Moncktified!
I call the process Moncktification, and it can be applied to any picture that is wanting of eye-googliness.
So, Lord Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, is visiting Australia to give talks on climate change, and also presumably to have his desiccated penis massaged by his staunchest allies in Australia. Alan Jones – who, in spite of multiple breaches of broadcasting code of conduct, has managed to keep his particular brand of bullshit on the air – was among them. The footage that was shown in the otherwise uninformative 7.30 Report, uh… report gave me a good idea of what this presentation was all about: basically a couple of hours of Lord Banana of Brenchley preaching to the converted, replete with PowerPoint slides and jokes.
From transcript:
(to audience) As you can see is the houses of Parliament would disappear, to which my saying is, and your problem is?
(audience laughs)
And I along with them!
Of course, the silliest thing about Monckton is still his charge that the global warming lobby is actually contriving to bring the world under a single government – Illuminati style. Unelected sponge that Monckton is, he even had the stones to emphasise the point that these shadowy rulers would be vilely unelected. All the drama around this – Monckton’s visit, Tony Abbott’s questionably-funded green policy, the stirrings of a Sceptic Revolution, of an empire on the brink of collapse – masks a fairly mundane political truth.
I don’t spend a lot of time going around talking to ‘the people’. Recently, in fact, I’ve spent most of my time talking to deliciously-animated space vixens. However, if gauging the public mood through politics is an endeavour that has any validity, it seems that things have changed a bit since before the Coalition leadership spill of late 2009. As a political issue, climate change is losing momentum. Here, Andrew Bolt might claim some sort of personal victory, attributing the stagnation to the daily truths that he ejaculates onto the face of Australian politics via his blog. He wouldn’t be entirely wrong, and an ALP federal election campaign that dodges the issue would be a major victory for sceptics.
But it’s not because the science is, somehow, ‘falling apart’. The relationship between man-made carbon emissions and the global climate remains well-founded, and scientists and researchers will continue their work in this regard for a long time. All we are seeing is an Australian public with a relatively short attention span getting bored of the politics, in a mediascape teeming with distractions.
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