The madness of Chris Kenny

By May 1, 2020Media, Society

Most people are aware of the bizarre ecosystem that exists on Sky After Dark (SAD) with all sorts of fruitcakes reinforcing their mutual divorcement from reality. I have occasionally written about the nuttier efforts some of these Murdoch lunatics have perpetrated on their listeners, with the three stooges (Dean, Panahi and Morrow) featuring prominently, particularly for their inability to even have a passing acquaintance with how science works, as well as their inability to distinguish science from drivel1,2,3.

Now one of SAD’s ‘lesser lights’, the transcendently incompetent ‘ruperter’, Chris Kenny, has taken an even more extreme lurch to the nutty end of the fruitcake spectrum4. While his idiocy regarding electric vehicles has been the topic of ridicule here before5, his recent piece to camera takes the cake. Of course, he begins with the standard Murdoch equine ordure that climate change is not happening, and that Paul Barry from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Media Watch program is promoting ‘leftist climate policies’. Then he has the gall, and the apparent unfamiliarity with the concept of irony, to state that Media Watch is “supposed to be a media watchdog, standing up for truth, accuracy and the like. ….But what it does is distort the truth and promote inaccuracies in order to promote its own ideological agenda”4. This, coming from a Murdoch hack just beggars belief. It demonstrates a stupendous lack of self awareness, the like of which one rarely encounters outside of studies of Anosognosia.

Kenny then continues his rant about the ABC’s “obsessive, biased, unfair, relentless and clearly wrong-headed persecution of Cardinal George Pell over many years” and Barry’s twisting of “the truth beyond recognition in order to acquit the ABC”4. This again betrays extraordinary twisting of the truth, and is part of the Murdoch campaign to destroy, or at least maim, the ABC. Indeed, it was the Murdoch rag, the Hun (Herald-Sun) which first reported the fact of a police investigation into Pell6. Like many Murdoch hacks, facts are unimportant to Kenny. He has such a severe antipathy to facts that if the ABC did a story on motherhood, Kenny would be foaming at the mouth to argue against it.

Now, hilariously, Kenny claims that “Barry, and the ABC, have found a new enemy, a very bizarre one this time, they are against a drug”4. This drug is hydroxychloroquine, a common medication to treat malaria, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, and which is being spruiked by the halfwit Mango Mussolini, Donald Trump, as a treatment for COVID-19. A few trials of hydroxychloroquine and other treatments have been undertaken around the world. Of these, a study of patients hospitalised with COVID-19 in the US found no benefit from the drug, either alone or given in combination with an antibiotic. In fact, the patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone had a higher mortality rate7. A similar trial is underway in Australia8. A high-dose trial of the related drug, chloroquine, was also begun in Brazil, but was stopped after numerous patients developed dangerous heart arrhythmia, two of whom died9.

Trump, in his promotion of hydroxychloroquine, effectively prevented Anthony Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, from answering a question about hydroxychloroquine during a White House press briefing10. Trump’s promotion of this drug has led to a run on it, such that people who actually need it for their chronic conditions are finding it hard to obtain. Indeed, some people who self-administered the drug, apparently by heeding Trump’s ‘advice’, have died or arrived at hospital with poisoning caused by it. The problem was so serious among the gullible trumpettes that the US Federal Drug Administration had to warn them against taking chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat or prevent Covid-19 outside a hospital or formal clinical trial11.

Kenny is not so much concerned about the drug per se, just sticking the boot into the ABC. He said: “Of course, the ABC has to find local whipping boys for their anti-Trump obsessions, that’s their whole schtick … they’re actually lining up against drugs that are being trialled around the world to fight COVID-19”4. However, given the results of the trials of these drugs, it seems like Paul Barry’s supposed ‘campaign’ against hydroxychloroquine may have been justified. In fact, Barry was not campaigning against the drug; he was simply pointing out the slavish repetition of the Trump promotion in the Australian media.

It makes you wonder whether Kenny will come out in support of ingesting or injecting disinfectant or inserting ultraviolet light sources into the body. After all, it was his hero, Trump, who said inarticulately: “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it … “And then I see the disinfectant. Where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injections inside or almost a cleaning, cause you see it gets on the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs.”12

Kenny finishes off with “the left has become … nutty over Trump”4. That is not the case; normal people are simply amazed that people like Kenny actually believe what Trump says. Kenny is so bereft of knowledge, so unthinking, and so rabidly reactionary that he implicitly believes what a mindless buffoon like Trump has to say. I wait with bated breath for Kenny to insert an ultraviolet light down his trachea or to ingest or inject some disinfectant to protect himself against COVID-19, or perhaps to encourage others to do so, while he is safely ensconced at home, much like epidemiologist Alan Jones13.

Sources

  1. http://www.blotreport.com/2018/10/30/is-rowan-dean-a-liar-or-just-stupid/
  2. http://www.blotreport.com/2019/05/13/rowan-dean-is-not-a-liar/
  3. http://www.blotreport.com/2019/05/27/the-three-stooges-vs-science/
  4. https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6152522717001
  5. http://www.blotreport.com/2019/04/06/the-shallow-end-of-the-kenny-gene-pool/
  6. https://www.abc.net.au/news/about/backstory/news-coverage/2020-04-11/why-the-abc-reporting-of-the-pell-case-was-not-a-witch-hunt/12137620
  7. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920v2
  8. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/28/australian-hydroxychloroquine-trials-continue-despite-studies-showing-no-benefit-to-coronavirus-patients
  9. https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-chloroquine-study-stopped-early.html
  10. https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/06/trump-hydroxychloroquine-fact-check/
  11. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/24/fda-issues-warnings-on-chloroquine-and-hydroxychloroquine-after-serious-poisoning-and-death-reported.html
  12. https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/newsfeed/2020/04/trump-suggests-injecting-disinfectant-treat-coronavirus-200427124512820.html
  13. http://www.blotreport.com/2020/03/17/alan-jones-epidemiologist/

12 Comments

  • JON says:

    Kenny’s a classic exemplar of two things: the Dunning-Kruger effect, and the damage caused to the intellect by blind ideology, especially when left unchecked.

    Anyone defending Pell in the face of the evidence – irrespective of whether he himself abused members of the flock – has lost his/her moral compass in my opinion. Pell is not alone in his guilt for the church’s actions with regard to perpetrators and victims of course. Many within the institution and also without (Vic police for example) failed in their moral, ethical and statutory duties. Lives were ruined, some victims driven to suicide because of the acts and the lack of justice. No reasonable person would condone this, let alone anyone with “Christian values”. Pell’s appalling comment about “gossip” being the reason the church failed to act is disingenuous at best. The hierarchy may not have known the full extent of the abuse but they can’t, and weren’t as the evidence showed, have been unaware of individual cases.

    • admin says:

      Jon,
      They knew. If you want to see what it was like. Watch the movie ‘Spotlight’. Although a dramatisation, it shows how the church hierarchy knew and covered it up. In one of my very early posts, I related a Q and A joke I heard in my hometown in the 1970s. It went like this: Q – What punishment do you get if you are a priest and are caught molesting children? A – Another parish. That was 50 years ago when I was in my teens. Everybody knew, but did nothing.

  • Mark Dougall says:

    This bloke just seems like an utter dill. What a horrible collection of columnists and commentators exist in the awful Murdoch non-news offices.

    • admin says:

      Mark,
      I’d like to see someone do a psychological study on these nutters. I must investigate if that sort of study has ever been done.

  • Ken says:

    You have to be loopy to get a job at sky,have a look at them all !

  • Warren says:

    Kenny, like many of our pathetic media, Government, advisers, etc., suffer from a severe mutation. I have observed that their perineum is located between their ears. Neo-liberal types have definitely been hit hard.

    People can be cruel. I often hear the terms dickhead and shit- for- brains being used. There is also another derogatory term used. All I can say is wooden eye.

    However I must admit that when I hear the dickheads rabbit on, my constipation issues disappear? Yes I’m sure I have worked that out (pun intended).

    In addition my insomnia issues are all but gone. I force myself to continue listening to the dickheads, and bam. It’s morning. It’s like an induced coma situation.

    My GP is very impressed.

    • admin says:

      Warren,
      Chortle! The insomnia is getting to me over the last week or so. I think more exercise will do the trick.

  • JON says:

    Further confirmation of Pell’s guilt/complicity in Catholic church abuse:
    “Cardinal George Pell was “conscious of child sexual abuse by clergy” as early as 1973 and failed to act on complaints about priests, according to royal commission findings released for the first time.

    In its unredacted reports tabled in Federal Parliament on Thursday morning, the royal commission found that child sexual abuse by priests was on Cardinal Pell’s “radar” in 1973 and that it “ought to have been obvious” to him during the late 1980s that abuse was being carried out…..”

    More here:
    https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/long-awaited-george-pell-royal-commission-findings-released-20200507-p54qmo.html

    • admin says:

      Jon,
      As I said in one of the articles I posted on this blog, when I was a kid in Newcastle about the late 1960s a joke went around the town in the form of a Q and A. It went: “Q; what do you get if you are a priest and are caught molesting children? A; Another parish.” That was over 50 years ago. The churches knew; the police knew; the politicians knew, but they all covered it up.

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