In which the pond takes a walk on the predictable side for its Sunday meditation ...

 

 

The pond realises that in the past it has dedicated its Sunday to a meditation, often with prattling awauy with Polonius, but now the Fauc is running wild and free, talking of science, the pond also felt a little-headed and thought it should try something a little different.

 

Yesterday's headline in the lizard Oz intrigued the pond,  especially with the announcement below SloMo's news that oil's time was up. Had the reptiles gone mad?

It turned out that was a link to Twiggy, sorting out the climate while pumping up hydrogen and Fortescue, but at least the pond did learn something new in Twiggy's comments section ...

 

Phew, thanks for that Bazza, another devoted reader trained to the reptile way of thinking, and sure enough Bazza, you were right, SloMo got it wrong ...

 

To put it mildly, the pond was profoundly disappointed, as no doubt was Bazza. What happened to the proud, defiant SloMo the pond loved?

 

 Sure, his transformation was wrapped up in mealy-mouthed crap about new technology as the solution, a favourite reptile meme, but the pond wondered how SloMo managed to keep a straight face when speaking in tongues to his imaginary friend ...

And the pond shouldn't have really worried, because the dinkum clean pure innocent virginal Oz coal lover was lurking just beneath the do nothing surface ...

 

Pure, undiluted gibberish of the recalcitrant kind ... how the reptiles must have slithered with delight, in a serpentine, wavy motion ...

 

 

Ah well, once bitten, twice shy, but the pond decided to continue its experiment this Sunday by going where it has rarely gone in recent years...

The pond's first excuse is that it'll all be over in two gobbets. The second is that the pond really did wonder if Bjorn had discovered something new and different to say, or whether he maintained a capacity for waffle up there with SloMo ...

 

Nope, the pond feels just like the coyote in those roadrunner cartoons, or perhaps Elmer up against the wily Bugs.

It turns out that the "very different approach" is just the same old denialist bullshit, dressed up as minimising the impact, talking it down, preaching against green spending ...

Oh fucketty fuck, the pond's IQ just slipped to Q levels.

It was like reading Polonius blathering on for the squillionth time about the lack of conservative voices on the ABC.

There it was again, as it was when the pond stopped reading Bjorn aeons ago ... "Fortunately, there is a much smarter way forward: investing a lot more in green research and development."

If only the pond had a pound for each time Bjorn has come out with that drivel. Why it would have enough money to solve the climate issue in a trice.

Alas and alack, the pond didn't score a pound, it just scored the usual crap.

Well once bitten twice shy and so the pond turned back to Polonius ...

 

 

 

The pond is alarmed by Polonius's viewing habits. His incessant watching of the ABC has clearly harmed his mental health. Whenever the pond rarely has its set tuned to the ABC, it automatically switches off whenever One Plus One turns up (ditto Australian Story). And yet it seems that Polonius was captivated ...

 

Is there something weird about Bedford and Grant on the ABC talking about the atmosphere of condescension on the ABC, while Polonius stands by, eagerly watching, wildly excited because they're not really black people, they're just people? In much the same way that the Menzies Institute is full of people who are just people, including old white folk like Polonius? But not so many black people, even if they are people ...

 

Polonius has no idea what Grant thinks about Australia Day?

That must disappoint Grant, considering he wrote an entire book on the subject ...

No, the pond hasn't read it, but then the pond always switches off whenever Stan Grant comes on, not because of ancient Tamworth racist sentiment, but because commercial television runs deep in his banalities, and that might explain why Polonius has discovered some sort of affinity with him ... because Polonius really would be better off giving up on the ABC. He should start watching the commercial networks' breakfast shows, he'll find his mental acuity improving in leaps and bounds ...

 

Well Grant and Bedford will have to live with what they've become ... tools for the Polonial world view. 

Apparently Bedford's whining about SBS's toxic, racist environment by-passed Polonius completely ... though it's passing strange that just as she turned up on the ABC to talk about prejudice, she spent a considerable amount of time at SBS complaining about her treatment. Not everyone is as acute and as wonderful and colour-blind as Polonius and fails to see the colour of a person's skin, or can carry on with remarkable Rinso-white complacency about how easy it is for an Aboriginal person to be a raging success.

And so to a bonus to the Polonial bonus, but only because of the piquancy of this juxtaposition ...

 

 

 

 

The pond has a fair contempt for both Dame Slap and Dershowitz, who wrote an appallingly bad novel the pond was once made to read ... so this should be a great exercise in masochism, of the kind suitable for a Sunday in bed ...

 

The first indication of what we're to expect from this exercise in bullshit is that Dershowitz should keep on pretending that he's on the left-liberal side of politics.

Why pretend? At best he's a contrarian, ripe for moaning and whining about being shunned by the rich folk at Martha's Vineyard ... (yes, he really did whine, as in the NY Times in 2018, here).

“I never thought I would see McCarthyism come to Martha’s Vineyard, but I have,” he wrote, of the elite island enclave off Cape Cod where he is a fixture.
Mr. Dershowitz, a self-professed “liberal Democrat,” said that friends on the Vineyard had snubbed him for publicly arguing against impeaching President Trump on television talk shows and in a forthcoming book.
“For them, it is enough that what I have said about the Constitution might help Trump,” said the lawyer, known for his fierce advocacy for civil liberties and his defense of famous clients like O.J. Simpson and Claus von Bulow. “So they are shunning me and trying to ban me from their social life on Martha’s Vineyard.”
This claim only seemed to draw a wave of mockery online that crested just as many of the nation’s media and political elites headed to the Cape for the Fourth of July.
“It is outrageous that people are now shunning Alan Dershowitz in their social lives,” one Twitter user wrote. “Really, what the heck took so long?”
Many rejected the comparison to McCarthyism, with its blacklists and smears that ruined careers. Countless people offered Mr. Dershowitz their thoughts and prayers. One enterprising troll even set up a crowdfunding campaign with a $5 million goal to “buy Alan some new friends.” But friends and acquaintances on the Vineyard confirmed that his outspoken defenses of President Trump had not been well received.
His name and the name of the resort were both trending on social media. There were jokes about fine “Vineyard whine.”
In an attempt to clarify matters, Mr. Dershowitz gave an interview to The Martha’s Vineyard Times, published Tuesday, in which he said that his column had been misunderstood.

What a hoot, follow the link for the rest of the hooting, and how far up yourself can you go, but at least it helps explain why Dersho and Dame Slap bonded with a mutual whine ...

 

Can we just let that answer hanging so the pond can repeat one of its favourite Dame Slap moments, one it promised never to repeat, but truth to tell, and especially with that talk of abhorrent and repugnant, never grows stale ... because, you see, it was done after the pussy groper had been given the keys to the White House, and apparently Dame Slap didn't find pussy groping at all abhorrent or repugnant ...

 

Thank the long absent lord Dame Slap was on the Upper side of NYC, it sort of helps keep the Martha's Vineyard vibe going ...

 

 

 

Has anyone started speaking to him at Martha's Vineyard? Is this why he's speaking to Dame Slap? Because no one else cares?

Ah, the pond just needed a little light relief. Back to Dame Slap hurling her puffballs at Dersho...

 

 

Oh please, the pond could feel a little vomit at the back of the mouth ... but then nobody called the pond into question when it strode into parliament in Canberra with a Glock strapped to its side when someone mentioned culture ...

So it goes ...

 

And so back to the delusional Dersho still imagining that he's somehow on the left and a liberal, but with nary a kind word to be found about the left ...

 

Yes, the way forward for free speech is to take on big tech, restrict and organise them in a good socialist way ... but please, spare a dime for Chairman Rupert and his minions ... which is great, because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about right now ...

Oh please, pretty please, just one last mention of the alternative ...

 

Thank the long absent lord no one stopped the free speech that celebrated the election of a self-confessed pussy groper and serial bankrupt. What could go wrong? Who could have known?

As for the pond, it's past time to leave the theatre ...

 

 

Not even the end of January, and already the pond is weary, and the Murdochian woods are dark and deep ...

 

 

 

It occurred to the pond that what with the current showdown between Google and the Murdochians, the pond might soon go away ... just vanish, disappear into the night.

The thought produced an immediate sense of relief, the sloughing off of dark shadows ... we're not even at the end of January and already the pond is deeply tired of the reptiles, the usual line up of suspects offering their usual tired, jaundiced, bizarre takes on the world, as seen through the fluff in their navels ...

Take Killer Creighton for example ... will someone just take Killer Creighton? No, oh okay then ...

 

 

 

 

The Killer became something of a pond favourite last year, but there's only so much time you can spend with one of the more moronic reptiles before the novelty wears off ... and becomes very wearing ...

 

 

 

 

 

The former White House noted? The White House was infested with notorious liars, and led by a serial liar of prodigious capacity for lying. And yet the Killer takes their word for it?

 

 

And just to add a little more:

These long-term trends gained political traction during the Great Recession. It became popular to refer to the “1 percent,” the group of ultra-rich who now hold more wealth than America’s entire middle class.
By the time 2016 rolled around, it seemed like voters were fed up. Capitalizing on widespread disillusionment with the economy, Trump campaigned on a pledge to do something about it. Among other things, Trump promised to restore America’s ailing manufacturing base and to stand tough against emerging markets that many people blamed for syphoning jobs away from the U.S. economy. The idea was that prioritizing workers would alleviate the pressure on blue-collar America.
Unfortunately, things have gotten worse, not better.
The numbers are revealing. The distance separating America’s highest and lowest income brackets grew by almost 9 percent annually under Trump. That growth is faster than in previous periods. From 1990 to 2015 growth was about 7 percent — a period that included three recessions.
That 2 percent difference might sound small. But it matters once we recognize that many households cannot meet their basic needs.
By 2019, housing was unaffordable for workers in 70 percent of the country. The average family is now far less able to afford home ownership than it was just a few years ago. Almost 30 million people lacked health insurance in 2019. One-quarter of Americans have no retirement savings. And one widely cited report from the Federal Reserve found that 40 percent of the country could not afford an emergency expense of $400. 
The list does not end there. A full 20 percent of American children now live in poverty, a number that increased under the Trump administration. At the same time, education, which is supposed to help overcome these problems, is becoming increasingly unaffordable as tuition outpaces income growth.
Perhaps most strikingly, all of this happened before the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the U.S. economy. Things have gotten worse since then.  

 

There's more at The Hill here, with links, but back to the man who feels humiliated at the notion of donning a mask ...

 

 

You can see why the pond is tired, deeply tired. Only a fuckwit would bother to defend a record that's seen 400k + deaths, shortly rising to 500 +, and the Killer is just too fuckwitted to waste time debating the point ... like that pointless blather about a travel ban on Chinese arrivals, which has long been noted as doing three fifths of fuck all, so porous and pointless was it ...

 

Thankfully the humiliated Killer had only one last small gobbet in him ...

 

 

 

US vaccine? Pfizer had the good luck to get into bed with BioNTech, a German biotechnology based in Mainz Germany ... and in any case, there had been much research done for years that paved the way for the current crop of vaccines ...

As for that talk of the US recovery, waiter, the pond wants a serve of the same kool aid they supply to the water cooler in Surry Hills ...

But why argue with a scribbler still trying to scrub a turd clean, and polish humbug to a gleam?

Instead the pond turned away from the commentary section and the likes of Bjorn to admire the top of the digital page as it appeared early on Saturday morn ...

 

Fuck, talk about an almost unendurable sense of futility ...

It is possible to believe the shameless cheek of SloMo? Politics of carbon has ended?

In what known, or unknown, reptile denialist universe? The same one that featured the usual Bjorn blather this very day, rabbiting on in a way that sees the pond step around him discreetly, as it does with the mad uncle down from the attic.

And what about the reptiles awarding a meaningless 'Australians of the year' gong to Victorians, having spent the entire time of the virus pouring shit on Comrade Dan and all the other state premiers who did something about it, apart from noble Gladys, who managed to be the slow one at the tail of the pack as the new year began...

And then over on the far right of the page was the dog botherer, less a harmless distraction than the pond's nemesis. Could the pond cope with two fuckwits in the one day?

 

Well at least there were some nice fireworks before the pond set off on its journey into mind-numbing tedium with the Utegate, war in Iraq man ... but perhaps the pond should start small, with a chunky gobbet full of meaty dog botherer...

 

Say what? Is the dog botherer pretending that he's above the culture wars, that he disdains the culture wars, that he's not, along with other reptiles, a proud barking mad member of the conservative forces that routinely howl at the culture wars moon?

Oh it was too much, and the pond knew it wouldn't get any better ...

 

 

Yes, more of the standard shit, but thank the long absent lord not many in Australia had to do what many have done in the United States, the UK and Europe when it comes to human rights ... toddle off to die in an emergency room hooked up to a ventilator ...

Now there's your basic human right, reptile style ... 'the, human, the', or as Bart would have it in German, Die, Human, Die ...

If the reptiles had run the show, the pond shudders to think of the carnage ... but then remembers what Lord Downer and his disciple, the dog botherer, helped produce in Iraq, and it can just begin to imagine what might have gone down, as the humiliated Killer Creighton tore off his mask and walked free and proud ...

More twaddle defending the Donald? Wearisome ranting about Trump's appalling character? Guess that means there should be no wearisome ranting about the dog botherer's appalling character ...

Chris Kenny is my dad. On one of the Sky News political analysis programs he hosts, he has replied to the Chaser joke, lamenting that if his children were ever to Google his name in the future, this is the kind of filth we would stumble across.
Heaven forbid.
Kenny is a staunchly neo-conservative, anti-progress, anti-worker defender of the status quo. He is an unrelenting apologist for the Liberal Party. He was one of Alexander Downer’s senior advisers at the time of the Iraq War. He’s been known to argue for stubborn, sightless inaction on climate change. He spits at anyone concerned with such trivialities as gender equality, environmental issues or labour rights from his Twitter account on a daily basis. Recently, he characterised criticism of the lack of women in Tony Abbott’s Cabinet as a continuation of the Left’s “gender wars”. He is a regular and fervent participant in The Australian’s numerous ongoing bully campaigns against those who question its editorial practices and ideological biases. The profoundly irresponsible, dishonest, hate-filled anti-multiculturalist Andrew Bolt has recently referred to Kenny on his blog as “a friend”.
And it’s a jokey picture of a bestial embrace that I should be afraid of discovering online? (here) 

It's an old trope, but some things never get old ... and the pond thought it should remind those who came late to the story, how the dog botherer earned his name.

And so to a couple of last gasp dog botherer gobbets, cut into digestible sizes ...

 

 

Unilaterally leading the world in energy innovation and efficiency? It's too long to repeat here, but take a squiz at the BBC in October of last year answering the question What is Trump's record on the environment?

"It'll start getting cooler. You just watch ... I don't think science knows, actually."

Barking mad, but then, why should the dog botherer, who has dedicated his life to climate science denialism care? Or think that's a significant achievement?

Leading the world in combating a gigantic hoax?

Oh it's all too wearying ... but at least the pond has reached the end of what turned out to be a predictable litany, designed to suggest that we'll someday look back on the Donald as an unfairly maligned genius, and Fox News as being right all along ... as opposed to being barking mad, far right Q delusional all along ...

 

 

Less abrasive? What a pity, because after all that, the pond is only left with abrasive thoughts of the 'fuck Killer Creighton and the dog botherer' kind ...

But then there always comes a moment of redeeming pleasure, when the pond can visit the immortal Rowe here, and discover a cartoon to be treasured as a way of wrapping up, and possibly even redeeming, proceedings ...

In which "Ned" and the erudite Henry hold forth ...

 

 

Yeah, Joe ... SloMo is with you all the way on climate change and climate science. 

 Here, have an inauguration present, just to show how serious we are ...

 

 

Oh and while we're cutting the malarkey, have a lizard Oz editorial showing deep concern for climate science ...

 

 

Yes, burning heaps of gas will really help fix the planet ...

And so to the rest of the day at the lizard Oz ... and naturally enough there were a host of pundits poking at the entrails ...

 

Good old simplistic Simon, and already the Murdochian Seib to hand to raise saucy doubts and fears,  but as always the pond favoured nattering "Ned", because the main aim of the pond is to remind stray readers that old fogeys of the white kind still litter the lizard Oz ... (why they can even become President of the United States) ...

 

You see the pond is always bemused by, and always marvels at, the way that "Ned" never seems to remember that he's a Murdochian, a kissing cousin to Fox News, as soul-less an operation as has been seen since the days of Hearst ...

Sheesh, the pond felt the need for a cartoon just to pluck up the courage before plunging into the morass of verbiage ...

 

 

Ah, that's better ...

 

The evils of the age? Strong words, perhaps, but true enough when it comes to talk of the partisan dumpster fire unleashed on the United States by Chairman Rupert and his minions ...

 

 

Meanwhile, the pond is waiting for the slip that will reveal that deep in his heart "Ned" remains one of the tribe ... here no Jimbo Murdoch, no Jimbo Murdoch here ...

 

Oh please, credit where credit is due. The Donald didn't do it all alone ... he had enormous help from Fox and from journalists who just loved the train wreck, because you never had to wonder about where your copy was coming from ...

 

 

And so to the final gobbet, and proof that "Ned" remains at heart a devoted Murdochian ...

 

Oh fucketty fuck, already with the talk of identity politics, and blather about lies, when the Donald, and Fox News and the Murdochians are full of not just lies, but endless bullshit?

As for the Donald, and him being a political martyr, and talk of unity, fuck that horseshit, that's the oldest con in the book ...

 

 

Meanwhile, there was more Donald at the top of the digital page, but one figure stood out ...

 

 

 

No, not Troy harking back to JFK, in anticipation perhaps of a Cuban missile crisis, or perhaps a return to Vietnam to expand the war, or raise totally stupid and unrealistic expectations, it was the erudite Henry who caught the pond's eye, as he usually does on a Friday ...

Come on down hole in the bucket fixer, so that the pond might avoid all this talk of the Donald and Joe ...

 

 

Indeed, indeed, how wise to berate the Germans and steer clear of January 6th when talking of the fragility of freedom ... why it's even better than berating Boris for all the Brexit woes currently going down in the name of specious freedom ...

 

 

Indeed, indeed. The Germans had failed in a spectacular way to build a peaceful, loving empire of the British kind, which left the world with a tremendous respect for civilisation ... including but not limited to the wondrous mess in Africa and what is loosely termed the middle east by British folk, and the splendid partition which now sees a Hindu nationalist government inspired by Adolf in charge of proceedings in the sub-continent ...

But do go on ...

 

Indeed, indeed it is easy, erudite Henry, to forget that it wasn't Germany's academics that had kind words for Herr Hitler.

Why there were some down under who thought he would be labelled as the really great man of the century, and who also didn't give a rat's arse about Poland, and incidentally thought the Japanese might benefit from pig iron shipments.

And who was that visionary?

 

 

 

Ah the pond loves to revisit old bits of the pond, and for that, many thanks to the hole in the bucket man, and so to his concluding gobbet ...

 

The pond will resist the temptation to list all the western thinkers who were tempted by eugenics ... why down under we had our share, as noted here ... and at The Conversation here ... and let us not forget that it was racial segregation in the United States that inspired the Nazis, as noted in the eugenics wiki here ...

Let us not forget the deeply anti-Semitic Henry Ford, or the deeds of IBM or a host of other US companies that were comfortable working with the Nazis (just love a cleansing Fanta), nor forget the American First movement and slogan, so recently revived by the recently departed Donald, with good people allegedly on both sides ...

Indeed, as we look back on the few days that separate the United States from January 6th, we should remember that the Donald's relationship to the cause was noted long ago in The New Yorker, in an out of paywall 2016 piece here, which ended this way ...

...The culminating shock of “Imbeciles”—a book full of shocking anecdotes—is the fact that Buck v. Bell is still on the books and was cited as precedent in court as recently as 2001. Forced or coercive sterilizations never entirely went away either. In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that at least a hundred and forty-eight female prisoners in California were sterilized without proper permission between 2006 and 2010. Last year, a district attorney in Nashville was fired for including sterilization requirements in plea deals.
Despite these contemporary remnants of America’s involvement in eugenics, and despite the fact that the movement shaped national policy and held sway in the upper reaches of society for many years, this chapter of American history is surprisingly absent from the common conception of the country’s past. It’s not that it has been ignored by historians or journalists. The New Yorker ran a lengthy four-part series on eugenics in 1984, and a number of books have been published on the topic. Many of these works approach the story of American eugenics as though it will be a surprise to the reader, which is probably a safe bet. Of the two other books on Buck v. Bell that have appeared in the past ten years, one has the subtitle “The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity,” while the other ends by noting that the history of eugenics in the U.S. is “often forgotten.” Cohen, too, writes that “Buck v. Bell is little remembered today.” Yet it seems that the collective forgetfulness is not a matter of some well of information remaining untapped but of our inability or unwillingness to soak up what is drawn out of it.
What is hardest to forget about “Imbeciles” is the stream of grandiose invective against the supposedly unfit—the diatribes concerning “germs of dependency and delinquency” and the “world peopled by a race of degenerates and defectives.” It’s a language that combines the detachment of scientific terminology with the heat of bigoted slurs. It’s clearly from another time, but, lacking any lip service to equality and opportunity and the other touchstones of American political rhetoric, it also seems to come from another country. This is not how we talk about ourselves. And yet there are passages that sound startlingly familiar. In the debate over the Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded eugenically undesirable races from the U.S., a senator from Alabama declared, “We are coming to a pitiful pass in this great country when it is unpopular to speak the English language, the American language”—a lament that might have been taken from yesterday’s paper, except that he was bemoaning the proliferation of Yiddish.
It’s impossible, especially, to read “Imbeciles” without thinking of the current election cycle. Although the concerns of the eugenics movement don’t map neatly onto today’s political divides, patterns of thought are repeated: fears of procreation and infiltration still have force, although they’re directed not at “hopelessly vicious protoplasm” but at “anchor babies”; instead of the pure blood of the Nordic races, we hear invocations of that other superior species, the Winners. The 2016 Presidential campaign has reverberated with appeals to strength and victory and virility and contempt for weakness and failure and foreigners, hitting notes of blatant ugliness that we’re not used to hearing in the public sphere. The response in some quarters has been bafflement, as though this way of speaking had materialized out of nowhere. But perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising. As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to a friend, about his pleasure in writing the Buck decision, “Sooner or later one gets a chance to say what one thinks.”

Oh dear, so the pond couldn't resist remembering the Donald, and the culminating shock of remembering that the erudite Henry had a soft spot for the Donald, and would sometimes scribble in his defence ... and yet, speaking of evil men, as even a secularist sometimes must ...

 

Never mind, it's always worth remembering that each day in reptile hell, we shouldn't forget all that's gone down, and hope that, as happened with Hitler,  others will join Rowe in opening the cellar door, with more door-opening Rowe always to hand here ...