Icarus flew too near the sunInto the blue his red wax did run

Franz Radziwill was not clear on some details of the Icarus mythogem.

He was not alone in this. Some Farangist duckspeaker at the Torygraph had a brainfart, and contributed to the gaiety of nations by retelling the story with a revisionist account of Icarus' construction materials:

"hand-made wings fashioned from wood, feathers and wax."

Also this revisionist version is Hubris-free; not a single Hubri is mentioned.

Now the rules of the Riddled Icarus Reenactment Club are quite clear: all entrants in the Closeness-to-the-Sun Trophy must construct their wings using only feathers and wax, as originally laid down by Ovid and Pseudo-Apollodorus. Otherwise it'll be open slather and hi-tech, all carbon fibre and monolayer boron-nitride, and the focus of the event would shift from human performance to technological innovation. Any wood means instant disqualification, as Swearing Bob discovered in last year's regatta. Space-Time Eddie was equally confused, but he confined himself to feathers and wax so he was not technically disqualified, although the Trojan horse he constructed out of them did not get very far off the ground.

I thought all these guys were meant to have a classical education? (Icarus perished after believing his own hype) https://t.co/h1RyZnyos2

— Angela Eagle (@angelaeagle) September 11, 2019

So who is Daedalus in this metaphor? The author did know that Icarus was just blindly following someone else's instructions, right?

— Smut Clyde, X-Ray Haruspex (@SmutClyde) September 12, 2019

Here's Breugel (Radziwill's inspiration) keeping it real.

Polydactyl policies

After 15 hours on Twittle, @FirstCatofNZ has 522 807 827 followers.

How many of them are Russian Bluebots?

Our chief weapons are decisiveness... decisiveness and responsibility... and an unwavering commitment to principles

The non-goodness of a Bad Decision can be measured by the speed of the Deciderer's search for someone else to blame.


There are limits, however, and I don't know if Theresa May's Brexit supporters will be entirely convinced by this new strategy of "It wasn't really my idea, it was the Europeans' suggestion and I just followed their advice."

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UPDATE: Another culpable advisor has been found:

Theresa May was talking [sic, because Daily Mail] into the disastrous decision to call a general election by her Brexit Secretary David Davis and senior aides by the promise of a three figure majority, it was claimed today.
The Prime Minister had previously insisted she personally took the decision while on an Easter walking holiday with her husband Philip in remote north Wales.
But as the fall out continued over the spectacular failure that blew away Mrs May's majority focus has turned to who came up with the idea.
The Times reported today that it was pressure from Mr Davis, together with her top aides Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, that persuaded Mrs May to roll the dice.

May is evidently unfamiliar with the adage that "Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan" [Ciano 1946]... in addition to her uncertainty on details of parentage.

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UPDATE²: The local Sunday advertisement-delivery vehicle found some gumby to opinionate on the UK election, in a praiseworthy effort to create work for our own dimwitted fuckknuckles rather than simply import Stockbroker Ignorance from the UK.


Highlights include

• "...the result is May's loss, not Corbyn's victory. A more competent Leader of the Opposition could have capitalised on May's atrocious campaign and delivered Labour to Downing Street."
• Corbyn is "an unapologetic Marxist better known for consorting with terrorist groups than political competence"
• The liberal hope of a crushing Tory victory -- allowing the Labour party to return to its proper Blairite roots -- "is in tatters".

This compendium of clliches was signed by an Associate Director of Sherson Willis, a "communications strategy company". Are the clients aware that the company is in the hands of some dipstick who evidently gains his knowledge of UK politics by reading the Daily Mail and believing every word?

Pro-tip: Highly-effective politicians only write dirty limericks

Here at Riddled we are aware of all Terms-of-venery traditions and we cannot condone the use of "bevy" as a collective term for bad poetry. "Bevy" can apply to quail, roe-deer or pulchritudinous ladies.

Judges would have accepted the terms "anthology" or "slim volume".

The culprit for this terminological turpitude was one Harrison Christian, who writes at more length here, with a paragraph break to finish each sentence in the standard journamalistic style of punctuation:

Rachel MacGregor has told a court she was horrified by former Conservative Party leader Colin Craig's "really bad poetry," and felt trapped while she was working for him.
On Monday, MacGregor - Craig's former press secretary - gave evidence in the Auckland High Court, where Craig is suing Whaleoil blogger Cameron Slater.
Slater's lawyer Brian Henry cross-examined MacGregor, asking her reaction to a letter Craig wrote to her on Christmas Eve in 2014, which included two love poems.
"I remember feeling really offended, because we agreed that there were going to be boundaries and he had even written them himself, and now he's writing me really bad poetry," she said.
"It was awful actually, especially because he was going really into detail about me physically."
One of the poems, titled Beautiful, which Craig has admitted was inappropriate, featured lines like, "You are beautiful because your skin is so soft."
It was part of a bevy of letters and poetry Craig sent MacGregor while he employed her as his press secretary.

...There is more, but it descends into a critique of dorky couture.

[Stoled from Oglaf]

Cameron Slater is a "high-functioning Youtube comment" [MMMM, 2017], whose niche in the political ecosystem rests on his eagerness to dirty himself with work that National Party politicians themselves are too fastidious to touch. He claims to be a journalist, and therefore immune from defamation lawsuits; and also a blogger, and therefore exempt from putative fact-based journalistic restrictions. Colin Craig is just another libertarian / theocrat gobshite, whom the National Party was courting for a while as a possible coalition partner when he was playing with political-party-shaped sockpuppets. And now they are suing each other.

The usual advice against mud-wrestling with pigs does not extend to watching two pigs mud-wrestle.

...Dramatis personae of the news report also includes a lawyer, previously friendly with both sides, not so much now.

Justice Kit Toogood asked Slater: "You say you felt betrayed, but did you not betray her express injunction that this [conversation] cannot go anywhere else?"
"I did dance around on that but I guess technically I did," Slater said.

Whatever Justice Toogood is paid to put up with the crap from these fucksticks, it is not enough.

A Productive Cough

Now, of course, one is a happy little work unit, going about not asking difficult questions and NOT seeing quite a lot, while making the world safe for capitalism (Bragg 1990). And part of that is the, dare we say it, fetishisation, of something called productivity.
"AH HAH" I hear you Joanna and Johnny Socialist exclaim "THAT'S JUST ANOTHER NAME FOR EXPLOITATION!" I really think that there was no need for the exclamation mark there, but you young folks today with your fancy intertubes and smartphones.
 Anyway when we put your accusation through the "Milton Friedman Answer-matic to combat Socialists dogmas and such" we get "Maybe it is IVAN. Or maybe it's not, we'll have to have a faculty meeting in Davros to see."
Yes we in New Zild clung hopefully to the olive branch of productivity, hoping that the Dove of Rising Economics will alight and, presumably using super powers gained through eating a radioactive peanut, carry us back to a Noah-like figure who is actually a sort of boss person whose son has just had a traumatising experience in the NZ court and been sentenced to 3 hours cleaning the Prime Ministers golf cart.
 Immediately he offers us a job sweeping out the Ark and through olfactory deadening hard work and several mysterious deaths we rise to control the Ark and challenge God himself...If, like Mel Gibson is involved.
 But as is usual in these sceptred isles (Shakespeare, olden days) to maintain the proper respect and discipline that PRODUCTIVITY demands of us all, we have a commission of Productivity. That's right a group of people, might one hazard a guess and say predominately white, male people?, who ensure that the correct observances are made and the proper sacrifices sent to the ravenous maws of the True Gods. Extensive research finds that only 5/7ths of the commission are white males. Everyone is lily coloured, however.
But, there they were, sitting around, watching daytime TV, buying fartbombs via the internet, sending cat videos to each other and they thought "You know, we haven't buggered about with tertiary education for a good week or so, let's have another whack at them, eh". Being the government's japesters that they are the commissioners had to consider the fee-fees of the National Party BFF the ACT party, who are a bunch of cold eyed society stranglers have made a few appearances in the pages of Riddled.
So the usual Randian ideas were cut and pasted into a document which was duly released into the wilds. 
Have I mentioned that one of my contracts at the moment involves driving around taking swab samples from cow and sheep poo? I'm pretty good at this thing now and  get the swab into it's tube and back into the swab bag with no mess. In a strikingly similar exercise the Productivity Commission seems to done the job blindfolded and using swabs taped to their foreheads.
This "paper" advocates a "Shake-Up" of the tertiary system that seems to be modeled on the Shake-Up that the Fukushima nuclear plant underwent.
Government would no longer have to pay for debts that universities incur, there would be a loosening of regulations about what constitutes a university and post grad supervisors would no longer have to be involved in research! Brave days, my friends and a green light went on in the Riddled Institute tea-room.
These people's outdated and stupid ideas will blight us all if implemented. They have learned nothing from the last 30 years of NZ economic rationalism experiment and can't see the damage they do, even as they do it. Interesting to see that they all have degrees too, I wonder what their student loan levels were? Oh wait, we didn't have them in our day, did we? Fuck 'em (Stipe 1993)
But they have been productive.

New plagiarism scandal looms

Donald Trump said Wednesday he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory and lifting the sanctions against the country if he’s elected president.

The settlement of the Czechoslovakian Crimean problem, which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace. This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor Russian Premier, Herr Hitler Putin, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine. 

My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister an American President has returned from Germany Russia bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.

God Win

Teh Dim-Post (a New Zealand political-humour blogger) has a bleg:

I am now obsessed with and addicted to reading about the US election campaign. My favourite commentator at the moment is democratic blogger Josh Marshall – but who else is good? I’d be very interested in reading an intelligent informed right-wing perspective, if that’s even a thing in contemporary US politics.

I have referred him to the works of William L. Shirer.

Making silver linings out of sow's ears

Just look at the bollocks some opinionator wrote for a NZ weekend fishwrap, and was understandably too embarrassed to sign a name to:


The claim that

Boris Johnson moved to take power in Britain last night as he assembled a dream team to renegotiate relations with Europe and the world

is perhaps bleed-through from an alternative time-line, or was written well in advance and then forcibly adapted to circumstances, since the "dream team" turns out to amount to BoJo himself, plus Gove. That is to say, a pair of career pundits in search of more lucrative political careers who resent expertise and who can't be arsed planning how to exit through their own front doors, let alone from the EU. I suppose "world of fantasy" is a kind of dream.

Planned exits: Much over-rated

And then there was this exercise in consolation:

NZ Initiative executive director Oliver Hartwich said there were potential benefits for Kiwis, but we shouldn’t expect anything to happen overnight.

[...]

Hartwich said it could become a lot easier for New Zealanders with a travel bug to nab themselves a visa – but this all depended on who took over from Cameron.
‘‘Should it be Boris, he’s gone on and on about making it easier for Kiwis to go to the UK,’’ Hartwich said.
‘‘If you’re hoping for better visa availability, you should definitely be in the Boris Johnson boat.’’

Because if there's one thing we know about Johnson, is that he's a man of his word.

[Right]: Victorious Johnson as
depicted by SST journamalist

[Left]: Actuality. Reporters seek
interview; Johnson not to be found

Trump d'œil

Edward Gorey continues to be politically relevant.

A working-class Nero is something to be

By way of the usual Republican / TIME courtiers, we are informed that Donald Trump regards himself as a blue-collar billionaire, a self-made man.

As in all his other construction activities, he seems to have cut corners and used the cheapest, shoddiest materials available.

Thx Yastreblyansky!

TIME magazine:

Unable to tell the difference between Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuego.


POTUS Obama does not appear to be leading military operations in Havana, so it is not clear why Melissa Chan felt the need to call him "commander-in-chief", apart from being an authoritarian barrack-mentality fuckstick.

Brawndo's got what Astroturf craves

Establishment Republican astroturfers launched an advertising campaign calling attention to Donald Trump's contempt for women (presumably hoping to reduce his support).

That made such a big difference last time.

Mittageisen (Metal Postcard)

JEbush boasts of his digestive prowess:

Perhaps he is unaware of all artistic traditions.

It would be irresponsible not to speculate that after each meal he craps out a corkscrew.

Update: Link to helpful Heartfield background added on suggestion of Yastreblyansky in comments. The Tate had a good exhibition of his original collages in 2011, but I can't find an online catalog.

The first time as therapeutic psychodrama, the second time as a primary debate

Dr Rokeach, we have 19 18 17 patients each convinced that he or she is the One appointed by God to become president and make the US great again into a theocracy to protect the constitution IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY!

OK, let's bring them all together in a mock debate and see if they get any saner when their delusions collide.

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"Rokeach brought together three men who each claimed to be Jesus Christ and confronted them with one another's conflicting claims, while encouraging them to interact personally as a support group. Rokeach also attempted to manipulate other aspects of their delusions by inventing messages from imaginary characters. He did not, as he had hoped, provoke any lessening of the patients' delusions, but did document a number of changes in their beliefs.

"While initially the three patients quarreled over who was holier and reached the point of physical altercation, they eventually each explained away the other two as being patients with a mental disability in a hospital, or dead and being operated by machines."

I am SHOCKED to find Republican politics revealed as turning into a con-job

To be fair, there is no reason to believe that the various primary candidates whose names are being used to flood my spam tray would ever see a trace of any money that the spammograms elicit. In fact it seems unlikely that a genuine candidate fundraiser, having obtained an e-mail address, would immediately share it with all the rival candidates.

[click to embiggen]

It is almost as if the authors of the scam target Republican voters as especially gullible.

Lucifer the light

So this oozed out from the Putin-supporting conspirasphere:

[Ukrainian] Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, himself a former legal U.S. resident who has been linked to the crypto-Satanic Church of Scientology 

The passive-mood "has been linked" is a sign of modesty on the author's part, for the main source linking Yatsenyuk and Scientology is in fact that same author:*

Yatsenyuk [...] either dabbled in Scientology or was a full-fledge senior member of the cult, a position known as «Operating Thetan Level 6» or «OT-6».

But here at the Riddled Comparative Religion Department and Peach Teat Wholesalers we are more intrigued by this term "Crypto-Satanism" and would like to subscript to the relevant newsletters. Does the conflation of Satan and cryptography emanate from fundamentalist Christians, as an expression of their fear of the latter? Or conversely, is there perhaps a specific branch within the Satanist movement which holds that Lucifer smiles upon the use of strong cryptography, so that to encrypt one's correspondence is to glorify His divinity? Perhaps images and encomia to Satan are to be encoded within JPG files at pixel level by way of steganography, in the manner of musical backmasking.

"The devil is in the details," Another Kiwi vouchsafed.

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* Madsen also seems to be the creative force behind the "former US resident" assertion.

When politicians talk of resurrection I reach for my shovel

The reader who has been paying attention to the seething viper pit suspended over a lake of lava and hanging by rusty cables that is Australian politics would have been glued to their iPod "tovarishch" (political model) this weekend as the runes were read for the election in the great state of Victoria, mate. As usual most of the interest was centred on the capital city, Melbourne as the Liberal/ National party fought a brave rearguard action to try and preserve their Parliamentary perks.  Note: in Australia, Liberal party means Conservative and National party means yokels.
But, as is often the case, the ungrateful Victorians, disregarded the wants and needs of the deserving millionaires who wanted to stay in power and cruelly judged them on their political competence and score out-of-ten in not fucking things up. Oh fickle public! Voting out a conservative government that, very surprisingly, had a cunning plan to revitalise the whole state with a new motorway across Melbourne.
Now the poor Lib/ Nats, who are barely speaking to each other what with each suspecting the other of "a knife in the back", are dependent on a few very leafy suburbs in Melbourne and large areas of not much in the bush for their livelihoods.
"But" you will be saying 'This, while educational, is hardly the searing political insights that we are used to from Riddled, what else can you show me" in a curious echo of Bob Dylan's classic "It's All Right Ma".
The real interest in the election came from the Rise Up Australia Party, a Christian fundamentalist bunch of loonies party whose guiding principals seem to be pinched from the more lurid pages of the islamophobic internet.
Their leader Daniel Nalliah maintains that he has a special link with God that the big G has explained to him that various natural disasters have been visited upon Australia for various slights that Australians have given to him on high.
Mr. Nalliah appears to several beehives of bees loose in his bonnet but his most amazing claim, to this admittedly provincial reporter, is to have been involved in three people being resurrected. Now THAT seems like a political agenda, as opposed to a pork barrel road building exercise. None of the resurrectees are quoted about how happy they are to be back breathing.
Mr Nalliah has the usual rant and rave using the words, Islam, Nazism and Communism in various combinations  in semi-readable sentences but does not mention the reanimating aspect which I am sure would get a lot of the young people along to his meetings.
Sadly, Victorians have not taken to Mr Nalliah and after running for the Family First party and being kicked out because he was too racist,  he started the Rise Up Australia (Brought to you by Viagra) Party. Over the weekend they received only 0.7% of the vote but in his seat Daniel is caught up in a thrilling race for second in the  South Eastern Metropolitan Region seat where he only need an extra 20,000 votes to be in the State Parliament. Tried prayin' Dan? Just askin'. Dan is telling his followers that the "media" says that the Greens will win, but god or something blah blah blah.
If it was me I would be hot footing it to Hollywood to talk to zombie film people because it's all about money and who works more cheaply than the newly resurrected?
   

Then, shalt thou count to three. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out

"What?!" exclaim the readers who were paying attention, both of you. "Has not Another Kiwi already covered the story of your Pry Mincer hobnobbing with unsavoury types like that plausibly-deniable dirt-conduit and widely-loathed shitweasel Roncame Isopod* ?" Well, yes, AK did that, but the word "hobnob" set him off on one of his turns, and right now he is engrossed in writing sternly-worded memos for the smoko-room notice-board about the Chocolate Biscuit Replacement Roster, so he will not notice if we revisit the imbroglio.

Let us approach it, this time, from the direction of Freud's Kettle. This is the poor country relative in the domain of Philosophical Kitchen Utensils, with Russell's Teapot and Wittgenstein's Poker hogging all the attention.

it was not a pot of which one could
say, Pot, Pot, and be comforted

It is a special case of the Rule of Three governing narrative enumerations and itemisations. Freud held that the optimal number of mutually-contradictory accusations or excuses is three. Just as with breasts, or pints of Viper Heavily-Fortified Cider, two are unsatisfying while four are over-egging the lily.
Our own Pry Mincer was able to oblige with an example (thanks to the vast reserves of Narrativium lying beneath the Central Plateau of NZ's North Island).* The underlying political scandal is hard to encapsulate, nor is it something you want to know too much about, due to the unedifying nature of the personalities involved. Suffice to say that his operatives were found to have colluded with Mr Isopod in the release of incorrect but politically-damaging claims about the Leader of the Opposition, just prior to the 2011 election. NZ journamalists, having taken part in that smear campaign at the time, are now looking for someone else to be responsible for it, so they keep asking awkward questions of the Right Hon. JohnKey.

So we get these weird parallel-universe interviews, in which the Right-Hon insists that the Gwyn Report actually vindicated himself and his staff, because

1. His staff didn't send any information to Mr Isopod.
2. What they did was not illegal because the information had been declassified just before they sent it.
3. He himself was overseas at the time.

This is not the first appearance of Mr Isopod at Riddled.

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* False name, used on the advice of Trahison & Clerisy, Riddled legal advisors.
** The Rule of Three demands that two other examples of Freud's Kettle should follow. Here is one from the anti-vaccination oeuvre of Christina England, a bodily-fluid-purity obsessive who is sadly excluded through accident of birth from admission into the Encyclopedia of American Loons. And here she is again.

We're going to need a bigger Bag of Dicks...

...the New Zealand election is approaching.

1936 of them ought to be enough.

On close inspection, they appear to be uncircumcised.

Shane Jones, candidate for Leader of the Opposition, is a class act

You can tell by the elegant circumlocutions he uses to ascribe the behaviour of female politicians to PMT.

Jones has decided that he has little chance of getting to lead the Labour Party on the basis of his policies or past form, so he is presenting himself as a Scourge of PC Language who can connect with the Average Working Man, i.e. a clinch to win the Moron Vote. Connecting with women, not so much.