Famed Negotiating Skills

In a carpet warehouse, two customers enter and, almost immediately, one spots an expensive but attractive Persian carpet.

Dr. Bandt:  Oh, my lord Lenin, that is the most beautiful carpet I have ever seen!  I must have it—
Sen. Milne:  Quiet, fool!  No mills!  They won’t give you a great deal if you look too eager.  The marked price is $1,500; let’s try to get it down to $1,450 or so.
Dr. Bandt:  Oh, but I want it, even if it might not immediately facilitate the free development of the class struggle in the rural districts.  I’ll pay anything to have it!
Mr. Wilkie:  Heriz an easy sale, Julia.  Qom, you take it:  that boy looks as if he’s in love with that rug.
Ms Gillard:  Ahar, sir, would you be interested in this lovely carpet?  What’s our price? $1,500?  I can do a bit better than that, I assure you.
Dr. Bandt:  I’ll take it, though the workers can obtain real political education only in the course of a sustained, consistent, all-out struggle of proletarian influences, aspirations and trends against bourgeois influences, aspirations and trends!  Not even Trotsky will deny that this is a lovely rug.
Ms Gillard:  How about I mark it down to, um, to … a thousand?
Dr. Bandt:  Only two thousand dollars?  I’ll take it!
Ms Gillard:  No, one thousand—by which I mean, of course, $850, Kashan hand.
Sen. Milne:   Hang on a tick, what else will you give us with this carpet?  We shan’t pay any more than $1,450.
Dr. Bandt:  I’ll take it!
Ms Gillard:  Look, I can’t go below $750, but I can throw in a few committees—
Dr. Bandt:  Yes, yes!  I’ll take it!  After all, the democratic system is a feature of bourgeois society—
Sen. Milne:   No, this rug looks a little worn.  Though there are rugs all over the room, I’m sure I can see some flaw.  What else can you offer? 
Ms Gillard:  All right, $500, and automatic upgrades to first class on all travel within Australia and some overseas “fact-finding” excursions.
Sen. Milne:   Come, you don’t represent the people of Australia as well as the Australian Greens do, with our consistent polling of well over ten per cent.  We don’t like it all that much.
Dr. Bandt:  I do, I do like it; I love it!  Damn!
Sen. Milne:   Quiet, you!  No damns.  Look, you can go a little lower, surely.
Ms Gillard:  All right, I’ll give you ten bucks if you take it away, and I’ll throw in an inutile tax on a trace gas essential to life, predicated on a pseudo-scientific scam, and—
Sen. Milne:   Only if you provide free delivery—
Ms Gillard:  Done!  

[After quickly completing some paperwork, Bandt and Milne exeunt, skipping.]
 
Mr. Wilkie:  So, make a good sale?  They seemed pretty pleased.
Ms  Gillard:  I’m a great negotiator.*  Now, what can I give you, Andrew?
Mr. Wilkie:  Well, Tony Abbott has already offered a thousand million dollars for this dingy, old rug-shop—
Ms Gillard:  How about a quarter of that, but I’ll throw in a promise not to gamble, a promise to have a surplus, somehow, and I’ll break my promise not to tax carbon dioxide?
Mr. Wilkie:  Done.


*  The Prime Minister of Australia, Hon. Julia Gillard, is, according to her many sycophants and lackeys, a wonderful negotiator.  Following the last election, which resulted in a hung parliament, Ms Gillard sought support from independent members of the House of Representatives to form a minority government.  Dr. Adam Bandt, the newly elected member for the seat of Melbourne, and sole member of the Australian Greens in the lower house, had already stated, on election night, that he would support only a Labor Gillard government and would never support any government led by the Opposition Leader, Hon. Tony Abbott; nonetheless, the PM entered into negotiations with the Australian Greens in order to enlist their support for her forming a government wherein, inter alia, she promised to introduce the “carbon” tax which she had earlier explicitly undertaken not to introduce.

“Love among the Roses”

An anonymous Anacreontic verse (Anacreonta, Fragment, 35):

Ἔρως ποτ’ ἐν ῥόδοισι
κοιμωμένην μέλιτταν
οὐκ εἶδεν, ἀλλ’ ἐτρώθη.
τὸν δάκτυλον παταχθείς
τᾶς χειρὸς ὠλόλυξε,
δραμὼν δὲ καὶ πετασθείς
πρὸς τὴν καλὴν Κυθήρην·
“ὄλωλα, μῆτερ,” εἶπεν,
“ὄλωλα κἀποθνήσκω· 
ὄφις μ’ ἔτυψε μικρός
πτερωτός, ὃν καλοῦσιν
μέλιτταν οἱ γεωργοί.”
ἃ δ’ εἶπεν· “εἰ τὸ κέντρον
πονεῖς τὸ τᾶς μελίττας,
πόσον δοκεῖς πονοῦσιν,
Ἔρως, ὅσους σὺ βάλλεις;”

My translation:

Once love among the roses
did not discern a bee;
and on a little finger
it stung him, painfully.
He wept and bellowed loudly,
and ran, with outspread wings,
to lovely Aphrodite.
He cried, “I’m done for, Mother;
I’m done for, woe is me!
A tiny wingèd serpent
did smite me mortally—
the farmers call it ‘bee’.”
She said,  “Reflect, my darling,
how much a bee sting smarts:
how more, then, must they suffer
whom thou hitst with thy darts?”

Thomas Moore’s translation:

Cupid once upon a bed
Of roses laid his weary head;
Luckless urchin, not to see
Within the leaves a slumbering bee!
The bee awaked—with anger wild.
The bee awaked, and stung the child.
Loud and piteous are his cries;
To Venus quick he runs, he flies;
“Oh mother!—I am wounded through—
I die with pain—what shall I do?
Stung by some little angry thing,
Some serpent on a tiny wing—
A bee it was—for once, I know,
I heard a peasant call it so.”
Thus he spoke, and she the while
Heard him with a soothing smile;
Then said: “My infant, if so much
Thou feel the little wild-bee’s touch,
How must the heart, ah, Cupid, be,
The hapless heart, that’s stung by thee?”

Robert Herrick’s translation:

Cupid as he lay among
Roses, by a Bee was stung.
Whereupon in anger flying
To his Mother, said thus crying;
Help! O help! your Boy’s a dying.
And why, my pretty Lad, said she?
Then blubbering, replyed he,
A winged Snake has bitten me,
Which Country people call a Bee.
At which she smil’d; then with her hairs
And kisses drying up his tears:
Alas! said she, my Wag! if this
Such a pernicious torment is:
Come, tell me then, how great’s the smart
Of those, thou woundest with thy Dart! 

St. Valentine’s Day

Valentine Schmalentine

Violets are violet
and roses were, originally, rose—
whence their respective names.
What passes for amorous
poetry these days, too often, is prose.
Enough of careless games.

Cui Bono

The Global Warming Scam Continues 

Hot days in summer!
Storms, and cold nights in winter!
Such strange times indeed.

“Unprecedented!”
yell the followers of the
global warming creed

despite the lack of
warming.  Wherefore, then, do their
rotten scams proceed? 

Cicero’s words help:
who benefits, and whither
do the profits lead?

Certainly, one thing
never changes: the sooth of
the awarmists’ greed.

UPDATE I (13 February):

“Settled Science”

“It’s settled science!”
shouted awarmists (and just
a few years ago),

“nasty deniers
refuse to believe warming
must lead to less snow!”

That “settled science”
remains their shrill cry, but now
they insist that no 

warming was what they’d
predicted, and “climate change”
has led to more snow.

Their “settled science”
means that—wet, dry, cold or hot—
whenever winds blow,
 
or ease, they come from
evil carbon preventing
any status quo.

UPDATE II (4 April):  never willing to miss an opportunity to act hysterically, awarmists have been upset, yet again, by a newspaper column from English author James Delingpole; many people have deplored the conclusion to his piece by on-line comments such as this one:

Delingpole muses about judges issuing death sentences.

Really? He wrote this:

The climate alarmist industry has some very tough questions to answer:  preferably in the defendant’s dock in a court of law, before a judge wearing a black cap.

An industry, not any one person, he imagines in the dock.  Now, English judges wear black caps on various solemn occasions—such as in the presence of the Sovereign—but not when issuing a death sentence because there is no longer any possibility of their issuing a death sentence in Britain.  So, where does he “muse about judges issuing death sentences”?

(Graham Readfearn, by the way, the consistently wrongheaded awarmist, naturally errs in his typically overwrought reaction to Delingpole, by opining, “black caps were only worn by judges when handing out death sentences.”)

Awarmist pseudo-scientists and their propagandising fellow travellers often advocate doing all sorts of harm—including having us tattooed or imprisoned or executed—to those who are slightly sceptical or rightly dismissive of their silly conjecture of AGW, but Delingpole is treated as if he issued a lethal fatwa merely for a trope.  The murderous awarmists, meanwhile, by increasing the costs of energy beyond affordability for many people are responsible for the real and not imagined deaths of thousands of unfortunate citizens in Britain alone.

UPDATE III (7 April):  in “An English class for trolls, professional offence-takers and climate activists”, Delingpole responds to those who mischievously misinterpreted his metaphor:

The last thing I would want is for Monbiot, Mann, Flannery, Jones, Hansen and the rest of the Climate rogues’ gallery to be granted the mercy of quick release.  Publicly humiliated?  Yes please.  Having all their crappy books remaindered?  Definitely.  Dragged away from their taxpayer funded troughs and their cushy sinecures, to be replaced by people who actually know what they're talking about?  For sure.  But hanging?  Hell no.  Hanging is far too good for such ineffable toerags. 
This isn’t to say that there isn’t a strong case for the myriad dodgy scientists-on-the-make, green activists, posturing and ignorant politicians, rent-seeking corporatists, UN apparatchiks, EU technocrats and hopelessly out-of-their-depth environment correspondents who talked up the global warming scare to be brought to account for the vast damage they have done to the global economy, for the people they have caused to die in fuel poverty, for the needless regulations they have inflicted on us, for the landscapes they have ravaged with wind farms, and so on.
Indeed, it would be nice to think one day that there would be a Climate Nuremberg.  But please note, all you slower trolls beneath the bridge, that when I say Climate Nuremberg I use the phrase metaphorically.  […] 
How do you hang an “industry”, I wonder.  How exactly do you put a rope round a dodgy computer model?  Or a £13.7 million UEA climate research grant?  Or an article in Guardian Environment pages called something like “How do you break it to your six-year old child that global warming is killing our planet and by the time he hits 21 the world will be a boiling soup of lava and dead puppies like on the Bedtime Stories advert”?
Seems to me that it’s quite an impossibility.  But there are others who don’t, clearly, for the day after the Australian article ran I was gobsmacked to read on Twitter that a small cabal of weapons-grade pillocks  from the further extremes of the eco loon movement had chosen to interpret this phrase as some kind of demand for “climate scientists” to be executed.  […]
(That’ll be another metaphor, btw.  I haven’t literally been smacked in the mouth).

It should surprise no-one when maleficent alarmists, who wilfully mislead the public and misinterpret data so regularly, deliberately, mala fide, and malevolently misread their critics.

UPDATE IV (8 April):  Peter FitzSimons, who is clearly a very foolish fellow, frets on Twitter:

In his article, “Not a shout but a Chinese whisper”, FitzSimons agonises:

Just supposing the best scientific brains are all but united in the view the planet faces a crippling phenomenon that will change life as we know it.  And just supposing that in response to this, Australia pioneered a scheme aimed at countering it.  You would think confirmation the scheme was actually working might be the occasion for national breast-beating, even some dancing in the streets?

His proof that “the best scientific brains” agree that our Earth faces doom?  He just asserts it (whilst arguing from authority and being inexcusably ignorant of one of our greatest physicists, Freeman Dyson).  FitzSimons’ proof that Australia’s “carbon” tax counters this alleged problem?  He merely asserts it.

UPDATE V (8 April):  see also Tim Blair’s “Unfair Fight”.

Cabinet Leaks – a Cunning Plan

In her office in The Lodge, the Hon. Julia Gillard is distractedly eating her breakfast at her desk, casting anxious looks occasionally out the window; clearly, she is impatiently waiting for something.  On the other side of the room, a nervous private secretary awaits instructions.  Her leman rushes in with an armful of newspapers.

Ms Julia Gillard:  Ah, the papers at last, Timmy.  There’s a good boy.  Would you like a treat, Timmy?
Timmy:  Umm, yum.  Did Timmy do good?
Julia Gillard:  Yes, Timmy, you did well.  Off you go.  I mean, go, now!  No, don’t pee on the floor; leave the room!
Ms Julia Gillard:  Right.  I had a cunning plan to stop cabinet leaks—or, at least, to discover which treacherous rat is leaking—and told Combet, Macklin, Shorten, Plibersek, Crean, Swan and Wong in confidence that I’d call a leadership spill next week; but—and here’s the really clever bit, which I did not get from McNasty, mind—I secretly told each of them individually that the vote would be held on a different day!  Ha!  I said, “on a different day!”
Private Secretary:  What? Oh, sorry.  Yes, very clever, Prime Minister.
Ms Julia Gillard:  Anyway, what does The Courier Mail say? 
Private Secretary:  “Rattled PM calls leadership ballot on Wednesday.”
Ms Julia Gillard:  Bloody Swan!  What does The Herald Sun say? 
Private Secretary:  “Embattled PM calls leadership ballot on Tuesday.”
Ms Julia Gillard:  Bloody Crean!  He’s next.  What does The Age say?
Private Secretary:  “Surprise vote call from brave PM next week.”
Ms Julia Gillard:  Well, that’s much better.  Good old Michelle.  What else does The Age say?
Private Secretary:  “Our resilient PM, in a show of strength, has called for a series of leadership ballots on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday as well as Sunday.”

Gillard’s End is Nigh

Finally, we can soon expect to see our duplicitous prime minister forced to provide proper answers to questions relating to her crooked past.  More details are forthcoming.

See Michael Smith’s “I was delighted to be able to share my happiness with you yesterday afternoon”.

See also Exposing the Truth behind the Woman. 

UPDATE I (23 January):  listen to “We will be OK, we are good enough to work out who’s done right and who’s done wrong”, wherein Michael Smith explains that he has “one hundred per cent confidence” that “the wheels are in motion” to bring the corrupt crooks of the AWU/Gillard-gate scandal to justice.

UPDATE II (24 January):  see “Police extend AWU slush fund inquiry”, by Mark Baker, in the SMH:

Victorian detectives have expanded their investigation into the purchase of a Fitzroy house with union slush fund money controlled by the disgraced former boyfriend of Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
A former legal secretary at law firm Slater & Gordon who handled conveyancing work on the purchase in 1993 is believed to have provided significant new information during an extensive interview with police earlier this month.
Part of the investigation is believed to involve a power of attorney document prepared and witnessed by Ms Gillard—then a salaried partner at Slater & Gordon—that her boyfriend and senior Australian Workers Union official Bruce Wilson used to buy the house in the name of union crony Ralph Blewitt.  […] 
Olive Palmer, the legal secretary who managed the conveyancing work for the Fitzroy house purchase and a mortgage through a Slater & Gordon loan facility, met detectives in Melbourne earlier this month.
One of the investigating detectives later flew to Queensland and conducted interviews with Ms Palmer, formerly known as Olive Brosnahan, at her Sunshine Coast home.
The power of attorney document drafted and witnessed by Ms Gillard that Mr Wilson used to buy the Fitzroy property in Mr Blewitt’s name was dated February 4, 1993.
But a note in the conveyancing file handwritten by Ms Brosnahan and addressed to Ms Gillard on February 16 says: “We need P/A or certified copy”.
Mr Blewitt claimed last year that he had not seen the document prior to the auction and that Mr Wilson had later brought it to him for signature in Perth, where he was AWU state secretary.  […]
It is believed the Victorian fraud squad is also liaising with its counterpart in Western Australia.

UPDATE III (24 January):  see Larry Pickering’s “Vic Police Close In on Gillard”, wherein he suggests that detectives “are on the brink of laying charges in the AWU Wilson/Gillard fraud case” and “two major law firms should expect raids within days”; he quotes a “reliable source”:

“We expect to have this all wrapped up in a few weeks, hopefully no later than March, and there will be people charged.
“We are treating this matter extremely seriously and no stone will be unturned in ensuring the alleged culprits face justice.”
There was no indication given as to who would be charged but the level of urgency and thoroughness indicated to me (and I say indicated) there is little doubt Julia Gillard is viewed as a major player and very much a person of interest.

UPDATE IV (3 February): 

UPDATE V (13 February):  Larry Pickering provides his tenth instalment of “Our Prime Minister Is a Crook” (sometimes varied as “Is Our Prime Minister a Crook?”):

For the first time in Australia’s history we are now witnessing a sitting Prime Minister seeking re-election while under investigation by a major fraud squad.  The Left of the Press still shows no interest.  […]
A mountain of evidence involves central character Gillard and a comprehensive prima facie case will shortly be dumped on the desk of the Public Prosecutor.
Fraud squads do not react to innuendo, rumour or smear, only evidence and the diligence and confidence it has exhibited so far suggest charges are imminent.  […]
The Press insists, nonchalantly, that the Victorian Fraud Squad is boringly investigating a range of people.  That is incorrect.
Evidence has been taken from a range of people but there is only one person of interest, there is only one person a complaint has been levelled against, there is only one person under investigation, and that’s Julia Eileen Gillard.
The Fraud Squad has implied they are thrilled with their progress and hopes to have its case wrapped up in weeks. […]
I’m no detective but if I had the massive resources of a professional fraud squad and had interviewed all persons of interest and corroborating parties including past employees of Slater & Gordon, I would certainly feel confident I had sufficient evidence against Gillard to put her away for a lengthy period.
Whether that happen or not is problematic.  But Gillard is certainly under investigation right now and should resign.
If she is charged she will be forced to resign.  She is not a Craig Thomson who can rely on the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ principle.
She will not be permitted by her own party to sully the Office more than she already has.

Time to Revisit Predictions for 2012

Not astonishingly, professional “psychics” tend to believe the silly but scaremongering predictions of professional “climate scientists”.

Hypocrites and Whores of Hollywood

Are the Government’s Ministers Stupid?

Some Questions Answered

Are the government’s
ministers really stupid?
No, they are lying

in order to take
money from us and, they claim,
to stop us frying

from man-made global
warmth (though that very silly
conjecture’s dying

from an utter lack
of evidence—which doesn’t
stop the greens crying

that “carbon” must doom
the world).  Is weather worse?  No,
the gods are sighing.

UPDATE I:

Some Questions Are Left Alone

Julia Gillard
it seems, was a lazy, inept lawyer
but she never shirked

shagging thick, married
men who could help her climb to
the top; and it worked:

she still can’t tell right
from wrong, but she’s now the one
who gets to decide

(for her compliant
press) whether she and her mates
told the truth or lied.


The Power of Exes

Doctor Emerson
can read the PM’s mind!  He
says her true recall

of facts from twenty
years ago, though imperfect,
fully explains all:

she did nothing wrong,
he shrieks (and hereon you may
put great reliance),

for always she was
only following orders
from wicked clients.

Try This Defence in Court

“I did nothing wrong,
and you can’t prove a thing; you
have my guarantees!”

asserts the PM;
and her crooked ex-leman,
Bruce Wilson, agrees.  

Try saying in court,

“I acted as clients bade,

and I charged no fees

and can remember

no crime; I’m innocent, as

everyone sees!”

Would the day come soon
when she appears in court and
makes similar pleas. 

UPDATE II:

Past and Present

Julia Gillard
is as duplicitous now
as she was back then;

as crooked as her
many lies, and as rotten
as her taste in men.

Was she, perhaps, a
conned, guiltless victim?  No, it’s
too hard to believe

she was innocent
or that she was ever quite
so “young and naïve”. 


Anyway, a Possible Explanation

With such a record
of incompetence why won’t
Gillard get the boot?

She’d have much dirt on
colleagues or, perhaps, she was
a really good root.

Incriminating
documents would persuade her
cronies to stay mute

and, of course, many 
lucripetous lackeys wish
to share in the loot. 

UPDATE III (7 April, 2013):

Yeah, Trashing Marriages Doesn’t Make the PM a Trasher*
 
Even though she’s wrecked
marriages, she’s no wrecker;
“she hasn’t the looks”!

Right, appearances
are all. Let’s spurn the old saws
of covers and books.

Likewise, we’ll suppose
Gillard’s cronies are honest:
they don’t seem like crooks.


Appeti Est Percipi†

The world is teeming

with unreason; we’re now in

the Age of Seeming:
 
from “climate change” to

the PM’s cleverness, true

believers believe:

no evidence will

change their set minds; it is as

if they are dreaming

that only they can

save the world, so facts are not

welcome; data grieve

them; they shut eyes and

ears to troublesome facts, and

feel it blaspheming

to mention what’s true.

Thus, Gillard’s toadies shout she

was young and naïve

when the thirty-two

year-old law-firm partner was

involved in scheming

to defraud and thieve.

Their reality is what

they want to perceive.

UPDATE III:  in response to public demand I removed a picture of the PM in favour of this:

*  originally posted as a comment at Catallaxy Files.
†  also originally posted, in a slightly different form, as a comment at Catallaxy Files.

The Government’s Lackey

On Listening for the First and Last Time to Jon Faine*

I’d never heard in all my days
such foul, pathetic, pathic praise,
and hope I never hear again
agagic moans from fervid Faine.

When Gillard calls, Faine’s one of those
who swiftly bend to touch their toes;
but critics he must mock and smear,
calumniate and domineer.

A proctoleichous poodle, he
conceals corruption willfully.
One fact, however, Faine can’t hide:
that Gillard, with aforethought, lied.

*  Jon Faine, an oleaginously partisan presenter in Melbourne for ABC Radio, is known, according to the ABC, “for his quick wit and willingness to ask the stickiest of questions”—except when his interlocutors are federal ministers or awarmist lunatics whom he must coddle and obsequiously defend.

For those with strong stomachs, go to Michael Smith’s “Jon Faine of ABC Local Radio Melbourne was my gracious host on the radio today”.

UPDATE I:  see “Jon Faine Doubles Down”, by Prof. Bunyip:

it is a good thing Jon Faine found paid work as a toady on ABC Radio 774, rather than remaining with the law, because a compulsion to connect dots is generally regarded as an asset amongst learned friends.  Faine, whose preciousness needs to be valued in carats, displayed none of that this morning, despite the oft-thwarted attempts of Michael Smith and The Age’s Mark Baker.  Each attempted to address the increasingly insistent question of our Prime Minister’s fitness to hold the highest elected office in the land, and neither could get a word in edgeways.
Smith was seldom allowed to finish a sentence and, when he did, his point was engulfed by the shill’s interruptions and poo-hooing.

UPDATE II:  the correct link for Jon Faine’s monologue (briefly interspersed with comments from Michael Smith) is http://blogs.abc.net.au/files/hectic-half-hour-23-11-12.mp3.

UPDATE III (24 November):  from the ABC’s Code of Practice 2011 (pp. 4-6): 

UPDATE IV (24 November):  see “Their ABC”, by Roger Franklin:

At about the same time Fairfax Editor at Large Mark Baker began looking into the “young and naïve” Julia Gillard’s past as a salaried partner at Slater & Gordon it should have been obvious to even the most blinkered eye that many questions about our Prime Minister remain to be answered.  Without stretching a point, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald have long been little more than house organs for the left, so a senior editorial executive’s decision to shrug off his incurious colleagues’ inertia and disdain, roll up his sleeves and begin digging came as a welcome change.  When even Fairfax catches the whiff of something rotten, then there must surely be more substantial than an olfactory phantasm of the conservative imagination.

There is, however, one place where the instinct to spin and belittle, to denigrate and dismiss, remains vigorous as ever, and that is the Southbank studio in Melbourne where ABC Radio’s Jon Faine puts on a show most weekday mornings.  His performance on Friday was a beaut, representing in less than 30 minutes, at least to this listener, not only the abrogation of a public broadcaster’s obligation to wield the straight bat, but also, and more to the point, why the ABC is seriously overdue for a very stiff dose of reform.  If and when the Coalition assumes the government benches, let Faine’s histrionics be Exhibit A.

UPDATE V (1 September, 2013):  I—along with many others, I reckon—lodged a complaint with the ABC, asking why it would provide “this contumelious, inept hack [i.e., Faine] with both a large salary and airtime?” and “Why do you allow such unprofessional bias?” I have not yet received an official response to my complaint, but the ABC has conceded that Faine must fain apologise for his unprofessional failure to act according to the ABC’s charter.  See Michael Smith’s posts here and here.