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A Quick Merry Christmas…

Ok, I didn’t notice quite as many people complaining about Christmas being cancelled this year and aggressively saying that they’d say: “Merry Christmas!” to people whether they like it or not… It may have been because thanks to the fact that Labor is in power, they had so many other things to complain about… like the fact that Labor is in power and the election is still a long way off…

Although Clive Palmer’s ventriloquist dummy in the Senate, Ralph Babet, did send out a Christmas message where he complained about people dividing the community by saying things like “Happy holidays”, and if there’s one thing he can’t abide it’s people who divide us when we all should be one country with one flag and one point of view… which just happens to be the one that he has.

Whatever, I’m going to wish you all a Merry Christmas… even Mark Latham who was X-ing a thought – and I use the word loosely – about the Sydney rain and how this meant that bushfires were unlikely so those Greens were wrong for the fourth year in a row. Of course, he ignored the fact that they were right in 2019 when we had so much of Australia burning that our Prime Minister had to retreat to Hawaii for safety. Still, if you’re going to chastise a political opponent for getting things wrong, it weakens your case to admit that they have occasionally got it right. Either way, I’m not sure that rain in December necessarily means that we’re completely safe from bushfires before the summer is out. After all, the Ash Wednesday bushfires were in February… Still that happened last century and Mark has a way of ignoring anything that happened a long time ago… Like the fact that he was in a different political party… or the fact that he was gloating that he and Pauline were still buddies and all the lefties were wrong and they stayed buddies until Mark become too offensive even for her after being deemed too offensive for Sky After Dark a few years before that.

So Merry Christmas from me, Mark, because I’m wishing everyone that no matter how much of a tosser they are. I’m full of the warmth of the Christmas spirit and I’m not referring to any eggnog brandy or other cocktails… One thing I’ve always said about cocktails is that they tend to be exaggerated so one shouldn’t listen to them any more than one should allow anyone to upset one’s day on Christmas. If your Uncle Brian happens to be telling you how great it was that the Voice was defeated, just smile and nod and tell him that it was defeated so he should just stop using his because we all voted against him speaking… It’s not true but it’ll confuse his argument long enough that you can bring up something like how good it is that Collingwood were premiers which will get him talking about that if he’s a Pies supporter and if he’s not, it’ll annoy him more than anything so he’ll complain for ten minutes how a free kick paid/not paid in Round 16 was the only reason that they won…

Whatever, try and have a good day and if you’ve been good, Santa will give you lots of presents but if you’ve been bad, Matt Canavan will give you a lump of coal.

Merry Christmas!

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There’s No Need For A Target Until You Have A Plan For How You’ll Reach The Thing You’re Not Aiming At!

A basketball story

“You missed,” says my opponent.

“No, I was actually aiming at the backboard, not the ring.”

“You’re meant to be trying to get the ball through the ring. It’s not enough to simply hit the backboard.”

“Maybe not for you, but there’s no point in having a target unless you’ve got a clear plan for how to get there and I had a clear plan for how I was going to hit the backboard.”

“Well, that’s all good, but you don’t get points for simply hitting what you’re aiming for. Besides, you missed the backboard as well.

With all this talk about whether the people who put the coal in Coalition will put the Scott in Scotland, whether the Nationals will agree to a net zero by 2050, whether weather is being affected by the amount of hot air coming out of the federal government’s mouth and whether Dave Hughes used to be funny before he tried to make serious comments, it’s hard to know what’s going on.

However, one thing is crystal clear to me.

Over the past few years, in education circles, learning intentions have become quite popular. This means that teachers are expected to write the learning intention of the lesson on the whiteboard so that there’s a clear understanding of what the lesson is trying to achieve…

Ok, I know this seems obvious but what if I suggested that there’s no way a teacher could agree to what the learning intention is unless he or she has a clear plan of how to get there? Or what if I told you that the teacher had one, but he couldn’t put it on the board until the boy sitting in the back row and the one hanging round the door threatening to go home agreed to it? Of course, they’d need to see the plan of what they needed to do to achieve it, and they certainly wouldn’t be signing up to anything that involved a change in anything that they or any of their friends were planning to do in the next fifty minutes.

Now, I know that some of you are thinking that it’s the teacher’s job to actually know what they want the kids to learn and it’s up to them to set the agenda, but what if they were using our PM as a role model?

Ok, ok. You’re right. We can all hear Scotty saying: “It’s not up to me to be a role model – that’s the state premier’s job.”

 

Photo from 7news.com.au (Photo credit: AAP Image/Dean Lewins)

 

But it does strike me as faintly absurd to suggest that we can’t actually commit to something unless we’re sure how we’ll get there. That’s like saying that a gun club can’t put up targets until they’re sure which Coalition MP will offer them a bribe, so just go out there and shoot, and whatever you hit will be a great result.

Still this week has been full of absurdities like the growing attacks on ICAC for daring to investigate Gladys Berijiklian. Now, I could suggest that there’s an element of hypocrisy for people who were responsible for launching a Royal Commission to find out how Julia Gillard paid for her home renovations in the previous century complaining that an independent body should launch its own investigation. That isn’t the absurd thing.

The absurd thing isn’t even that Gladys resigned before the investigation took place.

No, the absurdity is the argument that some are using which is best explained if we use a body that’s not ICAC. Take the police. Generally, if there’s a complaint, the police launch an investigation. Sometimes this could even be a politician, unless we’re talking about NSW police because they already know better than to do that.

Let’s imagine a hypothetical person who I’ll call Vladimir because I’m less likely to get sued by some guy who happens to have the same name and recognises himself by the crime I’m alleging.

One of the neighbours rings the police to say that the person sharing Vladimir’s house hasn’t been seen in several days and there was a lot of noise and shouting one night. The police knock on the door and ask Vladimir if they can speak to his housemate. Vlad asks them if they have a search warrant and they say no, so he says go away. The police then say that they’re pretty sure they’ll be able to get one.

At this point, Vlad goes public telling Sky News that he’s going to leave Australia on the first plane because we’ve reached a point where unelected bodies like the police can just get search warrants and dig up your whole back yard even though they have no evidence and you haven’t been convicted of anything and as such you’re entitled to the presume of innocence, so that means you’re an innocent man… And all right, his housemate was involved with some shady characters and he hasn’t seen him either but there’s no evidence of wrongdoing so it’s completely terrible that the police would question an innocent bystander who doesn’t know what’s in the cellar because he didn’t ask what they were doing and he’s just the victim here.

May I humbly suggest that it’s a brave Sky News person who’d say that this is an outrageous abuse of power by the police and that the more reasonable question is: Why exactly are you leaving the country and why didn’t you let the police look in your cellar if you’ve done nothing wrong?

Ok, Gladys isn’t in quite the same boat as Vlad. But neither can argue that they’ve behaved with absolute integrity.

I heard a newsreader say that there was a growing belief that there’d be an agreement between the Coalition partners to commit to net zero by 2050. I think that it’s a real shame that it’ll take another 29 years for them to reach agreement.

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Hope Is The Thing With Feathers And That Makes Scotty Glad!

One of Emily Dickinson’s poems was “Hope Is The Things With Feathers” and my first thought was that she must have meant that hope enabled us to fly. In fact, her poem talks about hope lifting us up with its song… which is what Gladys and Scotty are trying to do. They are trying to lift us with their warbling.

“Don’t worry about the depressing numbers look at the beautiful numbers like the ones that show that we still have a majority in parliament. They’re the sort of numbers that we find really inspiring and so what if there’s a few more cases today. Case numbers aren’t important unless you’re in a Labor state and then they’re an indication of how badly the government is doing.”

“Thanks to my great management,” says Gladys, “in just a few weeks you’ll be able to go on a picnic providing you can demonstrate that you’ve been vaccinated.”

Now one of the problems with vaccinations is that some people don’t want to get one. Well, it’s a free country and if that’s your choice, fair enough. What I find strange is the people who argue that they should be free to not get one, but then want to convince everyone else how dangerous vaccines are and want to ban people who do get the jab.

So, take Craig Kelly…

I’m tempted to say, please. Somebody has to… But that’s a very old joke and without him to laugh at, you might notice how much politics resembles an episode of Would I Lie To You?

(Would I Lie To You? is a British comedic panel show where guests are given the chance events to describe, some of which are lies and other unlikely ones true. It’s quite impressive the way that some of them can convince the other side that the most outrageous things are true. Mind you, this is just a game and we can be impressed with their capacity to seem convincing. I suspect that something similar happens when someone has been a journalist in Canberra for too long and they become more impressed with a politician’s capacity to convince people that they’re not responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people instead of being appalled by the fact that they actually are.)

So, if any of you are tempted to take Craig Kelly’s advice about vaccination, just ask yourself three questions:

  1. Would you accept his advice about your need for brain surgery?
  2. Would you allow him to perform brain surgery on you?
  3. If you answered no to the first two questions, I think the point has been made but if you answered yes, then wouldn’t you rather send me ten dollars and I can send you an alternative which I can’t disclose for fear of Big Pharma shutting me down but Donald Trump gave me a secret personal endorsement and for just an extra two thousand dollars I can get you an autographed photo of the time Donald, Clive, Craig and I all met and discussed how to.. sorry, what question was I asking? Oh, yes, I can send you Hydroinvermyasinagainsthumanity but only if you promise never to reveal who sold it to you because the drug companies are trying to shut it down owing to the fact that nobody has trialled it…

Anyway, Emily Dickinson was wrong. The thing with feathers turned out to be Gladys and she flew away before things got so bad that she’d have trouble with the misdirection of “That’s not the number that matters; this is the number that matters!”

Yes, Scotty doesn’t hold a hose, but Gladys doesn’t hold a press conference!

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One Sign Of Intelligence Is Being Able To Change Your Mind or Why Scott Morrison Is Einstein!

Remember just a few years ago when we were told that we needed to be “energy agnostic”. Well, all that’s out the window. Apparently we now have to build a church to gas because the private operators have decided that they’d rather invest in something profitable.

Why do I call it “a church”? That’s because – like a church – it will be large and unused for much of the time and in future generations people will look at it and go, “Wow, what a large structure. I wonder why they spent so much money and something with no practical purpose. They must have really believed that someone would reward them in the next life!” (In the case of the Coalition, that’s Life After Politics!)

It’s very tempting to point out that once we took it for granted that governments would be responsible for building the infrastructure that enabled us to generate energy, but we were told by the Liberal Party that private industry was a lot better at it and market forces would make the whole thing a lot more efficient. Now we’re being told that the market has failed because the market relies on making a profit and nobody in private industry is keen to build a gas-fired power station for the simple reason that it’s not economically viable.

Of course, I shouldn’t criticise the Liberals for changing their mind and completely repudiating their free market principles and totally embracing socialism. After all, it’s only the intelligent who can change their minds. At least I think that’s true…

Whatever, the Liberals are certainly good at changing their minds. Sometimes they’ll even do it from one interview to the next.

Remember when they told us that people don’t need the government making decisions for them and that individuals were best placed to decide what to spend their money on… Of course, this was before they realised that once they got the Indue card out and accepted, they could eventually roll it out to pensioners and then the rest of us and we could only shop at approved Liberal donor stores.

Remember when Scotty was all about opening up the borders but then he saw how successful various state premiers were with their border closures. Now he’s determined to keep Australia’s borders closed until… well, it’s not like he intends to set a date because targets are for the accountable. We can’t say when borders will be open again, even with the majority vaccinated. As he put it: “Even in that circumstance, you’re talking about many Australians, millions of Australians, who wouldn’t have been vaccinated. Because A, they’re children or B, they’ve chosen not to be [vaccinated].” Unvaccinated children a concern? Is this different from “Schools are safe, I can’t be any clearer than that!” Too right it is, which just shows the intelligence of the man because he’s apparently changed his mind.

Remember when they labelled that ad about the vaccines with the Liberal Party logo? Well there’s another example of them changing their mind. Now they want bipartisan support for the rollout. Surely, Labor have to take part responsibility. Why? Well, they said that the logo shouldn’t be there because it was the government who were providing the vaccines and aren’t Labor an alternative government?

And then we have the NDIS which just a couple of Budgets ago was so awash with funds that Josh Frydenberg could take $4.7 billion from it to put us into surplus. While at $4.7 billion, those “Back In Black” coffee seemed overpriced, that’s nothing compared to the unsustainable nature of the NDIS now. We need to stop those “empathetic public servants” from giving wheelchairs to people. Everyone needs to stand on their own two feet even if they have no legs. Yes, social media was very cruel and mocked Linda Reynolds about her heart condition, but even she agrees that’s better than being awash with empathy like those public servants who fail to push those on the NDIS to get better. Our PM does believe in miracles, as we all know.

And Scotty’s changed his mind on debt and deficit too. We’re going to have deficits for the next ten years according to #Scottyfromannouncements. Yes, ok, Hockey said that the Liberals would deliver a surplus in their first year of government and every year thereafter but they changed their mind about that, as well as Hockey being Treasurer. And about having a stable government who didn’t change Prime Ministers. Of course it would be unfair to bring up how the Liberals changed their minds about Abbott’s rolled gold maternity leave, because that’s so many Prime Ministers ago.

Some of you will be expecting that I’ll also be pointing out the PM’s changing his mind on electric vehicles, but apparently he hasn’t. He told us that he never mocked EVs in the lead up to the 2019 election. No, no, he was complaining about Bill Shorten ruining the weekend by simply being PM and that would have ruined the weekend of everyone who mattered so EVs had nothing to do with it.

Yes, I can certainly recommend that you vote for Scott Morrison in the upcoming election which he assures won’t be held until next year, so I’d expect it in about three months. Even if you don’t like his policies and what he announces, there’s a better than fifty percent chance that they’ll never be implemented and that he’ll change them before the month is out. You can be content knowing that if you don’t like, for example, his intention to build a gas-fired power station, that once they’ve bought the land from the Liberal donor, and once they’ve spent a few million on consultants, they’ll change their mind and sell the land to a firm who wants to make electric vehicles or develop it for social housing.

I suppose you’ve noticed that lately, Mr Morrison seems to have a booklet in hands every time he appears in the media. Perhaps he’s working on the next slogan. “Liberals: We Have A Plan AND a Pamphlet.”

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SmoKo’s Brisbane Line

The Brisbane Line was a controversial accusation from Labor’s Eddie Ward that the ruling United Australia Party under “Honest Joe” Lyons and “Pig Iron” Bob Menzies was prepared to surrender the northern part of Australia to the Japanese in WW2. Such accusation was never proven but it is incontrovertible that SmoKo Morrison is prepared to surrender Australia’s well-being to the interests of the voracious mining moguls. SmoKo’s Brisbane Line marks the point of no-return for our environment.

Menzies’ denialism was his insistence in 1938 on the sale of pig iron to the Japanese, despite all of the warnings. Scotty From Marketing‘s denialism has now predictably morphed into denial denialism and fatalist propaganda while mother nature is turning our vandalism back on us just as the Japanese would’ve turned our pig iron back on us as munitions. The spin merchant is in whirling dervish mode but he will heedlessly persist with surrendering our country to the eco-vandals and disaster capitalists while we “quiet Australians” “adapt and become more resilient”. It’s his version of turning Japanese (1).

The Brisbane Line analogy is somewhat ironic given it was voters from Queensland who got Scotty From Marketing across the line, it is Queensland that has already surrendered to the coal warlords and it is Queensland that produces an inordinate number of Tory hard core Luddites, weirdos and mining grifters.

The Tories are not just surrender monkeys they are active collaborators.

Clive Palmer, Queensland’s white-shod version of a yellowed Trump is a dishevelled bag of laundromat lost property. Clive is calling in the Lib’s $60M IOU as he targets the Galilee Basin for tax-payer funded rail links to his planned, subsidised coal mines and the consequent water theft that goes with it while the state is drying out and burning.

Georgie Porgy Christensen, that ten pin-shaped nudie bar consultant and ping-pong ball fieldsman saw his vote at the election actually increase. Apparently his climate denialism is more important to the finger painters in his Queensland electorate than was his regular cashing in of his frequent perver points in the shady Philippine neighbourhoods of cut-price bordellos, strip clubs and back alley knee trembles.

Poider from Security also had his vote increase at the last election. Parochial Queenslanders love nothing more than the prospect of Spud’s dark-uniformed goons tasering southern greenies. A heavily surveilled police state? Tojo didn’t quite make it as far as our pointy-ended state so its citizens now vote for Poider as an acceptable alternative. Poider was last seen publicly when at a Gold Coast Indonesian restaurant ordering take-away nazi goering.

Matt Canavan, climate criminal number 1 who in true Tory fashion is boostering the business interests of a family member via coal mining (2). This squinting, shifty-eyed Tony Abbott mini-me and his dodgy mate Black Angus Taylor can smell tax payer money through a concrete wall. These two despicable arseholes would happily club baby seals if they could hide the profits in the Cayman Islands.

Then of course there’s Pauline Hanson. A Ronald McDonald look-alike but with more credible clown credentials she continues to trigger coulrophobia across the land and drive down the national IQ average. The closest Pauline has come to nature conservation is deep-freezing her John Dory fillets and carving Peter Dutton images into the spuds as customer keepsakes. Pauline wants “this nonsense thrown out the window”. So do I, Pauline, so do I.

Queensland refugee, Barking Barmy Joyce, with his purple majesty tucked back into his dungarees for the moment, is never one to let an opportunity for graft or publicity go unanswered. Mouth aflap, revealing dentistry made from a discarded witchdoctor’s necklace, Barking has been throwing his deity under the environmental bus, accusing his maker of being behind the drought. If you want a do-nothing approach to planetary survival Barking is your man.

Susssan Ley, consonant abuser and Minister for the Environment (who says Tories don’t have a dark sense of humour?) has taken time out from incinerating koalas and destroying their habitats to visit a home for flambéd wildlife as an opportunistic self-promotion. Upon discovering that real koalas were much larger than the souvenir versions on her aroma therapy bracelet she took fright and passed the time poking wombats with a stick.

* * * * *

In the past I have accused the Tories of being lazy as well as incompetent. I will revise that. Their work ethic has resulted not only in the extinction of species but also their ongoing work towards the extinction of affordable health care, progressive taxation, public ownership of resources, adequate funding of public schools, open courts, the right to dissent, an independent public service, transparent government, support for science and the arts, world class comms, TAFE, manufacturing, the right to organise, affordable housing, liveable wages and freedom from religious bigotry.

Winston Churchill said, ‘Truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it, but, in the end, there it is.” The truth of climate change has caught the Tories out with their climate lies, their denialism, their distortions and their corruption. They’re now busily re-writing history, yet they will not change their underlying objectives – unconditional surrender to the coal magnates’ empire of a reddening sun. Australia’s future under the Tories is a treeless, sun-blasted quarry populated by compliant serfs and the charred corpses of whatever’s left of our wildlife.

Notes:

(1) You Boomers may recall the suggestive lyrics of The Vapors 1980 hit Turning Japanese. The underlying inference is more than appropriate for the wankers we have in this farce we call a government.

(2) Canavan’s brother John Canavan is Managing Director of Winfield Energy, a private coal company with a significant interest in Australia’s second largest coal mine (Rolleston) and financier of a export coal terminal (WICET). He’s also a former executive of Peabody Energy.

This article was originally published on The Grumpy Geezer.

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