In which the pond finds a couple of treats thanks to the 50 shades of Grey man, and Riddster from the IPA cheering on his friendly Jordie ...

 

The pond is coming to a transformative time of the year. Soon enough the pond will shift over from parritch to muesli ... as it does each year, what with the seasonal shift and the heating of the planet ... which is to say the ordinary heating of the southern hemisphere, and not the exceptional heating of the planet, which continues apace ...

The pond has a simple recipe for parritch ... a (small) cup, with a cup of milk and a cup of water, bring to a brisk simmer, and stir to a mucilaginous gluey glugginess and glutinous mushiness that suits ... then add a little brown sugar or Golden Syrup, Tamworth style, to taste ...

The result's a bit like the slushy, sludgy swill and undiluted pureed hokum you can get from the lizard Oz.

Some might think think that the pond should stick with cooked oats rather than shift over to munching on raw oats, but as with the lizard Oz, there's not much difference between the raw and the cooked ... (please, no Claude Lévi-Strauss jokes, leave that to an expert like a sociological Caterist).

Speaking of the cooked, there was Stan Grant at the top of the lizard Oz yet again, at the top on the far right ...

What could possibly explain the lizard Oz's ongoing fascination with Grant? Well, it's not just a climate denialist rag, it's routinely a racist and sexist rag, and bashing uppity, difficult, tricky blacks is par for the reptile bigotry course ...

Now the pond isn't a fan of Grant - anyone who wastes time at Q+A is a time waster - but does he need to endure the relentless persecution of the reptiles, carrying on like New Idea in the presence of a Hollywood star the rag can carry some false smut and innuendo about?

Grant didn't seem to think so, Stan Grant accuses the Australian newspaper of acting like a ‘racist hit squad’.

Here the pond must intrude. In its quaint way, The Graudian is talking about The Australian, with a capital T, as in The Lizard Oz, The Haven of Reptiles, The Gaggle of Racist Goons ... and its an EXCLUSIVE: prominent Indigenous journalist, who recently left the ABC, says he is being targeted by News Corp paper which ran story about a ‘bullying’ incident

Well of course. It's what the reptiles do ... and the pond did skim lightly over the previous reptile outing, but this one is worth a mention, if only because ...

...Stan Grant has accused the Australian newspaper of acting like “a racist hit squad” with a history of targeting Indigenous public figures, after the Murdoch masthead claimed the former ABC host was the subject of a bullying complaint.
“They’ve targeted Marcia Langton, they’ve targeted Noel Pearson – he’s been depicted as some sort of raving bully in the past,” Grant said. “They’ve done it to Larissa Behrendt, they’ve done it to Bruce Pascoe, it’s hunting season for Aboriginal people, that’s what it is.”
Grant said the article published on the front page on Tuesday was an “outrageous slur” and came on top of the referendum year in which he has been “constantly abused” by the media and on social media, including headlines about the colour of his skin.

Well yes, and for what? Nothing much, and something the reptiles would dismiss as cancel culture woke nonsense in another context, because apparently Grant said a naughty word or perhaps three and bunged on a bit of a blue, as they used to do out the back at Maguire's pub ...

...The Guardian has confirmed the senior colleague did not lodge a formal complaint about the conversation, which took place on 29 January, the day of the first episode of Q+A for 2023.

The Australian’s article reported that Grant swore at his colleague. Grant admitted “he lost it” when he was approached by the woman because he was talking to a friend about his distress about his niece dying and his father being ill.

“I was trying to get my head together to host a show before I jump in a car and drive out to bury my niece and give the eulogy,” he said.

ABC management did discuss the incident with both parties who have conflicting accounts of what took place but there was no formal complaint. No one who witnessed the incident has described it as “bullying” but rather as a single altercation.

The Australian has been asking the ABC questions about the incident for several months, sources said.

“This is an Australian newspaper; a racist hit squad that has been targeting me forever,” Grant said. “And I am sick to death of me and my family being smeared constantly.

“Do they care that my kids are gonna get abused today? Do they care that I’m gonna get abused today? Do they care that I am going to get death threats? Do they care?”

Well no, they don't care, they only care about angertainment, and serving up the shekels to Chairman Rupert, and cowering in the bunker the rest of the time ...

And now, rather than dwell anymore on that, on with a little of the pond's own angertainment, and there were a couple of splendid items in the comments section this day ...

Not the hit squad of Mundine and Shanners ... the pond only mentions them so that it can show off that infallible Pope from yesterday in proper format ...

... which it has to be said is less stomach-churning than this day's infallible Pope ... but as sexism has been mentioned alongside bog standard reptile racism ...

And with that the pond can turn to 50 shades of nuking the planet Grey ...

Why that artist's impression? Well they ain't got a real one that looks that good. And why does the pond bother, having gone down the path of nuking the country and the planet many, many times before with the reptiles?

Well the other day, the keen Keane went right off in Crikey in The right’s nuclear stupidity is enough to make us cough up Phlegm Orville. (paywall)

This was the lede ...The right's love of small modular reactors is scam used by fossil fuel interests to try to delay meaningful climate action.

The pond can take very little of the grundling that has returned to Crikey after a long absence, but the keen Keane was intent on nuking the AFR, and he will also serve here as a nice point and counterpoint montage ...

As Crikey has explained more times than we can remember, the “debate” about nuclear power in Australia follows a boringly predictable pattern. The right calls for a “sensible debate” about nuclear power (“sensible” means “don’t use it as a scare campaign against us because we know it will work”). Then someone who can count points out that nuclear power is famously subject to extraordinary delays and multi-hundred-percent cost blowouts, at which point the right will invoke “small modular reactors”, which have been promised for decades.

It’s so ritualised you could do a kabuki play about it. Not even the language changes. It was John Howard who as prime minister wanted a “sensible debate”, not once but twice. Julie Bishop wanted a “sensible debate” in 2014. Karen Andrews went “sensible” in 2015. Warren Mundine in 2019. Judith Sloan, too. Chris Kenny in 2021. Ryan Stokes earlier this year.

The latest iteration has played out true to form, with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton calling for “a sensible and sober conversation on nuclear power in Australia” because of “safe, small modular and microreactors”. But at least we’ve got something a little new this time. In July, when Dutton spoke to far-right lobby group the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) about the sensible debate, he tried to argue nuclear power is not just an obsession of the right.

President Macron has reversed France’s original plan to reduce its nuclear energy from 70% to 50%, indeed as part of a nuclear renaissance, France will build six new large reactors and shortly commence testing on a nuclear power plant in Phlegm Orville, which is set to open early next year.

Er, what? Phlegm Orville in France? Sounds like a haute cuisine serving of mucus. Presumably the IPA scribe misheard when Dutton referred to Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant (thank God he didn’t refer to Finland’s Olkiluoto). Or perhaps they couldn’t believe Dutton was seriously invoking Flamanville as an advertisement for the wisdom of nuclear power.

Now the keen Keane is full of keen links, and the pond hasn't bothered with most of them - there's a reason to head to the original piece in Crikey - but that joke about the IPA is worth the link ... if only to confirm it was really there ...

President Macron has reversed France’s original plan to reduce its nuclear energy from 70 to 50%, indeed as part of a nuclear renaissance, France will build six new large reactors and shortly commence testing on a nuclear power plant in Phlegm Orville, which is set to open early next year. France’s state owned electricity company EDF has created a subsidiary to develop its new SMR and is even bringing Italian partners into the fold.

And then it was back to those 50 shades of Grey ...

At this point the reptiles slipped in a snap of a smirking energy minister and the pond had to interrupt the montage to downsize it ...

With that done, the pond could return to the keen Keane in full flight... and with links that unfortunately the pond has lost, but as noted, the pond has to leave a reason for heading off to Crikey ...

Crikey first mentioned the new reactor being built at Flamanville in 2009, when it was due to open in 2013 and was already one-third over budget. By 2016 it was 200% over budget and scheduled to start in 2018. By 2018, the builder EDF discovered serious construction problems that delayed the start until 2020, and blew the budget out again. In 2020, the French government labelled Flamanville a “mess”. Early in 2022, when it was going to open at the end of the year, there was another delay and the budget rose to €12.7 billion (A$21.3 billion). At the end of last year, there was another delay into 2024 and the budget went over €13 billion.

So, all up, a decade overdue, and a final cost triple the initial estimate — if it starts next year. And it’s what Dutton thinks is an advertisement for nuclear power. Perhaps he should have mentioned Olkiluoto instead. It finally commenced in April this year… 14 years overdue.

Such criticisms, however, are now airily dismissed by nuclear power advocates. The future is small modular reactors (SMRs), which take much less time to build and are far cheaper — even if there are none actually operating outside Russia or China yet. “A single SMR can power some 300,000 homes. A microreactor could power a regional hospital, a factory, a mining site or a military base,” Dutton told the IPA.

At the same time as Dutton is spruiking SMRs, the Financial Review is as well. It’s run a three-part series on plans in Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom for SMRs (as one AFR reader acerbically noted, the keyword is “plans”).

Uh huh, but the safe word on the pond is "50 shades of Grey" ...

Now the keen Keane was agitated about the AFR, but really why not just transpose him to another key, and apply the rant to the 50 shades of Grey man?

The AFR also editorialised about the glories of SMRs. Conveniently absent, however, was the fact that even the new wonder technology needs massive taxpayer subsidies. The SMR that gets advocates most excited is the small prototype that US firm NuScale received regulatory approval to build in Idaho earlier this year — celebrated as a major milestone for the technology. Except it won’t commence operation until 2030 at the earliest and has already received US$1.4 billion in subsidies. That hasn’t stopped the proposed facility’s cost per MW-hour already increasing by more than 50% — three times the current cost of large-scale nuclear power in the US.

Why has the cost gone up for this SMR? Because, erm… cough cough… there’s been a massive blowout in the construction cost: 75%, to more than US$9 billion. Sure, it’s not a Phlegm Orville 300% blowout, but it is only a small reactor. And who will insure SMRs? In the United States, the government provides that insurance, with nuclear power plant owners paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year in premiums, further adding to the cost.

Another issue not mentioned by either the AFR or Dutton — both of whom like to whine about too much government spending — is what to do with the waste produced by SMRs. See, while they may be small, SMRs produce much more waste per unit of energy produced — and waste with higher radioactivity levels — than normal reactors. Good luck finding somewhere to store that for 10,000 years. You can bet no company will be doing that — it will fall to taxpayers, yet again.

So, apart from taking a long time to build, blowing out costs, requiring a massive infrastructure solution in terms of waste disposal and requiring colossal taxpayer support, the SMRs championed by Dutton and the AFR are completely different to traditional nuclear power.

What’s driving all this? Why does the right think SMRs are the solution? The delays that are typical of nuclear power, and which would be typical of SMRs as well, aren’t the problem — they’re the point. Switching focus to nuclear power and away from renewables and storage would delay decarbonisation and give fossil fuel industries extra years — indeed, extra decades — to keep operating while a nuclear “solution” was prepared. Like carbon capture, like gas, it’s another scam used by fossil fuel interests to try to delay meaningful climate action.

It’s enough to make you cough your lungs out.

And with that, the pond was nicely primed to get a final lashing from the 50 shades of Grey man ...

For those who think they've heard all this before, they have ... many, many times, because it's not just Stan Grant that routinely cops a lashing, so does the pond's eyeballs ...

That's what you get when a rag is a climate science denialist hit squad ...

And so to the bonus and another delightful item, this time featuring the Riddster of the IPA ... because when all other options expire, there's always Gina's money ... and a spot in the lizard Oz ...

A friend of the pond sent along a link to a CBC story, knowing that at some point the reptiles would do a friendly Jordie story ... Ontario court rules against Jordan Peterson, upholds social media training order.

It is of course seemly and proper, as you'd expect of CBC ...

Allow the pond to provide that link to the story about those social media posts ...

Allow the pond to cherry pick some of them ...

...The complaints centred on tweets Peterson had made about public health restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic and his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. The panel followed up on the concerns, examined other tweets Peterson had made and noted particular concern with a series of statements that included:

• Referring to Catherine McKenney, an Ottawa city councillor, who prefers to use they/them pronouns, as an "appalling self-righteous moralizing thing."
• A tweet in which he used the dead name of actor Elliot Page, stating: "Remember when pride was a sin. And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician."
• A tweet in which he referred to Gerald Butts, the former principal secretary of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as a "prik" (sic).
• His tweet in response to a Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover of a plus-sized model, in which he said: "Sorry. Not Beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that."

Peterson was temporarily suspended from Twitter for his tweet about Page. His account was reinstated by Elon Musk shortly after he purchased the social media platform in 2022.
After its review, the panel concluded that Peterson's conduct "poses moderate risks to the public," which includes the potential of "undermining public trust in the profession of psychology, and trust in the college's ability to regulate the profession in the public interest."

Actually judging by that content, Jordie poses more of a risk to himself than anyone else, and at this point the pond was reminded of the Groucho line, Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member ...

Why does addictive Jordie bother, why does he want to hang in there?

Well yes, you just have to ask Charlie Teo what happens when questions start being asked ... and and that point the pond was reminded of another matter entirely, featured in the Nine rag's Time for Teo’s media supporters to back away from their controversial mate

...With Teo’s reputation in tatters following a recent finding of unsatisfactory professional conduct: a Herald investigation has raised questions about his involvement in the Blacktown Brain and Spinal Institute, the sale of council land to developer Walker Corporation at a hefty discount, and the conduct of the neurosurgeon’s business partners.
The Herald’s chief investigative reporter Kate McClymont on Tuesday revealed that at a 2021 presentation on the “Transformation of Blacktown,” the council’s chief executive officer flagged a $100 million sale to the BBSI group for its billion-dollar medical development. However, last March the land was sold to developer Lang Walker’s company for $42 million, without going to public tender. The same day Walker Corporation bought the land, ASIC documents show builder Leny Manassa resigned as the sole director of the BBSI Group. Manassa, local businessman Carlo LoGiudice and Teo all quit as shareholders of BBSI, too.
Teo’s reputation was vital in gaining council support for the project. But the consortium was shaken after McClymont’s front page article on September 5, 2019, which raised serious questions about Teo’s judgment, behaviour, exorbitant fees and sexual harassment of female colleagues. The following December, she also reported Teo’s and LoGiudice’s association with Melbourne underworld figure Mick Gatto. The article also raised the multiple attempts to bankrupt LoGiudice, who had featured a number of times in diaries of the now-jailed former Labor minister Eddie Obeid.
Reputations and risk: Charlie Teo’s ‘wolf pack’ unleashes torrent of abuse
The medical profession took off after Teo. A professional standards committee last month found him guilty of unsatisfactory conduct, saying he lacked insight, empathy and judgment and that he had failed to properly explain the risks of the operations to patients and relatives. The committee also ruled he could not carry out brain surgery unless he obtained written approval from an independent neurosurgeon of 15 years’ standing who had to be approved by the Medical Council of NSW. It is now near-impossible for Teo to operate in Australia because no neurosurgeon will vouch for him.
Following the publication of the 2019 investigation, it has emerged LoGuidice boasted to a WhatsApp group that included Teo of a threat by a young Italian man and his father to “rifle” McClymont and set fire to The Sydney Morning Herald, and warned they were the “wrong wolfpack” to mess with.
He initially said the conversations may have been “doctored” but subsequently claimed it was “banter.” “Neither you nor the SMH nor any other person has anything to fear from me,” LoGiudice later told the Herald in an email. But, as we reported yesterday, NSW Police have discussed the threats with Nine’s security and management, who interpreted the comments as threats to staff. It should go without saying but is worth making clear: the Herald stands by McClymont and condemns these appalling threats of violence.
These latest revelations further damage Teo’s tarnished reputation. In response to LoGiudice’s message, Teo thanked him. Based on the contents of the Whatsapp messages seen by the Herald, he failed to rebuke his business partner for his choice of language. Teo did not respond to a request for comment about the exchange.

Sorry, the pond got distracted, but the principle's the same, there's nothing like a good goss, and if you head to Russia zonked out of your mind, someone's going to notice ... 

What Happened to Jordan Peterson? A philosopher, a medical crisis, and a mystery...

....it was something of a surprise to learn, in early February, that Peterson had spent eight days in a medically induced coma at an unnamed clinic in Russia. Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila, a 28-year-old food blogger, posted a brief but dramatic video claiming that she and her father had traveled to Russia in early January seeking an unorthodox treatment for his physical dependence on the drug clonazepam. Dependency goes against the core tenets of Peterson’s philosophical brand: stoicism, self-reliance, the power of the will over circumstance and environment. “No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life,” he admonished in his bestselling self-help book 12 Rules for Life. 

According to Mikhaila, he nearly died several times during his medical ordeal. After weeks in intensive care, he was unable to speak or write and was taking anti-seizure medicine.

The news was met with bafflement by doctors and laypeople alike. What was Peterson doing in a drug-induced coma in Russia? Based on interviews with medical professionals and a close reading of various statements that Mikhaila and Peterson himself have made on podcasts and social media, it is clear that Peterson ended up in Russia after an extended battle to wean himself off clonazepam. And it seems likely that Peterson, a self-proclaimed man of science, succumbed to the lure of a quack treatment—with devastating consequences.    

Peterson’s saga has mostly been covered in conservative news outlets, which have relied almost exclusively on a disjointed narrative put forth by Mikhaila, a nutrition “influencer” with no medical credentials who claims to have cured her idiopathic juvenile arthritis, clinical depression, and a C. difficile infection by eating nothing but meat, salt, and water. Peterson promoted his daughter’s snake oil diet and even embraced the program himself. In July 2018, he told celebrity podcaster Joe Rogan that he’d been eating nothing but beef, salt, and water for two months at his daughter’s suggestion, following a year of eating almost nothing but steak and salad. It’s unclear whether Peterson continued to follow this extreme diet. 

Peterson’s health problems first surfaced in September 2019, when his family announced that he had undergone a stint in rehab in upstate New York. According to Mikhaila’s update from Russia, he was prescribed the sedative clonazepam, a benzodiazepine, by his family doctor in 2017 for anxiety stemming from a “severe autoimmune reaction to food.” Peterson’s doctor allegedly increased his dose after Peterson’s wife was diagnosed with kidney cancer in April 2019. Peterson supposedly didn’t realize he’d become dependent on clonazepam until he suffered agonizing withdrawal symptoms when he tried to quit the medication cold turkey during the summer of 2019. 

Why on earth would any professional body want this man as a member? Why would this man think he was the right sort of man to be offering psychological advice under the auspices of a professional body?

Well eventually the pond had to get back to the Riddster, without expecting any sensible answer now that he's gone full Gina ...

Sorry, Riddster, that was indeed beyond the valley of the risk of being self-serving ... but why whinge and moan, you have Gina's money for comfort ...

Meanwhile, with that friendly Jordie, the question was simply who was going to be boss ...

And so on, and on, wanting to be a member of a club he shouldn't want to be a member of, and now back to the Riddster, who obviously sees himself as the same sort of martyr ... a persecuted Christ figure, iconic and symbolic ...

Here's the thing. The Riddster himself hasn't lost the right to freely express himself. The reptiles welcome him with open arms, as they welcome all sorts of IPA loons. 

Friendly Jordie hasn't lost the right to express himself. He can't just do it under the cloak of a licence from a professional body, much as Charlie Teo has run into troubled waters in his professional career ...

At this point, the reptiles decided to run one of their patented rights free dirt cheap snaps of an historical figure, naturally cut down to size by the pond ...

That was followed by a short final par from the Riddster now deep in his martyrdom ...

Dedicated professionals?

That's one deeply delusional way of putting it.

The pond is reminded of Icarus, who flew too high and got too close to the sun, and imagined that the world would worship him for it, and instead ended up in a deeply weird place ...

...Mikhaila blames Western medicine for her father’s predicament, and not just because Western doctors prescribed the pills. Allegedly, Peterson’s pneumonia was the fault of a North American hospital, too, though she doesn’t say how she knows that. Mikhaila is essentially weaving her own “hero’s journey” into her father’s ordeal, one in which she brought him to a far-flung clinic that had “the guts” to do what Western doctors wouldn’t. It’s a tale that burnishes her brand as a wellness influencer and shoves aside awkward questions about whether the treatment harmed Peterson.
When it comes to recovery, there are no quick fixes. But that doesn’t mean the most arduous option is necessarily the most effective. If Peterson’s sad story has a moral, it’s that a drug problem is neither a dragon to be slain nor a sin to be ashamed of. It’s a mundane health problem that should be treated scientifically, without heroics.

Sorry, the pond left the world of science long ago, first with that 50 shades of Grey man, and then with the Riddster, and all that's left for breakfast is a patented bowl of sludge ...

What a relief then to turn to the immortal Rowe for a closing cartoon featuring none of the above ...