Normal studies resume for students prepared to put in out of usual herpetology school hours ...

 

Okay, as the Latin teacher used to say at Tamworth High, get out your Bembricks ...

After bro's fairy floss sugar hit high this morning, the Ovid as it were of lizard Oz herpetology studies, it's time to get down into the trenches ...

Yes, it's long after usual class hours, but the pond doesn't resile from dwelling with the bromancer. Such pleasures only come along every so often, and so much of the rest is dross.

Speaking of reptile dross, is there anybody drossier than the Caterist?

After the dunking at Dunkley, the pond wondered where the reptiles would go next, and as noted in passing this morning, an EXCLUSIVE pointed the way ...

The funniest thing in this flicking of the switch was that the reptiles had to get into the time machine and dredge up another EXCLUSIVE ...

There was more, but back at the Caterist, two legends were on parade in huge snaps, reptile idols ...

That pair surely earn a cartoon ...

Then it was on with the Caterist doing his best to fear monger ...

Back at the top of the digital edition, there was talk of nuking the country ...

The reptiles have herded Captain Spud into this EXCLUSIVE space. 

Not the sharpest light emitting from an SMR powered bulb, Captain Spud has now worked himself into the unfortunate position of naming locations and detailed plans, presumably including cost comparisons, and before the May budget.

No doubt he will point to the many SMRs littering the world and generating an abundance of low cost energy.

The Caterist has helped corral him into these conundrums, though this day is just a fair amount of nattering negativity ... though even by Caterist ning nong standards a reference to the laptop class in Leichhardt is well above par. 

More like a triple bogey. Better to have revived an ancient classic like chardonnay swillers of Kirribilli? How about the caffè latte swillers of north Sydney? Is a Caterist bear of little brain always reliant on alliteration?

It's one response to the dunking in Dunkley, promising a dunking in Grayndler, but as a member of the lower north shore 'leet, working out of Canberra for a federal government financed quango, some might wonder how much in touch the Caterist is with the west, or the planet.

Never mind, it's a bit like making it to the end of Caesar's Gallic Wars ...

Compare this to the bromancer, and you'll understand why the pond went with the bro, but in the meantime, could the pond offer some humble reaffirming advice to the Caterist. 

Yes, he's as thick as your average brick, and as nuanced as concrete slab wall flung up overnight, but surely he's on the right path. 

While busy pocketing cash in the paw from Canberra, if you hope to attract the attention of voters, abusing them is surely the right way forward. 

Call them dickhead 'leets, talk down to them about their luxury beliefs, berate the use of laptops (why not throw in cell phones too?), and victory will be yours. The pond believes if the Caterist adopts the right posture - head firmly stuck up bum so far no light or hint of global warming can penetrate - SMRs will litter the land, and the only tragedy is that the pond won't be alive to see it.

Here, have a cartoon to celebrate winning strategies ...

And so to the Lynch mob part of the triptych, because indeed there three reptiles in this afternoon's study (remember The Caterist, the Major and the Lynch Mob is under contract to Ethan Coen as a potential title for use in his lesbian trilogy).

The pond has absolutely no interest in the matter to hand, but will always turn up for a public lynching. The reptiles obviously felt the same way because they slipped in a couple of huge snaps ...

What's deeply weird and truly wondrous is the casual way that the Lynch mob casually lynches the likes of Rish!

Even as he offers up a shameless, dangerous speech terrifying Graudian types, nothing is good enough for the Lyncher in chief...

And unlike Rish!, the Lynch mob knows how to do racism. 

Note his talk of woke, pro-ED madrasahs ... if the pond understands correctly they've already taken over London, or perhaps even the whole of little England ...

How the Lynch mob must love the poorly educated ...

Did you note the cunning way that the Lynch mob slipped in "she" as the student doing the thinking?

Could it be that he's catering in the most cynical way to the new hegemony. Surely "she" should be in the kitchen, learning how to cook by watching struggle street mum Dame Slap show off her skills ...

Not to worry, it was the last Lynch mob gobbet and the last of a very short listicle...

The pond immediately had a devastating image of hapless students trapped in front of a screen with the Lynch mob inflicting PowerPoint slides on them in the name of a truly expensive HECS education...

Such suffering in these troubled times, but in recognition of his use of "woke", the Lynch mob has earned a commendation ...

And so to some serious suffering, always the case when the Major abandons his search for that lost Order of Lenin medal and turns up in the lizard Oz to strut his stuff ...

The pond has been to this reptile well many times before - Media Watch understated the level of bias in the lizard Oz - and has its own ideas on what might currently be fuelling antisemitism ...

But the Major is a Zionist of the first water, and has no empathy or sympathy. 

He's comfortably numb, a phenomenon noted by Bernard Avishai in a piece for The New Yorker, What Joe Biden Must Tell the Israeli Public, Amid the escalating horror in Gaza, the President will have to go around Benjamin Netanyahu to forge a postwar vision for the region. (paywall)

“Every night, television newscasts retell the story of a victim of the original attack, or a soldier’s funeral, or a released hostage still suffering the trauma,” Eliezer Yaari, a veteran broadcaster and filmmaker, former combat pilot, and lifelong peace activist, told me. The economy has shrunk, while the I.D.F. has proposed increasing the mandatory reservist service to forty-two days a year, and raised the age of exemption to forty-five. “We see almost nothing of the suffering on the other side,” he said. “But, if we did, we could not take it all in. We’re growing increasingly numb to our own suffering, so how can we not be numb to the suffering of Gazans?”

You won't find the comfortably numb Major reading alternative sources of news ...

That's how you end up a Major ...

At this point, the reptiles slipped in a snap of the Major's hero, the genocidal butcher of Gaza ...

The problem is that he's not the solution, he's the problem... per The New Yorker ...

...Amid the I.D.F.’s proclaimed effort to root out Hamas, an estimated thirty thousand people in Gaza have been killed. The I.D.F. claims that around ten thousand were Hamas fighters (the Gaza Health Ministry does not specify that category)—seventy per cent of the dead are reportedly women and minors. Tens of thousands more, including many children, have suffered serious injuries and amputations. Rafah is a nearly twenty-five-square-mile area, in which refugees from Gaza City and Khan Younis are now sheltering. There are currently around 1.5 million civilians there, most of whom are living in tents—an almost sixfold increase in the population since the war began. (In all of Gaza, at least half the buildings have been destroyed or damaged.) United Nations agencies warn of famine, and note that there is no drinking water or water for showers in many shelters, and that there are many reported cases of hepatitis A, gastroenteritis, diarrhea, smallpox, lice, and influenza. Medical facilities have been raided. The refugees are utterly dependent on the humanitarian aid that is brought in, on average, by about eighty-five trucks.

On Sunday, Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told NBC that the invasion of Rafah should not proceed “unless there is a clear and executable plan to protect those civilians.” Netanyahu’s war cabinet contends that this population can just be moved out of harm’s way. Reserve Major General Tamir Hayman, the managing director of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, told me that the I.D.F. is developing a plan to move refugees “north,” along the coast, and in a central area south of Gaza City. (“We are speaking of people who have anyway left their places and are living in tents; the difference between a tent in the south or a tent in the center isn’t so great; and the choice is easier [than the original move], and is moreover in the general direction of home,” Hayman said.) But any such plan seems a portent of greater catastrophe.

On Thursday, it was reported that at least a hundred and twelve people were killed, and hundreds more injured, when an aid convoy carrying flour and canned food that was escorted by Israeli troops was thronged by starving civilians in the Nabulsi roundabout, quite near the area Hayman spoke of. First eyewitness accounts suggest that Israeli troops fired on the crowd, and although it is not yet clear how many died from gunfire and how many from being trampled or run over—in the local hospital, most of the injuries were said to be bullet wounds—more such horrors seem inevitable if refugees are forced north. (A spokesman for the I.D.F. initially denied that it was responsible for the deaths, and later said that it is “continuing to investigate” the incident.) 

The use of air power is how the I.D.F. minimizes dangers to its land forces—of which, as of this writing, two hundred and forty-two soldiers have died. The I.D.F. revealed that, in an audacious raid on February 11th, it rescued two hostages from a Rafah neighborhood. The Gaza Health Ministry reported that at least ninety-four people, including young children, were killed in the aerial bombardment that provided the troops cover.

Nor does Netanyahu’s postwar plan convincingly suggest how the crisis might end. Israel, his document reads, would maintain security control over the Strip, and demilitarize it, insuring that a “southern closure” will prevent “smuggling from Egypt—both underground and above ground, including at the Rafah crossing.” Gazan youth would be “deradicalized.” Civil affairs would be run by “local officials” who have no ties to “countries or entities that support terrorism”—an apparent reference to Egypt and the Gulf states, which would notionally be called upon to invest in Gaza’s rebuilding, a vast project that will cost billions. “The rehabilitation plan will be financed and led by countries acceptable to Israel,” Netanyahu disingenuously claims. No such candidates are mentioned. Neither is the Palestinian Authority.

Clearly, Netanyahu and his coalition allies—including the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and the internal-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir—are imagining an expansion of the occupation. Various coalition ministers participated in a mass rally in Jerusalem on January 28th, demanding, amid dancing and singing, continuing the fight. Ben-Gvir taunted Gazans, exhorting “voluntary emigration,” and envisioning Jewish settlers returning to the Strip. A Hebrew University poll suggests that a solid majority of Israelis opposes such resettlement. Netanyahu himself is on record saying that it’s “not a realistic goal,” but he does not say why it is realistic to attack in Rafah and yet expect to bring the hostages home alive, or, for that matter, expect local Palestinian officials to put themselves forward for the administration of Gaza under indefinite Israeli rule.

All this is water off the Major's duckly back ...

Back to The New Yorker ...

...Netanyahu, meanwhile, says that the Palestinian situation must be solved in direct negotiations “without preconditions.” Of course, he has preconditions, which are that the whole Land of Israel—read, the entire West Bank—is Israel’s, and that a Palestinian state, which, notionally had always also included Gaza, is impossible. Netanyahu does still face domestic opposition. Polls show that, if an election were held now, his theocratic coalition would lose badly—by as many as thirty seats in the hundred-and-twenty-seat Knesset—to a coalition of secular centrists led by the former chiefs of staff Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, who joined the war cabinet in October. They also show that more than seventy per cent of Israelis want early elections, which would otherwise be held in a couple of years.

The disaffection reflects Netanyahu’s ill preparedness on October 7th but also his assault on the judiciary, which prompted several months of divisive demonstrations. A government crisis is already brewing over the exemption of ultra-Orthodox youth from national service, which the Supreme Court has deemed illegal; the issue pits theocrats against secularist generals, including the Likud defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Hostages’ families, growing desperate, have mustered thousands of sympathizers to weekly demonstrations; they’ve broken into Knesset meetings and blocked highways. Six weeks ago, in a widely watched television interview, Eisenkot—who had lost a son and a nephew in the war—insisted that “the hostages will only return alive if there is a deal,” and whoever speaks of the “absolute defeat” of Hamas was “not speaking the truth.” He insisted that the government must “chart a path”—seemingly code for aligning with Biden’s evolving plan.

But the Major knows nothing of any of this ...

Note that splendid Majorly billy goat butt: "though some may be."

Many are, but the Major is routinely disingenuous and deceptive and misleading. More bluntly, he's a notorious liar.

The pond dealt with the matter of the West Bank recently by referencing a story in The New Yorker, The Israeli Settlers Attacking Their Palestinian Neighbors. (paywall)

Just a few reminders ...

...“They can’t just continue to unleash the settlers on us like that,” Odeh told me. “My generation has always tried to reason with our youth, but they can no longer take it, so what am I to do? People like me, who advocated for peace their whole lives—we are not respected anymore. They say what did Abu Mazen”—Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority—“ever do for us? And they’re right. He keeps asking people to protest peacefully. Peacefully? There’s nothing peaceful about the situation we’re in.”

On October 29th, settlers showed up at one of Qaryut’s two remaining springs. They hung an Israeli flag and, with soldiers present, demolished one of the large concrete water basins that villagers had been using for irrigation for generations. Then the Army closed Qaryut’s access road to the spring. The road separated Shilo and Eli, and Ma’amar guessed that the aim of the settlers and the Army was to connect the two settlements.

For the next couple of weeks, settlers came to the spring frequently, accompanied by soldiers. Some wore shirts with the logo of Artzenu (“Our Land”), a subsidiary of a government-funded organization which is dedicated to farming land in the West Bank before “non-Jewish entities” do. (A spokesperson for Artzenu said, “Not everyone who wears the shirt in their free time represents the organization’s values.”) One day, Ma’amar filmed two soldiers in sniper costumes on the hillside above the spring and young settlers burning tires on the access road. One soldier, lying prone with his rifle balanced on a tripod, aimed straight at Ma’amar.

And again ...

...In February, 2023, Netanyahu appointed Smotrich, the finance minister and the head of the Religious Zionist Party, to a governmental position that granted him sweeping powers over West Bank settlements. In 2005, Smotrich had been arrested as part of a small group in possession of seven hundred litres of fuel. The former deputy head of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security agency, accused him of plotting to blow up cars on a highway to protest Israel’s withdrawal from settlements in Gaza. (Smotrich denied the allegation and wasn’t charged with a crime.) Now Smotrich had the authority to legalize unauthorized outposts, to prevent enforcement against illegal Jewish construction, to thwart Palestinian development projects, and to allocate land to settlers.

Around the time of Smotrich’s appointment, a Palestinian gunman shot and killed two settlers. Smotrich said that the Army should “strike the cities of terror and its instigators without mercy, with tanks and helicopters.” Israel, he added, should act “in a way that conveys that the master of the house has gone crazy.” While the Army stood by, hundreds of settlers rampaged through Hawara, a village south of Nablus, killing one person and injuring about a hundred, and burning some thirty homes and a hundred cars. It was the worst outbreak of settler violence in decades. (The I.D.F. did not respond to a request for comment.)

Smotrich, who lives in a settlement, has become one of the most prominent settler ideologists. In 2017, he published his “Decisive Plan” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first step, he wrote, was to make the “ambition for a Jewish State from the river to the sea . . . an accomplished fact” by “establishing new cities and settlements deep inside the territory and bringing hundreds of thousands of additional settlers to live there.” Once “victory by settlement” was accomplished, Smotrich continued, Palestinians would have two options: stay in Israel, without the right to vote in national elections, or emigrate. “Zionism,” he wrote, “was built based on population exchange e.g. the mass Aliyah of Jews from Arab countries and Europe to the Land of Israel, willingly or not, and the exit of masses of Arabs who lived here, willingly or not, to the surrounding Arab areas. This historic pattern seems to require culmination.”

Luckily the Major offered up a last gobbet of disingenuous deceptions and misinformation in the cause of collective displacement, collective punishment, and an ongoing system of apartheid and ghettoisation, or best of all, exile ...

That last reference by the Major is typical of the reptile hive mind.

Check out reviews of his work, but no link. 

That wouldn't have been so hard to provide, but the reptiles want their mug punters trapped in the walled garden, never straying outside the bubble or the hive.

Sure you can google Pappe if you like, and you don't have to head back to 2011. He's still around ...

And so on. Agree or disagree, but why not provide a link or three? 

The answer is that the reptiles routinely treat their readership as tender mushrooms afraid of exposure to the light or alternative viewpoints.

The Major could just as easily supplied a link to the grundle, grundling away in Crikey ... but the reptiles simply don't do it ...there's no room in the bubble.

Never mind, as a bonus, the immortal Rowe of the day is offered as a closer who stayed back after school hours to complete their reptile studies ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, it's that urban legend that became the film Urban Legend by Australia's own Blanks one ...

Freaky, scary stuff, especially when you check out those killer hands ready for a strangulation, the intent hidden behind banker glasses ... or perhaps he'll just nuke the car ...