In which the pond continues celebrating Ēostre with the reptiles, helped out by prattling Polonius, the genie Jennie and a monumental "Ned" Everest climb ...

 

The pond has enjoyed celebrating Ēostre with the reptiles this year ... helped by news that Marina Hyde had invented the Loonsday clock ... just what the pond needed to stay in touch with the grifters. 

Let us start by preying in the usual way ...Angus Bucinum qui addit peccata mundi ...

Having preyed together, the pond can only remind correspondents that the Weekly Beast remains essential  reading - this week it was Nine doing the flip - while there was a special minute to midnight story about a loon in Revealed: US professor was behind extremist site that spread conspiracies ...

As usual, there was good reading during the week to discover, such as Brian Whitmore's piece In Russia, Mafiaism  Is The New Communism, and the death of comedy in China, in The New Yorker with Chang Che's The Afermath of China's Comedy Crackdown (paywall).

But enough of tootling off the tracks, this is the day for Polonius to kick off the Sunday meditation, which is going to be long, tedious and exceptionally gruelling ... though it did begin splendidly with a frock wearer in full regalia ...

The thing about any Polonial piece is when the ABC will turn up in the discussion. 

The silly old obsessive compulsive pedant spends all day listening to the cardigan wearers and invariably they set him off, and anyone who had a bet riding on when they appeared would have been able to collect early ...

At this point the reptiles slipped in a snap of, if not Satan, then certainly one of Satan's helpers ...

It wasn't long before Polonius had turned from the ABC to consorting with the fisher of people, who shamelessly appeared with petulant Peta, creator of the pond's current HFC drop out misery...

Don't get the pond started on the Dominican nuns, and don't get Polonius started on gay marriage ... and is that an asp in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see the pond?

Now remember when it comes to fiddling with kiddies, the Polonial theme song has always been how unfairly have the tykes been treated, and how it's the bloody guvmint ...

But everyone is compelled to help fund religious institutions, schools, charities, whatever, and the pond bitterly regretted wasting that Wilcox cartoon on yesterday's offering of reptile blather, when it would have been fun to run here. Oh heck, why not ... because anyone paying taxes is being compelled to support pie in the sky in the bye and bye ...

And so to nuking the country to save the planet with genie Jennie, able to produce a nuke miracle with the rubbing of a nickel boom. 

The pond only does this to delay encountering the Everest known as "Ned" ...

The pond had already nuked the country with the dog botherer and another dick, but why not nuke it again? Can there ever be too much nuking?

Dear sweet long absent lord, she really has flipped. Is this a chance to get in big with Captain Spud? Who knows, but she's certainly sounding like a member of the team ... 

For some reason, the pond was reminded of this in Crikey by keen Keane a few weeks back, On nuclear, the media serve us up another round of climate denialism, The media needs to stop treating nonsensical claims about nuclear power from the Coalition seriously and do some basic fact-checking (paywall)...

Inter alia ...

..Peter Dutton has proposed building large nuclear power plants on the site of existing coal-fired power plants about to be decommissioned, like Eraring in NSW. Eraring produces 2.88 MW. Based on the 2011 study, that means a 19-year build to fully replace Eraring. Plus four years of regulatory processes, that’s 23 years. So Dutton’s nuclear power station would produce its first electricity in 2049. Assume the federal government, not a private company, does it, and the government runs the regulatory process at the same time as it begins construction (defeating the point of regulatory approval, but anyway) and scales it back to two MW. It would start operations in the late 2030s.

But wait, there’s more. Australia has been plagued by delays to major infrastructure projects, partly due to workforce constraints, partly due to governments undertaking multiple megaprojects at the same time. In its 2022 market capacity report, Infrastructure Australia concluded “it is no longer a question of if a project will slip, but more likely when, by how long and at what cost.” Its analysis showed that “75% of major public infrastructure projects could take up to 53% longer to complete than their schedule targets at final business case.” And that’s for industries and workforces that already exist in Australia.

So there’s a 75% chance that Dutton’s nuclear power station could take half as long again to build — meaning that even the 10-year scenario is likely to be up to 15 years. Which means as late as 2045 even on an optimistic schedule.

In short, some basic fact-checking shows that the Coalition’s claim about a nuclear power station operating within 10 years is ludicrous. And while it is comforting to see that the mainstream media are finally starting to report what a lonely Crikey has been patiently explaining for over a decade (some of the delayed plants we reported on back in 2009 are still not operating), the response in some sections of the media has been to place the claims of the Coalition and the factual rejoinder by Chris Bowen on an equivalent footing.

David Speers, for example, on Insiders, repeated the Coalition’s talking points at Bowen, compared Snowy 2.0 to nuclear power in cost and told Bowen “It is happening in other parts of the world. The Coalition often make this point. And you were at the COP summit in Dubai, where I think it was 22 nations signed up to a pledge to triple nuclear capacity to, along with renewables, meet their net-zero targets.”

This kind of equivalence of fiction and fact has been a characteristic of much media reporting — and noticeably at the ABC — over the last 20 years on climate issues. The last big outbreak of it was around Scott Morrison’s 2050 net-zero pledge, which the press gallery treated as a substantial and meaningful policy (and political triumph), rather than profoundly inadequate and an ongoing cover for the Coalition’s climate denialism. Even after Morrison’s net-zero plan was found to be reliant on unknown technological change, many in the media continued to treat his “policy” seriously, the same way they treated Tony Abbott’s risible “soil magic” policy as credible, or his claims of a catastrophic impact of the Gillard government’s carbon pricing scheme.

It’s a false equivalence that misleads audiences and helps legitimise barely disguised climate denialism. For 20 years, the Coalition has denied basic science around climate. Now it’s denying basic economics and financing as well. Will the media change its ways this time around?

And there was this exchange in the Nine papers, Will Dutton's nuclear power play work? I asked a very bright spark ... (soft paywall). Again inter alia ...

Dr Dylan McConnell is a very bright spark. The UNSW senior researcher is an expert in energy systems, including nuclear.

...Fitz: Well, who puts up the money now for nuclear power stations around the world to be built?

DMcD: Nowhere around the world is the private sector saying, “We want to build nuclear reactors and will fund it,” and certainly not here in Australia. They only get built with direct government involvement – governments going guarantors on the loans, or at least guaranteeing price for the electricity produced. As an aside, I’d note that is quite an interesting philosophical position for our national fiscally conservative [political] party to take, saying they want to build it, and not leave it to the free market.

Fitz: So it has to be the government that takes the hit?

DMcD: Project developers have to get their money back. So, for example in the UK, they basically have put a levy on electricity bills to pay for their plant there. The latest projected cost of that one, at Hinkley Point, is £46 billion, which is $90 billion. And the electricity that will come from that is roughly $250 per megawatt hour, which is more than twice the cost of wholesale power in Australia at the moment, at least three times the cost of wind power, and four times the cost of solar power.

Fitz: The economics look grim! But what about the point about our bounteous natural resources? Huge chunks of Western Australia are apparently made of uranium. Is it insane for us as a country not to be pushing nuclear when we can sell it to the world and all of us, or at least Gina, can get rich – or richer?

DMcD: But you’ve got to have a market for it. And that market is disappearing because of the economic forces, whether we like it or not. Even if you wanted to, who are you going to be selling the uranium to? In the US, they tried to build one – the VC Summer project in South Carolina – and then it had to be cancelled because it was clear the economies didn’t work. So they spent nine or 10 billion dollars for a hole in the ground. Right now, there are no further plans for construction of nuclear reactors in the United States, and the UK only has Hinkley Point, which is a financial disaster. None are currently in train to be built in comparable countries, like France, Germany or the US. The French have announced intentions to build six, but none of this is contracted. At the moment, very little is planned for construction outside of China, and even there, they’re actually building substantially more pumped hydro and many times more wind and solar than nuclear.

Fitz: OK, what about the arguments that are still trotted out, along the lines of the sun doesn’t shine at midnight and the wind doesn’t always blow, so in Australia, we need nuclear or coal to assure “base load” if that’s the correct term?

DMcD: Yes, the sun doesn’t shine at night and wind doesn’t always blow, but the idea is to design an electricity system so big and integrated that through a combination of resources – wind, solar, hydro, possibly some small amount of gas – we have a reliable system. And that is what is being done now.

Fitz: The case you have presented so far seems very much against big nuclear. But there’s also a lot of talk of “SMRs” the Small Modular Reactors? Are they at least more feasible? (And what are they, by the way?)

DMcD: There’s a lot of hype around these, and the idea is that they’re smaller, and the constituent modular pieces can be built in factories like the pieces necessary for wind and solar, so they’re easier to build. With the economies of scale you could have the same sort of success story that you’ve had with renewable energy. That was the promise, but in practice, the ones that we have seen developed are not, by any stretch of the imagination, what most people would consider small.

Fitz: But are they working at all, or well, anywhere in the world?

DMcD: No, and that’s the other point. They’re all still theoretical. There is none operating, and the most advanced project in the world over in America, Nuscale in Idaho, fell over a couple of months ago. They had all these entities lined up to buy the power when it was built, but, over time, as the cost of building just escalated, it got to the point where they all said, “we don’t want this any more, it is too expensive.” And it hasn’t worked anywhere else.

Fitz: Can you, for a moment, be your own devil’s advocate? I clearly haven’t come at you with arguments that have made any headway for nuclear, but there must be some. What are they? Before the interview you acknowledged there were some academics at least open to the option of nuclear, if not gung-ho. What do they say, for nuclear?

DMcD: They talk of the concept called “dunkelflaute” which is the idea that we risk a time where across the system might not have enough wind and solar for a couple of weeks, so nuclear will cover that. The current reckoning, however, is that in Australia, which gets so much wind, and so much sun and will have a system spanning an entire continent, there is limited risk. Look, there are people of good faith, who are nuclear advocates who care about climate change and are worried that renewables aren’t up to the job and that we need nuclear power to do it. But there are more bad faith actors who see it as an opportunity to muddy the waters and essentially undermine the renewable energy rollout, to cause delay and confusion and essentially prolong the existing coal and gas assets. And it has turned into a sort of cultural war kind of thing, but none of that changes the central economic argument against nuclear.

Fitz: Speaking of culture wars, I suspect you’ll get this down the track, so let me go first. I put it to you, Dr McConnell, that you’re a sell-out academic in the thrall of the renewables industry – yes, a renewable junkie, you heard me, getting all your research grants from renewable people, and that’s why you’re saying all this stuff against nuclear!

DMcD: [Laughing, tightly.] I’d love to say that’s the case because it’s actually a bit of a bugbear of mine, how terribly bad the renewable energy industry is at funding research. I don’t think I’ve actually received any money at all from the renewable energy industry. And in the past I have received some funding from the brown coal industry.

Never mind, back to the genie Jennie ...

At this point the reptiles interrupted the nuking with a Getty snap ... suitably reduced to match its pointlessness ... there being nothing to say about burning off, except to burn it off ...

Then it was on to the final gobbet, with the genie Jennie studiously ignoring any difficulties regarding costs, building times and all the rest that goes with nuking the country to save the planet ... but as a measure of how far she'd gone down the rabbit hole, she did seize the chance to use "virtue signallers", thereby ensuring the pond's contempt (strange that she didn't throw in a "woke" - maybe next time) ...

Or can we descend to the level of genie Jennie deploying verbiage of the "virtue signalling" kind? 

The pond proposes a corollary relating to its use ...whereby as any reptile column grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving virtue signallers or the woke approaches, even though it had been dismissed as far back as 2016 in the Graudian ...

The pith of the argument came late in that piece...

...“Virtue-signalling” is also a neat, pithy phrase, with – and this is the killer, really – a social-sciencey air, as though it’s a phenomenon recorded by behavioural economists and factored into nudge-unit projections of how many men pee standing up. (As of January 2016, however, a Google scholar search for the term yields only a handful of citations related to the work of a single religious studies academic.)
In informal political discussions – that is to say, down the pub, across the internet and on talk shows – the phrase serves two functions: to make your opponent look shallow, while at the same time (the irony) signalling your initiation into a more sophisticated level of discourse.
That’s not to say that there’s nothing in Bartholomew’s idea. Sometimes people do take positions to curry favour, or to burnish their reputations. But that’s hardly new. “You’re only saying that to make yourself look good” sums it up pretty well, it’s less pretentious, and still leaves 90 characters for the rest of your tweet.
There’s another danger in the the way the phrase is being deployed (and it’s being deployed a lot). Anyone who makes an argument that casts them in a good light can be accused of “virtue-signalling”. Anyone. That’s an awful lot of babies at risk of being thrown out with the bathwater.
In many cases, the thinking goes like this (with the left a frequent target):
1. Bill is saying something right-on
2. Virtue-signalling is when you say something right-on just to sound good
3. Therefore Bill is virtue-signalling
But 3. is not justified by 1. and 2. You can argue for something that happens to make you look virtuous because you genuinely think it is the best solution. That’s the case, for example, with most religious beliefs. Do we really think the pope is just virtue-signalling?
What started off as a clever way to win arguments has become a lazy put down. It’s too often used to cast aspersions on opponents as an alternative to rebutting their arguments. In fact, it’s becoming indistinguishable from the thing it was designed to call out: smug posturing from a position of self-appointed authority.

Ah, the smug posturing of genie Jennie ... but all the pond knows and appreciates is that the need to nuke the country to save the planet managed to distract from, and delay the arrival of, "Ned's" latest Everest, but even the best dissembler, procrastinator and filibusterer knows you can only delay so long ...

Warning: even by "Ned's" pompous verbosity standards - exceedingly high - this is an endless outing, with non-stop verbal diarrhoea about vulgar youth.

Even by "Ned's" shameless bower bird filching of another's ideas, this goes beyond reasonable borrowing into the shameless territory of the cribber and the squawking parrot, and so the pond has arranged some visual distractions along the way ...

Ignore that stock photo and ignore that attempt to demonise Uncle Elon and his desire to live on Mars ... instead please allow the pond to explain the reason for the rise in anxiety, nervousness, and depression.

The Emeritus Chairman begat Fox, and Fox begat the orange Jesus, whom this holy holyday is dedicated to ...

The pond supposes it should pretend to be paying some attention to "Ned's" shameless parroting, if only because the pond has a bet riding on this discussion.

The pond has put a motza on there being the announcement of a book available to purchase - much like a richly priced public domain bible - at the end of the piece, and so must get to the end to the collect, and in the meantime, the price to pay is to listen to "Ned" do his Chicken Little impression, shouting at the clouds about vulgar youff ...

In the pond's day, not that vulgar youff bothers to listen to the pond reminisce, it was the rock 'n roll on the radio, and the comics and the television that saw dismal vulgar youffs spiral into rebels without causes ... singing nihilistic songs by The Who and hoping they never got old, until they did get old, and were grateful for it, there not being much hope of good times in the alleged after life.

The pond can remember, dimly, in a glass darkly, the pond's mother saying about the pond's habit of reading books, "they are forever elsewhere, off with their head in the clouds, what good will all this reading do, except make them short-sighted, stumbling about in the darkness? " Or words to that effect, the pond loosely paraphrases, but can remember a book being tossed out into the rain as a way of ridding the house of weevils ...

So began the birth of the comic book-based childhood and the pond was rooned for life ...

Or some such thing. The mantra has always been the same, and at the end of it, there's always a book to be sold, or in the case of the Red scare, a chance to get a place in Congress ... or perhaps on SCOTUS, treating books as you might in Tamworth ...

That's a clue as to how desperate the pond will be to get in a segue to a 'toon distraction ...

One of the pond's golden book rules is never to click on a reptile hot link. 

Whenever you do, you find yourself still in the bubble, just another part of the hive mind ... it's like that bloody hotel, you can try to check out any time you like, you just can't ever leave ... and sure enough, it was a fatal mistake ...

The pond stopped right there.

The first caveat is the clue. "Limit non-educational screen time."

But what's "non-educational"? Approached in the right spirit, lots of things can be viewed as educational. 

If you watch a TV commercial with a child, you can explain just how malicious and deceptive and misleading advertising can be, not to mention the programs being advertised ...

And you might also need to do it online. Think of an innocent child just trying to find the news of the day ...

Is it wrong to expose a five year old to a lie machine for the purposes of explaining it's a lie machine?

The pond takes a Spartan view... better to harden up early or experience early mental decline... now back to the regurgitator doing his regurgitating ...

At this point the reptiles produced a graph ... apparently there's someone left who can do a graph ...

There was nary a thought given to the real reason for the rise in depression and anxiety ...

The pond hadn't meant to slip in a TT so early in the piece, but the theme "Be afraid, be very afraid" seemed to match up with what was being offered...

Again the pond broke its golden rule and clicked on the link and found itself back in Hotel California, aka the lizard Oz ...

Does this Haidt realise that he's just the latest Jordan Peterson substitute? Does he have any regrets about consorting with the reptiles? Does he have any idea of how this sort of blather goes down with the pond?

Been there, been through that ... and the pond began to feel the familiar loonsday clock panic rising ...and no, Faux Noise can't be blamed on social media, so your point about lies is...?

Once again the reptiles produced a graph to back up the doom merchants ...

Not being a searcher for news on a mobile phone, the pond has routinely mocked the addicts, but there's even more fun to be had mocking the end-of-worlders, always coming up with a new form of FUD ...

Sorry, the pond hadn't meant to slip in the dancing bug so early, but it seemed to match up to the general level of hysteria...

The pond doesn't mean to boast, but it saw porn in Tamworth long before the age of 14, without benefit of intertubes or the telly ... though some boys used to get wildly excited over I Dream of Jeannie, proving that some boys could wank at the sight of a pumpkin ... (or at least what could be done with a pumpkin).

Meanwhile, the real stuff of young and old nightmares goes unmentioned ...

The pond has another nightmare, running out of 'toons before this pair has finished their caterwauling using the cliché about generational categories the pond has discussed a number of times and dismissed out of hand, but when you're a loon in search of a shallow analysis, you reach for the generation divide gimmick...

Around this point the pond guesses it should slip in an actual on topic 'toon ...

That might be construed as pandering, and the pond would like everyone to click the 'like' button provided on site, just so the pond can feel reassured there's some purpose in serving up this catastrophe carry-on ... (say what, it's not there? This is old school blogging, an agitated comment will suffice).

Here's the thing. The pond hasn't heard one word of explanation how the mango Jesus scored his cult devotees, or the reptiles still hold on to a geriatric audience.

Many of them were born before the intertubes took hold, and yet they've disappeared into cults like fish in water or reptiles into News Corp. 

Take Ronna McDaniel. She was born in 1973, and so in 1993 would have been twenty, so she could hardly blame it all on a childhood rooned by social media, and yet here she is ...

And so to the reveal, confirming that the pond did indeed collect on that 'gotta book for sale' bet ...

Yep, it was all in aid of a book publishing venture, peddling hysteria, raising the level of anxiety and depression another notch ... and yet after all that the reptiles didn't have the grace to link to Haidt's Substack. So the pond won't either, on the basis that some innocent might actually look at it on their phone, and be ruined for life ...

And the best bit? Thanks to the reptile paywall, vulgar youff won't pay the slightest bit of heed to any of it, and when the mad uncle comes down from the attic to wave the tree killer edition of the lizard Oz at them, they'll find comfort in their phone ... and who can blame them, because there must be more to life than being lectured to by a pontificating pompous ass of the "Ned" kind ...

And so to a closing 'toon, and here the pond must apologise because as a result of being out of timing with the infallible Pope when he turns up late on a Saturday, the pond missed this one ...

Better late than never, and it still manages to suit the general tone ...

And here's this week's offering, full of the cheer of the Easter bunny ...