The pond hit nadir yesterday, close enough to the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice blues, but only because the reptiles served up reheated onion muncher. (Damn you Connor Court ...)
Or so the pond thought, because "nadir" is usually taken to mean the lowest or most unsuccessful point in any situation, but things keep on getting worser and worser at the lizard Oz, if the pond might be allowed to trash the language to express the depths of the sorrow and the pity of it all ...
What an unappetising, unappealing bunch ... though the pond did enjoy that snap of the meretricious Merritt blathering on yet again about the Voice.
At the top of the page, the reptiles were distracted by declaring war on Russia ...
The pond heeded the call to arms, and naturally turned to the bromancer for guidance ...
Hmm, the pond knew at once it had made a mistake. Why couldn't we have some genuine fun, a real war of the crazies?
Still, a war with the Ruskis was some kind of distraction ...
For once the pond couldn't resist the illustration ... which evoked fond memories of
The Mouse that Roared ...
The lizard Oz editorialist had also declared war, or perhaps a season of Samuel Beckett ...or Ionesco ... or Pinter ...
Hmm, and perhaps the GOP and Faux Noise and Tuckyo could also concentrate their efforts on repairing the damage wrought on Ukraine?
Never mind, it was an elaborate ploy by the reptiles to provide the pond with some space filler, which is just as well because this day cackling Claire decided to enter Charlie Lewis's "woke" fame list ...
The pond was reminded of the terrible trouble a trans friend experienced getting a passport and a change to her birth certificate, long before the current transphobia that fixates reptiles of the cackling Claire kind ... but at least the deploying of "woke" meant the pond could avoid going there ... and instead just settle for a cackling Claire affirming cartoon ...
On the other hand, the pond was left with a terrible dilemma.
You see, this day the doddering dotard know fondly as our Henry went there, an area the pond has long refused to enter ...
Should the pond indulge the old dotard, or should the pond walk on by?
The pond decided to risk it, guessing that the blundering blowhard, arriving late on the scene, would spend most of his time rabbiting on about ancient matters ...
No doubt there will be a price to pay, but the pond was right.
The silly old humbug is so wrapped in his own sense of importance that he hared off down wayward bits of history, and the flailing, failing lizard Oz graphics department helped him by reaching for the cheapest snap they could find ... a painting well out of copyright ...
What's the painting got to do with anything? Nothing much, Hayter was a tedious and pompous painter, much like our Henry, and inclined to fawn over royalty ...
Meanwhile, the hole in the bucket man carried on about all sorts of nonsense, though the pond knew there would be a price to pay ...
Ah, thar he blows, and so we finally get to the nub of it ...
Long after the rest of the reptiles, long after
Media Watch ...
...what’s really needed and entirely unlikely to happen is for the media to behave with a little more empathy and concern for the people who are damaged by their stories.
Lehrmann and Higgins have both had their lives trashed by media and politics amid a war over competing versions of the truth.
Speaking personally, if I were doing some of the things that have been done to them, I would not be able to sleep at night.
But our Henry is just part of the tabloid yellow press ... fanning the flames while pretending to be shocked ...
Well it wouldn't be a proper handling of the Lehrmann matter without a snap of the witch, which the pond naturally downsized, but couldn't avoid entirely ...
Has our pompous blowhard contributed anything to an understanding of the matter? Well no, it's just another pompous reptile pundit indulging in political capers and trial by media ...
The pond regretted the indulgence. Sure, it revealed the hole in the bucket man as an abject groveller in the sewers, but if the pond is going to dwell on matters of law, it would have been more amusing to spend time in another sewer ...
And so to finish with the
immortal Rowe of the day, a matter the pond has studiously avoided up to now, and will assiduously avoid hereafter ...
There's no doubt that Holely Henry can come up with a plethora of names and quotes for his ill-formed opinions, is there. Once upon a time Nicholas Gruen (of Club Troppo) stated that from his experience Henry had (and probably still does) read a simply enormous number of books and that he had an almost infallible recall of all their contents. Is that what powers him to the kind of contributions such as todays effort: lots of venerables and lots of quotes from them. Or has Henry just got a very good ChatGPT to write his responses for him.
ReplyDeleteJust think of all the dropped names in today's effort: Sir William Blackstone, John Adams, JR Odgers. Otto Kirchheimer, Manichaea, Edmund Burke and the Constitution of the USA (and Australia). Plus all those quotes that emanate from them. Now, could any other reptile even begin to match that ? And has it persuaded anybody of anything ?
I had long assumed, GB, that Henry simply had a few books of “Great Quotations” and simply dipped into them each week, grabbing a handful or two that appear vaguely applicable (at least in his mind) to the subject at hand. At times - like today - the connection seems extremely tenuous. Henry though manages to take a Prophecies of Nostradamus or Humpty Dumpty approach, interpreting words to mean exactly what he intends them to mean.
ReplyDeleteHenry might indeed have a book or three of various 'quotations', Anony; it would be an easy way to produce his output. However, Gruen did say that basically every week or at most two, Henry would have a newly read bunch of books to quote - ie actual contents - rather than just the 'book of quotes' approach which all of us could imitate (or even emulate) if only we could be bothered.
DeleteAnd it could just be a combination: he reads some books and picks up some names to look up in a collection of quotes.
What should be asked what evidence do the murochracy have that makes Senator Gallagher guilty of misleading the house and that just by saying she is guilty without providing evidence does not make it so.
ReplyDeleteThe is a real danger here to our democracy the way politics is reported in their publications they are using the same tactics that they use in America to subvert and bring unrest by telling lies in their publications and without producing any evidence or facts.
The media is controlled in Australia and other countries by megalomaniacs who want drive our societies into right wing nuts like has occurred in America and South American states.
What is of great concern to me is what the future will be like for my children and their children if there is no change in the direction politics is taking we are being told that world order must remain as it is today with America dictating to rest of the world what America will accept as to how countries are governed and that they must not look to out grow America and its influence on world affairs.
The purchase of nuclear submarines at a cost of $400 billion is an outrageous amount to take out of the economy just to please the hawkes in the defence force and other rat bags that were part of the Morrison government when the media bent over backwards to support the lies that China is a threat to world peace because they are challenging America in growth and development of their society Asia is growing in strength and will undoubtedly develop because as with most societies in the world want to progress to better life style.
Sorry for my rambling today but I am at an age that I will not see some of the changes that are going to happen around the world and my hope is that those changes will not see Australia dragged into another conflict that is manufactured by America desire to be top dog on the planet.
The thing is, Anony, that the more 'evidence' you provide, the more easily you can be refudiated (tm Sarah Palin). The reptiles, like all of the Murdoch media, never make tthat mistake - they just keep on telling lies. Like Trump: "how do you know he's lying ? His lips are moving"). And not 'big lies' - like Nazi propaganda - but thousands of small lies that people just get sick and tired of picking up on, so they stop, and the lies keep on propagating. And the believers keep on believing.
DeleteEvidence, fellow-Anony? Who needs that, when you can simply take the Henry approach - name-check a few historical notables and documents, claim that they all condemn somebody, and case proven. Bugger evidence!
DeleteDespite Henry having yet to catch up with the modern world, where the Australian Parliamentary Education Office states: “Hansard reporters don't need to write down everything they hear; these days computer-assisted transcription and voice recognition technology help them to record proceedings”, even the old Pitman method might have been handy to shorten Henry and cut to the chase, where he tells us what he believes Gallagher did, without providing any reasons or evidence, and he avoids possible defamation proceedings by wavering on whether, what he claims was, an ex gratia payment, was or wasn’t illegitimate because, as usual, he doesn’t know.
ReplyDeleteNewscorp chemical engineers are amongst the most prolific at “poisoning the wells of justice”.
Classic Lizard Oz hysteria over the former Russian Embassy site. One minor Russki staffer squatting on a vacant block of land, presumably freezing his arse off (though by Motherland standards, a Canberra Winter morning probably feels like beach weather), and it’s a major incident, worth numerous articles and a typical outburst of hysteria from the Bromancer. Add in Claire’s latest trans-bashing cackle, and you encapsulate the Oz’s irrelevancy.
ReplyDeleteThe Caterist features in this week’s “Daily Beast” column, and sports a dye-job that would do Rudy Giuliani proud. https://www.theguardian.com/media/commentisfree/2023/jun/23/nick-cater-blames-probyns-sacking-on-poisonous-equity-but-didnt-get-the-news-corp-memo
ReplyDeleteIt seems our Henry still does a little of what his long-time day job was supposed to be - economic consulting. Specifically, report for the Pharmacy Guild on supposed effects on its members of the government's 60 day prescription policy. After my local member, Leader of the Nationals, Littleproud, had claimed several times on TV that that policy would see the loss of 20 000 jobs and the imminent collapse of many small towns, I tried to track down the source of the report. No success, until this day, when the Henry has a brief (he can be brief, it seems) letter in the 'Fin' claiming that columnists in the 'Fin' had got much of his report wrong, although the Henry finishes his letter with 'I would have thought it obvious that the policy will have a material impact on pharmacies; the question is what, if anything, one does about it.'
ReplyDeleteSo - regular Henry conclusion - no actual solution to the supposed problem.
Aside - my local, small town, pharmacy, (within the electorate of Maranoa) has been dispensing a tablet for me for several years on 60 day renewal, and they are still there.
Oh - and while we are apostrophising Connor Court, the Fin for this day has extract from another of their very recent prints 'Markets and Prosperity' edited by Harry Stutchbury - yes, son of Michael, Editor in Chief of the Fin, but that would be quite coincidental, even as Michael continues the steady march of the Fin into what used to the Limited News territory. The actual extract is by Jason Falinski, who did a significant public service in tipping Bronwyn Bishop out of Liberal nomination for the seat of Mackeller, but who lost it at his second election thereafter.
To save readers here, I looked at other contributors, and, if you want the latest thinking (?) from Georgina Downer, Gigi Foster (who seems to have slipped out of the 'go to' list for Sky) or even Tom Switzer - here it is. Or you could spend evenings tattooing your eyeballs with a toothpick. Take your pick (sorry!)
One does wonder what the pharmacist's take is on the actual act of filling the prescription versus the take on the prescription drugs etc themselves. For both of my drugs the act of filling the prescription is a matter of a quick read of the prescription followed by taking a small box of pills down from a shelf. I sincerely hope that the pharmacist's revenue does not depend too much on servicing customers such as me.
DeleteBoth of my drugs are PBS covered, so whatever the amount is, he gets very little from my custom and most, I would imagine, from the PBS subsidy and the effort it takes him is minimal. They really don't do much grinding up of ingredients and mixing and bottling of base chemicals these days. When was the last time you saw a pharmacist required to do that ?
I haven't checked this myself, but some intertube comments suggest that Henry grossly overstated the value of incidental purchases in his modelling of losses to pharmacies due to reduced customer visits.
Deletehttps://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/gp-opinion/why-60-day-dispensing-concerns-are-overblown
Reminds me of all the crazy assumptions in studies of "how much do you need for a comfortable retirement" (new tailored suit each year, two overseas holidays etc) - I've been retired a few years now and not living the frenetic lifestyle in the forecast.
You and me both, Bef, though I do know one or two from my previous life who do at least one OS trip every year. But then they generally had a significantly more profitable worklife than me.
DeleteMuch like our Henry, I expect, who probably collects a goodly sum for authoring exaggerations and lies.
Hmmm: "In any case, maybe there are too many pharmacies in some areas of Australia and the economic challenge will cull those with marginal profitability?"
DeleteSo really, we've been paying for 'service' we don't need. How very unusual that is.
“Obvious” that the proposed changes would be a material impact on pharmacies? Well, I don’t agree with Henry that any significant impact would be obvious. Presumably that’s why his services were engaged by the Pharmacy Guild. By all accounts the commissioned report is a masterpiece of fanciful exaggeration. I wonder if it’s replete with references to Classical Liberalism, Enlightenment figures and Thucydides?
ReplyDelete