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Let Us Follow The Chosen One And Protect That Fossil Fuel!

A headline screamed that Victoria could face power outages this summer. The reason? No, not those “unreliable” renewables. It seems that a couple of those coal fired power stations need repairs and can’t be relied upon if we have a hot spell. Yep, only coal can give us baseload power… Except that it can’t always because it keeps breaking down.

Then we had Matt Canavan telling us that a company was “weak as piss” for refusing to deal with Adani. According to him, all these companies such as the banks who refused to lend them any money and various others are just surrendering to the demands of activists. Now, I don’t know how many of you have had dealings with a bank but I have found that when I try to persuade them to lend me money, then they try to ascertain that 1) I have the means to repay them and 2) I am the sort of person who is unlikely to default on the loan. In the case of Adani, the company responsible for the mine is effectively insolvent.

Before Matt Canavan starts suggesting that I’m “weak as piss” and that Adani has many assets and plenty of money, Adani isn’t one single company. There are many aspects to its business and they’re not all under the one umbrella. It would sort of like a person having a number of aliases. And just like a person with a number of different names, banks tend to be suspicious if you produce statements which don’t have the same name as yourself and explain that these accounts are yours but you keep them under a different name so that people can’t get hold of them when you don’t pay your bills.

Not that I’m accusing Adani of any such thing. I’m just suggesting that banks may have been more worried about lending money to a company that may suddenly go into liquidation and the only asset they have is lumps of coal and access to as much water as they want. Perhaps it would be a better business model to leave the coal in the ground and just sell the water…

Of course some of you will be thinking that I’m just another greenie opposed to fossil fuel on ideological grounds. That’s not exactly true. I’m happy to destroy the planet for future generations because what have future generations ever done for me. No, my objection is one of pure economics.

Just like Scottie’s decision to follow the “Chosen One” into battle and protect oil tankers in the Persian Gulf…

You all heard Donald T-Rump refer to Himself as the Chosen One, didn’t you? That wouldn’t have been so bad had He not looked to the Heavens as he said it.

Anyway, the USA have torn up the agreement with Iran and now they feel the need to protect ships because Iran seems to think that it doesn’t need to abide by an agreement once it’s been torn up. Typical of those evil regimes that don’t acknowledge America’s right to do exactly what it likes and commandeer most of the world’s wealth for a mere six percent of the world’s population!

That’s why we need to send troops and ships halfway round the world. To protect fossil fuel. Although maybe it would be better just to save the fuel by leaving them home, but then that’s the sort of logic that climate change deniers use to attack any opponent who dares to fly to a conference…

Speaking of climate change deniers, did you hear that David Koch died of prostate cancer? Very sad. I mean, prostate cancer is so slow. Couldn’t he have got one of the more speedy cancers. Ok, that sounds harsh and one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but now that some media organisations are calling him a “philanthropist”, it’ll take years to explain to some people that the word doesn’t mean greedy fucker who was prepared to use their money to spread misinformation and kill the planet.

Of course, that’s just my opinion and everyone has the right to an opinion. Even Andrew Bolt who managed to be appalled that Pell lost his appeal. Bolt, who knows more than scientists about the state of the planet, informed his readers that the jury got it wrong and the judges got it wrong. They were probably just swayed by reading the hundreds of pages of evidence, whereas Andrew keeps his mind clear by only thinking about his own opinions. Probably why he dropped out of university: all that learnin’ was confusing him and making him aware that there were people who actually studied things.

So to sum it all up, renewables are too unreliable to provide power when the reliable coal breaks down, Adani’s backers are shifting the narrative so that any delays are the result of protests not the company’s perilous business plan, we’ve joined another coalition of the willing which is even smaller than the last one, David Koch has died, Pauline found the Uluru climb more difficult than her usual attempts to annoy thinking people, Pell is still in prison, Andrew Bolt is Andrew Bolt, and Donald Trump finished off the week by ordering US businesses out of China which had a rather negative effect on the stock market. It’s strange that a president that was meant to be so pro-business and anti-big government now sees his role as telling businesses not to trade with a particular country, but there you go.

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9 comments

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  1. Phil Pryor

    Trump, Morrison, B Johnson, and we have yet to forget, Adolf, Benito, Francisco, all the other egotistical stinkers.., As a class of conservative males, domineering loudly, they had and have to mentally masturbate, ejaculate, in endless cycles of performance and achievement as the corrupted neurotic, psychopathic personality dictates. It is essential for this low class of socially regressive character to pose up the personalty, to choreograph a performance, stage the inflated self esteem. They are a perverted political corruption in situ, well avoided if possible, except that similar exist in corporations and media and finance, big inflated egos, bigger than a dinosaur’s dicky,and determined to be seen, obeyed, feared if not revered. When seen in foreign places and cultures (think Brazil and Bolsonaro, and previously Mugabe or Saddam) it is clearly sicko, whacko, stuffo, bummo political nightmare. Why have we allowed this? Who supports this gutless submission to overbearing dictatorial political perverts, conquererors, huns, pillagers, eternal savages?

  2. Andrew Smith

    Incoherent but consistent or repetitive messaging fills up the news or entertainment media ‘space’ and if it precludes rational and/or science/evidence based messages then it’s effective.

    Politicians as preachers and preachers as politicians all demanding the right to misinform, manipulate and control their congregation or electorate, on behalf of corporate sponsors and other stakeholders.

  3. David Bruce

    The good news is that social media is changing the dynamics of protest movements. The Hong Kong and Chinese governments are lamenting the fact that the Hong Kong protestors seem to be leaderless, so there is no one person or small group of people they can negotiate with to prevent another disruption to Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA).

    We had a group of students en route to internships, with a layover in HKIA for 11 hours, during the previous demonstrations. Their flight out was the last before the airport was closed.

    Adani seem to have learned from Google, which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Google is now protected by the limited liability of corporations, where all their assets are now owned by a separate company. Makes it very difficult and expensive, to recover damages for breach of intellectual property rights, copyright and other non-lawful corporate activities.

  4. Kaye Lee

    Just this week while Matt Canavan was delicately declaring that mining contractor Aurecon was “weak as piss” for cutting links with the Adani coal mine, his brother John was launching a $422 million “bid” for Stanmore Coal that’s so aspirational it looks like he’s taking the piss.

    It seems only yesterday, Matt’s October 2017 High Court win on citizenship (with a little loan from John to cover legal expenses) reinstalled him as Resources Minister. This was just as his brother was working with fellow ex-Peabody exec Robert Hammond on a bid to buy the Rolleston coal mine.

    Winfield’s new acquisition had negative assets of $12.7 million in 2018. Any profits will go as payment for the purchase price—and the fall in coal prices since January will cut $US53 million from Winfield’s already meagre earnings, so that’s looking pretty bleak.

    Yet on August 5 while the Resources Minister was telling a mining conference of his plans to boost thermal coal sales to India, his brother was busy on an unsolicited, unfunded and entirely provisional bid for Stanmore Coal, of between $390 million and $442 million.

    While Matt Canavan says it’s not necessary to disclose his brother’s coal interests, it wouldn’t help even if he did. John doesn’t actually own Winfield— since last November the 59 per cent Canavan stake is held by John’s wife, Tanya. Completely arm’s length then.

    https://www.afr.com/rear-window/matt-canavan-s-family-obsession-with-coal-20190822-p52jm0

  5. stephengb

    I’m sat here nursing a mug of flat white, desperate to make a wity, but devestaingly stupendus response to Rossliegh’s fantastic article.

    Then I read Phil Pryors response – snorted half my coffee, all over the table, recovered with some dignity and then read Kaye Lees response and I just knew – I am a mere babe in arms.

    Thanks Rossliegh
    Thanks Phil
    Thanks Kaye

    Picks up fractured knee cap – place on left lug hole – exits through hole in the middle of record

    Zzzzzzzzzzz zzzzing

    Appologies to Minn!

  6. Diane Larsen

    Great read as usual thank heavens or whatever is in the great beyond for this wonderfully truthful and entertaing site makes me feel I am not alone in my feelings for this current crop of government tossers and there are other intelligent life forms with the same views out there

  7. whatever

    Scotty still looks like a typical member of the middle-aged, middle-management scrapheap who can only get a traineeship at Bunnings.

  8. crypt0

    So Donald T-Rump is actually the Chosen One !!!
    And there I was thinking (based on no factual evidence whatever)
    that our very own ScumMo was actually the Chosen One !
    Who would have thought ?

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