This being Dame Groan economics lecture day, the pond should tell a story against itself.
The pond had a mouse problem, but when in Coles discovered the only form of available mousetrap came from Ratsak ®, with "prebaited mouse attractant".
No sign of the old-fashioned wooden and cheap mousetrap. This variety was marked up handsomely, to the benefit of Ratsak ® and Coles. Naturally the pond smelled the attractant and fell for the pre-baited trap ...
Naturally it was a comprehensive failure. The mouse, being discerning, didn't have the slightest interest.
So the pond picked up an old-fashioned, cheap ($2.50 for two) trap at the local IGA, reverted to the old cliché of a most excellent cheese, and not thirty minutes later came the sound of the trap going off (anyone in PETA should address concerns to the mouse, who was issued a proper notarised eviction notice, which was wilfully ignored).
And that's how folk end up voting for the tangerine tyrant or buying the lizard Oz, they get suckered into emptying their wallet or purse by Ratsak ® and Coles. Not everyone has a friend or relative to gift a second-hand trap or a used lizard Oz ....
And so to the economics lesson for the day ...
The pond quickly realised it didn't have the slightest interest in the economics lesson, and like wayward children are wont to do, sneaked a look at the 'toons. There was the infallible Pope in fine singing form ...
The pond could usually rely on the Groaner to take a sideswipe at renewables or climate science, but apparently not today ... it was, to use the quaint argot of ancient times, dullsville ...
No doubt an esteemed correspondent might have a few words on the Groaning, but it seemed best summed up by the sheer banality of a snap of people shopping ...
People shopping? That's the best they could offer? Not even an ABC finance style graph? Clearly the remnants of the graphics department had also given up on the Groaning ...
Tinkering with the energy market? It was ever so brief a mention, but it was enough to trigger the pond and search out another 'toon to celebrate the tinkering ...
That took the pond to the final gobbet of undiluted Groan ...
It was only at the end of the groaning that the pond realised it had gone about it's daily business back the front, and had failed to offer a survey of the early morning offerings ...
There was the bro, pleased as punch and proud to be offered the top far right slot in the digital edition ...
As for the Alice crime scourge, the pond notes that the reptiles had turned to a gif by this morning.
When the story originally ran last night - never trust the reptile timings - the image featured was pure fear-mongering racism, of a kind that sometimes gets an NRL player into trouble ...
Well played Liam. The readership apparently can never get enough of images of threatening black people ... what a pity you weren't around for a job at The Bulletin back in the old days...
The pond notes that the reptiles were also hot on the fake image story, but that's best covered by a 'toon ...
One yarn that was conspicuously absent? The pond only notes it, in the hope that one day we can see an image of Dame Slap snorting a line ...
And that's as good an intro to the bro as the pond can imagine, and here the pond is going to break its own rules and allow the illustrations because they're so ... bro ...
Woke madness in the header? That's an automatic penalty ...
Why is the bro going here just at this moment in time? Well it's a course it's a distraction, up there with reeling and writhing ... because you know ...
...what of the writers at The Australian and Sky News, who had trashed the story and either made or encouraged the claim that the Four Corners story was just a ‘hit job’?
Strangely enough, there was not a peep out of them and certainly no apology for their ‘hit job’ on Four Corners.
Naturally the bro and the lizard Oz were keen to avoid salacious stories about teachers trapped in toffy boys' schools having saucy fantasies, so readers of the lizard Oz were treated to a trip down the bro's memory lane, and what a deeply weird trip it was, a field day for Freudians, but explaining so much ...
It was at this point that the first snap came and it was a doozy ...
You won't ever see the pond featuring the snap of its first communion, at a time when the pond was caught up in the Catholic ponzi cult ...
These days it's led by a quisling lackey doing hard yards for sociopathic Vlad the impaler ...
But let's not disturb the bro's reveries because it's not about waving the white flag, it's about manly men being manly men ...
Actually the pond lives in just such a house, and it was a vast relief to all when the woman of the house went to check on the burglar, but the pond digresses, and there's another narcissist snap to run ...
By this point the pond felt deep into the weird and the territory of TFMI, but pressed on, because it turns out that the bro himself wasn't so much a manly man himself, he wasn't a rugger bugger, he was a bit of a nerd ...
Sorry, the bro always brings out the worst in the pond and that misuse of prisoners dressed up in drag to help survive a war camp is unforgivable, but the bro's piece offered an alternative ...
Again TFMI, and the pond began to pray for it all to be over ...
No doubt, no doubt, Freudians on your marks, ready to explain how the bro is the perfect case study showing how boys' schools can do immense psychological damage, and then came a snap the pond could shrink, what with the figure being well known ...
It was the prelude to a very short final par, which explained almost as much as the Catholic indoctrination ...
So that's why the bromancer is in the "It's nuts!!" school of scribbling.
As for PG, the pond should point to Rivka Galchen's piece in
The New Yorker,
Wartime for Wodehouse, which explains that Wodehouse was, much like the bromancer writing on anything, simply incredibly naïve and completely oblivious and unaware ...inter alia ...
And now, while the pond is running over length, a final offering from the sampling of the digital comments section...
No not that rat in the ranks from the deep north, Milner minor, but Liz, doing what the bro should have been doing, reassuring everybody that things would be fine under the mango Mussolini ...
Relax, it won't take long ...
The pond is guessing that everybody has seen Katie Britt doing her thing, and the SNL skit featuring
Scarlett in the cold opener and might even have caught
that other Liz having a Cheney moment ...
Every act needs a warm-up and that was the warm-up for the reptiles' Liz ...
What a relief. The tangerine tyrant is going to be like a good dose of cod liver oil ...
Sweet, and so to a final reassuring gobbet ...
So everything's under control and the genocides can continue unabated?
We can drop bombs and food parcels at the same time for the victims? Sweet ...
TFM Samizdat. Update from the self awards. Samizdat, GozIzdat, canries and toxic gas.
ReplyDeleteI find it amusing, ironic and scary that Matt Tabbi is noteable for the podcast, Useful Idiots. As he is also a useful idiot . To wit he "and New York Post reporter Miranda Devine, I’ll [Matt Tabbi] be accepting the inaugural Samizdat Prize, given by the RealClear Media Fund". Dame Groan eat your heat out.
Samizdat is now mainatream, exemplified by the corpse-of-news opinionista ointment-ophillia's self aggrandizement and reach. And in true samizdat style, self publishing and self awarding.
Tabbi though, as usual, has a canary in a coal mine touch by writing, even though he also produces toxic gases:
"The Internet, in other words, was being transformed from a system for exchanging forbidden or dissenting ideas, like Samizdat, to a system for imposing top-down control over information and narrative, a GozIzdat.".
...
"Tonight, along with Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and New York Post reporter Miranda Devine, I’ll [Matt Tabbi] be accepting the inaugural Samizdat Prize, given by the RealClear Media Fund (^funding).
"America Enters the Samizdat Era
Thanking fellow honorees Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Miranda Devine, and explaining why an American Samizdat Prize is both great and scary"
MATT TAIBBI
MAR 7, 2024
Link?**
A better read on Tabbi than Wikipedia.
"What Happened to Matt Taibbi?
"The former darling of the liberal media is now one of its loudest critics. He says he hasn’t changed."
By Ross Barkan
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/10/what-happened-to-matt-taibbi.html
** no link as propadandists - realists in their minds- do not need the money which becomes a proxy for power providing samizdat platforms and payola. He, them, Patrick and John Collison / Stripe inc, - "the company received a $2 million investment, including contributions from Elon Musk, PayPalfounder Peter Thiel, Irish entrepreneur Liam Casey,[8] and venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and SV Angel.[9] " Wikipedia
^Funding of RealClear Media
"According to a 2019 piece by Center for Media and Democracy, "RealClear Foundation has been funded by right-wing megadonors for years."[6]
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/RealClear_Media_Group
"The golden rule : he who has the gold makes the rules : the discovery of Australia's Telfer gold mine"
Newmont won and the gold while Jean-Paul "Turcaud operated an Internet website called, in reference to Telfer,[1] The Greatest Australian Mining Covered up Swindle of the 20th Century."
Trove.
Samizdat.
Sheridan’s on to education now. Cannot waitfor his take on the red carpet fashions at the Academy Awards.
ReplyDeleteHis examples of the burglar and the out of control car show how steeped in the past the reptiles are and how an all boys school sends the wrong messages. Apparently females of the species need a man and a strong man at that, because women are weak. Clearly, Sheridan thinks single women just cannot get by in life.
Perhaps Dame Slap could knock Sheridan into shape.
Our Esteemed Dame tells us ‘the solutions are also the same: restricting the growth of aggregate demand while ensuring supply problems are remedied.’
ReplyDeleteMay I recycle a comment of a year ago - because it is still quite relevant -
“This comes from someone who has regularly praised Milton Friedman’s thinking on inflation, without reminding her readers that Friedman said inflation is produced ONLY by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.’
The essential equation is -
MV = Py
M is the supply of money, V is its velocity, P the price level and - although lower case, so seemingly less important - y is the gross domestic product. The ‘output’ if you would. The thing that ‘the economy’ is supposed to be about.”
She hovers around Milton’s equation, but still will not go near that ‘price level’ (price gouging, in other parts of reptile publications) and, I guess, she finds ‘velocity’ too difficult to explain to an 8-year old. Oh, and the gross domestic product is assailed by more than ‘supply problems’.
We have the whining of (many of) the motor industry folk about horrendous price increases coming from a requirement that what comes out the back of their combustion engines should be less responsible for chronic illnesses, and deaths. This comes from the same players who have made out like bandits over the last 4 years, jacking up prices way ahead of any other price index - justifying it by ‘supply chain issues’, but, incidentally, just recording about the best year for sales ever. Snowing us about ‘supply chain’ is not inflationary; proper emission standards, in the minds of the car salesmen - inflationary.
I am working through Hein de Haas’ ‘How Migration Really Works’, so will save her token rant about migration inflation for another time
The Dame’s little grab bag of ‘rookie mistakes’ has broad sweep - but it is too simple to say that they release funds to spend in other areas - that are inherently inflationary. Childcare assistance overall allows more parents into a better paid part of the workforce, but very likely they are at the stage of life that they are scraping to pay for a home, and a Toyota that now costs 40-50% more than 5 years ago (have you looked at the price of a Corolla this month?). Affordable pharmaceuticals mean people are less likely to queue at the local hospital A&E. TAFE courses might actually produce more of those ‘tradies’ that we now import, with strong support from particular industries. I would be interested in how many TAFE students the Dame knows, personally, who have, or whose parents have, significant funds that can be ‘released’ to spend up in other areas.
And of those services - support for childcare might, might, drive up prices, but TAFE, energy subsidies and pharmaceuticals? Really?
On the weekend we saw Maria Bartiromo delighted to have found an ‘economist’ prepared to tell her that, among all the dangers of Bidenomics (and, to Maria, it is ALL danger) comes one hitherto unsuspected - ‘wage inflation’. Better wages, said her sage, are inherently inflationary - and not many people realise this.
I wonder how long before reptiles here take up the Maria meme. My guess is it will start on Sky, and trickle down to the Flagship.
Chadwick, excellent.
DeleteWhen we talk about a "rapid increase in the quantity of money" would it be true to say that the quantity of money is always increasing ? As population increases, so must the money supply, surely.
DeleteSo the world population was about 2 billion in 1927, and now it's a bit over 8 billion - a bit more than a fourfold increase. So, has the 'quantity of money' increased fourfold over that time, or by even more.
And is that why 'inflation' - even at just a rate of "2 to 3 per cent" - is always happening. And has the supply of goods and services increased by fourfold over the same time - or by significantly more.
Just a reminder of those words of wisdom given to us by that great eco-philosopher, Henry Ergas: "money is a social construct underpinned by a complex of social and institutional conventions."
DeleteDoes that therefore mean that inflation - the unmanaged result of increases in a social construct - is just a "social construct" too?
You did write ‘the pond is going to break its own rules and allow the illustrations because they’re so . . .bro . . .’
ReplyDeleteWise readers should have realised that that was essentially a warning, that - these illustrations can never be unseen. This reader was not so wise - and has seen the illustrations. Hopefully they will go to that part of the brain that retains the registration numbers of cars y’r h’mble has owned, and which almost certainly have returned to nature, and to telephone numbers with 6 digits or fewer - although they might seep out during one’s lucubrations.
This one's for the delusional expert Elizabeth Buchanan.
ReplyDeleteTrump 2.0 (The Doubledown Mix)
Trumpled Twice?
It won't be nice
From day one
It's all undone
Lifelong Prez
Do what he says
His solution
Retribution
Does some shootin'
Rings up Pootin
"You're Ukrainin' -
I'm swamp drainin'!"
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteMuch noise and fury from the Bromancer today, but little real substance. He waxes nostalgic about his old all-male school - but doesn’t provide any evidence that it was a superior education or experience to that provided by a mixed gender school. Indeed, he seems to have found his final years at such an institution to have been equally satisfactory, and states at the outset that he has no objection to mixed education. So what, really, is the basis for his upset? Oh of course, it’s the “wokerati”, “ideological groupthink”, and the rest of the usual word salad. Basically it’s an excuse for the Bro to blow off a bit of steam, using as his excuse a change that’s been ongoing for many, many years. Has the Bro ever considered that part of the reason for the gradual reduction in the number of seperate boys’ and girls’ schools may be a desire on the part of many of the kids themselves and their parents to attend a mixed school? Not to mention a consequential recognition by the schools themselves that there’s an economic benefit in such change, rather than relying on the dwindling numbers who prefer single gender education.
ReplyDeleteLike the Bro, a fair slab of my education was at a Christian Brothers boys’ school. Nearby was a Catholic girls school, managed by nuns. Neither now exists ; they merged and became a single co-ed school, for the reasons I cited. This occurred over 40 years ago, long before such concepts as wokeness, groupthink or even “political correctness” had arisen to strike fear and terror into the hears of crusty reactionaries.
Still, I’ll give the Bromancer some credit for bravery in running some of his old school photos. The few of mine that still exist are safely locked away, “Picture of Dorian Grey”-style, and will never be viewed by the general public!
Anonymous - in my home town, there was a particular benefit in going to the Christian Brothers. There was also a Girls (Convent) School, and the Nun in charge (we heathen never did sort out the titles) regularly lectured their girls not to associate in any way with boys from the Presbyterian or C of E schools for young gennlemens, and absolutely never to even think of any kind of communication with those dreadful lads at the public high school, who, given the slightest opportunity, most likely would - said Nun was a bit obscure on details, we learned from some of their charges who did communicate with us - would very likely do villainous things with the young Catholic virgins.
DeleteBut, the girls were assured, the lads from the 'Brothers' school had been drilled in 'respect' for young ladies, and particularly those of the true faith, so - it was quite in order for the girls to associate with those lads. Said lads thought that was excellent tutoring in social life. We had no illusions about the extent of the 'respect' that our friends in the 'Brothers' were likely to show to young ladies, particularly as they were given the 'inside running' in that part of the great game of adolescent life.
Hi Dorothy,
ReplyDeleteHardly surprising that the young Bromancer was only “briefly in the science club”. Trying to get to grips with an empirical method for acquiring knowledge would have crashed straight into the religious brainwashing that the Christian Brothers had so successfully instilled in the teenage Greg.
Still a disdain for the “cult of science” made Sheridan perfect material for working at the dark Murdochian print mills.
“Rupert Murdoch is reputed to have said his preferred recruit was someone straight out of a mid-level Catholic school who wears short-sleeved shirts to work. When you combine this religiosity with neoliberal beliefs, News Corp is a powerful partner for the private schools.”
https://johnmenadue.com/labor-abandons-public-education/