Tuesday, December 19, 2017

In which the pond wastes time with an idle Sexton ...



Hmmm, that trip to the dentist combined with a mini-retrospective of Tarantino movies seems to have liberated the pond, sent it right off ...but amidst all the Harvey-fuelled nonsense of shows such as Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds, the pond retains an affection for Christoph Waltz, even as Austria disappears up its far right fundament ...

Somehow it all seemed right, so and just kind of viewing, as preparation for yet another idiot reptile complaint about free speech being trodden on ... when all the pond has seen of late is the Chairman turning up to tell a bunch of lies and hogwash about the culture in Fox News, proving that lies and fake news are now so embedded in News Corp, free lying speech is clearly alive and well, though after a few people noted it, and CNN made a meal of it, here, the Chairman's forelock tuggers, grovellers and supine dissemblers were forced to issue a clarification:

Amid online outrage about Murdoch's dismissive tone, 21st Century Fox issued a lengthy statement on Friday. It was widely interpreted as a damage control move. The statement said Murdoch "never characterized the sexual harassment matters at FOX News as 'nonsense.'" (There's more at Variety, and many other places).

And that's the point of course. Online anything goes - bloggers rant and rail, tweeters tweet outrageous lies of the Donald kind, and the comments on YouTube are a cesspit of filth and depravity, and that's before anyone gets into the weird world of 4Chan, alt right sewers and crazed libertarians, who sometimes get out from their mum's basement so they can shoot people - which the pond regards as a notable form of treading on free speech ...

Meanwhile, the Speccie crew and the reptiles themselves, aligned with the Donald and led by the Chairman, keep on printing all sorts of provocative crap and nonsense - duly noted in the pond's "twofer" comments section - and every so often this is interspersed with some willing tool chirping about how free speech is in dire peril.

The only thing in peril at the pond is how to cope with the tedium ...


Now all this blather needs only to be put up against the sort of trolling indulged in by the Speccie mob to be revealed as half-baked alarmism.

Truth to tell, Sexton has produced the old conflationary argument, moaning about how the real problem will involve religious bodies, then suggesting that it would be terribly expensive for individuals ...

Hint. Tax-free religious bodies have plenty of moola and feel free in spending it to defend their right to be bigots ... just as Akker Dakker and the Bolter and the Devine and the rest of the slavering rabid pack can turn to the Chairman for help should it get ugly.

The last the pond checked the Bolter was still careering down the track in his usual offensive way without any sense of being impeded or silenced ...


Oh sheesh, not the war on Xmas ...

Of course the Bolter always plays the martyr card ...


... when in reality it would take a miracle to shut him up for a nanosecond.

The pond suspects the reptiles are actually hankering for a prosecution so they can keep cultivating a martyred sense of persecution ...

You know, if free speech was such an issue, where's the harm in making fun of Christ or delusionals who think that they have a trinity of imaginary friends, while assembling to indulge in ritual cannibalism over the Xmas break ... (while in Melbourne the pond had to explain the actual meaning of transubstantiation to disbelieving young folk who'd never heard such twaddle before).

Sheesh, if the richly offensive Akker Dakker can start off a piece for the Spectator with this sort of tripe ...

‘Tis the season to be jolly,  Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la, Don we now our gay apparel … Oops, I don’t think Don will doing any fa-la-a-la-ing this Christmas, and as for gay apparel, no thanks. 

... then the pond can mock the trinitarians in a cheerful way, and all's well with free speech ...

Of course the tiresome Sexton wants to stir the pot and generate a sense of fear and loathing, when all the pond could think of was the pompous Sexton in Much Ado About Nothing:

"Dogberry: God's my life, where's the Sexton? Let him write down the Prince's officer "coxcomb." Come, bind them - thou naughty varlet!"

But enough of high falutin' references, it's on with the Sexton's hand wringing ...



If complaints are actively pursued ...

You see how they yearn and hunger for a do, for someone bunging it on?

In the meantime, it's all just empty rhetoric and posing and the Chairman can keep lying about sexual harassment at Fox and it's all just in a day's work in the failing media ... and in their provocation and trolling, they make the pond think it's in a Tarantino movie, swearing, guns blazing, putting a derringer bullet in the heart of a plantation owner, blowing up an ante bellum pad, confusing the movies with the Nazis, when really it should be disseminating its standard Python Xmas lesson ...

LADY PRESENTER: Well, that's the end of the film. Now, here's the meaning of life. Thank you, Brigitte. M-hmm. Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations, and, finally, here are some completely gratuitous pictures of penises to annoy the censors and to hopefully spark some sort of controversy, which, it seems, is the only way, these days, to get the jaded, video-sated public off their fucking arses and back in the sodding cinema. Family entertainment bollocks. What they want is filth: people doing things to each other with chainsaws during tupperware parties, babysitters being stabbed with knitting needles by gay presidential candidates, vigilante groups strangling chickens, armed bands of theatre critics exterminating mutant goats, page three girls with huge tits, Kristina Keneally in a swimsuit -- Where's the fun in pictures? Oh, well, there we are. Here's the theme music. Goodnight.


And now to a relevant Wilcox, with more Wilcox here ...



Monday, December 18, 2017

In which the pond trotted off in search of Xmas cheer and ended up sucking on all day Speccie humbugs ...


The pond is so over the reptiles' desire to bring down Malware ... it leaves the pond with absolutely nowhere to go ...

They keep promising this is the moment the man who rooned the NBN will be sent packing to his harbourside mansion, so it's lucky their promises aren't Xmas presents, or once again the pond would have been disappointed, as the mirage shimmered, then faded into the new year ...

Incidentally why is it that none of the reptiles ever ask these days what happened to Malware's pet project, the Digital Transformation Agency, now known as the Digitally Useless and Irrelevant Agency, blessed by a man who achieved fame in the 1990s as a web master for finance?

The pond has been assured it's a disaster area, ignored by all and sundry, impotent, toothless and useless ... yet all the reptiles do is scribble about the polls and yearn for Malware to go, if not this season, then certainly by next ...

Speaking of the season, the pond decided to celebrate the good cheer and joy by dropping in on the Spectator mob, a little late but better than ever ... and what a line up ...


First up was Noel Brown with this opening gambit ...

This year has certainly seen some milestones. First, there was the fall of Robert Mugabe. Here, I must make a confession: I should have killed him when I had the chance. I know this does not fit easily with the Christmas spirit, but I am sure there must be a principle of mediaeval law that says it is permissible to kill a tyrant. I should have done it then and there, but I stuffed it up, as usual, and foolishly let the opportunity pass… 

As leader of the Australian observer group in 1980, I was sent to darkest Africa to monitor the independence elections in the then Southern Rhodesia. During that perilous mission, we interviewed Mugabe in Salisbury for two hours on his plans for the infant Zimbabwe. We had bottles of Coca-Cola provided to refresh us, but Mugabe made do with idly spinning his unopened bottle around in a sort of Coke-roulette. I have often thought that if I had grabbed that bottle and given him a quick whack, I could have saved the world a lot of agony and particularly the poor Zimbabweans. Well I didn’t, and that was probably the worst mistake I made in my political career apart from voting for Billy McMahon as leader of the Liberal Party...

The pond once met Neil Brown and now bitterly regrets that it didn’t whack him over the head with a champagne bottle and thereby save the world and readers of the Spectator much unendurable misery …

 Of course the pond only says this as a joke. Political assassinations are a sign of western civilisation and democracy at its finest, and if only the pond had whacked Brown, it would now be celebrating a very festive season.

Brown then followed up with a Christine Keeler joke which is so pathetic and dire it’s unrepeatable, even on a low rent publication like the pond, and a meditation on Malware which concluded with this fine observation …

...Far worse was the behaviour of members of the house of representatives and the conduct that was both allowed and encouraged to take place in the public gallery. I am a curmudgeon as I am often told, but I was appalled at the appeals to base emotions, the applause for the crudest emotional point-scoring, the sneering at minority views, the waving of flags and banners, hugging and kissing like a lot of schoolgirls, and allowing the public gallery to be part of the debate and the reality show. It was a profound change from the detached manner in which parliaments as institutions have always conducted themselves. But then, in a regimented exercise to destroy marriage, why not damage another institution at the same time and get two prizes for the price of one in the ongoing war on the institutions? I am writing now to the Speaker to ask if all this is now approved: flags and banners, interjections, appeals to the public gallery, singing and dancing and all the rest of it and will it be tolerated for any cause taken up in the future? How about a debate on refugees or the republic with rival camps and their banners and hysteria in the public gallery? Merry Christmas! 

Like a lot of schoolgirls? On behalf of schoolgirls, who actually share affection, might the pond just observe that Brown might well and truly go and get fucked …

Is there anything worse than a fucking curmudgeon purporting to wish everyone a merry Christmas while mocking innocent schoolgirls?

Maybe Scrooge would accept it in the spirit it’s offered, but thank the long absent lord, the pond is able to offer it in the spirit She intended. Should have whacked the old bugger on the noggin and then there would be one less silly old angry Speccie fart shouting at clouds …

It has to be noted that reading the Speccie mob brings out the scatological in the pond ...but in the spirit that it's good to give as much as it is to receive, the pond will keep going...

So it was on to the Bolter ... who seemed to be attempting to be mellow, though the notion of a mellow Bolter is so bizarre that the pond had to check the amount of rum in the Xmas pudding ...

Naturally he was quick to revert to whining, moaning, whingeing mode ...

 … now we are in an age of mere seeming, with a booming industry in denouncing people in 140 characters or less – in proving our own goodness by simply vilifying someone else. Alexander once won trophies for Australia. Now his head is the trophy for Twitter moralists. 

To say nothing of the Spectator moralists, or the Bolter who has made a booming industry out of denouncing all sorts of people in thousands of characters or more ...though when the Bolter brings his family into proceedings, it’s always going to get weird and sometimes downright strange ...

More connections. My daughter tells me one of her friends accidentally stepped on the PH that marks the spot at the university where Patrick Hamilton was burned at the stake in 1528, on a day so windy that it took six hours for the fire to burn hot enough to kill him. He was just 24. My daughter is excited because she loves traditions, and stepping on those letters means her friend is doomed to fail her exams unless she breaks the spell by running into the North Sea at dawn on May 1.

Hamilton? Wasn't he just another victim of the religious wars they used to play hard in the late medieval period …

Must we now add blatant pagan superstitions into the mix?

Being the Bolter of course, somehow the religious wars get dressed up as a matter of free speech ...

We here risk failing something else: the test of our commitment to the free speech for which Hamilton died, refusing to take back his criticisms of church corruption.

Uh huh, it's supposed to be about free speech? In reality it was a debate about theology and heresy and fix-ups and the buggers in power ...

At length, he was summoned before a council of bishops and clergy presided over by the archbishop. There were thirteen charges, seven based on the doctrines affirmed in Phillip Melancthon's Loci Communes, the first theological exposition of Martin Luther's scriptural study and teachings in 1521. On examination Hamilton maintained their truth, and the council condemned him as a heretic on all thirteen charges. Hamilton was seized, and, it is said, surrendered to the soldiery on an assurance that he would be restored to his friends without injury... However, the council convicted him, after a sham disputation with Friar Campbell, and handed him over to the secular power, to be burnt at the stake as a heretic, outside the front entrance to St Salvator's Chapel in St Andrews. The sentence was carried out on the same day to preclude any attempted rescue by friends. He burnt from noon to 6 PM. His last words were "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit"... (Greg Hunt it here)

It's a typical Bolter error, to think that medieval theologians and the religious had the same set of attitudes and issues as are going the rounds today.

But there's a reason for the historical error and the seeking of parallels ...

The Bolter always fancies himself and his friends as martyrs, sacrificial lambs, as opposed to News Corp bullies allowed to bellow at the top of their lungs...

...I can’t pretend Milo Yiannopoulos is Patrick Hamilton. He says he’s a Catholic, but I doubt his preoccupation is our straightest way to heaven. But we cannot pick and choose whose free speech we should defend, because where’s the credit in defending only the most agreeable? In this case, though, Milo was chosen for me. I watched the West Australian Premier, Mark McGowan, pompously and unfairly denounce Milo as someone who ‘defends paedophiles and associates with Nazis’, adding: ‘We shouldn’t have [him] delivering lectures and performances to West Australians.’ I am anti-social and not attracted to making a spectacle of myself – which makes my television and radio career astonishing to me – but I got so cross that I blurted out on air that I would travel to McGowan’s capital and be MC for Milo’s Perth show, just to make a point about free speech. Let McGowan stick that up his kilt. 
But maybe McGowan is just making more connections. After all, Perth is named after the city where some of the nearly 4,000 alleged ‘witches’ to be killed in Scotland were sentenced to death. But he shouldn’t try so hard to be a modern witch-burner. He’s actually from the Irish McGowans, and I thought the Irish had more respect for blarney. I fly to Perth hoping McGowan’s mobs are held back by McGowan’s police. I’m not cut out for any Patrick Hamilton stuff, but Virgin has let me into the chairman’s lounge which at least makes martyrdom more comfortable.

Fuck that's weird .... No not the bit about the bleeding obvious, about Milo defending paedophilia and consorting with neo-Nazis, which he's done, or even the Bolter pretending to be a shy anti-social modest flower ...

No, it's that martyr complex, it's that comparing what happened to Milo to witch-burning - clearly the Bolter's never experienced a little burn on the stove, let alone at the stake - and then to blather on in an ethnic way about the Irish and the Scots... it's just so Bolterish ...

But think of the upside... as a result of being ethnically fixated, the Bolter forgot to indulge in black bashing for Xmas.

As for that pathetic boast about Virgin's chairman's lounge - so class conscious, so needy, so greedy, so desperate - the pond couldn't resist a chortle celebrating all the mug punters who think the Bolter gives a flying fuck for their fate as they crowd in line to pick up a free HUN and board in cattle class ... and be grateful they're allowed to fly behind their betters ...

Next came Milo himself, but on a few occasions, even the Bolter had to gag at the smell and to hold his nose ...

Thank the long absent lord that the pond, even when holding its nose, won’t go there or descend to the level of gadfly Milo...

But what about Akker Dakker, the fat owl of the remove, following on after Milo and offering a set of Jolly notes?

The fat fraudulent coke-sniffing hypocrite opened with this ploy… 

‘Tis the season to be jolly,  Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la, Don we now our gay apparel … Oops, I don’t think Don will doing any fa-la-a-la-ing this Christmas, and as for gay apparel, no thanks. 

The pond almost said no thanks from the get go, but then the fat fraud then went on with a defence of Don Burke …

There seems little doubt in the minds of the posse of ABC and Fairfax feministas that the bloke who once seemed as genial as a garden gnome was actually not only a real Burke but also the greatest living threat to Australian women, with wandering hands and a line in sexually-charged language that would make a Tourette’s sufferer cop a plea of coprolalia. 

Pages have been written about the television garden show host’s alleged behaviour toward women but given the number of women in very senior hosting roles in television over the years, why have these allegations taken so long to surface? 

Sure, the television industry in Australia has been über-blokey, as has much of the media, but the outraged thundering does have a whiff of McCarthyism about it. 

Would that the ABC and Fairfax thunderers have devoted a fraction of their aggression toward the very real attacks on the economic and social structure of the nation instead of saving all their powder for a showman who is as relevant today as a video cassette. 

And then there was that usual offering of condescension from the coke-addled, fried brain …

The rapid decline in Western democracy is, I believe, dear ladies, of far greater concern than the historic activities of an alleged low-rent antipodean Harvey Weinstein – and as the father of two women in the media I do not dismiss your anger out of hand, I just question your priorities. 

Dear ladies? Fuck the horse you rode in on, you addled hate-mongering fat fraud …

Luckily TT had a cartoon ideally suited to Akker Dakker, with more TT to hand here ...

On and on Akker Dakker went...

The pond will leave out the smearing of refugees with charges of rape - the pond understands that there are people who've been employed by News Corp who have been charged with rape, to play the Akker Dakker game - and then there was some moaning and whining about the conservative sisterhood being reviled, but the pond decided to cut to the final outrageous outburst of outrage ...

... The politically correct blindness to real, very physical and very violent assault is of a part with the manner in which so many in the West are eager to grapple with the symbolic whilst ignoring the realities of the degradation of their society. 
The old allegory of the frog in the slowly boiling saucepan is self-evident but the West is sleep-walking into its suicidal end. 
Sex sells, as the gals from ABC and Fairfax well know, and no doubt the clicks kept coming but at the expense of the publicity which should have gone to the existential issues. 

Gals? Fuck you and the horse you rode in on you old sexist bigot and small-minded and possibly shrivelled prick ...

In Australia’s case, the foremost issue which should be attracting a Burkean level of alarm are the nation’s failed energy policies, state and federal. 
It makes absolutely no sense to export coal to supply cheap power to commercial competitors in China and India whilst forcing up the cost of electricity domestically such that our own industry is forced to either close or relocate abroad. 
The global warming argument doesn’t wash. That coal will be burnt overseas if not here and you and me and every other Australian will be the worse off because it is not being burnt here to supply consumers, domestic and industrial with the cheap power the nation needs to compete globally. Burke’s alleged wholly unsavoury backyard activities are totally put in the shade by the wilful acts of South Australia, Victoria, Queensland and the federal government to make our industry uncompetitive. 
Similarly, no spotlight has been focused on the spineless vice-chancellors of the major universities who have permitted ranting radical students to take over their campuses turning their institutions into putrid petri dishes of purulent socialism and virulent anti-Semitism. Free speech, once cherished by academics, is now disdained. Open discussion is closed. Students are protected from ideas that might challenge the Marxist orthodoxy. Trigger warnings, safe spaces, cotton wool to shield fragile minds from unpalatable and confronting truths. 

Is it any wonder the pond gets scatological and abusive? The plump owl positively begs for it, he wants the outrage, he wants to shit-stir like the coke-addled fraud he is ... (they say once you've sniffed it, you're never the same).

Gender politics taught by moustachioed brutes who bizarrely identify as women seem to have swept through arts faculties. Perhaps the militant homosexual movement with its indeterminate alphabetical sub-classes should visit a race track or a farm to get a clearer idea of what gender is. Form guides describe mature thoroughbreds as either g, m or h. That is they are geldings, mares or entire horses (uncastrated). The youngsters are c for colts or f for fillies until they turn four, according to my snouts at the track. Stallions are designated as such when they go to stand at stud. Humans could thus be m, f, or w – for whatever, given the generally low public interest in the arcane world of the gender-confused and there is always g, for those who so choose. Few events have been so distracting to the febrile political class over the last year as the issue misnamed as marriage equality. Nor has any other issue highlighted the appalling hypocrisy of the virtue signallers with the grubs from the Greens and Labor and the Leftist wing of the Liberals (all of whom opposed the notion of asking the Australian people as proposed by Tony Abbott) later claiming glory when the silly survey was completed by nearly 80 per cent of those eligible. Merry Christmas, Fa la la la La-La Land. 

The pond rammed that last rant together just to get through it quickly. What a fucking offensive fat fraud he is ...

But the thought that there would soon be surcease and relief ended when the pond realised there was still old Flinty to go ... lost somewhere back in the crusades ...


Trump cerebral, in the same way as the onion muncher?

To be sure it had the pond gaily rolling the jaffas down the aisle ...

Not just a pompous fool, but ineffably stupid ...

And now to invite stray innocent readers to contemplate a garbled Flinty history of the middle east, as weird and as warped as any fundamentalist Jew devoted to a theocratic state ...


The result? Sorry Palestinians, Say hello to life without end in your very own gulag ... there's no future, no hope, no mercy, no sympathy ...

Remember, Flinty's supposed to be a Xian, but you should know that really means he's a hard-nosed brutal fucker who'll screw you in your gulag as soon as look at you ...


It's as if the village idiot had been given a series of talking points and managed to spew them out in the garbled but mellifluous tones of a pompous prat ...

All said and done, being wished Merry Xmas by this crowd of abusers and haters and fear-mongers is like Satan dropping in for a round of Christmas Cracker pulling ... all bang, and fuck all by way of substance ... just a cheap-arsed party hat and a trinket in lieu of thought ... 

But in honour and memory of Akker Dakker somehow managing to drag coal and climate science into the celebrations, the pond riffled through its bag of old Popes and came up with this aged souvenir ...


Bah humbug, indeed, and that's more than enough of Xmas cheer ...


In which the pond partakes of a festive Caterist bonus ...

 

 

Regrettably the pond must enter the home Xmas straight with a final warning ...

The pond is deeply appreciative of all the onion muncher has done for political harmony and stability during the year, and celebrated pictorially yesterday on The Insiders ... but if he's to maintain his place as a pond headliner he must pick up the pace.

Sadly the panellists seemed to think that he was a dropkick loser, a tragic irrelevance, a has-been, a wannabe past his prime and his time ...

The pond believes that he still has much to offer political harmony and stability, aided and abetted by the failing lizard Oz business model ... but he must try harder, even at the risk of losing what might be the last shreds of his battered, tattered, pathetic reputation ...

And so to the news of the day ...


Uh huh ...who could that man be?


It's particular fun, given what the pandering, forelock-tugging shill Mark Ritson scribbled today ...


Quality press? Presumably he's not referring to the Minerals Council propaganda rag ... which would throw up a press release disguised as a column at the drop of the hat ...

And now, given the way that there seems to be a dire absence of Oreos - what, no Xmas treat? - the pond decided it needed a dose of Caterism, and by sheer luck there was a chance to indulge on the weekend ... and better late than never ...



Now of all the dropkick failed Liberal leaders, attempting to revive Harold Holt's reputation must be the trickiest ... almost as hard as turning Billy McMahon into a statesman, or even a decent politician, let alone a treasurer ...

Menzies, as a sensible and cunning politician, had removed, promoted sideways, sent overseas, or obliterated any of his rivals who showed either ability, or capacity, and in so doing, posed a threat to his own position as fearless leader.

After his long reign, all that was left was kowtowing detritus of the Holt kind ...

As treasurer, Holt's most memorable achievement was the credit squeeze in 1961 which almost cost Ming the Merciless his job...

Holt sanctioned Treasury's monumental decision in February 1960 to remove virtually all import restrictions. The failure, however, to maintain strict fiscal and monetary control, and the preference for gradual measures to halt a speculative boom, led in November to another important decision which nearly reversed Holt's steady evolution to the top. He and the Reserve Bank of Australia announced a package of measures amounting to a 'credit squeeze' which drove the economy into a recession and saw unemployment rise to 131,000 by January 1962. On Treasury's advice, Holt argued against early remedial action on the expectation of a quick recovery and on the assumption that inflation was the real enemy. Complaining that the government had acted too late in disciplining the economy and too drastically when it did so, business turned on Holt, the treasury secretary Sir Roland Wilson and finally on Menzies himself. 
As a result, the government just scraped back in the December 1961 elections and Holt's vote in Higgins fell by 6.5 per cent. Many Liberals and Liberal-supporting businessmen demanded his removal from the Treasury. Menzies insisted that the credit squeeze was a government decision, and so Holt survived. The prime minister, with the treasurer at his shoulder, sought to retrieve the situation by consulting with business leaders in February 1962 and implementing policies which, very slowly, helped the economy to recover. Holt carried some scars, and he looked nervously at the reaction to his subsequent budgets.

When he got his hands on the levers, Holt spectacularly backed the wrong horse ...

Holt's personal plunge into the war was also fired by what Zara called 'Harry's most spectacular friendship' with the American president Lyndon Johnson. His off-the-cuff remark at the White House in July 1966—assuring Johnson that a staunch friend would go 'all the way with L.B.J.'—occasioned him embarrassment back home, yet, for Holt, an expression of loyalty did not denote servility. Rather, it reflected the genuine, whole-hearted and unsparing relationship between two men who shared many characteristics, and who fortified each other in the face of growing domestic criticism of the war. This hostility distressed Holt without affecting his resolve and its impact was eased when Johnson visited Australia in October 1966, one month before Federal elections which Holt won with a record majority. 
Whereas 1966 was a good year, everything seemed to go wrong in 1967. The death of his brother Cliff in March—'a terrible blow'—unsettled him, though he had a natural or developed immunity to sadness. Relieved that he managed to get to Sydney in time for the funeral, he left immediately for a scheduled Asian tour. In Canberra, Whitlam had replaced Calwell as the leader of the Opposition, and his debating skills and quick mind gave him an ascendancy over Holt who, as the year progressed, lost his customary equanimity while he struggled through his tangled speeches. Labor's by-election victories in July and September hurt him politically. So did his failure to carry the May referendum to break the nexus between the numbers in the House and the Senate, though the simultaneous proposal—to include Aborigines in the national census and to empower the Commonwealth to legislate on Aboriginal affairs—won overwhelming approval. 
The more serious wounds were self-inflicted. Holt was not prepared to discipline his own party or the coalition, animosities were rife, and he resisted party pressure for a much needed cabinet reshuffle. He also bungled the 'V.I.P. flights affair' in which the government was accused of misleading parliament over the existence of passenger manifests. Loyalty to a friend, Peter Howson, the minister for air, left Holt obviously floundering in the House. Disloyalty, possibly involving Holt's chief whip, and rumours of health problems, were fuelling doubts about his capacity to lead. 
'Young Harold' appeared to reach his nadir with the half-Senate elections on 25 November 1967. The government's share of the popular vote of 50 per cent in 1966 fell to 42.8 per cent at a time when hostile anti-Vietnam demonstrations were clearly unsettling him...

Now all that is courtesy of the ADB, here, where there's plenty more, but enough of the mood-setting, please, a bray of trumpets and wheel in the tinkling brass of the Caterist ...


Well that header is a straight-out bit of fraudulent misrepresentation for sure. Holt didn't have a clue about uniting Liberal values with a changing world, unless the Caterist means fornicating like an adulterous wildcat in the years of hippie free love ...

As for establishing the Australia Council, is that the very same body that Liberals have ever since resented and attempted to degut, or in the gorgeous George manage, take over and direct grants and funding to buddies?

The list of Holt's achievements is long? It might be not the right sort of metaphor, but Holt's government spent much of its time treading water, trying to get its head above the waves that kept crashing down on it ...

By way of an alternative, the reptiles also ran a long piece by Troy Bramston on Holt ... an excerpt ...


He cried in bed at night? Well he was the one who cried all the way with LBJ ...

And now back to the Caterists, doing their best ...


That's the best the Caterists have got?

That's what the taxpayers kick the can for?


Handwringing, and portentous, pompous talk of Burke and Paine ...?

Here's the thing. Holt was as careless of himself as he was careless of Australia ... cue Troy again ...


Anyone who has contemplated isolated Cheviot Beach, even on a mild day, might wonder why Holt behaved with such unseemly over-confidence, in a way that went on to produce all sorts of comical rumours ...

Back to the ADB ...

The party then went to Cheviot Beach where Holt changed into his swimming trunks, said that he knew the beach like the back of his hand, and, soon after midday, entered what everyone later agreed was a fierce and high surf. Harold was seen swimming freely out to sea when turbulent water suddenly built up around him and he disappeared....

...Considerable speculation followed Holt's disappearance. Every summer, Australians of all ages do foolish things in the water, and drown. Some commentators, nevertheless, found it impossible to believe that a prime minister, who was not in fact a strong swimmer, who had a sore shoulder and who entered a dangerous sea, could have acted foolishly. His customary fearlessness, a desire to 'show off', the likelihood of his being stunned or dragged down by debris, a simple miscalculation: these explanations were considered insufficiently momentous to match the gravity of the event.

Actually, Holt's capacity to act foolishly and impulsively was old news ... and a man who refused to take care of himself wasn't the sort of leader a country needed to take care of it ...

After all the comedy routines about his death are over, it's enough to know that, like many other Australians, he knew how to act foolishly in the sea ...

As for the rest, he meant well enough, but he only got to where he was, because Menzies had killed off many better rivals ...

Well there's only a couple more pars of Caterist reconsideration ... and no doubt there will be more elevated blather about a man who liked a fuck and talked of women as ripe peaches to be eaten without delay ...


Actually Holt didn't have the first clue about what to do about the changing zeitgeist, or how to respond to it, and his prime ministership was on a slow and steady decline, prior to its abrupt, and unexpected termination. 

The Liberal party spluttered on for a few more years, but the changing zeitgeist needed an entirely different response, and it got it ... and then that too faltered ...

So it goes, but history is better served by acute observation than sycophantic flattery, window-dressing and blather ... or Caterists, who might have been a little more aware if they'd actually lived in country at the time ...

Or perhaps we're better served by cartoons ... with Rowe signing off for the year, but more Rowe here ...


And so to a few cartoons celebrating the joys of young Harold ...


"I didn't expect anything like this when I said 'all the way with LBJ'!"



"The most booming recession? ... The most recessive boom? ... I'm looking for a formula."




They want to know what they're voting for? Is this wise?


Sunday, December 17, 2017

In which the pond gorges on Foxtel, the Devine and petulant Peta, and immediately regrets the indulgence ... too much Xmas pud always produces a bellyache ...


The Sunday Terrorists managed to do it yet again this weekend ...

Please, bear that front page in mind when we get to Miranda the Devine, offering a more than usually silly scribble this weekend, which at least answers the question that tormented the pond's comments section for a moment.

Yes, the answer is dumb, the reason people buy the Terror or vote for the Donald is that they're dumb, the sort of sheep and marks and johns and tricks always there at the country show when the snake oil sellers arrive to do their ritual fleecing routines ...

Speaking of which, before proceeding further, the pond happened to note this report in iTwire here, including this substantial gobbet in relation to HFC and Foxtel ...


So there's the real (as opposed to unreal) villains on parade.

Bloody Malware, useless Foxtel, and behind it all, the shadowy figure of that monster, Chairman Rupert ... a bloody American, ruining broadband for the nativists ...

Is there any upside? Well yes, as the chairman continues to clutch at old-fashioned media, this was noted in Crikey (no link, paywall protected, by Glenn Dyer for those with access) ...


And so to the Murdochian feast for the day ...


Now by way of a preamble, could the pond just explain that it's not going to comment much this day. 

The routinely barking mad Devine goes off the reservation, and there's nothing much to be done except send out a search party.

The pond will, however, issue an unreserved apology to sandgropers. Somehow this Sydney cockroach turns up in Perth Now, which just goes to show that it isn't cane toads alone that poses a threat to life in this country.

The pond is mortified. Nobody in the east pays the slightest attention to what happens in the west, and next thing you know the easterners are dumping intellectual asbestos in your western backyard, and you just sit back and take it ...

See how the Devine takes her rabid place amongst stories of interest to Western Australians ...


As noted, this is so fucked up and fundamentally weird - in a way that can only be attributed to the Devine's fucked up Catholic fundamentalism - that the main question seems to be whether she might not be better off in a nunnery ...


What, like the chairman, an honest and honourable man, as they all are, all honourable men, who thus far has accumulated a number of wives - counted in The Independent in 2013 here - or the Donald's efforts, including this noted in Vanity Fair here ...

...Propping up Donald’s sexual prowess called for some public self-degradation, but Melania, as his girlfriend, was willing to do it. In 1999, shortly after they began dating, she participated in an on-air phone call with Trump and Howard Stern, as they discussed her chest, and whether she stole money from Donald’s wallet. When Stern asked to talk to “that broad in your bed,” Trump put her on the line, and she spoke about how they had sex more than daily, and revealed that she was nearly nude. Stern replied, “I have my pants off already.” Thanks to her relationship with Trump, she finally got her glossy-magazine spread—nearly naked in British GQ, handcuffed to a briefcase on a private jet, which Trump supplied. Managing the career moves of his companions was part of a pattern. While he was still married to Ivana, Trump pushed his girlfriend Marla Maples to pose nude in Playboy and reportedly negotiated the fee himself. (The deal fell through.)

Ah yes, the age of chivalry isn't dead, not while we have the Donald ... but the pond can only find so many distractions, so it's back for a last Devine gobbet ...



See? The pond suggested that the lascivious, lip-licking Terror front page might come in handy ...


And so to petulant Peta, and what's interesting is the way her meme is just a pale reflection of so many other members of the right wing ...



And so on ... because inevitably almost any discussion of immigration of the Donald kind will be tinged with fear, loathing and racism ...

See how petulant Peta, deprived of a chance to slag off Malware about the Bennelong by-election, tries to step around the cow pats...



Real people?

As the pond's already noted, that's a real joke.

Of course it's stupid, like talk of real reality, and real Australia, and real Australians and real villains and all the other real realities ...

Where are all the unreal people? Well apart from the cockroaches that infest News Corp ... but then outside of Kakfa, how many unreal people are scuttling cockies?

And now - after the obligatory talk about supporting continued immigration - petulant Peta will soon cut to the fear and the loathing, but first, how about a suitably exotic and appealing shot of aliens looking very unreal and very un-Australian ...



Oh dear, that last snap is alarming, and now for the sophisticated bit of dog whistling.

You see there are good, sound economic and planning reasons to explain why STOP THE WOGS AND ASIANS COMING is just good old plain-fashioned real Australian sense ...



And so petulant Peta and the onion muncher and all the rest of the mob give comfort to the Pauline Hansons of the country, because that's the way they see to electoral success, trudging the by-ways of fear and loathing, and yet not a word about that wicked foreigner, that dire American, who has helped ruin the country's broadband ...

And as this is where the pond started, a few more cartoons from the land of the free, where Republicans have achieved wonderful success and there's Record inequality: The top 1% control 38.6% of America's wealth ... and better results still to come ...