In which the pond seeks any old Xian fundamentalist distraction from the Friday nightmare ...

 

Of late the pond has been experiencing a curious waking nightmare. 

Each Thursday, as the pond's eyelids flutter open, it imagines it's already Friday and it's time to head off to deal with the hole in the bucket man ...

It's a comprehensive discombobulation, and the pond is a fair way through Thursday before it finally realises it isn't Friday, and holey Henry isn't due yet ...

The pond remembers experiencing the same terror in university days, at the thought of enduring yet another lecture from a tedious academic intent on numbing senses. There was one who used to stalk the corridors shouting "it's all chaff" at the suggestion of having a nice meal ...

This weird dislocation isn't helped when an esteemed correspondent foreshadows Friday by unveiling details of a Quad rant ...

Off on another tangent, but this may be a harbinger of a future Friday foray from Holey Henry. OK - he may be required to continue with the reptile theme of ‘any mention of concern for Palestinian kids needlessly starving to death is 21 st century anti-semitism - and we do mean anti-Jewishism’, but this has given him opportunity to display some of his dilettantism in art, coupled with a hard shove to some of them pushy blacks.
On this day, the Henry appears on the ‘Quad Rant’ with an essay titled ‘Authenticity and Indigenous Art’. It starts with reference to articles in, of course, ‘The Australian’ which constituted a ‘devastating expose’ of the APY Art Centre. Henry goes on with gratuitous response to a rhetorical comment from a Minister in the NT Government; Henry ‘A glance at the long list of Aboriginal corporations that regularly fail to meet their statutory reporting requirements would have readily answered the minister’s question.’
But our Henry has found references to one Eric Michaels, which, apparently, set him off. Michaels is a Henry character - American, Jewish, who died young (40) from AIDS. Michaels’ involvement in indigenous Australian ‘culture’ was ostensibly to set up radio and television services for indigenous people around Yuendemu, into the 1980s, but seems he dabbled in many other areas of ‘culture’. What the Henry has seized on is an essay titled ‘Bad Aboriginal Art’. The Henry almost pontificates on the existence of ‘bad’ Aboriginal art, even though it is not clear what Michaels’ definition of ‘art’ was, for indigenous graphics, and, it follows, neither writer offers criteria for identifying ‘bad’ from ‘good’ of the work of the desert artists.
Our Henry kinda hints that doing dot paintings with acrylics is contrary to authenticity, but he offers no way to make permanent versions of the sand representations that are the precursors of the dot paintings. It all rather fades away - while leaving the kind of taint that Windschuttle looked for in contributions to the ‘Rant’, and, presumably, the new editor also favours.
Oh, at its end, the ‘Rant’ reminds its readers that Henry Ergas received the Order of Australia in 2016 “for distinguished service to infrastructure economics, and to higher education, to public policy development and review, and as a supporter of emerging artists”.

Then suddenly it was Friday, the waking nightmare had started, the Friday foray had begun, and the pond looked desperately around for alternatives at the top of the digital edition ...

Elle? Elle's the centrepiece?!

And the highly esteemed and much fought over far right perch had been awarded to a story about the ABC? 

And elsewhere sundry reptiles, dunking on Dunkley, were doing their best for a final push to Victory?

It was too much for a koala to bear and already the liar from the Shire is just a distant reptile memory, only celebrated by mourning cartoonists ...

Meanwhile, in other newspapers, there were many other stories to behold ...

The pond knew that the reptile dunkin' Dunkley fix was in when it spotted Captain Spud down below the fold making a wildly exciting guest appearance ...

Yes, there he was, and there was that rat from the deep north still in the reptile ranks, Milner minor, and, oh the ongoing nightmare, there was the hole in the bucket man ...

The pond was so terrified it did something rare, strayed outside the day's offerings and returned to the meretricious Merritt channeling dashing Donners...

The KJV? And that's what led us to the stolen generation? 

And as for the laws of England, the pond supposes it's produced a fine situation for homosexuals in Africa. 

Rum, sodomy and the lash says the pond with a huzzah.

The pond can remember the good old days, when dashing Donners himself would be given space in the lizard Oz to rail at Catholics, Jews and all the other riff raff that turned up on these shores. Like that wog Raffaello Carboni who dared write a book about the Eureka Stockade ...

Why you can find his presumption at Project Gutenberg ... and the pond was startled to find a glossary on the work on a site dedicated to Australian culture, as if this riff raff had contributed anything up against the pieties of little England, except perhaps to allow a caricature in a book and a film done by sturdy Englishmen noting they were a weird mob ...

But the pond digresses, in a way that often happens with those afflicted by reptile and swamp fever, as the meretricious Merritt wholeheartedly agrees wth the dashing Donners about wiping Catholics, Jews, pesky difficult furriners and the rest of the riff raff from the map ... and as for uppity, insolent blacks, don't get them started ...

If you want to really fix the middle East, send in a few men from little England (not to forget map-drawing little England women) ... 

Now back to the marauding Merritt ...

Ah, good old Judaeo-Xian values ...

There is of course a wiki list of massacres of Indigenous  Australians, showing those values at their finest ... but there's no time to brood, there's just a chance for a little more black bashing ...

A nation of critical thinkers, free from bias?

Ah,  of course, free from bias, and the opium-dealing British empire and the KJV in hand ...

Only in the lizard Oz could you find such an expert wanker channelling another wanker. 

Bring back dashing Donners, the pond says, we should have such wankery directly from the horse's mouth, not regurgitated by some lickspittle lackey reptile, spewing out the Donners gospel like ectoplasm into the ether ...

And so to the dread task, and as foreshadowed by the pond's esteemed correspondent, it was indeed a Friday foray from Holey Henry. OK - he may be required to continue with the reptile theme of ‘any mention of concern for Palestinian kids needlessly starving to death is 21 st century anti-semitism ...

Come on down holey bucket man, deliver the sermon ...

Why the pond's correspondent could almost take credit for that headline ... but is absolved from the rest of the rant ...

It is of course the pond's inclination, when holey Henry gets on his high horse, to interrupt with a few headlines showing that the collective punishment and Gaza genocide is continuing apace ...

There was that story featured in Al Jazeera ... and there was a series of dot points ...

There was a "pressing for answers", but not too much pressing, because after all there's still ice cream to be eaten ...

And there were denials, as featured in Haaretz ...

Meanwhile, there were words from that notoriously left wing Italian government ...

Back with Henry's piece for a nanosecond, the reptiles offered up a snap ....

... but this story in the Graudian? Nah, not so much ...

More than a hundred Palestinians were killed in the early hours of Thursday morning, Gaza health officials said, when desperate crowds gathered round aid trucks and Israeli troops opened fire, in an incident that the US president, Joe Biden, warned was likely to complicate ceasefire talks.

There were starkly different accounts of how the victims died in the chaos that took place near Gaza City in the north of the strip. Israel’s military denied shooting into large crowds of hungry people and said most were killed in a crush or run over by trucks trying to escape. Soldiers only fired at a small group that moved away from the trucks and threatened a checkpoint, a spokesperson said.

Witnesses and survivors described bullets hitting crowds around the aid trucks, and Mohammed Salha, acting director of the al-Awda hospital, which treated 161 casualties, said most appeared to have been shot.

Gaza health officials said at least 112 people were killed and 280 injured after Israeli forces opened fire on an aid distribution point. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said it was an “ugly massacre conducted by the Israeli occupation army on people who waited for aid trucks at the Nabulsi roundabout”.

Biden said the US was trying to determine what happened and that the loss of life would complicate efforts to broker a deal to stop fighting and release Israeli hostages, before the holy month of Ramadan, which starts on 10 March.

Hamas said the incident could jeopardise talks in Qatar. The group would not allow talks “to be a cover for the enemy to continue its crimes”, it said.

The death toll from Israeli attacks on Gaza has now passed 30,000. With more than 70,000 others injured, and thousands more uncounted victims buried under the rubble of collapsed buildings, nearly one in 20 of the prewar population of Gaza are now casualties of attacks.

The US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, said earlier on Thursday that more than 25,000 women and children had been killed by Israel since 7 October 2023, adding that Israel could and should do more to protect civilians.

The survivors are stalked by hunger, with “pockets of starvation” reported particularly in the north, and widespread malnutrition that has already killed some children. There are also severe shortages of medical supplies, clean water and shelter.

The desperation of crowds who died trying to reach the food aid underlined the extent of shortages in the north around Gaza City. UN officials have described a blockade within a blockade, with additional Israeli controls that make it even harder to get supplies into northern Gaza than the south.

One injured survivor, Kamel Abu Nahel, said he went to the aid distribution point in the middle of the night because he hoped for food supplies, after two months of eating animal feed.

After trucks arrived and a crowd gathered, Israeli soldiers opened fire, so people scattered to seek shelter but returned once the gunfire stopped, he told the AP news agency. However the troops opened fire again, and Abu Nahel was shot in the leg then run over by a truck that was speeding away.

There were so many wounded that some were taken to hospitals in donkey carts; videos shared on social media appeared to show medics walking beside one piled with victims. Hospital corridors were crowded with survivors and relatives.

The Israeli military spokesperson Lt Col Peter Lerner said most casualties were caused by a crush around some trucks in the convoy after they first passed the Israeli military checkpoint into northern Gaza.

Later, crowds chasing the final truck in the convoy turned and moved back towards the checkpoint, he said, prompting troops to fire warning shots, and then lethal rounds in self-defence. The Israeli military released footage of crowds round the trucks which it said showed the lethal crush but not the shooting incident.

Lerner declined to say how much time elapsed between the crush and the shooting, or estimate casualties in either, saying only he did not believe the Palestinian toll.

It was not clear who had supplied the trucks of food. The UN agency for Palestine, Unrwa, has not sent an aid convoy to northern Gaza since 5 February, when its trucks were attacked by the Israeli navy even though the delivery had been approved for transit. Lerner said he did not know who sent the aid.

There are thought to be about 300,000 people still living in northern Gaza, months after Israel ordered all civilians to leave.

Some were not able to travel, others feared they would not find a place to stay in the crammed shelters of the south, felt that with strikes all over Gaza they preferred to take their chances at home, or worried Israeli forces would not allow them to return if they headed south.

The deaths prompted fresh international demands for a ceasefire. The UN’s undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, said: “Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.”

Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, said: “The tragic deaths in Gaza demand an immediate ceasefire to facilitate more humanitarian aid, the release of hostages and the protection of civilians.”

In the region, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan accused Israel of targeting civilians, and separately called for more aid to reach Gaza and greater international pressure on Israel to reach a ceasefire deal.

In February barely 100 trucks a day of aid had reached Gaza, just half the amount that got through in January, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of Unrwa, told journalists on a visit to Jerusalem.

And it is just a trickle compared with the 500 trucks that went in daily with food and medical aid before the war started in October. Then Gaza had a functioning economy, agriculture sector and commercial imports, with many people feeding themselves.

After Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and in which more than 200 people were kidnapped and taken to Gaza, Israel tightened a years-long blockade to halt entry of most food, water and medical supplies to Gaza. It says the controls on supplies are vital to its war on Hamas, and efforts to recover hostages.

With much of Gaza in ruins and the majority of its population displaced from their homes, almost everyone now relies on aid. Lazzarini described the restrictions as a siege that had brought the strip to the brink of an unprecedented human-made famine.

“What’s extraordinary in this conflict is the man-made widespread hunger and even looming starvation and famine in some pockets,” he said. “The type of situation or siege being imposed on the Gaza Strip since October 7 has led to a situation not seen anywhere else in the world.

“Within four or five months, suddenly we talk about a famine, which is absolutely easy to reverse because to reverse it depends only and exclusively on the proper political will.”

The proper political will?

Talk to Henry's hand ...

Meanwhile, the cleansing is having its desired effect ... per Haaretz ...

And just like the meretricious Merritt the right sort of curriculum is being rewarded ...

Hmm, our Henry is a pretty good Netanyahu toady. A first class flunkey. Do they make the prize open to anyone around the world?

But enough of the interruptions, it's time for the hole in the bucket man to finish off in his patented genocidal, collective punishment style ...

Nothing will erase the horrors ...  

... but it's very unlikely that the far right extremists, fundamentalists and barbarians on both sides will be called to account, and the genocide and collective punishment and displacement will be deemed a tremendous success ...

Way more than enough already, with the pond's esteemed correspondent's prescience proven beyond a shadow of a doubt ...

All that's left is an apology.

The pond is mortified that in revisiting this seemingly endless nightmare of suffering, it has failed to note one great comedy item designed to relieve stress.

It was ASIO's desire to ensure ongoing funding that helped fund this tremendous form of trolling, this teasing bit of theatre, and the cartoonists leapt on it like starving wolf hounds, so that the pond might end on a high ...