Dame Groan worked her magic and the pond's hits spiralled down into a deep depression, which is where the pond likes them, as it means only the strongest and the most willing are being exposed to reptile ranting...
But being in the wilderness is no excuse for abandoning herpetology, and so the pond did its usual early morning survey of the digital edition...
Nothing about Benji's plan to take charge of the Gaza ghetto, compound or gulag or open-air prison if you will, for an indefinite time?
Nothing about the glorious mission of the rabid ratbag from the Shire?
The pond only mentions that so it can give the infallible Pope of the day an early run ...
Keen eyes will have noticed Dame Slap perched up on the far right of the digital edition - really, there should be a far right slot that reaches far out into space to planet Janet above the faraway tree - and for once the pond decided to forsake the usual red card ... and give a green light to quintessential Dame Slap golden age thinking ...
There was more - any bashing of the failures of the ABC is a traditional reptile sport - up there with snake bashing day in Springfield - but the pond had to get back to Dame Slap ...
Even when she was given a plum job on the ABC board - mate's rates for a member of the 'leet - she was still always bollocking the ABC ...
The pond can't remember a time when she ever celebrated the ABC, except by some retro golden age mirror or reverse telescope, whereby a conversation with a common war criminal and the head prefect became an example of good times ...
The pond hates to drag Woody Allen back into anything, but still, it's a convenient explanation, as remembered here ...
In Midnight in Paris, struggling novelist Gil Pender (played by Owen Wilson) feels like a fish out of water in modern times.
On a trip to Paris with his fiance and future in-laws, Pender romanticizes the idea of writing in the City of Lights during the freewheeling Roaring 20s.
If only he could go back to that time, all of his problems would be solved and he would be much happier.
Michael Sheen plays Paul, a know-it-all who tries to set Pender straight on his nostalgia for another time:
"Nostalgia is denial – denial of the painful present… the name for this denial is golden age thinking – the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in – it’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present."
Yep, that's Dame Slap alright, yearning for lost times, always finding it difficult to cope withe present ...
There's a few more lines before we get onto a sprinkling of snaps by the reptiles ...
...Through some movie magic, Pender ends up getting transported back to the 1920s on his midnight strolls through Paris, hanging out with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, T.S. Eliot and Salvador Dali.
On these ventures back in time he falls for 1920s Adriana (played by Marion Cotillard) but she doesn’t see her own time as the golden age of Paris.
So when Gil and Adriana are transported back to the late-1800s Belle Epoque period she feels that must be the most wonderful time in history to live.
Of course, when Gil asks some people from that time what they thought the best era was, they answer the Renaissance.
It’s easy to look back at previous generations or maybe your own childhood and conclude things must have been better.
A survey of Americans, Brits and the French asked people whether life in their country is better or worse today than it was 50 years ago. Nearly one-third of the Brits, 41% of Americans and nearly half of French people said things are worse now.
Johan Norberg recently wrote an excellent article at the Wall Street Journal explaining why this happens:
"Psychologists say that this kind of nostalgia is natural and sometimes even useful: Anchoring our identity in the past helps give us a sense of stability and predictability. For individuals, nostalgia is especially common when we experience rapid transitions like puberty, retirement or moving to a new country. Similarly, collective nostalgia—a longing for the good old days when life was simpler and people behaved better—can also be a source of communal strength in difficult times.
Another reason is that historical nostalgia is often colored by personal nostalgia. When were the good old days? Was it, by chance, the incredibly short period in human history when you happened to be young? A U.S. poll found that people born in the 1930s and 1940s thought the 1950s was America’s best decade, while those born in the 1960s and 1970s preferred the 1980s. In the 1980s, the popular TV show “Happy Days” was set in a nostalgic version of the 1950s; today, the popular series “Stranger Things” fondly conjures the fashion and music of the 1980s."
And at that point the pond thought there'd been enough talk o nostalgia, and could get those reptile snaps out of the way quickly ...
...it’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present."
Back in the day, Dame Slap could keep company with the likes of "Lord" Monckton with nary a thought about where it might end ... especially as news of the present became grimmer, as in WaPo's Greenland’s ice shelves hold back sea level rise. There are just 5 left. (paywall)
Why wouldn't you yearn for a golden age, or blather about a mystical diversity when your own mindless conformity has produced an unhappy present?
“Those are the last remaining ice shelves of the ice sheet,” said Romain Millan, the lead author of the study in Nature Communications and a scientist at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France. “All the other ones have collapsed or retreated.”
Overall, losses of ice from Greenland have caused about 17 percent of observed sea level rise globally between the years 2006 and 2018. But it could get worse from here.
If Greenland’s five remaining ice shelves shatter, it would not only mean much faster sea level rise, but also that only the southern hemisphere would continue to feature major ice shelves. Across Antarctica, many glaciers still boast these large floating extensions, which can be the sizes of cities or even states and, in a few cases, countries.
While the globe currently contains huge ice sheets in both hemispheres, the latest news — delivered during a year of record global heat — further underscores that Greenland’s ice sheet has been deeply compromised by planetary warming, with potentially grave future implications.
“We are heading toward an ice shelf free northern hemisphere,” Millan said.
Put it another way ...
Better to retreat into a mindless past ... better to rant about the wonders and glories of the CIS ...
...turned into this ...
The only way to deal with all that is obsessive googling and preparations for the US to become an authoritarian dictatorship ... WaPo again ... (again the paywall)
And so on and on ... will cartoons be allowed under the new regime?
Dame Slap's unerring ability to pick ways to fuck the planet and fuck the United States and fuck the ABC and fuck the country is truly astonishing ...
Mindless rotten insidious wretched conformity? Says a reptile scribbler who ran with the "Lord" Monckton crowd and the mango Mussolini pack?
The pond has its own form of nostalgia, for simpler days, when it could simply run with a joke ...
Luckily that snap is tilted to the right ... and so to see what else is around ...
Not the craven Craven, an irrelevance in search of even more irrelevance ... but still better than some of those other options, because boredom and ennui tends to numb the pain ...
Still here we are and the pond with not the slightest interest in higher education or what the craven Craven has to say about it, nor even cheap jibes about Victorians, the kind of pathetic 'leet joke that could only come by way of a plucked chook turned irrelevant feather duster ...
What was this talk of cultural enrichment and intellectual diversity?
Hadn't Dame Groan explained yesterday that they could barely speak English? And that all these international students should be sent packing?
Hadn't Dame Slap explained today that diversity was either the CIS way or hit the highway?
Not to worry, it all became clear why the craven Craven was carrying on. The reptiles had inserted a gratifyingly huge snap of the irrelevance himself ...
What a pompous ass he is, and the pond is bewildered as to why there are no courses in comedy at tertiary institutions that the feather duster might attend ...
Just the thing to help the craven Craven improve his comedy stylings, just the thing to irritate the pompous humbug ...
There's much that comedy course will have to teach the pompous craven Craven, including an explanation that changing a few words around doesn't get you away from the basic cliché of foxes in the hen house ...
And so to round out the day with a word from the lizard Oz editorialist.
Some might wonder why the lizard Oz editorialist is dancing with joy and celebrating the rate rise and blathering about the need to tighten belts and so on and so forth, and the reason is simple. It causes grief, and from the grief might rise the mutton Dutton, and then we could all enjoy the reign of Captain Spud ...
Why did the pond bother? Well it needed a segue to a Rowe cartoon ...
... and while having no time for horse racing, the pond did appreciate the chance to refer to the original Degas, at the M'O under the name Le Défilé ...
Fooling as tooling new newscorpse business model. Replace Janet with BotJanet. They will come for them too.
ReplyDeleteDP "because the reptiles don't like readers straying outside the hive mind, the reptile silo ..."
Reptiles know ...
"... across all the studies, the researchers found Dana’s original split to be fairly consistent. On average, 40% of people chose not to learn about the consequences of their actions, and such ignorance was associated with less altruism compared to those who became informed."
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/people-choose-willful-ignorance/
The 40% rises to over 90% at news corpse and all 'western civ' lobby groups. Yet they see themselves as the only knowing group. Which as Richard Feynman noted, they are the best at fooling themselves, to our detriment. And newscorpse content. Groan!
And soon the lies, spin, deivel, culture and war wars are going to be AI'd!
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/news-corp-negotiations-with-ai-companies-over-content-usage-ceo-2023-09-07/
We fools. Them using fooling as tooling.
I'll chip in to train the anti news ai in loonpond corpus to fight fools and ignorance. Any takers? BotLoon. DPbot. Antinewsnewsai.
According to Dame Slap, “much has been written in recent days” about that London blather-fest. Well yes, in a way - seemingly endless reams of copy has been devoted to it by the Reptiles of the Lizard Oz. The remainder of the MSM have either ignored it completely or made a few scant, bemused references. Perhaps they simply didn’t have the space, after covering all those topics so resolutely ignored by News Corp?
ReplyDeleteBtw, that picture of various reactionaries and cranks atop Slap’s column appears to have their names in the incorrect order. Not that it makes all that much difference, but is this still another slipshod effort on the part of the Graphics Department?
Albrechtsen berating the ABC for supporting diversity but claiming that having people from different societal groups is not diversity of thought, because, hey, they are not right-wing thoughts. But the CIS and ARC are apparently OK, because their diversity is right-wing thoughts versus extreme far right-wing thoughts. Well, what can one expect from someone who donned a MAGA cap; she makes about as much sense as Trump.
ReplyDeleteWhat a day: Planet Janet, the craven Craven and a fine piece by the day's tight-belted Mr Ed.
ReplyDeleteThe Slappy one simply wants to save us all from the evil of "the march of leftist politics through our educational institutions" and "the monocultural swamp at the ABC and in government bureaucracies" as well as the latest threat to human existence: "the arrogant political swagger within myriad other organisations".
Oh, what a terrible fate has befallen the prime proponents of Judeo-Christian Western Civilisation. All those organisations that were once fine, unwavering exemplars of free market capitalism which, of course, we all gave unlimited loyalty to. And now it's all just a swamp of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for those who haven't kept up with the devil's acronyms).
Surely J-CWC is doomed, and the human race with it.
As for the craven Craven, well he is all on about "research" and how important that is. "...universities by definition do both teach and research, talk and think. Any institution that does not research is simply not a university." How very true, and whadda ya know, we once had quite a few such institutions: we called them Colleges of Advanced Education and even the national capital had one: Canberra CAE that I attended for a year as part of my induction into 'ADP' back in 1974. Yes, the federal Pubserve used to actually train many of its specialist staff to ensure high quality workers.
And surprisingly, although CCAE didn't do much "research", it was a perfectly good institution for imparting knowledge and skills to those who needed them, but who weren't going to go into research themselves. They were cheaper than universities too: they cost less to build, staff and operate, and they charged the students smaller fees. But then, those libertarian capitalists Hawke and Keating "implemented the sweeping reforms of education Minister John Dawkins". And another good idea just bit the ideological dust. Canberra CAE transmogrified into Canberra University which costs more and achieves less.
Notice though, that Hawke-Keating-Dawkins didn't convert those terribly working-class TAFEs into universities. Oh no, never them.
As for today's Mr Ed, well he would like us all to know that Jim Chalmers "must now get the message that he still has work to do to assist the RBA in the inflation fight". Oh yeah, he really has to "assist the RBA" which simply can't stop inflation all by its little own self. And that this "will involve cutting government spending to make room for the productive economy" which, as everybody knows, Australia doesn't currently have. And the more that we flog off Australian businesses to foreign "investors" the less of it we will have in future. But then, I suppose 4 major banks and 2 major supermarket chains is all we really need in this modern world, isn't it ?
Oh, and a few very rich miners too, I guess.