In which the pond continues bleeding obvious Thursday with the bromancer ...

The pond had many possible distractions for a bleeding obvious Thursday, not least the bleeding obvious way that the Bolter would drag Waleed Aly into the pay dispute - anything to needle the Islamic and get him agitated - and side with Julian Assange and Vlad the Impaler ...

If Hillary Clinton is damned by her links to sexual predators, what to make of the Donald or Steve Bannon in the locker room of life?

But it wasn't distilled essence of bleeding obvious, and the pond had to rule out other contenders for the same reason ...

Johnsie going the green fiends? Actually that was too bleeding obvious, and anyway, who'd spend time with an insincere, hollow untrustworthy loon who started in the Labor party and veered off like an Oscar Wilde rocket to the hard right, which threatens us all?

And there were the reptiles, getting very excited about Nick X, though it was bleedingly obvious they were doing a poll-driven beat-up ...

Is there nothing a silly poll can't achieve, apart from silly headlines left, right and centre?

Naturally the dog botherer had to pour cold water on all this ...

But in the end it was the bromancer that hit exactly the right bleeding obvious tone ...

The bromancer even had the cheek to dress it up as a rhetorical question:

You thought the bromancer was a cluelessly provocative twit? Right!

Now the pond immediately knew it had a bet going. The bromancer would spend endless time on China, but there wouldn't be one mention of Manus Island, Nauru, or Australia's treatment of its indigenous population, pace the record-breaking prison achievements of the NT government ...

Actually, notwithstanding the pond's indifference to lawyers, there's something to be said for the evolution of a legal system, and it's worth noting that China has moved some distance from the madness of Mao's cultural revolution, which took place around the same time as that great bastion of human rights and democracy decided to move over 500k military men into Vietnam and bomb the country either to corrupt democracy or the stone age, whichever came first. Oh yes, those were the great days for human rights ...

And speaking of human rights, it seems about the right time for the pond to raise some ancillary matters ...

Well yes, and more at the ABC here, but thanks to Nauru and Manus Island, and treatment of indigenous folk, Australia is eminently qualified to sit alongside the likes of Pakistan and the Congo ...

Indeed, indeed, and more and hot links here,  though it seems a pity not to celebrate Australia's role in liberating Iraq and helping generate the wondrous respect for human rights in the middle east, with Abu Ghraib symbolic of all little Johnny helped achieve ...

Of course all these epic achievements are in turn used by the Chinese Communists to justify their own wretched behaviour.

With all these great human rights achievements going down, the pond almost lost sight of the bromancer's final gobbet ...

The pond loves it when the bromancer talks dirty, or of eerie realisations of George Orwell's dystopian vision, while at the same time in another country ...

Turnbull denies new facial recognition measures amount to 'mass surveillance' ...

Mass video surveillance about to change Australia ...

And what's this back in June 2013? Big Brother surveillance is our reality ...

Mass surveillance of a country's citizens by its government can no longer be said to be the preserve of authoritarian and dictatorial states. 
The publication last week by The Guardian of classified National Security Agency documents has exposed the extent of surveillance by the US government, throwing into question the security and privacy of the communications of people around the world. 
Not only does the US government have carte blanche access to data collected by phone companies about every single phone communication conducted on American soil, but it also has a direct line into records kept by internet companies such as Google, Microsoft and Twitter. In short, the US has the ability to spy on citizens of almost every country across the globe. 
Even living halfway around the world, seemingly out of the reach of the US government and its vast and intrusive intelligence program, it is safe to say that Australians have been the subject of US government surveillance. Their Gmail records and Facebook photos have been vulnerable to examination and investigation. Their phone calls have been tracked. And they have no means of recourse to prevent this activity from continuing.

Now there's a comfort, knowing the Donald has been fully briefed ...

But at least thanks to the bromancer we now know that China doesn't care too much about human rights, and there's another rich win for the bleeding obvious and deep irony ... and don't you worry about what Malware or the Donald might be doing ...

Meanwhile, there's an actual humanitarian crisis of astonishing proportions going on in Bangladesh, courtesy of a Myanmar government ostensibly led by a woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize ...it makes UN Warns of Looming Humanitarian Crisis on Manus Island look like small beer, but perhaps the bromancer might take some time out to look at the mote in our eye ...

And so for distraction and light relief a few bleeding obvious cartoons ...