Just as the late night comics return to work, the pond has decided to go on strike ... only a protest strike about the reptile serving up of lizard gruel, but a strike all the same ...
Yesterday's Groaning was the culmination of a deep discontent.
Today the notion that the mutton Dutton and Jacinta Price are on a road to unity, removing division from the nation, was the straw that broke the pond's back ... and yet there she was, the looming Sauron behind her, at the top of this day's digital edition ...
While Price was braying at microphones, with Cash only handy if you want to save at Aldi, "Ned" was down below, braying at the yes campaign in the usual way, and picking up a pond red card. If he keeps going this way for the next few weeks, there might be a season ban.
The pond has already voted, and has no need for a serve of "Ned".
Ditto Dame Slap, following the absurd Price line of a unity vision ...
The rest of the mob were particularly useless this day ... so the pond took a squiz at the lizard Oz treekiller edition ... and only saw headlines boasting about what News Corp had achieved ...a deep well of racism ...
But if the pond had gone on a reptile strike, what to use as filler between the cartoons?
The pond might be on strike regarding the amount of protein in the reptile stew, but surely there was some entertainment elsewhere?
The Speccie mob!
What a relief. The pond hadn't thought about the Speccie mob for ages ... and will leave it to others to brood about niche elitist research, but just the use of "elitist" was a relief ...
The pond could safely ignore class clown Rowan Dean, best left to those with the stomach to take on Sky After Dark, but the pond was excited to discover that Bella from the IPA had her very own column ...
For those who came in late, Bella was once to be seen quite often at the lizard Oz, venturing out from her IPA ivory tower to cry freedumb and go Thucydides ...
Bella's offering was lightweight, but more fun than a reptile stew, dedicated as it was to café culture, with fragrant hints of nutmeg and climate science denialism ...
The title alone was worth the price. Who else but Bella of the IPA could come up with such a subtle invocation of Freidrich Hayek?
And mention of "climate catastrophism" reminded the pond of the recent mysterious failings of Lloydie of the Amazon at the lizard Oz ...
On another planet, there might be many stories of fires and floods ...
The Conversation had that story about platypuses here ... and a yarn about economists underestimating severely the financial hit from climate change ...
But Bella had such trivial matters safe in IPA hands ... because if the reptiles are off doing angertainment about the Voice, she's a reminder that there's splendid fun to be had trotting out righteous indignation in the cause of denialism ...
Splendid stuff, and on we go to the road to 2°+ and a tremendous lifestyle for the sheltered rich, but maybe not so enticing for the serfs without air con ...
Talk of freezers meant the pond could now throw in the infallible Pope of the day ...
... and it was time to move on to a Speccie mob bonus ...
Insufficiently libertarian! But isn't he in favour of medical freedumb? That reminded the pond of a good news story. At last dynamite had been put to a good use ...
Back in the United States, there was more entertainment, and as a result, a couple of Luckovichs to hand ...
Outrageous. Fancy thinking him a kooky outsider when in reality he's a first class conspiracy theorist ...
The pond was reminded of a bit of the preamble to David Remnick's interview in The New Yorker with the prize loon back in July, The Alternative Facts of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (paywall, but soft)
..If there is a madness, slight or otherwise, in Kennedy’s bid, it is not confined to his hubris. He is roiling with conspiracy theories: S.S.R.I.s like Prozac might be the reason for school shootings, vaccines cause autism. There are many. To prepare for the conversation, I listened to some of Kennedy’s podcast sessions with the likes of Bari Weiss, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, and Joe Rogan. I watched his marathon announcement speech and tuned in to all the hosannas he was getting from a peculiar amen corner that includes Steve Bannon, Jack Dorsey, and Tucker Carlson. In his 2021 book “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy accuses Fauci, who was then the nation’s top infectious-disease doctor, of helping to carry out “2020’s historic coup d’état against Western democracy.” (The book has blurbs from Carlson, Naomi Wolf, Alan Dershowitz, and Oliver Stone.)
Kennedy’s habits of mind are maga-adjacent, but his manner differs from that of his Republican doppelgänger. Donald Trump is a bully—rude, swaggering, out to flatten his questioner under an avalanche of lies and volume. Kennedy is not rude. Rather, he is serenely convinced of his virtue and his interlocutor’s pitiful susceptibility to conventional wisdom. The experience of interviewing him and listening to his previous interviews, I found, was like settling in for a long train ride with a seemingly amiable stranger in the next seat. You ask a straightforward question and, an hour later, as you race by Thirtieth Street Station, in Philadelphia, he is still going on about the fraud of covid vaccines and how he was unfairly “deplatformed” for spouting conspiracy theories. By the time you’ve pulled into Wilmington, he might be talking about how drugs known as poppers helped cause the aids epidemic, or how “toxic chemicals” might contribute to “sexual dysphoria” in children. As you head south, he is talking about being “censored” by Instagram, the F.B.I., and the Biden White House. New technologies like 5G towers and digital currencies are totalitarian instruments that could “control our behavior.” Wi-Fi causes “leaky brain.” After a while, you begin to wonder why you bought a ticket. But it’s too late. You’re pinned into the window seat.
That's more like it ...
The pond doesn't know how long its strike will last. How long will it take for the lizard Oz reptiles to come to their senses by returning to sounding interestingly insane?
Perhaps the lizard Oz reptiles will, in a miraculous transformation, by tomorrow stop rabbiting on about national unity and such like, and return to their real métier ... division, denialism and angertainment ... and a celebration on a daily basis of assorted loons devoted to all forms of loonacy ...
But at least the pond found some spacing to put between the infallible Pope's outing and the closing immortal Rowe ...
Beauteous Bella: "...cutting down on the use of steel and cement in construction and increasing the proportion of buildings made from wood." What about this:
ReplyDeleteWorld’s tallest wooden building to be built in Perth after developers win approval
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/03/worlds-tallest-timber-building-c6-to-be-built-in-perth-after-developers-win-approval
That's "a “revolutionary” 50-storey hybrid design reaching a height of 191.2 metres." They're way ahead of you, Bella.
If Bella is so opposed to a return to Mediaeval standards, why does the header to her column depict her with a quill pen?
ReplyDeleteThis is splendid stuff, though; outraged howling about a wish-list endorsed by local government authorities totally lacking in the powers necessary to implement such such changes, allowing Bella to champion the rights of all lovers of gourmet cheese platters. Much, much more entertaining than endless droning about the perils of the Voice and the upcoming War On China.
This is perhaps the perfect (horrific) vision of the never ending consumerist paradise (nightmare) that the Bella promotes - a sardine can hell!
ReplyDeletehttp://kunstler.com/eyesore-of-the-month/september-2023
"Our overloads", indeed.
DeleteHere I am, sitting in my wooden house, surveying my pantry of plant-based products, and my very small wardrobe, and I realise that I am a serf! And I thought I was a rich person enjoying the high life in leafy Leura! Talk about false consciousness (we all remember Marcuse don't we).
ReplyDeleteJust a little bit of consciousness, Joe:
Deletehttps://youtu.be/2oX2FSv4Rys?list=RDMM
Should we expect to see the Nobel award in Physiology or Medicine to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman taken as confirmation by all the arms of Limited News that the Karolinska Institute has been wholly infiltrated by woke socialist lackies with no real awareness of how them inscrutable Chinese arranged for Covid-19 to be synthesised, virtually from scratch, in the Wuhan Institute?
ReplyDeleteThe citation alone rather bears out the assessment of Dr Fauci that a certain Senator from Kentucky does not know what he is talking about, when he makes claims about coronaviruses. Contributors to the Flagship (we are looking at you, Killer) Fox and Sky, already know which side they on, there with esteemed colleague Sharri (disrespect intended), but this should redouble the vehemence of their stated beliefs.
It might not sit well with our Killer - the Karolinska Institute being, as it is, in Sweden - but he is quite able to rationalise that some reactionary cells might survive even in Sweden. I mean, just look at their confiscatory tax system, throttling freedumb in so many ways.
Ok, so what is the background:
Delete"...at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, Karikó submitted her first grant application in which she proposed establishing mRNA-based gene therapy. Ever since, mRNA-based therapy has been Karikó's primary research interest. She was on track to become a full professor, but grant rejections led to her being demoted by the university in 1995.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karikó
Oh, science is just so reasonable and rational, isn't it.
GB - it is a pity that, although he had several attempts at it, Thomas Kuhn never really crystallised his thoughts for 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', and, if you intend to cite something he wrote - you need to specify which edition of that rambling work you are drawing on.
DeleteI suspect Karikó saw possibilities in RNA that the establishment did not share in the 90s, but, unlike, say, Barry Marshall, did not have the equivalent of a Robin Warren to cover for her.
Perhaps this award might bring out a biography that gives us detail of those years in her career. Happily, her ideas came through when the world needed them.
I wasn't aware that I was 'quoting' Kuhn - which I did read and enjoy many decades ago but have almost entirely forgotten now - I thought I was just quoting Wikipedia as per the link given.
DeleteYes, she did go on to greater things, but only after she'd shown very great persistence and initiative. To the eventual benefit of all of us.
GB - I was invoking Kuhn - sort of - only to suggest that Karikó probably was not 'in' the paradigm of the 90s for setting up vaccines. By comparison, also in the 90s, Ian Frazer's work on possible vaccine for papilloma was directed at synthesizing structural elements of the virus, so it could be free of DNA, and any risk that it might mutate. I sill marvel at how Xiao-Yi Sun constructed that framework.
DeleteSo, the whole mRNA idea was quite a conceptual jump, and, while I don't know the details, I can well imagine committees assessing grant applications, thirty years ago, being risk-averse to someone proposing to use mRNA as the mechanism to trigger immune reaction.
But I was not trying to verbal you. I think Kuhn's main idea would have worked better as an extended essay, or, if he really wanted to put up a book, it should have been with deeply committed editor.
I didn't think you were 'verballing me' Chad, I just wasn't sure where Kuhn came into it - other than the author of an excellent book that nonetheless wasn't uncriticisable or uncriticised.
DeleteI think the point with Karikó was that her (and her close colleague's) work was rather unappreciated - once she freed herself from Penn U it all took off very quickly, well for that kind of thing, anyway. I'm just complaining that the 'manager types' - the ones who refused her advancement - very often, and definitely in this case, don't understand what it is that they "manage".
In short, that evidence is often rejected by the ignorant and/or irresponsible both in and out of an environment in which the process of 'scientific revolution' should be well understood. So we get heaps of nonsense accepted, and acts of genius refused.
Anyway, I tend to agree with you about 'Structure' but editors such as Robert Gottlieb are few and far between. A good middling-longish essay would have been more memorable. I had an acquaintance once who maintained that "if it takes more than 50 pages to say, then it isn't worth saying" and in my dotage I tend to strongly agree.
DeleteSo, Ben Domenech about RFK: "In a poll commissioned by John Zogby [who ?], they find thst Trump and Biden would be satistically tied at 38 percent if Kennedy were in place, with the third party candidacy garnering 19 percent of voter support." With virtually all of that 19% going to RFK, yes ?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the last time was Biden 81,284,666 versus Trump 74,224,319 for a total of 155,508,985. And 19% of that is 29,546,707. So Ben reckons that a rabid conspiracy believer (he doesn't make "theories", he just believes) such as RFK could garner about 30 million votes.
Now in the 2020 election, the 'independent' vote was a gigantic 1.8% (2,924,869) but somehow the loony RFK is going to lift that to 19% (29,546,707), = 19/1.8, roughly a 1000% increase. Oh yeah, that'd happen.
Bella, Bella, Bella...
ReplyDeleteFrom the bio pic, dear Very Old Mindset Intrasagent Troglodite Bella, is not only destroying our Natiinal Archives, but is also "Reclaiming History"!
"History Reclaimed -
But From What?
September 15, 2021
by Alan Lester
...
"For the history that this group defends is far from “shared’”. It is the history created by White Britons over many decades to justify their denial of sovereignty to others.
...
"A group of scholars including Andrew Roberts, Robert Tombs, Zareer Masani and the ubiquitous Nigel Biggar, has banded together to create the History Reclaimed Project. It consists at present of a website and social media presence that aims to rescue neutral, disinterested, evidence-based historical enquiry from a supposed ‘woke’ assault. In particular the group believes this assault is directed at our understanding of Britain’s imperial past. Most of the short articles and book reviews on the site, including Gilley’s now notorious “The Case for Colonialsm“, have been published elsewhere. They are collated under the project’s auspices to create economies of scale for a group of scholars who believe themselves to be marginalised and gagged (despite Biggar’s CBE).
...
https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/snapshotsofempire/2021/09/15/history-reclaimed-but-from-what/
"Nigel John Biggar CBE (born 14 March 1955) is a British[3] Anglican priest, theologian, and ethicist. From 2007 to 2022, he was the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford.
...
'In 2017, Biggar initiated a five-year project at Oxford University, entitled "Ethics and Empire". Its stated aim was to scrutinise critiques against the historical facts of empire.[11][12] Historians and academics widely criticised the project, claiming that it was "attempting to balance out the violence committed in the name of empire with its supposed benefits".[13][14][15] The project also received criticism for failing to engage with the wider scholarship on empire and not submitting itself to peer scrutiny and rigorous academic debate."
Wikipedia (donate now)
I just don't understand how it is that believers in the Trinity cannot quite grasp that we are as their Gods made us, and that we kill and steal and rape and oppress because that's what the Trinity have built into our "souls". When the whole business of getting redemption from sin is a doddle for those who can show repentance, then really, there's no problem with anything we do.
DeleteExcept maybe when No 1 of the then Duality has a hissy fit and basically drowns all but a handful of us. Though in fairness 'He' only seems to have done that once - at least only once in the time of our documented history. Who knows how many times 'He' did it before we had writing to record our history.
Maybe, He does it whenever He feels like it, these days, but has become both more discriminating and better at disguising it; now, no-one gets out alive, and there's always that lake of firewater holding-tank thingy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c7NEf6qFlc .
Delete