There's been a lot of fuss about Beryl of late ...
Why Hurricane Beryl foretells a scary storm season
Why Hurricane Beryl's 'insane' intensification has experts worried
... but not in the lizard Oz of course, where you can always shelter from the storm, but not really surprising, given this report back in January 2022, Future hurricanes will roam over more of the Earth, study predicts.
The pond only mentions this because you won't find it anywhere in the top of the digital edition of today's reptile rag ...
The pond could have done the same for heatwaves, with this in WaPo ... (paywall, hiding splendid graph)
You know, this sort of joke ...
The pond has enjoyed a Death Valley heat wave, but instead Killer lead the reptile commentariat team at the top of the far right of the page with a gloat about Joe Biden's dementia ...
The pond isn't going to spend time with Killer, if only because of the four signs of policy dementia mentioned by Killer, one was the refusal to sell out Ukraine to Vlad the sociopath, and the other?
You guessed it ... "The late 2021 Covid-19 vaccine mandate for all private sector workers, overturned by the Supreme Court, has trashed confidence in public health."
There's always that anti-vax weirdo bubbling away on the surface of the mask-fearing Killer ...
The pond might have spent more time with Killer if he'd mentioned the alternative at all ...
That would have given the pond a chance to celebrate with a few cartoons ...
Besides, with the pond having long thought that both parties needed younger leaders, spending time with Killer is a little unseemly. Been there, and already thought that, and how uncomfortable to be in Killer's company in gerontocracy 'r us days ...
If only Killer had offered a little balance and mentioned the MAGA cult, and what it portended, and why the GOP also currently has a leader in the grip of his own form of virulent dementia...
Instead the pond turned to news outside the top page ... demented toads in the deep north ...
There was a snap of the wretched wretch who refused to go full crazy ...
... and then the piece tailed away, with a crazy bringing up the rear ...
Rennick is ofcourse a reassuringly deeply weird toad in the deep north, made infamous in stories such as Climate experts hit back at Australian politician's bizarre theory about gravity's role in global heating ... or if you can get behind the paywall at the SMH, Anti-vax Coalition MP Gerard Rennick dumped.
The pond mentions all this as a preamble and as an excuse for running petulant Peta this day.
Usually this produces a visceral reaction in correspondents and the pond is aware of the peril, but this day there came a petulant Peta challenge as a way of slogging through a standard whine about weakness (what the West needs is a strong man sociopath or at least someone who can wear budgie smuggler cluster buster ball hugging boaster swimwear) ...
It'll take time to fully unveil the petulant Peta challenge, and there's a lot of whining and moping and visual distractions before she gets there ...
Yes, it's one of those listicles that you have to get through, but the next gobbet after this will produce the goods, the first hint of where the pond is heading for a pay off ...
No, it's not the bit about the apocalyptic death cult... though the genocide is going along quite nicely , with plenty of killings and mass forced movements ...
It's this line ...
Meanwhile, all the main democracies are engaged in economic self-harm in the name of climate change and other luxury beliefs.
The pond realises it's making the petulant Peta challenge easy, but perhaps it'll keep people reading to the increasingly bitter end ...
Usually at this point the pond would introduce a different topic and this day Peter Martin's piece in The Conversation will do the trick, When it comes to power, solar is about to leave nuclear and everything else in the shade.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton might have been hoping for an endorsement from economists for his plan to take Australian nuclear.
He shouldn’t expect one from The Economist.
The Economist is a British weekly news magazine that has reported on economic thinking and served as a place for economists to exchange views since 1843.
By chance, just three days after Dutton announced plans for seven nuclear reactors he said would usher in a new era of economic prosperity for Australia, The Economist produced a special issue, titled Dawn of the Solar Age.
Whereas nuclear power is barely growing, and is shrinking as a proportion of global power output, The Economist reported solar power is growing so quickly it is set to become the biggest source of electricity on the planet by the mid-2030s.
By the 2040s – within this next generation – it could be the world’s largest source of energy of any kind, overtaking fossil fuels like coal and oil.
Installed solar capacity is doubling every three years, meaning it has grown tenfold in the past ten years. The Economist says the next tenfold increase will be the equivalent of multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight, in less time than it usually takes to build one of them.
To give an idea of the standing start the industry has grown from, The Economist reports that in 2004 it took the world an entire year to install one gigawatt of solar capacity (about enough to power a small city). This year, that’s expected to happen every day.
Energy experts didn’t see it coming. The Economist includes a chart showing that every single forecast the International Energy Agency has made for the growth of the growth of solar since 2009 has been wrong. What the agency said would take 20 years happened in only six.
The forecasts closest to the mark were made by Greenpeace – “environmentalists poo-pooed for zealotry and economic illiteracy” – but even those forecasts turned out to be woefully short of what actually happened.
And the cost of solar cells has been plunging in the way that costs usually do when emerging technologies become mainstream.
There's more, and there was a spiffing graph too ...
It meant that the pond could get through the next petulant Peta gobbet quickly, a howl of pain, a yearning for the days when she ruled the onion muncher and he produced knighthoods for the suffering masses ...and there is a point to the solar detour, though it's slow in coming ...
It's been a long wait, but now for the payoff to the petulant Peta challenge...
It's not as if the pond didn't give clues, what with that talk of toads refusing to nuke the country and solar nuking the nukes ...
Yep, petulant Peta managed to go from this ...
Meanwhile, all the main democracies are engaged in economic self-harm in the name of climate change and other luxury beliefs.
... to this ...
And yet, some change-for-the-better might be in the offing. By being upfront with voters that nuclear power is the only way to get to net zero and keep the lights on, and that the inescapable choice is between paying more for a reliable emissions-free system, or even more for an unreliable one, at least Peter Dutton has shown the political integrity we claim to expect of a leader.
The question now is whether voters have sufficient collective character to recognise it.
She's such a lightweight bubble head, sublimely unaware and monstrously stupid, apparently incapable of recognising that nuking the country is, if nothing else, a luxury belief in the cause of what the onion muncher announced was crap ...
In Tamworth argot of old, she's a genuine 24 carat fuckwit, a splendid maroon, and that's the excuse the pond has for spending time with her this day.
Some will resent having wasted the time, having discovered the Peta challenge was a trip into the bleeding obvious ... but what else to do, given Jack the Insider was ranting about Berko Bandt, apparently unaware he was keeping company with berko Killer and berko petulant Peta ...
As a bonus, the pond decided it would revive Mein Gott, who briefly surfaced yesterday. It's not for any reason of substance, the pond just needs some spacing for the 'toons ...
To be fair, Mein Gott never takes long with his paranoid conspiracy theories, and there's always visual distractions. Where else could you see rubber gloves from iStock, as compelling an argument for Mein Gott's economic conspiracies and problems as might be imagined by smaller minds?
Those rubber gloves give the pond a chance to slip in the infallible Pope of the day ...
Sure, the infallible Pope doesn't have much to do with Mein Gott - perhaps more to do with the homeless being criminalised in some places - but Mein Gott, that's the entire point, and it's back to the interstitials, or the padding, or the 'toon spacing, if you will ...
Mein Gott, this might entertain the pond's correspondents with an inclination to the dismal art of economics, but more to the point, the pond can keep celebrating luxury beliefs, thanks to the immortal Rowe ...
Now that's the sort of thing the shopping trolley cartels should be stocking.
Sadly the pond ran out of Mein Gott gobbets long before it ran out of cartoons ... with this the last to hand ...
Mein Gott, the pond shed a tear for those slaves peddling around town in the gig economy, and turned to Wilcox to get us back to where we'd started this day ...
Trump's "You can be evil" is quite right, it's only ratings that matter. In evidence, consider some historical figures that were loved: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco and so on. And even some lesser lights: Thatcher, Reagan, Trump himself and even some real flickering candlelights: Bjelke-Petersen.
ReplyDeleteIt's a genuine and consistent property of a significant proportion of the human 'race'.
Petty Peta: "...Meloni, who's been better at railing against immigration in opposition than reducing it in government" Oh my, who'da thunk it: actually doing things is harder than just raving on about them. And so Trump: "...although he never quite 'built the wall, didn't even come close to 'draining the swamp' and continues to pretend there's no cost to unilateral protectionism..." Oh my, but he does have "ratings", doesn't he.
ReplyDeleteNot much commentary today, then. But not much to comment on, was there. After one says 'petulant Peta' how much more is left to be said.
ReplyDeleteBut that's ok, one has to experience all that's on offer or one might just miss out on that wonderful "Contest of ideas" that the Oz's TV ads are boasting so happily of. So never no mind, there's always tomorrow and even more "ideas" to contest.