With the pond shortly to head south, and so go off air for a little while, what better way to celebrate than with a bumper crop of lizard Oz reptiles, so that keen herpetology students can return to the festering pile in the pond's absence?
Not that the lizard Oz is ever far from mind for travellers. A pond correspondent reported that while the derelict business lounge of derelict Qantas now only contains the detritus of a few magazines ...
... and while Sky News can no longer be seen, the reptiles turn up as headlines, peddling the usual misinformation and self-serving bias ...
What's the point of the tree killer edition if it can no longer be given away as a loss leader, of the kind which drug dealers employ, hooking potential victims with a freebie sample?
Meanwhile, speaking of misinformation and self-serving bias, Killer Creighton was out and about today, and the pond judged his bleat the most exceptional and wondrous up against standard reptile efforts...
If the pond went off to Killer's wiki listing, and noted that he was a barking mad far right loon of the first water, and a reptile hack extreme even by Murdochian standards, the pond would be censored for the use of intemperate language, even if it happened to be the truth.
At this point, the reptiles sprinkled in a couple of snaps to help the triggered Killer, going over the same old turf ... and yep, here we go again, hunting Hunter and showing people in masks. Deploy them whenever you feel like being triggered, Killer style ...
Meanwhile, Killer is still moaning and whining and wailing ...
Back to Killer giving wiki some Killer Kurry...
Hmm, what did Rachel Maddow say about masks? Did she pass the Killer Freudian test for a deep and abiding fear of masks?
Ah, the war in China still goes on ... and that leads to a final, mercifully short Killer gobbet ...
Indeed, indeed, how can anyone learn about Killer's Freudian fear of masks by resorting to his wiki?
Typically that moan by Killer neglects to mention that it was Jason Wilson in The Graudian who kalled Killer an "arch neo-liberal", and his retort, even more damning, that he was "old DLP Labor sprinkled with a bit of libertarianism", was locked behind the Murdochian paywall ... and the conflation of wiki with Jason Wilson was full steam ahead way back then ...
Actually, wikipedia didn't declare Killer an "arch neoliberal". Jason Wilson did, and someone put up the link. Why is Killer routinely and reliably so obtuse? Why was he ever on the ABC?
What's shocking and shameful is the way that the ABC routinely harbours reptiles and gives them safe passage, and so does the business lounge at Qantas ...
Meanwhile, Killer is still moaning and whining and wailing ...
Poor old Killer. Doesn't he realise that the Murdochians are locked behind a paywall, trapped in a bubble of their own making, and only occasionally to be seen, perhaps when in the Qantas lounge when you can stumble across a sample, and then might wonder if crack is worth a go ...
As for a top score for reliability, look no further than the Qantas business lounge ...
Now on to routine reptile business, with both the Caterist and the Major out and about ...
The Major was occupying top perch early in the day, right next to Dame Slap carrying on in her usual vengeful, full bitch way ...
But the pond decided to go with the Caterist, because the pond had heard it all before and didn't feel the need to do anything except the monotonous consistency that the Caterist parrot manages to summon up when reciting his lines ...
As well as nuking the country, the reptiles nuked the pond's eyeballs with a few distracting illustrations. Use them throughout the Caterist piece when feeling the need to be triggered ...
Reading this day's Caterist, the pond idly wondered if the Menzies Research Centre had used some of its taxpayer cash in the paw loot to buy in an AI program, feed in all previous Caterist columns, press a button, and cop this regurgitation ...
Not bloody "Sharri" again (and a thanks to that correspondent who advised the pond that "Sharri" was the right and proper form of address).
Yep, it was time for the Major to shift gears ...and head back to familiar pastures ... climate science denialism, with just a little re-dressing ... with his celebrated appearance as one of Clive Hamilton's dirty dozen in Crikey in 2014 handily archived here ...
Some of those links still work if you head off to the original, but the pond's real point is that many years later, the Major is still a reliable performer ...
Hang on a moment, you useless goose. They're not adverse to discussing the merits, or the so-called demerits, they're just wary of the company they might be keeping in the process, and self-promoting prats of the Switzer kind are exactly the company to avoid ...
Meanwhile ...
Back to the old matinee routine, denialism dressed up in a new form of fear mongering, because it should never be forgotten or forgiven that the Caterist started out as your average barking mad denialist ... now purporting to be a deeply concerned environmentalist ...
The pond supposes it's a new angle ... Katerist as koncerned koala karer, and blathering bull artist with a raging lust for biodiversity ... and it might pass muster for stray readers unaware of the real agenda ... nuking the country, as a way of diverting attention from doing anything about the climate for the next twenty years or so ...
What's most expensive? The pond votes for the constant drip feed of taxpayer money to the Menzies Research Centre so that they can deploy AI on regurgitated Caterist columns ...
And so to top of the digital world Major this morning, and again there's nothing new, just the usual recycled offerings, but the Major does reliably summarise all the current reptile grievances doing the rounds ...
Might the pond mention as an alternative an old New Yorker story it came across ... It was by Elizabeth Kolbert back on February 19th 2017 under the header Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds, with the lede New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason, and it should be outside the paywall if you have a few clicks left, and it ended this way ...
Or perhaps an experiment being run by chairman Rupert, as expounded by the Major. Whatever, on this matter, what passes on a good day for reality is not reassuring ...
Actually, Malware's stupidity isn't the sort of figleaf the Major should try hiding behind. The coverage of the Voice by the reptiles has been shameful, all the while dressed up as both siderism, and "just promoting healthy debate", and the same has applied for decades in relation to climate science ...
Some of those links still work if you head off to the original, but the pond's real point is that many years later, the Major is still a reliable performer ...
Trust the Major? Sure can, and it seems tht climate science is just a way to generate website traffic ... and if that isn't a classic bit of Majorism, the pond's eyesight must be failing... but then such is the Major's vanity that he's always trying to get a mention by Graham Readfearn, you know, The world likely just had its hottest month on record. What a time to be a climate science denier.
Dammit, it was Killer Creighton and the Bjorn-again one who scored the mentions in that one, but what a time to be a Major denier ... and now to bring it all home with a classic Major conflation of killer cold, killer Dame Slap and suffering killer "Sharri" ...
And so to a fourth and final reptile, which is way more than the pond would usually endure, but the pond felt so affronted by this outing by the swishing Switzer, the preening aggrandisement, and the narcissist attention-seeking, that the pond just had to vomit it up ...
To help out, the reptiles stuck in their now standard array of huge snaps ...
Deploy as needed ... as the righteous prat explains why they should be helping out the CIS and its useless business model ...
That crap about John Stuart Mill would be enough to send the pond screeching from the room, but the tone deaf Switzer has simply no idea how patronising and condescending he manages to sound (remind the pond why the ABC coddles him with a radio spot, even if it's consigned to Siberian timeslots?)
What an overweening and insulting prat he is ... but it got worse and worse, more offensive by the gobbet ...
Listen to the man. Tone deaf and beyond the pale, and with a righteousness so far up itself, not a shred of self-awareness sees the light ... and yet he still ploughed on, insulting potential speakers in a way seemingly designed to ensure anyone in their right minds would avoid him and the CIS like the plague ...
There you go. As strong a case for dodging the swishing Switzer and the CIS as ever the pond might expect to read ...
And so to a concluding couple of immortal Rowes. First there's what might pass as a comment on the Switzer ...
... and the reptiles this day managed to distract the pond from news of the mango Mussolini, so this will have to do ...
Perhaps Killer’s real concern is that he only has a “short” Wikipedia entry?
ReplyDeleteHe may dislike being called a neoliberal, but there are even less flattering terms that might be applied to somebody who considers Glen Greenwald “one of the best journalists around”.
Reckon you have to work 'libertarian' in there too, somewhere, Anony.
DeleteDoes anybody, apart from the KillerCs of the world, still read Greenwald ?
What can you expect from a debate with the No case? Wikipedia (???) tells us :"The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. During a Gish gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal debate."
ReplyDeleteSo, claims of inherent virtue from KillerC: "For years I've been writing columns advocating for land and inheritance taxes, a higher top marginal tax rate for very high incomes, tougher bank and pharmaceutical regulation, scrapping negative gearing and a universal age pension, and I even advocated against privatisation of energy markets and US meddling in other countries." Strewth, sounds like KillerC was actually conducting Bill Shorten's election campaign just a couple of elections ago.
ReplyDeleteThing is, maybe it's just because I only get to see KillerC through his 'The Australian' efforts, but I've never seen him contribute even a single one of those claimed positions into anything he's ever written. Maybe it was all verbal on ABC's the Drum until he wet his copybook ? Can anybody point to an example of even a single one of KillerC's claimed journalistic contributions ?
Then there's this gem: "Not just allegations, mind you, but "false" allegations -- so much for readers being allowed to make up their own mind." Now how exactly does anything included in Wikipedia prevent anybody from making up their own mind ? Is KillerC saying that anything included in Wikipedia is ipso facto incontrovertible truth and that we'll all have to just unconditionally believe it ? Or is that just him importing his reptile practices into Wikipedia to be together with his mate Greenwald.
Dear Dorothy - you need that break. The content you have spread before us this day is so repetitious that much of it no longer registers with a reader who is not just activated by trigger words or phrases.
DeleteI agree with your first billing for Killer, particularly when I saw that he had used ‘tendentious’ to qualify research which did not fit his ideology. That is a word that, I think, many of your readers would be more likely to use about Killer.
Oh - declaration - each year I send a donation, equivalent to what I spend to buy my very local newspaper, to the Wiki Foundation. I smiled when I saw Killer try to damn with faint praise, with his ‘Wikipedia is unquestionably useful, especially for time-pressed journalists seeking to check basic facts.’ How often have the comments to your own efforts noted that this or that contributor to Limited News not taken the thirty seconds to do just that, and it is not that such contributors are ‘time pressed’. They have known for years what they are expected to write; their challenge now is to make it read better than whatever cheap AI Rupert has taken up.
In Killer’s case, AI probably knows that Glenn Greenwood does favour a couple of ’n’s for his given name.
And - a rather revolutionary idea for the Killer, as for everyone who makes his kind of accusations against the Wiki - if you think there are problems with its processes - the invitation is always open to get involved. Many people do. That is the remarkable thing about the Wiki - it attracts a wonderful amount of voluntary labour, and, in turn, is available free. Oh - of course - that alone makes its content suspicious - if you want the very best content, you have to pay for it. The Rupert model; the one that worked so well for his several attempts to get in on that ‘social media’ lark, and still tries to charge the price of a good coffee for ‘content’ that has been recycled endlessly.
I could try the line from Capt. Mainwaring 'I wondered which of you would spot that', but honesty, and humility, compels me to admit a Muphry - I don't know what preferences anyone named Greenwood might have for their given names, but I did know that Glenn Greenwald, journalist and sometime lawyer, does favour two 'n's.
DeleteThat 'Muphry' was a comeon, wasn't it Chad ? Just to see if any of us are alive and still conscious ? But I'm sarching for any evidence at all, no matter how 'tendentious', that KillerC has ever written a single word of all the woke stuff he's laying claim to. Or was it just that from his cadetship time, he's mentally converted a bunch of stuff he stenographed from sundry others into something he fondly believes that he wrote himself.
DeleteNickC: "Small modular reactors have yet to be commercially proven, but the technological challenges have largely been overcome, unlike green hydrogen, for instance." Oh great, the technology has all been bedded down now and we can expect SMRs in how long ? Or has the technology only been bedded down in theory, and now a decade or two's work remains to design, build, test and finally, hopefully, put to work the module factories, the module transport system and the SMR assembly people and process.
ReplyDeleteA doddle, we reckon ? Only take about 15 - 20 years maybe ? Stopwatch started and counting.
“Technological challenges have _largely_ been overcome” is a wonderful phrase - so much wriggle room.
DeleteAs usual, the Major’s cawing boils down to “News Corp good, everyone else bad”.
ReplyDeletePerhaps other media outlets are ignoring Sharri’s latest “EXCLUSIVE revelations” because they’ve heard it all before, concluded that, as per yesterday’s Pond, we’ll never for sure one way or the other, and don’t share the Major’s obsessive need to push the infallibility of Reptiles? Or to put it another way - they’ve moved on and have better things to do.
And always did have, Anony. But I'd have to count myself as a lot more sure of the zoonotic explanation than that some mysterious chaps walked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology ready to spread SARS-Cov-2 around China and on to the world.
DeleteHmmm. Here we go with the Lenin Medal man again. Crikey's Clive Hamilton tells us that "Otherwise-good journalists at The Australian allow themselves to be sucked into Mitchell's vortex of paranoia about all things green." Ummm "Otherwise-good journalists" ? Who are they exactly in the reptile 'vortex' ?
ReplyDeleteNow correct me if you think I'm wrong, but I can't recall any 'The Australian' journalists rating as "otherwise-good" in a very long time; several decades at least. But here we go with the Maj. once again: "Cold weather kills far more people annually than heat." And Maj. Mitch. knows because he personally counts them all - and didn't I tell you that ? But hey, only in Maj. Mitch's frozen mind does the world stay still: Hanigan, Woodward and Dear: "We found that in 1968 there were approximately 73 deaths in summer for every 100 deaths in winter. By 2018, this had risen to roughly 83 deaths in summer for every 100 deaths in winter."
More people die in winter than summer, but climate change may see this reverse
https://theconversation.com/more-people-die-in-winter-than-summer-but-climate-change-may-see-this-reverse-159135
So just wait a while, Maj. and then count them again. In the meantime, we can think about what "Long-time leading civil libertarian Terry O'Gorman" had to say: "...you have to read people you don't agree with because it might actually cause you to change your own views." And that's why the reptiles are always changing their own views, isn't it - because they are always reading lots of people that they don't agree with.
In an ideal world that O’Gorman comment would have some validity, but it assumes honestly, openness and goodwill on the part of those putting forward opposing views. In the case of the Reptiles those qualities are conspicuously lacking. Why waste time and energy pretending that those with decades of obfuscating and outright lying deserve such courtesy?
DeleteI wouldn't call it 'courtesy', Anony, I'd call it self interest - that is if they had anything at all to say that wasn't just another self-interested lie, I'd gladly pay some attention. But they simply haven't - why would I pay any attention whatsoever to 'Sharri' when I can read the words of the actual scientists involved.
Delete"As strong a case for dodging the swishing Switzer and the CIS as ever the pond might expect to read ..." Agreed totally wholeheartedly, DP; and they just get worse by the day.
ReplyDeleteI notice that pretty much all the commentary on the leaking of the Sofronoff Report refers to Dame Slap as a “journalist”.
ReplyDeleteI’m sure that there are other, much more accurate, terms that could be used.