In which the ghosts of the onion muncher and Malware infect the pond and so there's a scuttle through a Killer offering and a standard bout of climate change denialism ...

 

Malware's NBN has been behaving very badly in the last few days, even by Malware's shockingly low standards.

Even doing a simple blog has become a tedious chore, involving endless drop outs, numbing, enervating waiting for flickers, signs of life ...

The supplier has promised a day offline in the near future while somebody tries to throw a spanner in the works to make it work.

Fat chance, it's the culmination of years of Malware's pride and joy, with more money poured down the aged and broken HFC well... 

It meant that the pond approached the reptiles today in a sullen frame of mind. Their campaign to destroy the full to overflowing intertubes had worked ...

As a reminder, the puppet master behind the onion muncher who had ordered Malware to destroy the internet sat in pride of place at the top far right of the digital edition, in a highly esteemed, much desired position, because in the company of loons, the top extreme far right position is what's needed ...

Naturally the pond gave petulant Peta a red card,  while noting that the AJN part of the reptile coverage of events in the middle east focussed on the STC, rather than the ongoing genocide in Gaza or Benji's recent capers ...

Down below the pond heaved a sigh of relief ... simplistic here no conflict of interest Simon and the bouffant one were carrying on in the usual way, and could be safely ignored ...

    

All that was left for the pond was a quick bit of business with Killer and a standard serve from a climate science denialist ...

The pond did pause to note that Jack the Insider apparently couldn't trust Uncle Elon, bunkered down Gates or the Zuck, but somehow forgot to mention the Emeritus Chairman. 

Good to know that apparently News Corp is the one place you can listen to and rely on as an irrefutable chronicler of our past, present and future.

And with that hollow horse laugh out of the way, it was on with Killer ...

Ah, masks, vaccines and election integrity, not to mention the right to see dick pics. Good old Killer ...

Indeed, indeed, and at this point, the reptiles began a parade of snaps, summarised here ...

Stripped of his snaps, Killer was left with nothing much more than his usual sense of outrage ...

Indeed, indeed, the pond shed tears at the rights of Nazis to be heard. Perhaps Killer should join Substack. 

What's that, even Quigginomics is a tad concerned by the new company ... If someone organized a group move of anti-Nazi Substackers to a new provider, I would join. Anyone willing to bell the cat? (here)

No one belled the cat, and to be fair, the pond itself is a constant, dedicated supplier of far right bile, misinformation and dangerous nonsense, and each day the pond wakes with the notion that finally someone will decide to ban the pond outright, and what a relief that would be for all ...

Meanwhile, the traumatised Killer returned to his favourite trauma... masks ...

What's deeply absurd about this is that the anti-maskers and the anti-vaxxers and the anti-lock down mob were at it from the get go, and that's how Killer earned his reputation in the Killing fields... and now he can't stop yammering about it. Talk about free speech, the way that Killer freely blathers about his fear of masks suggests there should be a law about it, or at least a trip to the shrink's chaise longue ...

Say what? It's only Uncle Elon that stands alone against the ravaging herd, providing safe shelter for Nazis?

Didn't Jack the Insider just have a go at him? Nah, not really, Jack missed the fun of watching free speech advocate Uncle Elon squirm at the notion that free speech should allow people to think and say that Uncle Elon was a prick of the first water.

As for him being the only salvation, where has Killer been? The pond understands that a gigantic Ponzi scheme is about to make squillions for the orange Jesus, and it seems that Killer has missed the fabulous news of an amazingly successful rival to Uncle Elon has arrived...

The pond doesn't have the time to contemplate meme stocks - you can do that in the Graudian. 

Instead the pond would like to add to its collection of a Trump degree, a Trump steak and a shot of Trump vodka ...

There's more fun at The Daily Beast (paywall) and elsewhere celebrating the endless number of sheep lining up to be fleeced ...

The pond would like to spend more time with the sheep, but must get out a standard burst of reptile climate change denialism before Malware's NBN strikes again ...

Usually you could find Michael Asten with the Speccie mob (paywall), but for anyone wanting a reminder outside the paywall, Steve Bishop back in 2018 in Independent Australia wrote about The Australian's continued support of climate change denialism ...

The pond thought it might introduce the new Asten by offering up the old Asten ...

Splendid stuff, but time and life move on and the new Asten had to freshen up his act. 

It was time to nuke the country to save the planet, while dissing that whole renewables thingie and yearning for sweet innocent virginal Oz coal ...

Back with the old Asten just for the heck of it ...

By golly, doing FUD was easy in the old days, but nothing stands still, and so the new Asten had to get down with nuking the country ...

At this point in nuking the country the reptiles featured Captain Spud and Rish! and the pond was pleased at the distraction ...

For some reason in recent days the pond has been besieged by tales of woe about little England.

There was Gary Young in the NYRB observing Small island (paywall) and asking What has happened to Britain?

The answer was melancholy and woe, much longer than this sample...

Britain’s diminished status has been anticipated for some time. It was, to my mind, best captured by the broadcaster Peter Jennings on New Year’s Eve 2000 as he watched an impressive fireworks display cascade over the River Thames:

It’s something of a reminder for those people who pay attention to history that in 1900, when Queen Victoria was on the throne, she presided over the largest empire in history. Four hundred million people, one fifth the earth’s surface…. And now as we come to the end of the century, for all this fantastic show that they’ve put on…Britain’s possessions have dwindled…but the Falkland Islands are still British.

Britain’s decline is relative, of course (its economy remains the sixth largest in the world), but it is real (it was fifth until the end of 2021, when India, its erstwhile colony, overtook it). Decades ago this diminishment was understood to be gradual and generational. After the Suez Crisis in 1956, there was an attempt to retreat to this smaller position in an orderly manner. I’m fifty-five, and my generation’s parents grew up in a virtually monoracial country, reliant on heavy industry, with the globe colored pink to mark British territories. I was raised to learn the metric system, the names of new countries—Zimbabwe, Benin, Burkina Faso—in a nation that saw itself as the stable conduit between Europe and America, with postcolonial ties across the globe. My children’s cohort has adjusted to an economy in which Indian restaurants employ more people than steel, coal, and shipbuilding all put together, and membership in the EU is a fact of history.

But recently it has felt like we have been experiencing a more disorienting, abrupt descent. Public infrastructure has been run down to such a level that expectations of service, delivery, and maintenance that were commonplace just a few years ago now seem implausible. Trains and emergency rooms are only marginally more reliable on days when the workers are not on strike than on days when they are.

Poorly maintained buildings thrown up using cheap concrete several decades ago have started crumbling, forcing many schools to close shortly before the school year started last fall. Four city councils have declared bankruptcy in the past year—including Nottingham, the ninth-largest city in the country—because they cannot meet statutory obligations with the money they get from the central government. In 2019 the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty accused the UK government of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population.” Four years later his successor said that “things have got worse” and claimed the UK was in violation of international law over poverty levels.

Welfare payments have been slashed and the threshold for disability payments raised. In 2010, when the Conservatives came to power and launched their austerity agenda, the Trussell Trust, which oversees the largest network of food banks in the UK, operated thirty-five nationwide. Today it runs more than 1,300. At least one in seven of those using food banks is employed.

That includes teachers and nurses. The salary of some experienced nurses has fallen by 20 percent since 2010; of experienced teachers, by 13 percent. In some areas you can’t get an appointment for your child to see a mental health professional unless they have already tried to commit suicide. In February 2023 I was diagnosed with a serious heart condition and put on a waiting list for an MRI. I’m still waiting...

And so on, and then Sam Knight turned up in The New Yorker to moan What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain? Living standards have fallen. The country is exhausted by constant drama. But the U.K. can’t move on from the Tories without facing up to the damage that has occurred. (paywall).

Again the pond can only offer a small sample of a dismal tale of woe ...

Some people insisted that the past decade and a half of British politics resists satisfying explanation. The only way to think about it is as a psychodrama enacted, for the most part, by a small group of middle-aged men who went to élite private schools, studied at the University of Oxford, and have been climbing and chucking one another off the ladder of British public life—the cursus honorum, as Johnson once called it—ever since. The Conservative Party, whose history goes back some three hundred and fifty years, aids this theory by not having anything as vulgar as an ideology. “They’re not on a mission to do X, Y, or Z,” as a former senior adviser explained. “You win and you govern because we are better at it, right?”

Another way to think about these years is to consider them in psychological, or theoretical, terms. In “Heroic Failure,” the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole explains Brexit by describing Britain’s fall from imperial nation to “occupied colony” of the E.U., and the rise of a powerful English nationalism as a result. Last year, Abby Innes, a scholar at the London School of Economics, published “Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail,” which argues that, since Thatcher, Britain’s political mainstream has become as devoted to particular ideas about running the state—a default commitment to competition, markets, and forms of privatization—as Brezhnev’s U.S.S.R. ever was. “The resulting regime,” Innes writes, “has proved anything but stable.”

These observations are surely right, but I worry that they obscure two basic truths about Britain’s experience since 2010. The first is that the country has suffered grievously. These have been years of loss and waste. The U.K. has yet to recover from the financial crisis that began in 2008. According to one estimate, the average worker is now fourteen thousand pounds worse off per year than if earnings had continued to rise at pre-crisis rates—it is the worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars. “Nobody who’s alive and working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this,” Torsten Bell, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, which published the analysis, told the BBC last year. “This is what failure looks like.”

High levels of employment and immigration, coupled with the enduring dynamism of London, mask a national reality of low pay, precarious jobs, and chronic underinvestment. The trains are late. The traffic is bad. The housing market is a joke. “The core problem is easy to observe, but it’s tough to live with,” Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, told me. “It’s just not that productive an economy anymore.”

With stagnant wages, people’s living standards have fallen. In 2008, Brown’s Labour government commissioned Michael Marmot, a renowned epidemiologist, to come up with ways to reduce England’s health inequalities. Marmot made suggestions in six policy areas, including better access to child care, walking and cycling programs, social-security reforms, and measures to improve people’s sense of agency at work. In 2010, he presented his ideas to the incoming Conservative-led coalition, which accepted his findings. “I thought, Wow, this is great. . . . I was pretty bullish about the whole thing,” Marmot told me. “The problem was they then didn’t do it.”

Ten years later, Marmot led a follow-up study, in which he documented stalling life expectancy, particularly among women in England’s poorest communities—and widening inequalities. “For men and women everywhere the time spent in poor health is increasing,” he wrote. “This is shocking.” According to Marmot, the U.K.’s health performance since 2010, which includes rising infant mortality, slowing growth in children, and the return of rickets, makes it an outlier among comparable European nations. “The damage to the nation’s health need not have happened,” Marmot concluded in 2020. He told me, “It was a political choice.”

And that is the second, all too obvious, fact of British life throughout this period: a single party has been responsible. You cannot say that the country has been ruled against its will. Since 2010, the Tories have emerged as the winner of the popular vote and as the largest party in Parliament in three elections. In December, 2019, Boris Johnson won an eighty-seat majority in the House of Commons, the Conservatives’ biggest electoral success since the heyday of Thatcherism.

Wow, so that's the mob that the retired prof is offering as a role model in his next gobbet ...

At this point the pond should, just for the sake of completeness and nostalgia, finish off the old Asten ... the golden days of the likes of Nicola ...

Yes, in the olden days FUD was so much easier and simpler.

Now on to the current FUD and fierce alarmism, not about the impact of climate change, but the wonders of clean, dinkum, pure, virginal, innocent Oz coal ...

The pond would usually get alarmed by the sight of a short final gobbet ... but for once it serves a purpose, as an interstitial between the infallible Pope of the day ...

After passing Go, pause for interstitial gap filler and closer, offering a stupendous vision once you've got your Go cash ...

... and with that suitable gap separating the 'toons, the pond can jump straight to the immortal Rowe for the closer ...

The pond does hope that the Easter Bunny does the right thing by the pond and serves up the detail, with lashings of dark chocolate... how better to enjoy the break than munching on Dan the Man and Captain Spud/