In which the pond promotes the cause of footballification and bokonism ...

 

Shamefacedly, and on today of all Adelaide days, the pond must admit it only just caught up with the idea of footballification, as perpetrated by James O'Brien ...

The pond immediately thought of Dame Slap and the voice, out yet again today, and with "emotion" the new reptile buzz word ...

Is that a suggestion that Dame Slap is the voice of reason?

Dear sweet long absent lord, moving right along, that got the pond to recalling Kurt Vonnegut and Bokonism and granfalloons and false karasses ...

For those who haven't read Cat's Cradle - shame on you - there's a granfalloon wiki, as there should be ...

The opening line is succinct enough: A granfalloon, in the fictional religion of Bokononism (created by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle), is defined as a "false karass". That is, it is a group of people who affect a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is meaningless.

The wiki provided a fine example from the aforementioned Cat's Cradle ...

"His gaze lit on Newt again. "You go to college?"
"Cornell," said Newt.
"Cornell!" cried Crosby gladly. "My God, I went to Cornell."
"So did he." Newt nodded at me.
"Three Cornellians – all in the same plane!" said Crosby, and we had another granfalloon festival on our hands.

The pond is now going to extend the notion of the "false karass" by noting that PwC and the ABC and their current situations have absolutely nothing in common, but we might be dealing with that concept of footballification ...

Why is this a false karass? Well the mention of PwC is just a feint, a ploy, guilt by association ... the real purpose and aim is to pander to the reptiles and dump all over the ABC ...

Naturally this false karass was accompanied by copious photos, naturally downsized by the pond ...

And on to the real mission, the dumping on the ABC, with the occasional mention of PwC to keep up the false associations and comparisons ...

Again there came a photo, of a huge size, again downsized ...

When thus reduced the size of the gobbets came into focus ...

With PwC forgotten, it was on to another snap, again downsized ...

And then we were on to the final gobbet, and PwC could return for more meaningless comparisons and confusions...

The pond's gaze lit on Simpson ... "you worked for the ABC?"

"My God, I once worked for the ABC".

Two former ABC workers on the same blog ... and with the same ability to link associations into a meaningless morass and miasma of blather ...

Take a bow, John Simpson AM ... for furthering the reptile cause of ritual ABC bashing ...

And here's an immortal Rowe to celebrate the outing ...

As for the rest, it was slim pickings this day, because the pond will never pander to the reptile taste for tranny bashing and the lizard Oz editorialist was at it again today ...

As for talking up the UK trade deal, already dead in the water, or a Cyber corp, juxtaposed with AI transforming teaching, is it any wonder that the pond settled for "Ned" as the bonus?

Say what? Not seen since before World War II?!

What about Joh? What about Albert Field? What about the subsequent election campaign? During the tumultuous election campaign precipitated by Whitlam's dismissal by the governor-general John Kerr, Bjelke-Petersen alleged that Queensland police investigations had uncovered damaging documentation in relation to the Loans Affair. This documentation was never made public and these allegations remained unsubstantiated. (wiki)

Come to think of it, what about the hanging premier, Henry Bolte? He managed to hang around - if you'll forgive the dire notion - for some 17 years, a pain in the but to everyone, and possibly the reason that Victoria still tends to elect Labor governments ...

And what about Sir Thomas Playford? He hung around before the war and after it, and according to the wiki, stayed premier from 1938 to 1965. 

When the pond lived among the maiden aunts and the wisteria, there was still wistful talk of the Playmander, and the town still showed signs of its Playfordisation, being a dull backwater anxious to don pink pants, safari suits and hurl back the tide ...

Never mind, at that point the reptiles flung in a snap designed to send Killer Creighton into a frenzy ...

Then it was back to "Ned" ...

Indeed, indeed, and the pond has long favoured secession and the formation of the state of New England ... but is that all there is? Might it not have something to do with SloMo being a truly diabolical and incompetent PM, and that insight might have trickled across the Nullarbor to the sandgropers?

Unless you happen to be into footballification and false karasses, and then the west becomes foreign and 'other' and deeply weird ...

Um, rinse and repeat? How hard was it to take down a singularly incompetent and unappealing figure? On with "Ned" ...

"That is surely an unprecedented result for any ALP premier in our history"? 

So much for Joh, and yet, back in 1975, the Labor party was left with just one certain seat in Queensland and also in WA, as recorded in this archival visit ... and Fraser romped home with a huge - neigh, record - majority (wiki here).

Unfortunately there's no way to get from "Ned" to the infallible Pope of the day, so the pond won't try to do a false karass ...

Finally to a complaint. The reptiles keep tucking away Killer Creighton's report from America ...

Hiding Killer deprives the pond of the chance to run a few associated cartoons of the false karass kind ...

It goes without saying that Killer is unhappy with the deal and uses a term of the Google bot might find offensive to sensitive souls ...

Perhaps the reptiles felt that Killer's report would be displaced by fast-moving events, one of those theatrical displays the United States loves ... (why else have a reality TV star and conman and hustler as your President?)

Never mind, Killer is in the Rand Paul camp, and never mind that Miss Lindsey is now so famous Vlad the Impaler has demanded his arrest ...

Fancy wanting to be creditworthy ... what the country needs is real men, not that spineless loser ...First Republican publicly supports ousting McCarthy as Speaker

Manly men are standing by and ready for the fight ...

In which Dame Groan makes desiccated coconut feel like a quarry in full flood, and then the bromancer moves beyond the valley of caricature into the hills of emotional self-parody ...

 
The pond is still brooding about Google's "community guidelines". One of the posts slammed with a sensitive content label was an outing featuring simpleton Sharri way back in October 2017.

Odds on, the Google bot wasn't worried about Sharri being gaseous, which would offend any sensible, let alone sensitive, reader any day of the week, or it being a http link. 

The chances are the bot didn't care tuppence about Sharri, the chances are it was offended by this line ...

Talk about a discount ... talk about energy made easy ... talk about the usual token Malware bulls**t ... wash the paws and put the results on a website...

Why did the pond insert that double asterix? Well the pond doesn't want to offend the bot but was startled to read David Mitchell yesterday, as bold as brass and rabbiting on about a minor matter on UK television. 

He had a good line explaining why the pond's mind is now frazzled and deeply superficial ...

For most of us, the dry detail and/or savage tragedy of momentous issues drive our minds towards triviality. I have never grasped what’s happening in Syria or why to be scared about China, so this week I’ve been digging into what’s going on with Holly and Phil.

But then he went on like this, and the pond was forced to bleep him:

This is what makes the story so diverting. The contrast between the evident reality and the hastily applied coat of bulls**t. They are lying to us and we can tell. That makes us feel powerful and them look foolish. And it’s a much better story than the one they’ve been feeding us for years.

How can David Mitchell get away with robust Tamworth speak in England, and yet a native Tamworthian can't? The pond suspects that the Google bot is oversensitive, possibly deeply fugged* (*licensed from Norman Mailer's estate and used whenever the pond wants to accurately describe how men speak in time of war).

Meanwhile, the sociopath minions under Vlad the Impaler have gone too far. This too turned up in yesterday's reading Head of RT Calls for Lindsey Graham’s Assassination After Edited Video (here to avoid paywall blues)

...Alleviating any doubt about the meaning of Medvedev’s comments, Simonyan went even further during her appearance on Solovyov’s Sunday show. After first acknowledging that Graham’s statements may have been portrayed in a video out of context, Simonyan said that she ordered her staff “to look into it.” She invoked the name of a Soviet Lieutenant General Pavel Sudoplatov, who was involved in several major intelligence operations, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky.
Simonyan ominously pointed out: “If Lady Graham really said that the money for the killing of Russians is the best money the US ever spent... I hope that in our country, the sons or grandchildren of Sudoplatov are alive, his pupils, or the descendants of his pupils. It’s not even hard. We have his address.”
The head of RT explained her bloodlust by the need for retribution: “I have no ill will towards anyone and our religion tells us to forgive, but no one tells us to reward these types of things. When we don’t act in response to these things, it is the same as encouraging them. It causes them to become increasingly more brazen.”

Lady Graham? They really are clueless. Everyone knows that the correct term is "Miss Lindsey", in homage to Miss Scarlett:

Mammy : Oh now, Miss Scarlett, you come on and be good and eat just a little, honey!
Scarlett : Fiddle-dee-dee!

Feminists are allowed to revise history and use "Ms Lindsay", but "Lady" will not fly, with the onion muncher banned from bringing knights and ladies back here and in the USA.

As for assassinations, why not just stick to windows and discreet poisonings? Putin Poisoning? Belarus dictator Luakashenko in critical condition in Moscow hospital, says opposition figure.

Following a closed-door meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Lukashenko was swiftly transported to a Moscow hospital in critical condition.

Okay, the was just the Ukrainians making trouble, but there does seem to be a pattern, and speaking of trouble, the pond did so enjoy reading the NY Times' Missteps and Miscalculations: Inside Fox’s Legal and Business Debacle. (the link avoids the paywall).

The pond didn't learn anything new, but Succession is over, leaving real life for entertainment, and what fun to see Tuckyo at the heart of the affair:

...The weekend before trial was to begin, with jury selection already underway, the board asked Fox to see the internal Fox communications that were not yet public but that could still come out in the courtroom.
That Sunday, the board learned for the first time of the Carlson text that referred to “how white men fight.” Dinh did not know about the message until that weekend, according to two people familiar with the matter. Fox’s lawyers believed it would not come out at trial, because it was not relevant to the legal arguments at hand. The board, however, was concerned that Dominion was prepared to use the message to further undermine the company with the jury.
And then at the very end came the promise of more fun to come ...
“The distraction to our company, the distraction to our growth plans — our management — would have been extraordinarily costly, which is why we decided to settle,” Lachlan Murdoch said at an investment conference this month.
But there was broad agreement among people with knowledge of the discussions that the Carlson text, and the board’s initiation of an investigation, added to the pressure to avoid trial.
The text also helped lead to the Murdochs’ decision a few days later to abruptly pull Carlson off the air. Their view had hardened that their top-rated star wasn’t worth all the downsides he brought with him.
Fox’s trouble has not ended. In the weeks since the settlement and Carlson’s ouster, prime-time ratings have dropped (although Fox remains No. 1 in cable news), and new plaintiffs sued the network, most recently a former Homeland Security official, Nina Jankowicz.
As one of Jankowicz’s lawyers said in an interview, the Dominion case “signals that there is a path.”
Still pending is the Smartmatic suit. In late April, Fox agreed to hand over additional internal documents relating to several executives, including the Murdochs and Dinh. In a statement reminiscent of Dinh’s early view of the Dominion case, the network said that the $2.7 billion in damages sought by Smartmatic — operating in only one county in 2020 — were implausible and that Fox was protected by the First Amendment.
“We will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial, likely in 2025,” the statement said.

Oh if only the pond survives until that day ...

What's that you say, an extended coverage by the pond already, and the only reptiles to make the cut thus far those at Faux Noise?

The pond is aware of its grievous error and hastens to remedy the deficiency ... but after all, it's only a groaning, and a delay to the groaning is what is needed to whet the appetite of anyone not a Groan cultist ...you must simmer the parritch for a long time if you want an excuse to indulge in brown sugar.

Why the Groaner? Well look at the alternatives ...

There's simply no contest, which says as much about the reptiles as it does about the pond's growing sense of ennui and tedium, and here Dame Groan is no help at all ...

Sheesh, only a cultist could explain why a Dame Groan tour of budgets and treasurers past is of the remotest interest ... yet here the pond is ...

The pond had wavered at the sight of jolly Joe and the terminator, still boring Europeans rigid, but enough already with snaps of ancient warriors ...

Back to the tour of budgets past ...

The pond will allow a snap of Petey boy because the reptiles took a dig last night ...

That'll go nowhere, so the pond cut it short, and it was nothing up against Media Watch's observation of Nine's treatment of the fundamentalist Hindu nationalist with a lot of unmentioned dirt on his hands ... but the pond expects reptile watchers have already watched Nine's Modi mania ...

And so to conclude what has possibly been the pond's dullest post to date ...

Could Dame Groan be any more tedious for a more extended time? It's possible, or perhaps a major meltdown in the markets would shake her out of her lethargy, but the pond felt the need to add a bonus, only to discover it was a two horse race ...

"Seemed to alert"? Apart from being about the Lehrmann matter, the pond doesn't deal in 'seems', unless it's a decent coal seam, and so that left the bromancer and the ABC ... yet again ...

It is, of course, just the usual reptile projection, what with angertainment having been the staple diet of News Corp for decades ...

As well as hate, fear and loathing, there's always been reeling and writhing, and distraction, uglification and derision ...

The pond understands the bromancer might still be suffering from his gassing, but there seems to be way too much helium in this offering, beginning with his talk about the rigid negativity of Mr Potato as being "calm and sensible" ...

What's the point of this maudlin, mawkish celebration of Stan, accompanied by huge snap, cut down to size by the pond?

It's just so the bromancer can set up the turf for an emotional assault on the ABC ... because if ever there was a case of a reptile inclined to hysteria, and calling people nut-jobs and fruitcakes and such like, it must be the bromancer ...

Here was his Xmas message back on 24th December 2022 ... (sorry the pond doesn't link to reptile rags) ...

There was a lot more, but it's always worth remembering that deep down and on the surface, the bromancer is a prize fundamentalist Xian loon ...

Now back to the ABC bashing ...

As the pond suggested, pure projection. The pond can't begin to count the number of times the reptiles have cried out, why is the world so unkind? All we did was bug phones and help incite a coup, and sundry other bits of fun ... while deploring those wretched progressives ...

Some days the bromancer goes beyond the valley of caricature into the hills of self-parody, burlesque, and essence of farce, and this was one of them, with the melancholy tone of the last gobbet the essence of distilled emotion and maudlin self-pity ... you know, the "in my day, way back when", and "nigh on forty years or more" sort of carry-on ...

What can the pond do, except hit the repeat button? Distilled essence of emotion, with resentment and bile for ballast ...

On the upside, the pond managed to avoid doings in the west, and could save a mention of PwC to the immortal Rowe ...

In which the Caterist, Killer and the Major reveal there deepest nightmares ... well, the deepest for this week. Fresh nightmares are sure to follow ...

 

Warning. The google bot thinks that there's a blogger community and that this blog is part of it. This blog is not part of a community, this blog is full of dangerous reptile content. Proceed at your peril.

And with that dire warning in place the pond can proceed to unfold a catalogue of reptile fears, phobias and nightmares.

First up is the Caterist, handsomely rewarded with federal cash in the paw, and leading a handsome urban life (save for unseemly defamation settlements), but desperately afraid of urban 'leets ...

Terrifying. The pond wonders what's more upsetting. That snap of KK dragged up from the ancient past to evoke memories of SloMo ...

Some routines never get old ... they just need freshening up every now and then ...

No, it was that terrifying snap of protestors in the streets, and in Comrade Dan's town of all places. Isn't comrade Dan a repressive authoritarian dictator? What's he doing allowing protestors to roam the streets?

Meanwhile, back to the Caterist, a reformed climate science denialist, desperate to save the planet in his own terribly unique way ...

Ah the wit of a former climate science denialist, who only discovered climate science denialism was out of fashion much later this century.

Then came a snap so terrifying and huge that perforce the pond downsized it ...

Still as a recorder of reptile behaviour - while it lasts, before the pond must head off to substack or Wordpress - the snaps should be noted, while sharing the fears of reformed climate science denialists ...

At this point the reptiles put in another shot designed to startle stray readers. Draconian comrade Dan was still not doing the right thing and showing his authoritarian colours, and there was a flash of red placed before reptile reader eyes ...

It's a tough job, keeping those terrifying images in check, but someone has to do it, and the pond is up to the task ...

Decarbonising the economy? Demands? What on earth is he thinking? What's gone wrong with the man? He hasn't turned into some kind of Gyro Gearloose? What's this?

Some things never get old, and don't even need freshening up, and the pond finds the old Caterist more amusing than the new one feigning indignation and with plans to decarbonise the economy because of an alleged existential crisis, in his own special 'quarry floodwater whisperer' way ...

Meanwhile, there was another terrifying image which had to be downsized ...

And so at last to a final gobbet and a final plea ...

Indeed, indeed, better to leave it to the urban elites with government cash in the paw, and a wondrous capacity to predict the movement of floodwaters in quarries and a magical ability to move from climate science denialism to displaying an astounding ability to fix what ails the planet ...

And so on to the next reptile fear, and as it comes from Killer, herpetology students will immediately know the cause of the anxiety and fear. It's not from another global plague or even antimicrobial resistance ... it's masks ... or perhaps extremely long headers ...

Trust the Killer to be ever alert for infections, albeit of the bureaucratic kind ... and so Orwellian totalitarian nightmares must get yet another run ... with a snap on Melbourne plods on the street, because comrade Dan is so draconian, except when he isn't ...

Indeed, indeed, Covid was just a bad cold, except for the millions who caught death from it ... but never mind, Killer's heart is in the right anti-vax, anti-mask place ...

They did to tweets what they did to the pond? Dire warnings of the perils of masks removed? What could be more alarming?

You guessed it, a snap of sheeple lines up to be given a shot which the unsuspecting fools don't realise will implant them with a chip that will put them under the control of Bill Gates, via 5G. Or was that George Soros by the power line?

Yeah, yeah, and sure a few oldies must die so that Killer can run wild and free and unfettered, but really his ghastly global totalitarianism is nothing up against the Major's fear of China ...

How could the pond leave out this fear in its catalogue of reptile fears?

Say what? The Major gives a toss about emissions? Is this the same Major who was was named by academic Clive Hamilton as one of Australia's "Dirty Dozen", a list people he believed to be "doing the most to block action on climate change in Australia". He featured in editions of the list published in 2006, 2009 and 2014. (The Major has his own wiki here).

Is this the same Major who was proudly featured in the Graudian back in 2022 here?

...In the Australian, former editor Chris Mitchell sought to play down the climate crisis, preaching “It’s time journalists reported what is really happening”, under a headline that reporters were “blind to facts”.

So how did some of Mitchell’s own “facts” stand up?

In an apparent effort to undermine the nature of global temperature rise, Mitchell wrote: “Evidence suggests temperatures were higher during the medieval warming and the Roman warming.”

Actually, evidence does not suggest this. The latest United Nations assessment of climate studies says the world is warmer now than at any time over at least the past 100,000 years.

The medieval warming period (MWP) occurred roughly between 950AD and 1,250AD – although there’s slight disagreement on the start and end dates. The Roman warming period covered the first few centuries AD. Both were regional, not global.

A 2019 study in Nature of temperatures in these periods, the authors wrote, “provides further evidence of the unprecedented nature of anthropogenic global warming in the context of the past 2,000 years”.

Mitchell wrote: “Global temperature sits about 1.2C above the pre-industrial era, which also coincided with a little ice age.”

Prof Nerilie Abram, an expert in ancient climates at the Australian National University, said the little ice age lasted a few centuries, but was considered over by 1850 – the start of the 50-year period that scientists use to refer to “pre-industrial”....

... Mitchell also claimed “latest research” suggested the world’s climate was less sensitive to CO2 “than previously thought”, but Sherwood said this was “off base”.

“The most recent IPCC report moved the sensitivity significantly higher than past reports and no research since then has changed that – a few papers have pushed it up or down but there’s no consensus.”

Meanwhile, the deviant, devious Chinese are playing on weak-kneed minds who actually think there might be something to climate science, as opposed to the Major's interpretation of it ...

Foolish devotees of EVs. And for what? Remember, there's no need to fuss and get excited. “Evidence suggests temperatures were higher during the medieval warming and the Roman warming.”

Yes, there was the Major, way back when ...

And here's the Major today ...

What's remarkable is how the Major manages to maintain his vision ...

That ancient column went on ... (and here the pond reverts to text to avoid giant snaps of News Corp refugees, ads, etc) ... and on ... and on ...

..But there’s a better reason for scepticism about “loss and damage”. The Daily Telegraph in London the same day reported: “China has emitted more carbon dioxide over the past eight years than the UK has since the start of the industrial revolution. Between 1750 and 2020 the UK emitted 78 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide … compared with China’s emissions of 80 billion tonnes since 2013.”

This newspaper’s environment editor Graham Lloyd described the real UN climate agenda in 2011 when reporting that year’s COP17 in Durban, South Africa, ignominiously dubbed “Flop 17”. Lloyd wrote that much of the Durban conference looked like “an exercise in extravagant foreplay with a very messy ending”, until the situation was rescued by a commitment from developed countries for a $US100bn a year fund “to finance mitigation and adaptation in the developing world”.

Nothing much has come of that; hence the focus in Egypt. Most journalists, especially those at the ABC and Guardian Australia, refuse to call all this out for the diplomatic pantomime it is. Yet the general public is starting to understand fossil fuels are not being abandoned in most countries and the UN’s preferred power sources – wind and solar power – are not proving cheap or reliable.

RN Breakfast host Patricia Karvelas seemed surprised by the point former Energy Security Board chair Kerry Schott made during an on-air interview last Monday morning. Karvelas wanted to discuss Schott’s proposed appointment by Grok Ventures’ Mike Cannon-Brookes to the board of AGL, which Cannon-Brookes hopes to wean off fossil fuels earlier than present management plans.

Asked by Karvelas to comment on a warning the previous week by AGL chair Patricia McKenzie that closing all the company’s generators early would destroy the reliability of the electricity grid because replacement capacity cannot be built in time, Schott said: “Well I think it may not be possible but I think we’ve got to try.”

This column, looking at Cannon-Brookes’s bid for AGL at the time, interviewed Schott last February. She said intermittent wind and solar could only be firmed by building thousands of kilometres of new poles and wires across the continent so power could be fed to major population centres from wherever the sun was shining and the wind blowing. That network infrastructure would need to be backed up by billions of dollars of new pumped hydro projects because batteries only harmonise the network and cannot yet store power for long periods.

It’s time journalists reported what is really happening. Copenhagen Consensus president Bjorn Lomborg in this newspaper on October 1 wrote: “Even the Biden administration expects the world in 2050 to be dependent on fossil fuels for 70 per cent of energy.

“Rich countries are showcasing the policies to avoid. Germany is on track to spend more than $US500bn ($A770bn) on climate policies (per year) by 2025, yet has managed to reduce fossil fuel dependency from 84 per cent in 2000 to only 77 per cent today.”

Wind and solar account for about 10 per cent of global power supply despite global investment of about $US1 trillion in such renewables every year.

So what does the future hold for the climate and for the business of climate reporting? In the digital age it is a business strategy aimed at securing clicks from vulnerable young media consumers who have not seen and read all the doomsday scenarios for 30 years and understood they never arrive.

For the real climate, warming oceans will increase evaporation and rainfall, but the IPCC is clear no single weather event can be attributed directly to climate change. Tropical storm data shows cyclones and hurricanes are becoming less frequent in the Pacific and Atlantic. Some evidence suggests such storms may be becoming more powerful.

Weather patterns such as this country’s east coast La Nina since 2020 will come occasionally but always have done. The La Nina events from 1954-56 and 2010-12 killed more in floods than this La Nina.

Global temperature sits about 1.2C above the pre-industrial era, which also coincided with a little ice age.

Evidence suggests temperatures were higher during the Medieval Warming and the Roman Warming. Latest research suggests climate is less sensitive to CO2 than previously thought. Media consumers seldom see these facts.

The world will need to build for resilience, but no serious scientist expects a climate emergency by 2030: the IPCC has essentially abandoned the scam RCP8.5 warming scenario upon which that scare campaign was based.

Coal and gas will continue to be burned in advanced countries, we will continue to export both because our fuels are cleaner than those extracted elsewhere but Australia will lose almost all of its domestic manufacturing industry, which will move to countries with lower emissions standards as we drive towards more renewable, less reliable power.

The political right here will be disappointed because Australia will never go down the nuclear path, even though it should.

But Australia will continue to export uranium to countries that see the obvious benefits of clean, emissions-free, baseload power.

Finally, while Australia will most likely pay climate bribes to Pacific Islands, the public will eventually find out what the ABC Fact Check unit confirmed in December 2018: most island nations in the Pacific are growing rather than shrinking. Don’t expect ABC reporters to admit that or to challenge Pacific Island leaders complaining about CO2 but taking Chinese money when China is the biggest contributor to global emissions.

Just hit the short-cut key, and it can all roll out again ...

As for the planet? Oh never mind, with the cunning Chinese and the deviant reptiles in play, nothing will get done ... 

Instead here's the immortal Rowe of the day ...