The pond overdid yesterday - the pond was astonished when one correspondent claimed to have read "Ned's" natter, which is a bit like saying they tossed off War and Peace in an hour - and so was hoping that a serve of Polonial prattle would settle the nerves.
Alas, it only exacerbated an ever-deepening nausea ...
The header: Labor minister Julian Hill challenges progressive left in patriotism speech; Two Labor politicians – Anthony Albanese and Julian Hill – have delivered starkly different messages on education and multiculturalism.
The caption for the prime goose who managed to score a shout out from Polonius and a handsome Emilia collage: Julian Hill, a left-wing Labor frontbencher, ‘almost channelled Tony Abbott by recognising the importance of Anzac Day, Australia’s British parliamentary democratic inheritance alongside Indigenous history and culture, and the celebration of “new people taking Australian citizenship as a welcome act of patriotism”.’ Picture composite: Emilia Tortorella
For once that Emilia collage is fitting, because that prime goose deserved to be fitted up with a fit of Australian flag-waving.
The pond wonders if he might question his ineffable stupidity when he discovers he's been soundly endorsed by Polonius?
Probably not, the ALP is littered with hacks and mates and bears with little brain.
In these situations the pond is always reminded of that quote in The Wire made by Royce's ex-chief of staff, Coleman Parker, to Norman: "They always disappoint. Closer you get, the more you look. All of them."
Go on, disappoint:
The AEU is a left-leaning trade union. The McKell Institute is a Labor-right think tank. Albanese was a member of Labor’s Left faction until he became the party’s leader. Hill is a member of Labor’s Left.
What was surprising turned on the fact that the Prime Minister and his assistant minister took different tacks. Albanese appeared to speak without reference to a written text. The Prime Minister’s office issued what is termed a speech transcript.
Hill, on the other hand, delivered a long written speech. He told Radio National Breakfast on Thursday that he had been thinking about the content of his address “for months, or in some cases years, but it just kind of came together at this moment”.
It was Hill’s speech that made the news while Albanese’s address was all but overlooked. Yet both were important.
The reptiles interrupted with a snap so that Polonius could cluck-cluck and tut-tut: Anthony Albanese ‘expressed concern about “far-right ideological positions”, which he seemed to imply were evident only in non-government schools’. Picture: NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui
The tendency for Polonius to tyke is never far below the surface, and so it was today...
It is understood that the Christian Brothers advised Albanese’s single mother, who was an invalid pensioner living in social housing, that she need pay only what was affordable by her with respect to the education of her son. A generous but not unusual act at the time.
In his AEU speech, the Prime Minister made no reference to his education in a low-fee Catholic school. In fact, he did not mention private or non-government schools. Rather, he opined “strengthening our public education system has always informed the priorities and the work of Labor governments; it is what Labor does”.
In what could be read as an implied criticism of non-government schools, Albanese said “at a time where we talk about social cohesion … in this country, one of the things about public schools is that they’re open to everyone”.
He said in the government education system “kids don’t see race, religion, gender, anything else, they just see kids; hatred and division is something that’s learned”.
Earlier the Prime Minister expressed concern about “far-right ideological positions”, which he seemed to imply were evident only in non-government schools. A controversial position, to be sure.
Towards the end of his address, the Prime Minister commented: “Certainly, if you look at where I was born and the circumstances, you would’ve got pretty good odds against me standing here addressing you as Prime Minister today.” Quite so. He went on to thank his mother again but made no mention of the Christian Brothers.
Hmm, probably no need to mention the leather straps that were paraded routinely and with vigour at the CB school in Tamworth, which sent tyke boys of the pond's acquaintance into a heap of shivering fear, but never mind, at this point the reptiles offered the hive mind the chance to be distracted by the dog botherer offering a standard burst of Islamophobia, Sky News host Chris Kenny details how the ISIS brides are returning to Australia despite their husbands actively being a part of a radical Islamist caliphate. “The issue of Islamic State families returning to Australia also relates to the threat of Islamist extremism and terrorism in this country,” Mr Kenny said. “Let's be clear, the so-called ISIS brides and their husbands were part of a radical Islamist caliphate that took the barbarity of Islamist extremism to unprecedented levels.”
Whenever the pond sees that method of generating fear, it's always reminded of the nuns who wandered through Fellini's movies and through many other flicks and through the pond's early schooling ... thereby reviving the pond's ancient fear of copping a slap on the cheek from a hooded peril.
Those snaps are from Ken Russell's extremely fruity The Devils, though if you're a student of nun flicks, you should always find room for the Powell-Pressburger epic, Black Narcissus:
Barking mad, and for devotees of the genre, there's 15 nun flicks listed here...
But the pond digresses, but then so does Polonius, because amazingly he's reached this point without hitting on his keyboard shortcut that announces there are no conservatives in the ABC ...
As would be expected from any talented politician, Hill had his criticisms of his political rivals, namely One Nation and the Liberal Party. But the focus of the McKell Institute speech was what Hill called “the progressive left” and its unwillingness to acknowledge that those who settle in Australia should “not import foreign communal conflicts into our society”.
Hill made this point: “Many decent Australians have attended ‘Marches for Australia’ or may vote for One Nation … they deserve to be listened to rather than dismissed: the economic concerns of frankly pissed-off people or worries about integration are real.”
Hill went on to warn of “the dangers of radical Islamist politics and ideologies” and express concern about gender segregation, forced marriages and homophobic abuse of gay children. And he targeted “neo-Nazis, criminal gangs and ISIS” in one sentence.
Then Hill turned his attention to education, pointing out that “over the last decade there were 320 new Catholic and independent schools and only 279 new government schools”.
The pond has already gone down that both siderist, Charlottesville, "good people on both sides" routine, and so was amazed when the reptiles interrupted to reveal the sort of loons that the prize goose suggested we should be listening to rather than dismiss, Neo-Nazi groups are reportedly working to regroup, after disbanding prior to hate speech reforms passed parliament. Picture: Simon Bullard/NewsWire
Yeah, that mob, sunnies 'n singing, n'all ...
Go on, both siderist that mob of goons.
The pond understands a little.
When you're a low rent assistant minister, you're by definition a bear of little brain, and so will be pleased to have anyone turn up to a speech, and even be pleased by Polonius paying attention to your mindless offerings...
He expressed concern about reports of “quite extreme or conservative curricula being used” but did not identify what institutions he had in mind. Hill added: “This is not an argument against faith-based schools, I attended one myself.”
At the end of the McKell Institute address, Hill expressed thanks to his audience for coming along at short notice. This suggests that the speech may have been timed to give attention to his “final few words about patriotism”. He stated that “controversially to some … this means embracing Australia Day for as long as there is no consensus to change the date, as a day to reflect, celebrate and be proud of our country and our complex history”.
Hill went on almost channelling Tony Abbott by recognising the importance of Anzac Day, Australia’s British parliamentary democratic inheritance alongside Indigenous history and culture, and the celebration of “new people taking Australian citizenship as a welcome act of patriotism”.
And there was the hard point – directed at the left-intelligentsia. Hill stated: “Many of us like to don Aussie garb and people don’t want to be sneered at for loving Australia.” This a rejection of what I have termed the sneering left-wing interpretation of Australian history which is replete with guilt and self-hatred. In other words, a repudiation of the alienation of Manning Clark’s history and a focus on the Australian achievement.
It’s difficult to imagine a left-wing Labor frontbencher making such a pitch to patriotism before the radical Islamist attack on the Australian Jewish community on December 14, 2025. It remains to be seen whether the Prime Minister will embrace the Hill doctrine in future addresses.
Oh sheesh, more than enough already.
"The Hill doctrine"?
Let's not give the bear of little brain too much praise, or he might get stuck in a tree trying to reach for a bit of honey comb.
As always in such moments, the pond turns to Haaretz.
They were distracted by King Donald's plans to destabilise the region, as were others, with this in The Independent noting...
That came to pass, making the chant "Make America first and isolationist again" sound a little hollow, as the reptiles were forced to pay attention and go LIVE... (well it's not an away game like Pakistan v. Afghanistan, this is a core Australian Zionist Daily News home game).
But even while King Donald's minions were suggesting that Benji lead the way in bermbing Iran, so that the real culprits could skulk in the shadows, because that would look good, Haaretz still had space for this ...
'They Had Murder in Their Eyes' Reports: Four Wounded After Israeli Settlers Assault Palestinians, Activists in West Bank (*archive link)
And for this ...
Israel Police, IDF Clash Over Probe Into Killing of Palestinian-American Teen in West Bank (*archive link)
And then the pond came to grating, garrulous Gemma ...
Australia is not learning from Bondi massacre as extremism threat continues to grow
In the absence of honest conversations about the clear and present danger from extremism, it feels as if we’re still simmering, instead of having the heat turned down.
By Gemma Tognini
...and baulked at the jump.
The pond decided a change of course was urgently needed.
Back in the day - in the times of angry Sydney Anglicans and rampant Pellism - the pond would spend its Sunday meditating in a religious way befitting a heathen secularist and barbarian atheist.
Instead the reptiles kept flinging useless bits of detritus into the digital ether ...
Randa Abdel-Fattah used $889k tax grant to fund ‘intifada’ chant protest: report
Macquarie University has been forced to release the findings of its review of Abdel-Fattah’s unorthodox research techniques and expenditure.
By Natasha Bita
So she's been cleared and the grant reinstated?
But that's never enough for the gnawing reptiles, always wanting to gnash at the bit.
Spend six unholy minutes on a Sunday watching Natasha gnashing?!
Instead of any of that, the pond thought it would take as its text the KJV of Genesis 18-21:
19: The Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites,
20: And the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims,
21: And the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.
It is of course the text that Tucker quoted to the hustling Huckster.
Some liberal Xians have tried to suggest that the KJV got it wrong, and that the "river of Egypt" isn't a river or isn't the Nile, but fair's fair.
There aren't too many rivers of Egypt that match the Nile, especially when it's a river nicely positioned to mark the beginning of Israel.
The pond notes that the bible is allegedly inerrant and mono/univocal, and that any alleged contradictions are simply click bait for YouTubers of the Dan McClellan kind.
But truth to tell, Tucker caught the Huckster napping, and while Tucker might be barking mad, he has a rat cunning for gotchas, and given the berming of Iran - is there ever a war Benji hasn't loved to stay out of clink? - it might be worth examining Israel as the biggest imperial state on the middle east block.
That's why the pond was delighted to see that the Huckster had turned up in Vanity Fair to try to redeem his situation:
In a wide-ranging interview with Vanity Fair, the US ambassador to Israel explained his controversial comments to Tucker Carlson and addressed a shift in public opinion against Israel over its bloody war in Gaza. (*archive link)
The introduction to the interview didn't augur well ...
Huckabee quickly backtracked after Carlson expressed consternation at the idea of an American diplomat signaling approval for a single country annexing almost the entire Levant, half of Saudi Arabia and a good chunk of Egypt. He did not take back his claim he would “be fine” with Israel taking the land, but instead claimed the country has no current plans to do so. Israel’s neighbors were unamused, condemning the remarks as “dangerous and inflammatory” in a joint statement and arguing they endanger regional stability. According to The New York Times, the comments could even have forestalled American strikes on Iran. Politico reported that Trump administration officials were calling Arab countries for damage control.
The two-hour interview with Carlson, held at Ben Gurion Airport, had other eye-popping moments. As Huckabee defended Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of children in Gaza, Carlson asked: “Do you hear yourself?” The debate reflected a growing fissure in Donald Trump’s base. Carlson’s faction is increasingly critical of Israel, which has coincided with souring opinion among younger Americans—on the right and the left. A recent poll found that more than half of younger Americans have a negative view of Israel, a number that spiked as the country waged a bloody war in Gaza that killed more than 75,000 people and left the densely populated enclave in ruins. A Gallup poll out this week found that for the first time since they started polling, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis.
(That Gallup poll can be found here, though Gallup is currently unpopular with the pond because it cravenly refuses to do popularity contests when it comes to King Donald).
Poor old fundamentalist, the rapture is coming for the Huckster ...
Mike Huckabee: I’ve been very pleased. People that saw it thought that it was kind of bizarre in some ways, that he went off on some rabbit holes that were very difficult to understand, like DNA testing for Jewish people in Israel, the ridiculous and reckless claim that President Herzog had been at Epstein Island—something he later edited out, reformatted his program, and then issued a video apology for that. There were a number of things that were just kind of strange. And then the first 30 minutes that he went back and tacked on to the interview was filled with stuff that had us scratching our heads, like treatment at the airport, at the executive lounge and stuff.
There were an overwhelming number of people who felt like I didn’t lose my cool. I was able to push back on some things. He normally will give a guest like Nick Fuentes or Darryl Cooper, or some of the people that have some very strange views, or the Iranian president, or Vladimir Putin, and he’ll give them 65% of the time of his show and he’ll spend 35% asking the questions. With me, it was exactly the opposite. He talked 65% of the time and gave me about 35% of the time to respond to questions. And [he] interrupted me, I think one analyst said, like 500 times.
VF: Did you hear from the White House? Tucker Carlson apparently met with Trump this week.
Huckabee: Nothing negative. I heard positive things, but nothing negative.
VF: There was one exchange that sparked coverage. Carlson asked you if Israel was entitled, according to a literal interpretation of biblical scripture, to claim much of the modern Middle East. And your response was, “It would be fine if they took it all.” When he pressed, you said that Israel didn’t have any intentions to take over all that territory, which includes the land of many other countries. Could you tell us what happened there?
Huckabee: He had pressed and pressed and pressed, and he just wouldn’t let it go. And I finally, it was really tongue-in-cheek, said, “Well, they can just have it all.” And then I immediately, five times, five times said, “Tucker, they’re not trying to take over everything that is listed from the Nile to the Euphrates. They’re just not.” And made that very clear. He took an edited version of that and he left that part out. He ended his clip—that he sent to apparently every Arab nation in the world—and put it out that this was the full exchange. So therefore there was so much consternation about it.
I thought that was a very deceptively edited piece, and dishonest and disingenuous to do it that way. It would be like me saying, “I watched the hockey game between the US and Canada in the Olympics, but I didn’t watch the last 30 seconds.” So the question is, Do I really know how that hockey game went? Well, not if you edited out the last 30 seconds. And I would say that if you edited out the rest of my response, you have no idea what I really said. (Carlson declined to comment to Vanity Fair.)
VF: There are people in the Israeli government who do want to pursue what they call Greater Israel. Would you support those efforts?
Huckabee: Honestly, I’ve never heard anyone—and I’m pretty close to a lot of the people by virtue of my job. I deal with ’em every day. I have honestly never heard a single person say, “Yeah, the land should be the Euphrates to the Nile.” I’ve never heard it, ever.
The pond is pleased to suggest a link to the Huckster, though his hackles would probably rise if he found himself at Al Jazeera, reading ...
Recent US and Israeli comments on ‘Greater Israel’ trigger regional concerns over sovereignty and territorial expansion.
The pond will cut to the chase and clip this key gobbet:
The current state of Israel emerged from the British Mandate for Palestine in 1948. The mandate, created by the League of Nations in the wake of World War I and the occupation of Palestine by the British, geographically limited Israel upon its creation.
The 1948 war that followed the end of the mandate led to Israel taking control of all of Mandatory Palestine, with the exception of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
But Israel soon expanded by force – in 1967 it defeated Arab forces and took control of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and Syria’s occupied Golan Heights. Israel continues to occupy all of those regions, with the exception of the Sinai, which it returned to Egypt in 1982.
Since then, Israel has ignored international law and continued occupying Palestinian and Syrian land, and has shown little respect for its neighbours’ sovereignty, occupying more land in Syria, as well as in Lebanon.
How popular is the idea of Greater Israel?
This needs to be broken down into two separate concepts – the expansion of Israel into the territory that immediately borders it, and the most extreme definition of Greater Israel: between the Nile and the Euphrates.
In terms of expansion into its immediate surroundings, Israeli Jews by and large support the annexation of East Jerusalem, which is occupied Palestinian territory, and the Golan Heights.
The Israeli government continues to move towards the de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank. Israeli politicians vary in how open they are in their support for the formal annexation of the West Bank, but most mainstream Israeli politicians are supportive of the illegal Israeli settlements in the territory.
An expansion of Israeli settlements into Gaza is not as popular, but is supported by far-right Israeli parties.
A Greater Israel, including parts of Jordan, or the most irredentist definition between the Euphrates and the Nile, is more controversial. Pre-1948, many Zionists sought not just Palestine but also Jordan for their future state – one of the most important Zionist armed groups at the time, the Irgun, even included the map of both Palestine and Jordan in its emblem.
But after the foundation of Israel this took a back seat, and open calls for a vastly expanded Israel were largely restricted to the fringes. But those fringes – far-right figures like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir – are now in government, reflecting a wider radicalisation within Israeli society itself.
That means the Israeli ‘mainstream’, politicians such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and centrists like Lapid, are either more open in their support for some form of Greater Israel beyond the West Bank, or less willing to publicly oppose it.
And there was also this in Al Jazeera:
The interview brought the ‘Israel first vs America first’ debate to heart of the American right.
Inter alia ...
But for many years, this scrutiny was largely confined to academia or left-wing activist circles. Conservatives and liberals labelled such critics as conspiracy theorists or anti-Semites.
The Carlson-Huckabee interview has perhaps let the cat out of the bag on the American right.
What makes the interview important is not simply the substance of Huckabee’s remarks, but the interviewer, venue, audience, and underlying message of the line of questioning.
A hugely popular conservative media figure travelled to Israel and publicly pressed a sitting US ambassador on whether American interests are being subordinated to Israeli interests. He questioned the theological and historical underpinnings of Zionism, criticised Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Christians, and asked why US tax dollars are sent to Israel.
In his responses, the ambassador appeared to speak more as a representative of the Israeli government than the United States government.
Judging by Huckabee’s defensive reaction after the interview and its social media fallout, he is learning an important lesson: appearing to put Israel first and America second is no longer an asset, but a liability, for American politicians.
Elected American officials will be watching the public reaction carefully — especially in light of polling data showing that American public opinion towards Israel has shifted dramatically in recent years.
The political incentive that has driven decades of unconditional support for Israel has now been weakened. The political calculus, too, is changing — it may be politically advantageous for American officials to adopt more evenhanded, even openly critical, approaches to Israel.
This alone marks a significant shift.
Carlson’s interview with Huckabee did not create that shift, but it brought it into the heart of the American right. If the question “America first or Israel first” can now be asked openly in conservative circles, then important political boundaries have already been broken.
The Carlson-Huckabee interview could be the wake-up call that American politics needed to break free from the outsized influence of a Middle Eastern country that has long undermined US interests.
Well yes, there's a reason the pond calls the lizard Oz The Australian Daily Zionist News, but there's no sign it will break free from the outsized influence of a certain Middle Eastern country
And having gone down the Xian fundamentalist rabbit hole, one thing led to another, and in particular to ...
PragerU, a fount of Judeo-Christian edutainment, is now a key partner in the Trump Administration’s “civic education” campaign. (*archive link)
The pond will begin at the beginning:
Ostensibly, Prager is recounting this awful crime because it illustrates a central question taken up by his book, which is “Why do people hurt other people?” The answer, by and large, turns out to be secularism. “The death of God has led to massive deaths of men, women, and children,” Prager writes, citing the “secular doctrines” of Nazism and communism. Secular creep, he goes on, “also appears to be leading to the death of Western civilization.” One might wonder why Prager would choose a thirty-seven-year-old murder, which he implies is linked to monotheistic religious extremism, to build his case against secularism. But the God he has in mind is specifically that of “the Judeo-Christian outlook.” The sole “source of objective morality,” Prager suggests, is the Bible. Prager does not mention that the murdered girl’s mother, who held her down while her father stabbed her to death, was Catholic and from Brazil, a country whose most famous landmark is a hundred-and-twenty-four-foot statue called “Christ the Redeemer.”
“If There Is No God” is not the worst thing Prager has ever written. (That honor may go to a two-part op-ed from 2008, titled “When a Woman Isn’t in the Mood,” in which he explains why wives should have sex with their husbands even when they don’t feel like it.) That said, if Prager’s new book were a term paper, his teacher would have a lot to say. She might flag, for instance, that lack of symmetry between his argument and his choice of grisly anecdote. She might object to the tautological reasoning, or to the flagrant cultural animus and Islamophobia. Using terminology from the education world, she might say, politely, that Prager has many “areas of growth” as a student, or that his progress toward grade level is “emerging.”
Yet Prager, a co-founder of the conservative education-media nonprofit PragerU, is one of the most influential voices in education in the United States today. PragerU is not an accredited university, but curriculum materials from its PragerU Kids division, on American history, civics, and financial literacy, are approved for optional classroom use in eleven mostly right-leaning states. (One of those states, Oklahoma, also worked with PragerU to develop a short-lived multiple-choice test intended to screen teachers for signs of “woke indoctrination.” Last year, PragerU unveiled the Founders Museum, a “partnership” with the White House and the U.S. Department of Education featuring A.I.-generated video testimonials from luminaries of the American Revolution. These include a digitized John Adams who ventriloquizes the words of the right-wing influencer Ben Shapiro, almost verbatim: “Facts do not care about our feelings.”
PragerU is also supplying the multimedia content for the Freedom Truck Mobile Museums, a travelling exhibition of touch-screen displays, Revolutionary War artifacts, and A.I. slop that will chug across the country on tractor-trailers throughout 2026, in celebration of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It seems that the battle over who defines good and evil—or, at least, over who defines American history—will be waged, in part, from the helm of an eighteen-wheeler.
There's more - PragerU is a a remarkably malevolent force -but the pond will - knowing it's in the archive - do a quick edit and cut to the end, because there's only so much disunited States madness the pond can take in any one day:
The most noxious PragerU videos often involve slavery. In the PragerU Kids series “Leo & Layla’s History Adventures,” animated versions of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington are deputized to play down the historical significance of slavery; Christopher Columbus goes a step further, using slavery to introduce children to the concept of moral relativism. (“How can you come here to the fifteenth century and judge me by your standards in the twenty-first century?” Columbus asks.) A now deleted video—as bland as a corporate-compliance webinar, and scored to a generic hip-hop beat—gives Robert E. Lee a thumbs-up for crushing the attempted rebellion of enslaved people at Harper’s Ferry. The video also uncritically shares Lee’s view that slavery was harder on whites than on Black people, since “Blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa.”
In terms of historical facts and narrative, the A.I. videos that PragerU produced for the Founders Museum offer nothing so repugnant. In fact, they offer close to nothing at all. Like a poorly trained large language model, John Adams filibusters on his bona fides, calling himself a “voice for independence” who believed in “telling the truth” and who “stood on principle.” The content is oddly content-free, and then it repeats. Thomas Jefferson, who never blinks, says, “We must guard liberty with learning.” Adams, who seems to be reading off a teleprompter, tells us, “Guard liberty well, for, once lost, it is lost forever.” Ben Franklin agrees: “Respect this founding, friend. It is your inheritance, hard-won and fragile. Guard it well.”
A commonality across all the PragerU videos, and distinctly those in the PragerU Kids catalogue, is their total aesthetic bankruptcy, their absence of beauty or joy or wit. It’s impossible to imagine anyone enjoying any of this or electing to watch it, not because it’s factually wrong or propagandistic but because it’s ugly and boring. The intentionality of the misinformation—or the absence of information—coupled with the laziness of the execution ties a perfect knot of contempt. The various characters in “How to Think Objectively” grimace and vocalize as if the woke mob had dosed them with tainted ketamine. The “Leo & Layla” render-farm animation of Martin Luther King, Jr., sways back and forth affectlessly, like a puppet on a stick, voiced by an actor doing a bad Jay-Z impression. Perhaps Dr. King is dissociating, and the viewer should follow his lead.
In the Founders Museum, PragerU’s Chuck E. Cheese-ification of Presidents is hideous enough, but the animation deteriorates further as you click through to lesser-known revolutionaries, their mouths taking on the shape and muscular coördination of a Wombo A.I. The merchant Francis Lewis blankly recounts the death of his wife after her imprisonment by the British, and concludes, “Freedom demands much of us, but what it gives in return is everything.” Another Founder, Roger Sherman, intones, “I did my part. Now you must do yours.” It’s entirely unclear what the viewer is being asked to do, which may be the point. Dennis Prager once admitted that he didn’t mind accusations that PragerU indoctrinates its young viewers, saying, “We bring doctrines to children. That’s a very fair statement.” But perhaps indoctrination and stupefaction go hand in hand. Maybe reaching patriotic Judeo-Christian nirvana should feel like the unbearable lightness of an emptied mind.
And there it is, what a fine meditation on barking mad fundamentalist Xians - as a little both siderist balance to fundamentalist Islamics - and what a deeply weird country it is.
The pond won't be reading any of that sort of stuff in the lizard Oz soon, but what a relief it was to turn away from bog standard lizard Oz Islamophobia and Zionophilia to spend a little quality Sunday time with the Crusaders.
And so to Simon Marks, who skipped last week, but turned up yesterday ...
