Moving on from moving correspondent anecdotes about the joys of a good strapping and a groaning, it was time to rip out an eye in approved biblical style at this day's reptile offerings ...
The pond couldn't help but notice that clever Claire had discovered that clever C. (so much better than O as a letter) had pulled off a publicity triumph with a meisterstroke...
And that's as much attention as the pond will pay to that ...
Also near the top of the digital edition, Dame Slap had decided to move away from the Lehrmann matter to batter DEI, which is a relief, and the pond looks forward to her campaign to make snorting a new Australian fad ...
... strictly in the interest of avoiding dangerous concepts such as equity... though perhaps there are more than enough substances going around (did you hear that licking a reptile hide will produce a trance-like state better than an LSD high, more like sucking on a cane toad?)
As for the lesser Lessor, the pond notes a dereliction of duty on his part because he seems to have failed to notice the genocide going down in Gaza ... while brave Bronnie was left to take the heat ...
Good old Bronnie, always wanting to get her face out there, but enough already of stories from rival rags, the pond covers the morning beat for the daily lizards ... and it turns out that the story about the lesser Lessor was just a warm-up for the real thing beneath the fold ...
Okay, the lesser Lessor has gone AWOL in relation to the genocide in Gaza, so the pond could ignore the lesser Lessor for other delights, and Mein Gott, there was an outing on offer with the pond's new favourite lizard Oz columnist ...
Mein Gott, he doesn't know the detail, but he knows how to deploy "Orwellian" on these fiends ... snaps included for identification purposes because you never know when you might stumble across an Orwellian Satanist with deviant tendencies.
Mein Gott did everything the pond expected of a lizard Oz columnist, and more ...
Extreme left wing agendas?! Why that sounds Orwellian! Hang on, wasn't George himself a socialist to the day he died? Mein Gott, that sounds deeply, deviously Orwellian.
Now there's a lot Mein Gott doesn't seem to know, but the pond was naturally consternated and deeply alarmed, and it got worse:
Steps to make mining approvals smoother?!
Why that sounds bloody Orwellian:
“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.”
Poor George, if only he knew how his name came to be applied carelessly as a form of abuse:
"The Orwell tradition"?
I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy ‘proving’ that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the ‘mystique’ of ‘Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all. And it was here that those few months in the militia were valuable to me. For the Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. The effect was to make my desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had been before. Partly, perhaps, this was due to the good luck of being among Spaniards, who, with their innate decency and their ever-present Anarchist tinge, would make even the opening stages of Socialism tolerable if they had the chance. (here)
In an alternative universe that would have been an excuse to introduce Dame Slap railing at equity, but instead it's time for the pond to maintain its filibuster, and avoid, at least for a nanosecond, the inevitable "Ned", by turning to the latest EXCLUSIVE news in nuking the country to save the planet ...
To set up the topic, the pond should note it much preferred this earlier pungent juxtaposition ...
Here's the conundrum. The reptiles are fiercely anti-EV, but of course one of the best arguments for nuking the country would surely be the fierce demand for electricity the monsters would generate in a bid to solve a non-existent problem generated by devotees of the climate religion...
It was a reptile conundrum to make the pond's brain hurt. Could banning EVs mean there was no need to nuke the country?
Just to stop the hurt, it was time for the latest simple "here no conflict of interest" Simon EXCLUSIVE ... promising pie in the regional sky bye and bye ...
The pond had thought that the mutton Dutton and Ted, led by the reptiles, had given up the SMR push, but no, there was a beauty ... and the pond can never get enough artists' impressions ...
By golly, the pond would like to put in an order. It would look bloody amazing right next to the barbie in the back yard, and so much better than
Rowson's vision for little England ...
Enough already with the distractions, back to the EXCLUSIVE ... the steady repetitive drip designed to make the readership turn into atomic candidates of the Manchurian kind ...
At this point, the pond should note that the immortal Rowe shared the dream ...
What a view, it's dizzying ... and so on to the final EXCLUSIVE gobbet of EXCLUSIVE insights ...
What did the immortal Rowe say? "... the details. It's all about the details". Why indeed it is ...
And now, having snorted that nuke the country line and feeling so high, it was time finally to end the filibuster and tackle "Ned", attempting to revive the onion muncher as international seer and statesperson ...
Who does the pond believe? The tangerine tyrant or the onion muncher?
Does the pond get a knighthood for answering the right way?
As for moral fortitude, how soon can we get on with the genocide?
The pond at this point should note that both "Ned" and the onion muncher discreetly pass over the recent suggestion of their supposed moral and religious leader ...
The pond supposes that's because it would be tricky to answer the question "Is the Pope a Catholic or is the Pope a lickspittle lackey, appeasing fellow traveller and Putin flunkey of the Neville kind?"
Nor will you find any note by "Ned" or the onion muncher regarding the role that the Murdochians, and Faux Noise in particular, have played, and are still playing, in elevating the mango Mussolini, while allowing the GOP to become a dictatorship supplying funds to legal matters...
Instead the onion muncher is given a position in the gallery ...
Putting all those ill-fitting ducks in a row meant the pond had to struggle on, handicapped by the burden of "Ned's" risible suggestion that the onion muncher and his opinions were somehow still relevant ... as if his thoughts counted more than a hill of beans on the world stage ...
Still no mention of that noisy ghost in the machine?
Come on man, how could the pond make it through this malarkey without some 'toon relief?
Funny the onion muncher should break Godwin's Law and bring Hitler into it...
Donald Trump’s second White House chief of staff tried to stop him praising Adolf Hitler in part by trying to convince the then president Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, was “a great guy in comparison”.
“He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’” the retired marines general John Kelly told Jim Sciutto of CNN in an interview for a new book.
“I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world. And I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing. I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.”
Kelly, a retired US Marine Corps general, was homeland security secretary in the Trump administration before becoming Trump’s second chief of staff. Resigning at the end of 2018, he eventually became a public opponent of his former boss....
...Kelly told Sciutto it was “pretty hard to believe” Trump “missed the Holocaust” in his assessment of Hitler, “and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theatre” of the second world war.
“But I think it’s more … the tough guy thing.”
Trump’s liking for authoritarian leaders, in particular Vladimir Putin of Russia, is well known. His remarks to Kelly about Hitler – like his former practice of keeping a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed – have been reported before. But Sciutto’s recounting of his conversation with Kelly comes amid resurgent fears over Trump’s authoritarian leanings, with Trump the presumptive Republican presidential nominee despite facing 91 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil defeats, and having seen off attempts to disqualify him for office.
Kelly’s remarks to Sciutto were published shortly after Trump welcomed to his Florida home Viktor Orbán, the strongman leader of Hungary.
Singing Trump’s praises, Orbán said that if Trump defeats Joe Biden for re-election, the US would not “give a penny” more in aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders.
Kelly told Sciutto Trump “thought Putin was an OK guy and Kim [Jong-un] was an OK guy … to him, it was like we were goading these guys. ‘If we didn’t have Nato, then Putin wouldn’t be doing these things.’” (Graudian)
All that's long been know. The not so crypto love of fascists and authoritarians. Worse, the desire to be one. The attempt to be one, with the rioting and the storming. The new attempt to become one ...
And yet nary a mention of the role the Murdochians and Faux Noise has played in all this, just faux humbug and righteous cant of the usual portentous, pompous, preening "Ned" kind, compounded with the stench of the onion muncher ...
The long absent lord help Ukraine, because "Ned" and the onion muncher will never be able to get to the canker at the core ...
And there you have it in the Catholic Boys' Daily ... a form of moral derangement and a complete inability to recognise what they and their kissing cousins in the United States have helped spawn and continue to nurture, all in the name of a family's greed ...
And now to matters only mentioned in passing, and noted by way of closing 'toons...
... and the pond suspects it should have saved the infallible Pope for the next Groaning or bromancer outing ...
So Muncher Abbott is Noodlenuts Ned's Gott im himmel to pose against Trump. And as for Trump: "It's wrong to put much store by a single reference from Trump given he lies constantly ..." Much like the Murdoch media, indeed.
ReplyDeleteBut nonetheless, that won't stop the fan club: "As Australian conservatives flock to Trump ...". Yes indeed, the local wingnuts are all flocking to Trump, just as the local reptiles instigated them to.
DP said "Mein Gott, he doesn't know the detail, but he knows how to deploy" ...
ReplyDelete... "The other three language–power relationships refer to the powers - OF - language that are based on a language’s communicative versatility and its broad range of cognitive, communicative, social, and identity functions in meaning-making, social interaction, and language policies. Such language powers include, first, the power of language to maintain existing dominance in legal, sexist, racist, and ageist discourses that favor particular groups of language users over others. Another language power is its immense impact on national unity and discord. The third language power is its ability to create influence through single words (e.g., metaphors), oratories, conversations and narratives in political campaigns, emergence of leaders, terrorist narratives, and so forth." From Language and Power" by
Sik Hung Ng and Fei Deng
Copyright © Oxford University Press
ReplyDeleteMurray Goot has a good article about the Oz's misuse of opinion polls in support of their nuclear campaign at https://insidestory.org.au/nuclear-power-newspoll-and-the-nuances-of-polled-opinion/
Did you notice the size of the doors in the building on the right in the artist's rendering of the "small reactor"? Small, I suppose, compared to the bulk of the collected writings of Ned.
Who to believe - the Onion Muncher or the Hitler Lover? Easy decision, Ned; neither, as they’re both obnoxious fuckwits.
ReplyDeleteSlothful, devious, vindictive baby elephant walkers intent on small nuclear bomb mining Our pristine Outback for agrarian socialist subsidies need to find lost Malaysian Airlines planes by mapping sea canyons off the coast of nuclear submarine ports of call.
DeleteThey are sooo predictable. Like theatre companies, you give your potential ‘expert’ a trial run on Sky, and if that does not set off a storm of reaction - an EXCLUSIVE fluttering from the Flagship. In this case - Dr Adi Paterson, again.
ReplyDeleteI can well understand Adi was not encouraged to claim any kind of lefty sympathies when he was interviewed by our Dog Bovverer, particularly around apartheid (which did such a good job of keeping uppity blaks in their place - or, as Alan Jones identified more recently, being ‘sick to death of the rank ingratitude of indigenous activists’, and we will leave ‘Secret Women’s Business’ well alone.)
Perhaps Adi would like us to believe that he departed South Africa because of ‘the struggle against apartheid’. Perhaps his references to his work on PBMRs were edited out. This would seem strange, because the appropriate Wiki tells us that -
‘The PBMR is characterised by inherent safety features, which mean that no human error or equipment failure can cause an accident that would harm the public.’ Not only that, but the tennis-ball sized fuel ‘pebbles’ are cooled by inert gases, which can include - carbon dioxide! How good is that? A modular reactor that uses carbon dioxide? We have to be on a winner there, which local communities would actively campaign for.
Oh - the South African government could not generate commercial interest in the PBMR that Adi was so devoted to? Perhaps it still needs a little work.
Meanwhile, Benson has neatly conflated Adi’s time at ANSTO with serious investigation of commercial nuclear electricity generators (which does not figure in ANSTO objectives, or reports). This allows Ted O’Brien to claim Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen are arrogant, to think they know more about nuclear technology than ANSTO and (unspecified) nuclear specialists. Yep, it’s all showbiz, in this case, what the stage magicians call ‘misdirection’ - getting your attention to one motion, while working the trick with another.
The pond knew you wouldn't be able to resist the catnip Chadders. The pond was sorely tempted to do a cut and paste of your earlier comments ... oh heck ...
Delete...It seems the tag-team arrangement for this day has Sky promoting nuclear, while the Flagship educates us on education. I did look at the Cater contribution, but, oh dear oh long absent deity - he is just so tee-jus, ain’t he?
Anyway, earlier in the day we had rambling interview with Littleproud, calling for another ‘mature conversation’, but telling us it was the Nats who were pushing to go nuke, years and years ago, but were blocked by their coalition partners.
Be that as it may - later we had the Dog Bovverer with tame ‘expert’ who assured us that we were doomed to fail as a nation if we did not nuke. Expert was sometime head of ANSTO, one Adrian ‘Adi’ Paterson. According to Adi, it’s all a doddle - you can have big plants operating in less than 10 years, just like they do in the Emirates. Yep - democracy in the Emirates is just like what we have in Australia - sort of.
Now, while Adi’s time with ANSTO is likely to make him a shill for nukes, I thought to try to follow his career. He has a ‘Wiki’ entry. He is from South Africa, and immediately prior to coming to Australia, was General Manager of Business Development Operations at the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor Company in South Africa, and held the position until December 2008. The Company downsized significantly following his departure. In 2010, Public Enterprises Minister Barbara Hogan described the project in Parliament saying that "between 2005 and 2009, it became increasingly clear that, based on the direct-cycle electricity design, PBMR's potential investor and customer market was severely restricted, and it was unable to acquire either [investors or customers].
There is a separate, detailed, Wiki for Pebble Bed Modular Reactors. There is no indication that, during his time with ANSTO, Adi gave any attention to Pebble Bed Modular Reactors - but, for the Bovverer - he is an ‘expert’, thoroughly plausible, and serves whatever their joint masters demand of them.
To which GB added ...
Nicely researched, thank you Chad. But basically just another reptile con job getting a 'non expert' to provide supposedly expert opinion. Something that always appeals to wingnuts, doesn't it.
Thank you Dorothy - but - where else could we all have so much fun?
DeleteAnd why do you think we're all (including DP, and Kez) still here ?
DeleteIn my younger, and, I hope, more idealistic years, I never thought that (1) so many homo saps saps could be such saps and that (2) I'd have so many years of entertainment therefrom.
GB
GB - and (Im not sure how many separate Anonymice contribute) others who like to pick up on the bumbling efforts by reptiles to invoke serious economics - might be interested in item carried by the 'Crikey Worm' this morning. It is RETHINKING MY ECONOMICS by ANGUS DEATON
ReplyDeleteMARCH 2024 and can be found at imf.org by entering 'Deaton'.. I could not find any pay wall or other impediment to its free distribution. Deaton (born 1945) received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2015, but has taken an humility pill for this article. It is not long - just a bit too long to be copied to this site - and is written for a more general audience (although I don't know how 'general' might be the regular readers of IMF journals).
Direct link
Deletehttps://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2024/03/Symposium-Rethinking-Economics-Angus-Deaton
Wayback Machine
https://web.archive.org/web/20240306030651/https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2024/03/Symposium-Rethinking-Economics-Angus-Deaton (you need to click off request for email address)
Teaser
Economics has achieved much; there are large bodies of often nonobvious theoretical understandings and of careful and sometimes compelling empirical evidence. The profession knows and understands many things. Yet today we are in some disarray. We did not collectively predict the financial crisis and, worse still, we may have contributed to it through an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets, especially financial markets whose structure and implications we understood less well than we thought. Recent macroeconomic events, admittedly unusual, have seen quarrelling experts whose main point of agreement is the incorrectness of others. Economics Nobel Prize winners have been known to denounce each other’s work at the ceremonies in Stockholm, much to the consternation of those laureates in the sciences who believe that prizes are given for getting things right.
Like many others, I have recently found myself changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practicing economist for more than half a century. I will come to some of the substantive topics, but I start with some general failings. I do not include the corruption allegations that have become common in some debates. Even so, economists, who have prospered mightily over the past half century, might fairly be accused of having a vested interest in capitalism as it currently operates. I should also say that I am writing about a (perhaps nebulous) mainstream, and that there are many nonmainstream economists.
Ah yes, thanks Chad and DP. This is, I think, just another incidence of the N David Mermin discussion of 'explanations' and 'descriptions' - explanations being the theories we form to 'explain' some thing(s) we think might exist or that we might have conceived and descriptions being a statement of things that actually do exist or happen. So we have 'dark matter and dark energy' to explain the description of the accelerating expansion of the observable universe - though recently we've seen an alternative 'explanation' in terms of a 'wobbling universe' and we've also seen that some alternative descriptions have been challenged by a confirmation of the Hubble expansion coefficient.
DeleteBut that's science (astronomical physics) and Deaton is talking about economics: replete with 'explanations' but very sparce for descriptions. But then physics refers to something quite independent of homo saps saps, while 'economics' is all about that "social construct underpinned by a complex of social and institutional conventions" called money.
But have no fear, the worldwide army of 'economists' will stick to their 'explanations' even when they clearly do not attach to any clear 'descriptions' and the world, as 'described' by them continues to misbehave.
And it's about time more people were aware of Mermin:
Boojums All the Way through: Communicating Science in a Prosaic Age