In which the pond tries to filibuster the bromancer and the groaner, but perhaps it's just a grifter trying a con, a hustle or a tease ...

 

Has there ever been a better time for grifters, and marks and johns opening their arms, their hearts and their wallets to grifters? 

The pond suspects it's as old a routine as when the long absent lord conned Eve with the apple routine - aeons of copping the blame but every so often, the con still brings a smile and a lightening of the pond's day ...

There were a lot more jokes about the pandering here, and over at the Graudian, John Crace was having another joke, thanks to another con artist, I, Boris Johnson, do solemnly declare the truth. Yes, I know this is a first.

Then came news that the old lecherous goat was at it again, the fifth time at 92!, while the pond was still reeling from the awesome banality of the questions asked in state news coverage, as noted on Media Watch ...

PETER OVERTON: Yes, well done. Where do you get the best pie in Sydney, Premier?
DOMINIC PERROTTET: Down at Beecroft.
CHRIS MINNS: Oatley Pies

Beecroft? The pond passed through Beecroft recently and spotted its first dragon.

It was almost as weird as some of the pitches that have been made, the right to speed, and an outright bribe by the Opus Dei push ...

Watching the coverage of the coverage, suddenly the pond remembered why it never watched FTA commercial television. And then came the ultimate con ...

Say what? Was the groaner saying she'd stayed too long in her current job, scribbling blather for the reptiles, and so was a major drag on productivity? 

Nope, it's just another grifter, still grifting, and once again the pond was the mark or the john ...

But the pond knows how to play that game. To get to the Groaner, first you must go through the bromancer, who is these days as happy as a pig in shit, or at least as a lover of big toys, as celebrated in the streets of Footscray ...

Ah Melbourne, what a feast, almost as good as the heart-attack inducing rolls at Oh! Banh Mi in Equitable place... and so to the bromancer ...

You know the drill. After a few pars of the bromancer going hysterical, the pond's eyes begin to glaze over and the pond begins to think of other things it's been reading. 

Lie back and think of Britain, or at least Jeff Sparrow ...The Aukus deal is a crime against the world’s climate future. It didn’t have to be like this

Under the terms of the government’s nuclear submarine purchase, the first Australian-built Aukus class vessels come into service in the early 2040s. What else might be happening then?

According to the IPCC, at current rates, the planet will have warmed more than 1.5C above its pre-industrial state. In fact, many scientists believe temperatures could smash the 1.5C barrier as soon as 2030 or 2035 – that is, around about when Australia receives the first of its Virginia-class nuclear subs.

Warming on that scale means extreme weather becoming common. It means disasters like the 2019/20 bushfire season or the 2022 floods taking place not once in a century, but every year or so. It means drought and heatwaves disrupting food production, it means rising seas inundating the land, and it means millions of people fleeing regions suddenly rendered uninhabitable.

When you think about what the Australian people might require under such ghastly conditions, “nuclear submarines” do not top the list.

Back in 2019, Scott Morrison responded to a Greta Thunberg speech by saying that he didn’t want children to feel “needless anxiety” about global warming. That bizarre insouciance about climate science still pervades the national security establishment, even as the Age and Sydney Morning Herald’s “Red alert” panellists demand a “psychological shift” to ready Australians for a major war.

The submarine enthusiasts don’t care that the geostrategic environment for which their vessels are designed won’t exist as ecological collapse reshapes world politics. Rather, they consider the eye-popping sums associated with Aukus (“the biggest transfer of wealth from Australia to another country in its history”) as an immediate down payment on the US alliance, integrating Australia into the forces propping up declining American hegemony in the Asia Pacific...

Well yes, but then the pond won't be around to see the worst of climate change or whatever happens whenever the subs finally arrive (nor will most of the politicians currently ruining the planet).

Meanwhile, speaking of another planet ...

Well yes, and the pond only mentions The Graudian, because it provided a link to the IPCC ... (security check, d'oh) for those masochistic enough to do a Percy Grainger and flay themselves with the facts of an alternative reality ...

Meanwhile the pond is stuck reading the bromancer, still somewhere back in the era of the battleship or perhaps the Suez crisis ...

On climate change? Only in the bromancer's world, and back to thoughts from the Sparrow ...

...An arms race in the Asia Pacific and beyond will enrich the defence companies contributing to funding the Australian Strategic Policy Institute but it will derail the international cooperation necessary to cut emissions, as all the main powers throw resources into their own polluting fleets.

An actual conflict would be infinitely worse. A Sino-US war would mean a world-historic catastrophe, both because of its likely escalation to a nuclear exchange, but also because it would lock in an environmental future immeasurably bleaker than the already grim projections of the IPCC.

The fighting in Ukraine has already resulted in vast amounts of greenhouse gases. What do you suppose two clashing superpowers would do?

That’s why the Age/Sydney Morning Herald Red Alert series was so extraordinarily irresponsible. If war is really as imminent as these “experts” claim, we don’t need conscription or atomic weaponry or other blithely mentioned nostrums.

We need, rather, to redouble efforts for peace, simply because a conflict between nuclear powers would seal our environmental death warrant. No one should have illusions about Chinese dictators and their regime. But Iraq and Afghanistan provide an awful warning that military assaults on authoritarian regimes do not culminate in democracy and freedom, but instead intensify the misery inflicted upon ordinary people.

In 1953, Dwight Eisenhower spelled out what the first cold war race signified, saying, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”

We know, with a level approaching certainty, that climate change is coming. So how else can we think about Australian’s unprecedented new arms expenditure other than as an awful crime against the future?

They always disappoint, just as Joe has resumed the search for fossil fuels and the Labor party is busy appeasing the gods of the military-industrial speech, as Eisenhower called it, though as the pond recalls it, he really only got around to considering it in his farewell address to the nation on 17th January 1961...

But the pond will allow that back in 1953 he also made his Cross of Iron speech ...

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron

Well yes, but that was 1953, and here we are in 2023, still dangling from that cross of iron, and then the reptiles had the indecency to insert a snap of a certified war criminal ... triggering a memory of another pond reading, this time George Monbiot, who concluded, in a matter going beyond hypocrisy ...

...There is another way of saying “crime of aggression”: an act of mass murder. The invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of people. We cannot be more precise than that, as the invading forces refused to measure the carnage. But it is almost certainly the greatest crime against humanity so far this century. Blair, Brown, Bush and Rice are as guilty of a “manifestly illegal war” as Putin and his close advisers.

But who gets prosecuted is a matter of victors’ justice. For example, until it issued a warrant last week on another charge for the arrest of Putin and one of his officials, there had been 31 cases brought before the international criminal court. Every one of the defendants in these cases is African. Is this because Africa is the only continent where crimes against humanity had occurred? No. It’s because Africans accused of such crimes do not enjoy the political protections afforded to the western leaders who perpetrate even greater atrocities.

Instead of facing justice, the killers walk among us, respected, revered, treated as the elder statesmen to whom media and governments turn for counsel. Brown can pose as an august humanitarian. Alastair Campbell, who oversaw the compilation of the “dodgy dossier”, which provided a false case for war, and is therefore as complicit as any of Putin’s “henchmen”, has been thoroughly screenwashed: in other words, rehabilitated, like other grim political figures, by television. He is now treated as a kind of national agony uncle.

There has been no reckoning and nor will there be. This greatest of crimes has been so thoroughly airbrushed that its perpetrators can anoint themselves the avenging angels of other people’s atrocities. To quote King Lear: “Plate sin with gold, and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks: arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw does pierce it.”

Oh come on George, we have our war criminals down under too ... here's a snap of a few of them, and aren't they still loved by the bromancer ...

At this point the pond felt no interest in linking to the bromancer at CIS ...

Bizarrely the reptiles decided to insert a snap of Gough, and because it was so large, the pond had to cut it down to size ...

If the reptiles are going to interrupt with an illustration, it's an invitation for the pond to interrupt with an infallible Pope ...

Yes, the pond has already voted, and the upper house card was like unfurling Kerouac's typing of On the Road on an endless roll of toilet paper. It was choice taken to an absurd and meaningless American degree ...

But the pond digresses yet again ... and there's still more bromancer to unfurl, dedicated to rolling the voice ...

And that last outburst of bromancer logic reminds the pond of why it always thinks the bromancer is deeply fucked in the head, because at the end of the day - as a correspondent noted - the prime minister who broke the nation's heart in the end lost his own seat as well as government, a rare but spectacular result ... just as the notion that Boris "won Brexit" is truly weird, because nobody won much of anything with that spectacular folly ...

Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. Nietzsche

Or doing down uppity, difficult blacks for that matter ...

Meanwhile, the bromancer was exhibiting a deep anxiety about vulgar youff and millennials and all that jazz...

By the end of it, the pond was reaching for another Wilcox ...

Meanwhile, even Media Watch, these days always caught between stools, did begin to wonder and grudgingly conceded that maybe there was a point to the fuss, with Quiggin MID ...

...amid all the outrage — or glee — Keating’s intervention did charge up the debate, with economist, Professor John Quiggin, questioning the huge price tag, a US defence procurement expert warning the subs will be ‘over budget, late and obsolete’, and another former PM Malcolm Turnbull forecasting a “very high risk of failure” and calling for more public debate.
Those critics may or may not be on the money. 
But one thing is clear — this is a crucial decision for Australia. 
And instead of all the cheering and flag waving, the media should have been asking from the start whether the government’s decision is the right one.

And so after that epic tease to the usual groaning, but the pond should first reassure stray readers that the groaning only appeared after a strict vetting of contenders ...

Ancient Troy on the voice, Joel worrying about Gen Z, Ben doing Japan, and a re-heated WSJ doing a McCarthy?

Yeah nah, he can just keep on helping out Marge, and let the legal chips fall where they may ...

The pond is more intrigued by the question of whether a Jew can be a fascist. Why surely he can ...

Sorry, sorry, it's almost as if the pond is avoiding Dame Groan, busy ruining the country's productivity by staying too long in her job, but all teases must end, and so to the groaning ...

The pond got lost at that talk of a thousand pages of cardigan-wearer scribbling. Suddenly the idea of a listicle or even a PowerPoint presentation you could fit on a page seemed like a good idea ... but if that report is perverse, then reading Dame Groan to get any insight into it is just as perverse ...

After all didn't she berate workers for staying too long in their jobs and so ruining productivity, and yet, here we are ... with snaps needed to break up the tedium ...

Hmm, what would be the best fit for Dame Groan's skills and aptitudes, now that she's in her dotage? Keep scribbling blather for the reptiles?

If you insist ...

Oh dear, not the old one about the internet and productivity. On another day, the pond might have bitten, might have been tempted, but when dealing with an analogue mind still scribbling for a media empire devoted to tree killer publications, next thing you know we'd be talking about the contribution of LPs to productivity, the need to revert to eight tracks, and what was wrong with Box Brownies anyway ... so the pond suddenly dried up and ran out of words ...

This is going to improve productivity? Killing trees?

Whenever productivity is mentioned, the pond gets incredibly tired, and so does the productive groaner, because suddenly the groaning ran out of productive words ...

Could the terms of trade nosedive? 

Of course not. Why when the war with China kicks into gear by Xmas, we'll all be busy producing kit, and then there's the planet to fix, and for some strange reason the pond was reminded of the end of Vonnegut's Player Piano ... when having destroyed everything, the desire to fix things kicked in ...

...Paul and Finnerty left the car to examine the mystery, and saw that the center of attention was an Orange-O machine. Orange-O, Paul recalled, was something of a cause célèbre, for no one in the whole country, apparently, could stomach the stuff - no one save Doctor Francis Eldgrin Gelhorne, National Industrial, Commercial, Communications, Foodstuffs, and Resources Director. As a monument to him, Orange-O machines stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest, though the coin-box collectors never found anything in the machines but stale Orange-O.

But now the excretor of the blended wood pulp, dye, water, and orange-type flavoring was as popular as a nymphomaniac at an American Legion convention.

"O.K., now let's try anotha' nickel in her an' see how she does," said a familiar voice from behind the machine - the voice of Bud Calhoun.

"Clunkle" went the coin, and then a whir, and a gurgle.

 The crowd was overjoyed.

"Filled the cup almost to the top that time; and she's nice and cold now, too," called the man by the machine's spout.

"But the light behind the Orange-O sign didn't light up," said a woman.

"Supposed to."

"We'll fix that, won't we, Bud?" said another voice from behind the machine.

"You people get me about three feet of that red wire hanging out of the shoeshine machine, and somebody let me borrow their penknife a second." The speaker stood up and stretched, and smiled contentedly, and Paul recognized him: the tall, middle-aged, ruddy-faced man who'd fixed Paul's car with the sweatband of his hat long ago.

The man had been desperately unhappy then. Now he was proud and smiling because his hands were busy doing what they liked to do best, Paul supposed - replacing men like himself with machines. He hooked up the lamp behind the Orange-O sign. "There we are."

Bud Calhoun bolted on the back. "Now try her."

The people applauded and lined up, eager for their Orange-O. The first man up emptied his cup, and went immediately to the end of the line for seconds.

"Now, let's have a look at this li'l ol' ticket seller," said Bud. "Oh, oh. Got it right through the microphone."

"I knew we'd be able to use the telephone out in the street for something," said the ruddy man. "I'll go get it."

The crowd, filled with Orange-O, was drifting over to encourage them in their new enterprise.

When Paul and Finnerty returned to the limousine, they found Lasher and von Neumann looking extremely glum, engaged in conversation with a bright-looking teenager.

"Have you, seen an eighth-horsepower electric motor lying around anywhere?" said the youngster. "One that isn't busted up too bad?"

Lasher shook his head.

"Well, I just have to keep looking, I guess," said the youngster, picking up a cardboard carton jammed with gears, tubes, switches, and other odd parts. "This place is a gold mine, all right, but it's tough finding exactly what you need."

"I imagine," said Lasher.

"Yep, if I had a decent little motor to go with what I got," said the youngster excitedly, "I'll betch anything I could make a gadget that'd play drums like nothing you ever heard before. See, you take a selsyn, and -"

... and instead of taking a selsyn, the pond decided to take an immortal Rowe, because some times some things are hard to fix ...