It was just another Monday at the lizard Oz, with news of sociopath Vlad in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza kept far removed from the hive mind readership. Wouldn't want to upset the possums ...
Over on the far right, the commentary team was completely predictable - simpleton Simon leading the way (here no conflict of interest, no conflict of interest here), and concluding not with news of the suffering in Gaza, but the suffering of Jews in Australia.
When they cop a missile that wipes out a family of thirty, the pond might take an interest.
A little later the insufferable Mike Pezzullo was promoted to the top of the list. It seems he's attempting to redeem himself by presenting to the reptiles as a credentialed mango Mussolini whisperer.
The pond was too over it to go there, what with the Pezullist blathering on about transformation of the world order, and never mind the climate science, reminding the pond he was more in his element when bullying the public servants below him, in true MM style.
As for the bog standard reptile fodder offered by Monday regulars, it didn't take long for déjà vu and ennui to raise their ugly heads as the pond continued its endless herpetology studies, together with a healthy dose of a Pythonish sense of absurdity at the meaning of life.
Peggy Lee crooned, inter alia..
Just as well as I'm standing here talking to you
That when that final moment comes
And I'm breathing my last breath
I'll be saying to myself
Is that all there is
Is that all there is?
Bloody Caterism and a squawking parrot of the Major Mitchel kind
If that's all there is my friend
Then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is ...
The Caterist is particularly heavy on ennui this day, dragging out assorted ancient dead bears and beheaded whales, and reviving them.
Little Johnny, Brexit - a feat most pundits consider an epic failure - and Boris, remembered for his shambling, rampant ego and party-gate.
Lookin' back at the years gone by like so many dismal Oz columns
In '24 I was way too ancient and runnin' up the 31
I don't know where I'm runnin' now, I'm just runnin' on
runnin' on empty
(Runnin' on) runnin' blind
(Runnin' on) runnin' into the sun
But I'm runnin' behind
Just the header and pitch conjured up a Caterist running on empty and running behind dreams of past dubious glories:
Anthony Albanese’s terminal inability to rise above his character failings has raised conservative hopes that the next Brexit moment may be a matter of months away. Trump’s victory in the US has raised conservative morale.
The next Brexit moment as a win? What a prize loon.
The reptiles promised it would be just a 4 minute read, but the pond knew it would be an eternity.
The only distraction was the way that the reptiles presented the piece, at least in the pond's browser. The text was remarkably, monocle required, small, while the snaps were huge.
The photos of Boris and the mutton Dutton overwhelmed the pond and produced a sense of vertigo verging on nausea, and the pond makes no apology for downsizing the lot of them.
As is obligatory these days, Trumpism led the Caterist way, with Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Mullet Arena in Tempe, Arizona:
After that, the pond thought it best to leave the Caterist to correspondents, who might bestir themselves to pass comment, or might not, if afflicted by Monday-itis, and either way, it would be a never no mind.
Nights such as this have become known as Brexit moments, after the 2016 British referendum when the BBC kept viewers waiting until 4.40am for the declaration, eight hours after the early result from Sunderland had signalled game over.
Brexit moments are inflection points in a nation’s cultural and political life. Experts are dumbfounded, conventional wisdom overturned and common sense allowed breathing space, at least for a while. Brexit moments signal a shift in the power balance towards the “deplorables” but fall short of total victory. The elite forces have a propensity to regroup and devise more clever words to give cover to their next cultural offensive.
Oh FFS, the elite forces, the cultural offensives. From a man who is deeply, profoundly, routinely offensive, not to mention weirdly stupid ... but hey ho, on we go ...and yes, the 'leets get a mention, because there's absolutely nothing 'leet about getting a cushy job as a fellow in some taxpayer-money devouring think tank ...
Just to rub it in, the reptiles did their usual bit of cross promotion of a billionaire, though please remember that these days billionaires are never a member of any 'leet, Newsweek Deputy Opinion Editor Batya Ungar-Sargon says Donald Trump represents a “revolt” of the working class “against the elites”. Former US president Donald Trump has been found guilty on all 34 counts in his New York hush money case. Sentencing is set for July 11. “It is a revolt of the working class against the elites – that’s what Donald Trump represents,” Ms Ungar-Sargon told Sky News host James Morrow. “You have all of these people who are behaving in a coordinated, zombified way against him, but it comes down to class solidarity of the elites against the everyman.”
Little Johnny was dragged into the next gobbet, and the monarchists, coming at a time when the Poms have just discovered how much the royals have been rorting the country, including the NHS, prisons and whatever else you've got ... Beeb it here or if the paywall doesn't kick in, the UK Terror regurgitates the Times' yarn here.
The presidential election was held on the eve of the 25th anniversary of Australia’s republic referendum, one of the earliest and most decisive populist revolts of modern times. Anthony Albanese’s decision to drop his proposal for another vote testifies to the power of conservatives to win the battle of ideas when they stick to the task.
On Friday, John Howard told a gathering of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy: “I don’t think we’ll have a referendum on this issue in my lifetime.” It’s hard to imagine the former prime minister being obliged to eat his words.
Yet from the early 1990s until the eve of the 1999 referendum, a transition was regarded as a fait accompli by Australia’s presumptive ruling class.
Paul Keating visited Balmoral in September 1993 when he warned Queen Elizabeth that a republic was inevitable. Every Australian newspaper, including this one, barracked for the Yes campaign. Jason Morrison’s report from the tallyroom for 2GB, which was played to the audience on Friday, gives a flavour of the night.
“Even this morning, The Australian newspaper and the Sydney Morning Herald had tipped a double win for yes,” Morrison reported. “Both were wrong … constitutional monarchists won this argument against an onslaught from the republican camp involving celebrities and marketing campaigns. But on this historic night, the status quo remains.”
Alan Jones’s Breakfast Show, then on 2UE, was one of the few forums where the monarchists could expect a fair hearing. “It is an elitist debate,” Jones told Friday night’s gathering. “It’s a debate prefaced and predicated on the notion that a few people know better than the ordinary Australian. Whenever ordinary Australians are given a vote in any of this, they will vote emphatically no.”
Just to rub salt into that King Chuck the talking tampon wound, the reptiles ran a huge snap, John Howard admires the Australian flag on the hood of his Commonwealth car the morning after the republic referendum.
Then it was on with the wonders of Brexit. Most economists, even conservative ones - as well as Graudian ones - think that Brexit has been a mighty dud, with past problems compounded by the arrival of the mango Mussolini's threats of tariff wars, but the Caterist still lives back in that glorious lying day ...
The pond dug up that still as a reminder of the massive porkies that were told, ones the Caterist seems to have missed out on ... and yes, "woke"scores a mention...
The Brexit vote, the rejection of the voice referendum and the defeats of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris are skirmishes in the same war. These national debates resonate across the Anglosphere, which explains why our ABC denounces Trump with the same degree of passion it uses to condemn Scott Morrison or Peter Dutton.
The Prime Minister’s terminal inability to rise above his character failings has raised conservative hopes that the next Brexit moment may be a matter of months away. Trump’s victory in the US has raised conservative morale. The Opposition Leader will benefit vicariously if the president-elect can shift the agenda on issues such as climate change, energy, inflation and immigration.
While the economy and strong borders were the headline issues, Trump’s skirmishes into the culture war mattered, too. In the closing weeks of the campaign, team Trump rolled out political ads attacking Harris’s support for transgender rights with the tagline: “Kamala’s For They/Them. President Trump is for you.”
Sorry, talk of "woke" requires a ritual cleansing of the temple ...
The reptiles decided the moment was right for them to slip in their own BoJo snap, and never mind that the lad was kicked off air for trying to flog his book in an unseemly way:
Then it was on to how to become as rabid as the mango Mussolini ...
The good news for the Coalition is that Labor intends to copy almost everything in the disastrous Democrat campaign, from choreographed glee clubs staged for the cameras to forgiveness of student loans. It will attempt to wedge the opposition on abortion as it did in Queensland by conflating the duty of care for babies born alive with women’s rights. Dutton has warned Coalition candidates to avoid falling into the trap but that may not be enough given the left’s determination to frame conservatives as mad.
The Liberal Party’s strategists will rightly urge caution on the fraught issue of transgenderism. Yet they can take courage from the evidence that the transgender lobby is collapsing under the burden of its extremism. The instinct of most Australians to respect their fellow citizens equally has been exploited by a pernicious campaign to overturn the social order, weaken familial bonds and judge people by the colour of their wristband rather than their character.
The next snap was truly frightening in its enormity, not to mention its subject matter ...
The Caterist's best advice to the hair-challenged one?
He can be sure, however, that he is on the right side of the argument, outside the inner metropolitan bubble. The wide-eyed transgender zealots know they cannot win the popular vote, which is why they resort to silencing and censorship.
In a referendum to change the definition of a woman from one based on biology to one based on gender, there can be little doubt the No vote would win decisively.
Nick Cater is a senior fellow at the taxpayer-funded Menzies Research Centre.
Oh FFS, not tranny bashing as the way to power. What are the figures for this terrifying phenomenon - under 2% in the US according to some - and for an understanding that the world simply doesn't slot into a binary, and that biology allows for all kinds of sexuality? Is there a hermaphrodite in the house?
One of the pillars of the modern scientific method is to test models and try to prove them wrong. However, sex and sexuality have long been an exception to modern standards of science because of the perceived consequences of scientific findings on controversial social debates. Human sexual anatomy was categorized into five types in the 19th century. An individual could be a female or a male (with typical feminine or masculine external genitalia, respectively), a female or male pseudohermaphrodite, or a true hermaphrodite. Male or female pseudohermaphrodite—terms no longer appropriate—referred to individuals with ambiguous external genitalia, a blurring between masculine and feminine features, and the presence of either testes or ovaries. True hermaphrodites have both testicular and ovarian tissue. As noted by Dreger, this model, centered on the gonadal anatomy, was adopted by clinicians, and all patients born with ambiguous genitalia were traditionally classified into one of these categories. For example, individuals born with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia have been categorized as female pseudohermaphrodites...
And so on at the link, and sorry it was wrong of the pond to introduce the opening of scientific paper published in Nature way back in 2007.
The Caterist lives in the land of climate science denialism and the prediction of the movement of flood waters in quarries, and his tools are ignorance, fear and demonisation.
As for Major Mitchell this morning, the sense of ennui continued, together with remarkably large snaps.
Will the reptiles ever get tired of comrade Dan or ABC bashing? Probably not, it's what you do when you're a hoary-headed relic, an ancient scribbler hauled out each Monday to indulge in a ritual bashing, requiring the evocation of past grievances.
Take Covid for example. The pond was reminded of a talk by historian Richard Evans at the Cambridge Union (YouTube), mainly to flog his latest book, but also to talk about various historical approaches in the context of Nazi Germany.
Amongst a variety of topics, Presentism came up, though not quite with that word, with its wiki listing opening this way:
In literary and historical analysis, presentism is a term for the introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Some modern historians seek to avoid presentism in their work because they consider it a form of cultural bias, and believe it creates a distorted understanding of their subject matter. The practice of presentism is regarded by some as a common fallacy when writing about the past.
The Major presents a classic example of presentism.
Back in the day, nobody had the first clue about the latest pandemic and how to deal with it. Vaccines and anti-virals were but a dream, transmission and mechanisms of transmission were only dimly understood. It still hangs around - the pond's partner's mother's nursing home has been isolated twice in the past month as Covid strode through its desolate corridors - but even amongst the elderly it can now be relatively contained, though the fear and the effect on morale and health remain.
The reptiles assured the pond it was only a five minute read, but the Major always presents as a major slog, and the header gave the pond no hope it would be different today.
And again the snaps, even of mortal enemies of the Comrade Dan kind, were huge. The pond simply couldn't take it, with the header offering only a vale of tears and a cavorting parrot scoring a cracker from his master ...
Many reporters behaved like political enforcers rather than questioning journalists during the Covid pandemic, and with their coverage of Donald Trump.
As noted with the Caterist, these days all reptile columns seem to begin with the orange glow of the mango Mussolini, The left-liberal US media got Trump and the electorate wrong for nine years but last week showed little sign of understanding why. Picture: AP
As a correspondent has noted, dubbing the NY Times as left-liberal is a silly ploy, given that it always peddles both siderism, craven headlines and a roster of columnists not far from the Major's world view. As for other rags, WaPo and the LA Times are both ensnared by oligarchs keen to do business with the MM.
That Major blather seems to be designed to act like a musty throwing about of napthalene flakes, mothballs if you will, a way of deterring all but the rabid from entering.
BTW, according to the google bot, napthalene was banned in New Zealand in 2014, but there's no known way of banning Major Mitchell's squawking, so let the parrot do his thing.
First comes the parrot preening his feathers with a righteous "told ya so", accompanied by a dismal failure to explore what a US turn to authoritarian dictatorship might actually mean:
The left-liberal US media got Trump and the electorate wrong for nine years but last week showed little sign of understanding why. This column was reminded of the sullen faces on the ABC on election night 2019 when Liberal leader Scott Morrison beat Labor’s Bill Shorten.
A similar example here was coverage by parts of the media, but particularly the ABC, of the Covid pandemic and rules imposed by federal and state governments to deal with it. Many reporters behaved like political enforcers rather than questioning journalists.
Some at the ABC even referred to health editor Norman Swan as a “single source of truth on Covid”. Yet his public forecasts in 2020 of the imminent collapse of the hospital system were utterly wrong.
This may be why the federal government’s 871-page inquiry into Covid, released on October 29, landed with a dead cat bounce.
It led this newspaper’s front page and was allocated two full inside pages, an editorial and a commentary page led by Judith Sloan. That Saturday’s Inquirer section ran extensive analysis by Paul Kelly and Chris Kenny.
Dear sweet long absent lord, here the pond must at least add a footnote. Dame Groan, nodding doddery "Ned" and the dog botherer as Covid experts?
The pond supposes the upside is that the Major discreetly pushed Killer Creighton and his fear of masks and vaccines to one side. How dismal can it get? The Major added this line ...
The Sydney Morning Herald covered the report with a single page one story, plus one inside comment piece by economics writer Shane Wright and an editorial. Its Saturday Review section ignored the report altogether.
... before the reptiles flung in a huge snap of a beast to be feared by the hive mind readership, Some at the ABC even referred to health editor Norman Swan as a ‘single source of truth on Covid’.
With due regard for Swan, a smaller size was urgently needed...
Then it was back to the Major's survey, constructed in the weird way he has, whereby truth and understanding only come from a long stay in the hive mind.
The Major cranked into gear with a lengthy bout of presentism:
ABC 7.30 on October 29 ran a couple of cursory comments about the report from Canberra correspondent Jacob Greber in a wider seven-minute wrap of the day’s events in the national capital that mainly focused on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Qantas.
Coatsworth was cautious about the report’s central recommendation: the setting up of an Australian Centre for Disease Control. He pointed to the mistakes of the US CDC, especially its “overzealous guidelines on masking of young children, prolonged school closures and protracted vaccine mandates”.
“At times, the US CDC was locked in a feedback loop of ‘epidemiological fundamentalism’, a rigidity that stifled open debate and eroded public trust,” he wrote.
Sloan and Kenny argued there should have been a full-blown royal commission into the handling of Covid by all levels of government. The pandemic killed 24,000 people here, cost at least $158bn of lost GDP, pushed the national debt towards a trillion dollars and triggered a global inflationary spiral.
Yet even though its terms of reference prevented the inquiry from looking at the failures of state Labor governments, there is meat in the report for the persistent reader.
This includes barbs at Victorian hotel quarantine mismanagement, the negative effects on attitudes to vaccination, statements by the then Queensland chief health officer Jeanette Young (not named in the report) criticising the original AstraZeneca vaccine, the irrationality of school closures, their negative effects on children’s mental heath, and debacles in aged care.
The report covers hundreds of individual actions across all Covid policy areas and makes many recommendations about how to improve them. Apart from its support for a CDC, it is concerned about a lack of public trust in governments, based on the submissions and interviews it did.
This lack of trust triggered some of the worst civil disturbances in our history after Victoria’s fifth lockdown, even though for the first year of Covid, Victorians had supported the approach of then premier Dan Andrews.
The report says misinformation contributed to a loss of public trust but does not focus on the way incorrect commentary from experts often contributed to that mistrust.
It examines the closures of international and state borders, quarantine implementation, the role of the public service and the impact of the virus on groups ranging from schoolchildren to the homeless, Aboriginal Australians, women, people in aged care, those with disabilities, culturally and linguistically diverse Australians, and women.
If you don’t have the time or energy to read it, an easy way to understand what really happened in 2020 is to look at the testimony of US health chief Anthony Fauci before the US House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
Fauci freely admitted many of the harshest rules he oversaw had no science behind them and were simply best guesses. There had never been any work to assess the US “six feet separation” rule or mask-wearing for children.
Indeed, Coatsworth last week told this column epidemiologists knew early in the pandemic that the virus was not dangerous to children.
“In reality, the decision to close schools was not about protecting children from the disease. It was about restricting movement of adults who were driving children to schools,” he said.
The federal report says many children’s mental health was severely affected by lockdowns and millions of children’s educational results were hampered by remote learning.
You know, that last line almost made the pond think that the Major was being a snowflake, moaning about mental health like some thirty something mum in the suburbs.
Just harden the fuck up Major, but no, then came a terrifying snap of a man who still haunts reptile nightmares and is likely to do so until the twelfth of never, Former Victorian premier Dan Andrews. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui:
Then it was on with more doses of presentism, accompanied by lavish doses of historical revisionism:
Swan was a harsh critic of NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, who tried to keep Sydney open whenever possible. He backed Andrews who locked down Melbourne longer than any city in the world.
Yet Victoria had a higher death rate by the end of the pandemic than NSW.
Worse was the performance of federal and state governments in keeping the virus out of aged care, where most deaths occurred.
Coatsworth says the medical profession needs to think carefully about its attitude to end-of-life care for the very elderly.
My sister and I were blocked from seeing our mum on her 90th birthday and had to sing Happy Birthday to her on FaceTime. We were asked not to send flowers because disinfecting them was too labour-intensive. As if flowers could transmit Covid.
For much of 2020-21, aged care visits were banned. It took a severe toll on residents’ mental health.
Yet most residents caught Covid from staff rather than from family visits.
Coatsworth said: “There’s no way we have the balance between compassion and infection control right in aged care. We’d lock facilities down in a heartbeat if a pandemic arrived tomorrow and it would be just as problematic.
“We need to come to terms with the fact that the life expectancy of someone in an aged care facility is 12 to 18 months. Is it better to keep people alive but isolated and alone or to risk them getting an infection and die in the arms of their families? We forced isolation and loneliness on tens of thousands of elderly Australians during Covid.”
Without a royal commission, the nation could easily snap back to an extreme eradication mindset at the next sign of any new disease.
Nah, not really, for all that the Major tries in his usual way to instil fear, what with fear mongering being the reptile way.
It will depend how long it is before the next pandemic strikes and what form it takes. Many parts of the world had been insulated from the sort of pandemic of the Spanish flu kind, an event only dimly remembered and not to hand as a guide.
If another pandemic strikes while the memory is fresh, the past will seem not so much like a different country as a guide to might be done.
If it strikes long after the pond has gone, the chances are that pundits will be like the Major ... clueless when it happens and astonishingly wise and prescient after the event.
As for another lengthy, expensive royal commission to study much of what is already known, no doubt the real motivation is the never ending desire of reptiles to slag off Labor, though in reality many politicians were as clueless as clowns of the BoJo Tory kind.
And with that dose of reptile fear-mongering done and dusted, the pond is pleased to report that the immortal Rowe has come up with a fearful but most apt comparison:
It fits perfectly, the sexism, the misogyny, the gag, the bondage ... though perhaps a hair transplant and a touch of the bronzer might have helped make the comparison even more apt.
Sadly, there was no bikini, as in the original, but no doubt the transformed White House will be working on it ...
Commenting on the Caterist ? Yeah, well what about the time that Fox News declared Biden the winner in Arizona and Trump came down on it heavily for making that declaration which turned out to be quite true.
ReplyDeleteIs that an Anti-Brexit moment ?
Major Mitchell's squawking"...that regularly get things hopelessly wrong, even national elections."
ReplyDeleteDP said "Then it was back to the Major's survey, constructed in the weird way he has, whereby truth and understanding only come from a long stay in the hive mind."
"A concrete analogy may help here: it’s like Scalia telling astronomers, “Your objects of inquiry are celestial, so look at the sky instead of your telescope!”
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/11/out-of-the-frying-pan-chevron-in-context.html#more-266568
Good old Maj. Mitch: "For much of 2020-21, aged care visits were banned." and "Yet most residents caught Covid from staff rather than from family visits." Yeah, well I guess if "aged care visits were banned" it was gonna be just a little hard to catch something from people who weren't there, wasn't it.
ReplyDeleteBut staff ? Well somebody's gotta be there so the aged care folk don't starve to death, right ? Because, according to Coatsworth "We forced isolation and loneliness on tens of thousands of elderly Australians during Covid." Yet if Covid "pandemic killed 24,000" in toto over its full timeframe, then how many of those thousands actually died directly from Covid ?