gas prices rose and rose, the price paid by China for what Howard had called "a gold medal performance" stayed at rock bottom. Australia's gas exports of 3 million tonnes a year from that single agreement were contracted to stay at basement prices until 2031.”
Let’s me see, that deal was 2002 - Tiananmen Square was 1987. Could also talk about Port of Darwin, Talison Lithium etc etc etc. There’s no moral imperative when the political wind is blowing the other way.
I guess the point is, these things do matter but dumb (tm PJK) observations don’t, in themselves, move you any closer to a workable solution. Certainly, moral outrage does not equal $300 billion for subs.
No, they aren't 'defenders', they're attack subs. The whole point for their existence was rapid counter-attack: because they are nearly always at sea and underwater, they constituted a virtually indetectable nuclear missile attack force. Now no longer needed because of much cheaper and more effective intercontinental hypersonic missiles launched from constantly moving trains or deep underground. And all the big boys have 'em - USA, Russia, China, NATO.
DeleteBut you can't really be critical of the second best PM we've ever had - John Winston Howard - and his superior marketing and negotiating skills, can you ?
"Well the pond doesn't have to pay seven bucks for an answer ..." Well these days I'm using Edge and Bing so apparently neither do I. You ought to see what Edge delivers for free on an hourly basis: heaps of one paragraph pronouncements from Sky News and heaps of Daily Mail. But also ABC and Crikey, amongst others.
ReplyDeleteOh, dear. For all his waffle about philosophy and Latin roots, Henry’s whinge about cultural policy really does seem to boil down to “How come them uppity blacks get special treatment?”.
ReplyDeleteNext time, Henry, stick to Thucydides.
It really is hard to find anything worthwhile or remotely sensible about today's Holely Hen. isnt it. The nearest I could come to was based on this: "'Revive' will not breathe even greater life into that common ground, helping secure its fruits for the generations to come, rather, by splintering it into fractured terrain, it will breed division, resentment and - worst of all - a culture of pretentous mediocrity."
DeleteSo, have I ever mentioned the reptiles dedicated use of 'psychological projection'? And what is it that reptiles do other than "breed division, resentment and - worst of all - a culture of pretentious mediocrity."
And boy, is Henry the brand exemplar of "pretentious mediocrity".
Anonymous and GB - I understand that the Henry was born in 1952, and was at University of Queensland, probably around 1970, or so. So he should have been aware that, in the 1960s, the state of Queensland had that ‘indigenous art’ thing well sorted. Almost all of the emerging artists, in various media - the question of ‘whether they know how to paint’ was immaterial then, and is now, because a work may have been done initially in coloured sand - anyway, almost all of the emerging artists were ‘under the Act’, and it was technically illegal to buy works from them directly.
DeleteConfession - I happily bought works from, amongst others, Dick Roughsey, rather than see one penny (that was the currency) go into the paws of the manager of a certain tourist facility, who assured us, and tourists, that he was the person authorised to manage Dick’s finances.
21st century Queensland is still processing civil cases of the families of persons who worked regular jobs, ‘under the Act’, and saw nothing for it beyond a few shoddy store goods. The Henry need not go back millennia for his insights into history - he was a young man for much of the history that blessed the exploitation of indigenous artists.
Otherwise, yes, Dorothy, the Henry offers a ‘pile of pious but odious bullshit’, not worth analysis.
I think it's always a serious assumption, if not a presumption, to say of Henry that "he should have been aware" but thank you for that background - I probably know as little about indigenous "art" as he does.
DeleteGood on you Chadders. For those who came in late ...
Deletehttps://ia.anu.edu.au/biography/roughsey-dick-goobalathaldin-14193
https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/roughsey-dick-goobalathaldin-14193/text25205
The thought has come to me, a little belatedly, that Henry is actually a human ChatGPT: lots and lots of words, very little understanding.
Delete"Ye shall know them by their fruits" and indeed the Bolton is just the very kind of fruit(cake) that Trump would have appointed as a security advisor, isn't he.
ReplyDelete:)³
DeleteNewsguard like robodebt. Article averaging. And enshitifaction didn't take long. Free to distort the minds of the young. NewsGardening dollars.
ReplyDeleteHmm, now Newsguard is run by a couple of guys: Steven Brill and L. Gordon Crovitz. I have no idea about Brill, but there is this about Crovitz: "While at Dow Jones, he led the redesign of The Wall Street Journal in January 2007, repositioning the print edition to focus on 'what the news means'...".
DeleteNow what other big thing happened to the WSJ in 2007 ? "Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has focused on his British properties, it has also put News Corp’s. U.S. outlets under a brighter spotlight—particularly the prestigious Wall Street Journal he acquired by purchasing Dow Jones for $5 billion in 2007." Right.
Meanwhile - over at 'Reptilelite' - a.k.a 'Financial Review', Phil Coorey, Political Editor, sought to beat up on Paul Keating by writing 'When Keating was last in office, most people in China rode bicycles - and the internet, let alone cyberwarfare, hadn't been invented.' I cannot pin down Coorey's birthdate, but bio. notes tell us he was working for the Adelaide Advertiser in 1998, so should have had some personal recollection that Paul Keating had been Prime Minister up to March 1996, and that the WorldWideWeb was well away by then. Still, the broader content of the 'Fin' suggests that Editor-in-Chief Stutchbury (never noted for imagination) is steadily reshaping it into reptilian form - such that its readers happily recognise their opinions in what they read, with further confirmation for their prejudices.
ReplyDeleteWith great respect, Chadders the pond found that hard to believe, and thought you might be up for a leg pull, but a deeply apologetic pond took a squiz, and there you are, and here we are ...
Delete...When Keating was last in office, most people in China rode bicycles, and the internet, let alone cyberwarfare, hadn’t been invented.
“Unlike present players, you haven’t received a [security] briefing on the issue since the mid-1990s,” Caisley noted. “Could you be out of touch on this issue? And given you didn’t foresee the military build-up from China as well as intimidation of neighbouring countries when you were in office, what makes you so sure China isn’t a military threat to Australia?”
In other words, when Keating was last in office, most people in China rode bicycles – and the internet, let alone cyberwarfare, hadn’t been invented.
Way back when, Keating was indeed visionary to identify Australia’s future as being in the region, and he could only look on acidly as the Australia-China relationship flourished under his nemesis, John Howard ...
He said it twice! All that he needed to add was "when I visited China, the natives learned to speak English quick smart, and move that rickshaw along at a clip or there'd be no opium for them, just a clip around the ears".
As you note the full to overflowing intertubes preceded the end of Keating's term ...
https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN. The Web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.
Meanwhile, the pond had to resort to EB ...
https://www.britannica.com/topic/cyberwar/Cyberattack-and-cyberdefense
One of the first references to the term cyberwar can be found in “Cyberwar Is Coming!,” a landmark article by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, two researchers for the RAND Corporation, published in 1993 in the journal Comparative Strategy.
The reptiles don't like it up them, that's the truth of the matter, and the only good thing that can be said about the AFR is 'Rowe' ... which is why the pond links to Uncle Elon with gritted teeth.
What a bunch of snowflake dickheads, and as you note, with a genuine dickhead in charge ...
PS we can argue about Berners-Lee being given sole credit, but it's the date that matters.
DeleteIndeed, GB; I recall my first exposure to the interwebs being circa 1994, and I was hardly a pioneer. I’m also pretty sure that the eager adaptation of consumer goods by the Chinese population was well underway by then. Still, who needs accuracy when it’s easier to resort to vague memories and lazy generalisations? It’s not like anyone expects journos to base their work on facts…..
DeleteAh, Dorothy - I am not smart enough to be able to make up a leg-pull as good as the actual words of Phil Coorey. As the old saying goes - 'Ya can't make this stuff up', but you have to pay, now $5 per copy, to read it.
DeleteThank you for the bio. links to 'Goobalathaldin', which also acknowledge Percy Trezise.
I thought Berners-Lee's main claim to fame was the invention of http rather than the invention of 'the web' itself.
Delete