In which Lloydie of the Amazon returns to save the whales, and there's a few bonus space fillers ...

 

Apparently it's only outside the paywall for a limited time, but the pond did enjoy the read in the NY Mag,  Excerpted from The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, by Michael Wolff (Henry Holt and Co.; September 26, 2023), which built to a thundering climax (spoiler alert)...

...Like all monopolies (and religions and single-party states), Fox was built on a great, uncompromising, stubborn, black-and-white literal-mindedness: us against them. Appropriately, it has been felled not just by its own overreaching and sense of impunity but by something like a conflicted conscience: The Murdochs feel bad, about Carlson, about Trump, about themselves. Too late, they are trying to reject the monsters they have created.
But the monsters, Trump and Carlson, are by this time bigger than the network that made them. In that age-old media tension, the best talent becomes larger than the platform by which it has been nurtured — and walks out the front door. Elvis leaves the building.
In the bittersweet department, accompanied by the wild laughter of his enemies, you have the lonely figure of Rupert Murdoch, 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch, now shaded by doubt, ambivalence, regret, bafflement, and the harsh and clanging voices of his children. Not the best mind-set with which to hold a kingdom.

The pond doesn't know or care if all the gossipy tales of backbiting and chaos are true, it was too distracted by wild laughter ...

And speaking of bafflement and regret, somehow the lizard Oz lurches on, and this day committed an obscenity at the top of its digital edition ...

Of course petulant Peta was going to be at the top on the far right and of course the pond was going to red card her pouting fear mongering, but to juxtapose her with Charles Perkins was an undiluted obscenity ...

The Rish! was also on view, but for that, the pond could offer the disinfectant of John Crace's Cynical Rishi sells net zero targets down the river to appease the right ...

..He wasn’t watering anything down, he said snottily. His anger at being outed was exposed. He was keeping to the same targets by pushing the targets back. It was delusional stuff. Insane. Even the car industry thinks he’s mad. And he didn’t care about his daughters because they wouldn’t be paying £10K for a heat pump. Mmm. That’s rather the point. But he had spoken to them and asked them which they preferred. The planet dying or Daddy being disappointed at the next election. These were hard choices.

Down below, the climate theme turned up again, but this time in the guise of one of the pond's most beloved reptiles ...

At last Lloydie of the Amazon had returned from his recent silence!

He hadn't been lost like Colonel Fawcett after all ... and given that Rachael Kohn was the alternative, the pond immediately made room - though not before banning Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and Beethoven for unwisely dedicating his third symphony to Napoleon before changing his mind, and all that dreadful modernist music which the Nazis deemed Jewish and offensive to their ears, and the Shostakovich works which offended Stalin, including but not limited to the notion that Lady Macbeth somehow turned up in Mtsensk, only to be banned for thirty years ... presumably by some petty Russian bureaucrat channeling Rachael Kohn ...

Is this the same Rachael Kohn who for years filled the ABC with waffle about religion and spirituality, cults, loons and weirdos, and thereby almost single handedly convinced the pond to forsake RN and start listening to ABC News?

Never mind, enough of that form of cults and cultist thinking, the pond has the cult of Lloydie of the Amazon ...

Sad to say, Lloydie of the Amazon is only worth two gobbets, so before proceeding to the final gobbet, the pond thought it might offer a few details on Shellenberger.

Like many prize loons, he has a reasonably detailed wiki here, and that talk about the whale killing fields had already been taken up earlier, as noted in a story by Elizabeth Weise and Dinah Voyles Pulver for the Cape Cod Times, Whale deaths exploited in 'cynical disinformation' push against wind power, advocates say.

Cape Cod. The pond always liked the notion of being named after a fish.

And in the story, who scored a mention? Why there's wild laughter echoing down the page at the thought of Tuckyo Rose and Lloydie being linked ...

...The cause has also been taken up by Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, who has aired a series of segments in which he called wind turbines DDT for whales.

Long-time whale advocacy groups aren't buying it. 

“It’s just a cynical disinformation campaign,” said Greenpeace oceans director John Hocevar. “It doesn’t seem to worry them that it’s not based in any kind of evidence.”

Scientists who study whale strandings say there’s no known link between wind turbines and whale deaths, although they continue to probe what role, if any, wind development has in whale deaths. 

So far, evidence for a link is little more than speculation. Experts point to the United Kingdom, which has 2,652 offshore wind turbines and where experts say autopsies have not found a connection between dead whales on their shores and the turbines off them.

Gib Brogan, a campaign director with Oceana, an international ocean advocacy group, said those opposed to wind power are using a spate of whale deaths in the area as an opportunity.

"It seems that the connection between the whale strandings and wind activities is a convenient line of opposition to development of offshore wind in the mid-Atlantic," he said.

Then there was a review by Peter Gleick of a Shellenberger book, back in July 2020, which makes for an amusing read ...Bad science and bad arguments abound in ‘Apocalypse Never’ by Michael Shellenberger

A sample ...

...The historical tensions and intellectual debates between Malthusians and Cornucopians are now more than two centuries old and have evolved. In recent years, the public conversation around critical global crises like human-caused climate change, deforestation and species extinction, population pressures, and new and worsening public health threats has grown louder, harsher, and increasingly ideological. As the sciences have improved, the deep complexity and connections among these problems have also become more apparent, as have urgent calls to address them through local, national, and global actions.

A recent entry in this debate is Michael Shellenberger’s “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All” (HarperCollins Publishers, 2020). Shellenberger explains in his introduction that he seeks to counter and dismiss what he considers irrational, overwrought arguments of pending Malthusian catastrophes; instead, he seeks to promote the Cornucopian view that environmental problems can be eliminated if we’d just pursue aggressive economic growth, simple technological advances, and increased tapping of abundant natural resources. In doing so, he echoes previous efforts of authors like Herman Kahn, Julian Simon, and Bjørn Lomborg.

Climate dialogue seen as ‘out of control’

Shellenberger self-describes as an environmentalist activist and a bringer of facts and science to counter “exaggeration, alarmism, and extremism that are the enemy of a positive, humanistic, and rational environmentalism.” He decided to write this book because he believes “the conversation about climate change and the environment has, in the last few years, spiraled out of control.”

Voices of reason and clear analyses in the contentious debates about how to tackle our global problems are welcome. Unfortunately, the book is deeply and fatally flawed. At the simplest level, it is a polemic based on a strawman argument: To Shellenberger, scientists, “educated elite,” “activist journalists,” and high-profile environmental activists believe incorrectly that the end of the world is coming and yet refuse to support the only solutions that he thinks will work – nuclear energy and uninhibited economic growth.

‘What is new in here isn’t right, and what is right isn’t new.’

But even if the author properly understood the complexity and nature of global challenges, which he does not, and got the science right, which he did not, a fatal flaw in his argument is the traditional Cornucopian oversimplification of his solutions – reliance on economic growth and silver-bullet technology. As the great American journalist and humorist H. L. Mencken said, “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.” Mencken also warned against those who know precisely what is right and what is wrong, a warning especially worth hearing in the highly complex and uncertain worlds of global climate, pandemics, and environmental change...

And so on, which naturally leads to the last Lloydie gobbet ...

Not a shred of evidence, just alarums and fear mongering, no consideration of the literature or alternatives, a classic Lloydie outing, and what frabjous joy, the lizard Oz editorialist was also out and about, this time deploring said alarums and fear mongering, but suddenly it's become "weather panic" ...

It helps explain why the lizard Oz resolutely refused to cover recent events in the real world ... and yet in an alternative reality on another planet ...

As a corollary, over at the Graudian, it was possible to read Adam Morton's The push for nuclear energy in Australia is driven by delay and denial, not evidence ...

...Coincidentally or otherwise, many prominent members of the pro-nuclear and anti-renewable energy campaign dismiss climate science. Some do it directly. Others do it indirectly by arguing there is no urgency to act.

The primary sources of this climate rejection are the federal Coalition, the Australian newspaper and the misinformation sewer of Sky News After Dark. The Australian is happy to run unquestioning news stories claiming multi-billion dollar “black holes” in renewable energy plans based on flawed analyses by former mining executives, but then devote pages to tut-tutting over an estimate by Chris Bowen’s energy department that says nuclear energy would be – shock horror – really expensive.

This is, of course, a newspaper that gives more space to contrarian campaigns by individual scientists who claim that the Great Barrier Reef is not under threat and the Bureau of Meteorology’s temperature records cannot be trusted than it does to the overwhelming weight of thousands of peer-reviewed science papers. Considered and balanced scepticism is healthy. The Australian’s coverage of these issues has the rigour of an old bloke shouting in the corner of a pub as last drinks are served.

Yep, that sounds about right, have an infallible Pope to celebrate ...

This was all by the numbers lizard Oz climate science denialist, fear mongering stuff, so the pond decided to turn to a new reptile warrior, deploring the entitled and lazy lucky country ...

A couple of things. Almost every day the pond is blessed by the deep strategic thinking of the bromancer. That's why the pond is ready to be plunged into war with China by Xmas. So please, no talk of the pond being incredibly naive. The pond is standing back and standing by ... waiting for the bro word.

As for Liz, has she any idea that she's scribbling for Satan himself, in a rag which deals with issues with the rigour of an old bloke shouting in the corner of a pub as last drinks are served?

And as for pearl clutching and the horrors of waging war, what can we learn about Liz's experience if we head off to ANU ...

Hmm, not much field work there, not a uniform or an F88 Austeyr in sight.

Anything else?

Sorry about the screen caps in relation to the hot links, but don't overlook that boast for the ages, about doing a PhD in 2017 under the supervision of the sociopathic war mongerer himself ...

And with all that field work done, time for more from Liz ...

At this point the reptiles decided to run a few stills showing the current war going down and the sociopath himself ...

Meanwhile there's an another war going down, with the reptiles not so much MIA as misleading in action...

Back to Liz for a couple of short gobbets ...

Yes, yes, whenever the pond talks to a Vietnam war veteran, he's always keen to remind the pond of the way that he did most of his fighting in Europe. Ditto those who served in Afghanistan, which apparently is spitting distance from Paris. Ditto those who served in Iraq. Ditto the pond's uncles, who served in Korea ...

Sorry, what was the point?

We continue to frame the Ukraine-Russia war in terms of supporting democracy? Should we reframe it in terms of supporting a sociopathic war monger?

What a disappointment warrior Liz turned out to be. The pond at least learned it was right to stick with the deep strategic thinking of the bromancer. Bring on the war with China by Xmas ...

And so to the immortal Rowe to wrap up the day's proceedings, with the planet another day worse for reptile wear and tear ...