Wednesday, January 18, 2017

In which the pond wavers between dashing Donners, the dog botherer and an educational cat fight ...





The pond keeps hearing the siren song of the Donald, urging it to take to the street to stop the travesty, end the disgusting injustice, and fight the disaster for democracy ...

But there are other sirens singing a siren song, and no one has tied the pond to the mast ...

With Moorice announcing the end of the world, perhaps by Friday, certainly by the end of the month, it's perhaps not the best time to think about getting a good education, and besides, the pond is with Mark Twain and his line about never letting his schooling interfere with his education ...

But for those who care about the suffering in Toorak and Vaucluse, it's been struggle street of late. A few diligent readers might have ducked and weaved past the real estate stories and already caught up with the Fairfaxian yardn about the way Sydney private school fees soar ...

Apparently, the only hope is to head to Brissie and dwell amongst the toads ...Brisbane school fees: Brisbane 'most affordable' city for private schooling according to report ...

Now some might find the thought of toad-kissing a little repugnant, and confronted by this sort of crisis, while some might holler for a marshall, the reptiles, and the pond, will always holler for another bout with the reliable dashing Donners ...



To tell the truth, the pond has never got over the recent January visitation by the mighty one, daring to break the unbreakable intertubes rule, 'don't feed the blogging trolls'...

Sadly it has to be said that Donners response to the crisis is a tad short measure ...




Oh goodie gumdrops, another plug for the tykes and non-government schools.

Anything but those bloody secularist atheistic government schools that are a pox on the land, and quite get in the way of the Catholic ponzi scheme of getting hold of them while they're young ...

But what's this, also on the lizard Oz digital opinion page?


It can only mean one thing ...

A chance for the pond to increase the clicks with a few shots of cat fights about education policies ...


The pond could have illustrated the concept of a cat fight with more raunchy and ribald illustrations, but this is a family friendly blog devoted to concepts of education for the little ones, and so it's on with the argument ...

On the other side of the ring ...


Oh dear, where might this be heading?


Well it's back to dashing Donners for his additional arguments and if possible some kind of rebuttal ...

Let's hear it for the tykes ...



Dearie me, that's very short weight.

Vouchers might have been in fashion in assorted United States education system a few years ago, in a vain attempt at privatisation by stealth, but it didn't take long for the results to turn up, and for the dreams to sound like delusions ...

Here's the NY Times on the work of one pusher of vouchers ...

....Ms. Devos will also be hamstrung by the fact that her deregulated school choice philosophy has not been considered a resounding success. In her home state, Detroit’s laissez-faire choice policies have led to a wild west of cutthroat competition and poor academic results. While there is substantial academic literature on school vouchers and while debates continue between opposing camps of researchers, it’s safe to say that vouchers have not produced the kind of large improvements in academic achievement that market-oriented reformers originally promised.

Indeed, and so to Dempster scribbling about choice ...


Well that was short and sweet, but please allow the pond to put in a word for private schools of the posh kind, which happens to exclude many Catholic schools that delight the Donners.

If anyone can afford a private school, you get excellent facilities, good teachers, and an inculcation of a born to rule and how to get rich mentality that's immensely aided by mingling with other members of the ruling class ...

This sort of peer group is a tremendous comfort when heading off to university to join a young Liberal club and fight with the filthy lefties, greenies and socialists.

Sadly, if you go to an average parish pump Catholic school, as the pond did, you're likely to end up with a healthily atheistic attitude to life - especially if you then, as the pond did, head off to a state school and get to enjoy intelligent secularist conversations ...

Never mind, with the cat fight over, the pond was feeling a little short-changed. Donners looked like he'd dashed off his piece as an afterthought and Dempster was looking a little caddish in his talking down of private schooling ...

So the pond went looking for dessert, perhaps a refreshing sorbet, and came across some left-over dog botherer, tidily laid out in the cat bowl to attract the pond's eye ... especially as the pond is bingeing on the Donald...




"As bad as Donald ..."

What could he mean? Every reptile has been explaining how the Donald was a refreshing breath of fresh air, who'd smash up the joint, turn everything upside down, and in the process produce paradise ...

Luckily the actual piece was as short on substance and wit as anyone might hope for ... yes, it was that old Tamworth butcher syndrome, another example of reptile short weight ...



That's it? That's all he wrote, and he got to have a splash on the digital page?

By golly soon the dog botherer'll be tweeting his columns.

Actually, there were a number of problems with the TPP, though ironically in recent days nobody much bothers to talk about them.

The draft tilted many areas towards the United States, not least in the areas of intellectual property rights and big pharma and the ability of private companies to sue governments ...

That the Donald should see these tilts as bad for the United States is just another bit of Donald myopia ... and as for the dog botherer pretending it was all about free trade is another example of the low level of analysis offered by the reptiles ...

It turns out - in the usual reptile way - that almost anywhere else offers better insights into the TPP, and what might have been, and why some of it might have been beneficial, and some might have been problematic ...

Even if none of it happens, thanks to the Donald being the Donald, it's worth remembering some of those discussions ... especially if we jump into the middle of them ...


Well yes, and much, much more...

The first part of that discussion and more here,  but in the age of the Donald, all that the dog botherer could offer was a bit of half-baked barking, and short weight barking at that ...

A home grown populist of the right barking at the moon about populism?

Well it's comical enough, but hardly informative.

And now what's left but to enjoy a few Donald jokes ...

One's thanks to Rowe here ...



And the other is a Pope, with papal wisdom having returned, and more available here ...




3 comments:

  1. Hi Dorothy,

    I'm was hoping that my application for an ARC Grant for my research paper on "The correlation between extreme heat days and the lack of comments on Loon Pond" would soon be approved.

    Unfortunately I fear my timing is poor as the new Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, the "Honourable" Arthur Sinodinos is much more interested in "Memory Erasure techniques" and the "Scientific applications to make millions from Australian Water Holdings" which are evidently all very cutting edge.

    DiddyWrote

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. :)³ You could always try the Department of Finance ... if they'll give money to the Caterists, there's hope for everyone ...

      Delete
    2. Like DP says, DW, after all, if they'll finance The Stibium Kid, why not you ? But do remember that some of us have air conditioning in these degenerate days, even though the long hike to the dunny can still be a trial.

      OTOH, sometimes there's just nothing more to be said - after all, would scribbling over the Mona Lisa make it any finer ?

      Delete

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