The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

In USA they got the Pussy Grabber and now Down Under we got the Goat grabber.
This must be some inside joke that the serpent is not privy to but to see that sad lonely creature out there wandering in the wilderness is a most amusing spectacle indeed

Or maybe old Tony is truly as blind as a bat and has mistaken the furry creature for his Precious as he scurries madly away from Mount Doom

Today has been the most entertaining Question Time in Canberra since the Mad Monk called the opposition leader the “Doctor Goebbels of Economic Policy

It was so truly touching to hear of the Government’s dedication to ‘The Rule of Law” on today’s 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta. Especially when spoken by a Prime Monster who along with his lapdogs and minions is doing his damnedest to tear up every last shred of decency and accountability in government.
He sets his attack dogs on the woman whose actual job description it is to call government to account when it oversteps the mark. “Executive overreach” was the polite phrase Gillian Trigg used to describe some of this appalling behaviour.


Some time later this week his government will try to pass legislation that will strip citizenship from Australians at the whim of a minister no doubt relying on just the sort of intelligence information that led their predecessors to follow George Bush like a mindless zombie into the quagmire of Iraq. No due process, no fair trial just the word of some brown nosed spineless guttersnipe on a petty power trip. It will not be the first time either. These folks are just too arrogant to ever learn from their mistakes no matter how many lives they destroy in the process.

These measures are so drastic that even members of the Prime Monster’s own party are complaining that he has gone too far.

( Mad dogs and other hounds of hell )

A certain Cyberian serpent has been gobbling up all my spare online time and more besides. Python is a hard task master and demands sacrificial offerings every week since early October. So I’m woefully behind in catching up with comments and gossip in general. Even the RasPutin vs The Mad Monk mixed martial arts championship has been sadly neglected. Some of the cartoonists have been having a wonderful time devoting their poisoned pens to portraying the assorted training regimes of the two combatants.




I must be going completely crazy. It’s simply not normal to be slaving over a keyboard at 6.30 in the morning in a desperate attempt to put some last minute touches on a very buggy game of Pong. I might manage to salvage 12 of the 19 possible points which is a bit of an improvement on the first version that would be struggling to score more than 6.
So it looks like I have well and truly hit the wall this week. Will keep plodding along anyway since this python is proud of her persistence. Here’s hoping the long hoped for light bulb moments are not too far away. November will be the true test of commitment since the annual ritual of novel writing is simply not negotiable.

It is simply not rational to expend such time and effort on a course that has very little use in real life. It could come in handy for two grand procrastination projects - a second attempt at Coursera’s cryptography classes and a rather long to do list at Project Euler. I guess they are the online equivalents of designing that deck of tarot cards, actually editing at least one of 5 nano novels and finishing sewing and stuffing Snowball the teddy bear.

And this week’s topic in the very interesting “Learning how to learn” course is all about procrastination and zombies. Perfect timing.

( It's a dog eat dog world out there. )



Mad Mutt Tony can't swim out in his budgie smugglers to rescue a desperate drowning dog because he's too busy being a suppository of wisdom and Kevin 747 is off in his superman suit (or should that be Incredible hulk?) saving the world on behalf of his American lords and masters

It looks like even the Taiwanese are in on the action




Strange how the faces look nothing like the originals but their mannerisms are pretty spot on

The present prime minister is getting increasingly desperate as it appears he has less than two weeks as top dog. When a so called Labor party wants to set up tax havens up north and one of their has beens wants to turn Oz into the world's nuclear rubbish dump while the so called conservative party proud of their fiscal rectitude promises to pay rich women up to $75,000 to have babies, then you know the world has gone completely and totally bonkers

Even the Wikileaks party is being sneaky and secretive. Any day now the Greens will be also wanting nuclear waste dumps, million dollar grants for Monsanto and big fat taxes on solar panels and wind turbines

Interesting times lie ahead.

So it’s now official. On Saturday 7th September there is going to be an invasion of Vote People in Australia. This serpent is excited already. Had already complained that it’s not possible to put them all last. Well at least nearly all of them. It used to be possible but those days are long over.

Two weeks ago Radio National ran an interview with a guy by the unlikely name of Arthur Dent who until the recent adventures of a certain Julian Assange had laid claim to being Australia’s first political prisoner

He wasn’t always called Arthur and had in fact changed his name by deed poll. His muggle name is Albert Langer and he was notorious for having issues with the Electoral Office.

The crime that earned him time in the slammer was the promotion and possible invention of a devious and wonderful scheme for filling in the boxes of election voting slips

Here in Oz for federal elections the lower house is elected using some form of preferential voting. You rank the candidates in order of preference. If your number one candidate does not get the numbers, they take your second choice into account and so on down the line until one of them eventually has sufficient numbers to get across the line. Sometimes that could mean your vote going to the last or second last name on your list

Albert Langer proposed a simple but ingenious solution to keep the two big bastard parties from stealing your vote in such a devious manner. You simply numbered the ballot as far as you wanted to go and then gave all the rest the very same number. So if there were only two candidates you could bring yourself to vote for out of a batch of six you would number the ticket 1 then 2 and then put a 3 in every single other box.

This pissed off the two major parties big time so they pulled strings and pushed buttons and sent the Electoral Commission on the rampage to give poor Albert a hard time. They sent nasty ‘cease and desist’ letters which he politely ignored. He continued his sneaky rebel rousing anarchist activities and got tossed in the slammer for his trouble

He was talking about the whole drama on the radio last week. They had changed the law so that any vote cast in such a manner would no longer be considered valid. But apparently they did not bother doing that for the Senate.
The interviewer asked him if it was worth all the hassle since so few people had actually voted using his neat little trick - somewhere in the low thousands at each election. Arthur had never expected such a ridiculous reaction from the authorities but still had no regrets.
Izzie had been one of those few thousand and had been most peeved indeed when they got rid of that useful loop hole. It would come in so so handy in September.

For Tweedledum and Tweedledee or as others call them - the Pepsi party and the Coca Cola party are particularly obnoxious this time. Both parties are now led by egomaniacal control freaks with blue ties, with almost identical policies when they actually bother to have policies and each in a race to the bottom of the barrel in their desperation to get elected

( Votes and Boats )

This serpent has been slacking off on the posting front. Been glued to the never ending drama in Canberra that could best be described as The Red Wedding.

So after much scheming and machination, the end result is that in the next election rather than choosing between Tweedledum and Tweedledee or more accurately, the Pepsi and the Coca Cola parties, we now get to choose between two megalomaniacal narcissists in blue ties as the future leader of the country instead of just one

And the combatants have not confined themselves to Canberra. Only yesterday found this slush in the serpent inbox

"Izmeina,

In recent years, politics has failed the Australian people. There has just been too much negativity all round. There’s been an erosion of trust.

Negative personal politics has done much to bring dishonour to our parliament but done nothing to address the urgent challenges facing our country, our communities and our families.

In fact it has been holding our country back.

This must stop, and with all my heart that is the purpose that I intend to pursue as Prime Minister.

I want to acknowledge the achievements of my predecessor, Julia Gillard. She is a woman of extraordinary intelligence, of great strength and energy. She has achieved much under the difficult circumstances of minority government.

Every effort I have in my being will be dedicated to uniting the Australian Labor Party. No retributions, no pay backs, none of that stuff. It is pointless, it is old politics.

Together, we can win and defend all that Labor has achieved in the past six years. Join the campaign today or click here to donate.

Thanks,

Kevin"

That's the kind of crap one would expect from Barack Obama and his mates in the NSA but not here in old Oz

( plotting and scheming )

This is one of our potential prime ministers!!! A Vladimir Putin wannabee





Tony goes tweeking the Time Turner