In which the pond remains in mindless holyday mode, and the lizards of Oz help maintain the vibe ...

Over the break, the pond noticed a trend at the lizard Oz, what might be called the increasing Trumpification of the rag ...

The WSJ, once proudly conservative in the original sense of the word, has been long gone, fully Trumpified and pathetic, in keeping with the Chairman's desires, and now it seems the lizard Oz, as it recycles its American cousin, is heading down the same path, in keeping with the Chairman's pandering to the Donald ...

Listen to yourselves reptiles.

Is the best argument you've got revolve around the Donald not being a full-blown fascist and autocrat? Is that how you taunt progressive elites, as if making a nice little earner at the WSJ or the lizard Oz doesn't put you in the category of forelock-tugging, supine elites?

What if he's just Putin's puppet, a con artist who scored the biggest trick in his life, conjuring a country of marks and johns so that Ivanka could continue selling her fashion label and the hotels and golf resorts could do even better business?

Truth to tell, the Donald is a dud, a fizza, a lemon, a clunker ... and as a result the pond heads elsewhere for analysis, such as The New Yorker, featuring outside the paywall for the moment Evan Osnos's excellent Making China Great Again ...

This very day comes news that South Korea has decided on direct talks with North Korea, no doubt unnerved by the elephant Donald clumping around and invoking the spectre of nuclear war ... and adding another feather to Osnos's original thesis:

...Under the banner of “America First,” President Trump is reducing U.S. commitments abroad. On his third day in office, he withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a twelve-nation trade deal designed by the United States as a counterweight to a rising China. To allies in Asia, the withdrawal damaged America’s credibility. “You won’t be able to see that overnight,” Lee Hsien Loong, the Prime Minister of Singapore, told me, at an event in Washington. “It’s like when you draw a red line and then you don’t take it seriously. Was there pain? You didn’t see it, but I’m quite sure there’s an impact.” 
In a speech to Communist Party officials last January 20th, Major General Jin Yinan, a strategist at China’s National Defense University, celebrated America’s pullout from the trade deal. “We are quiet about it,” he said. “We repeatedly state that Trump ‘harms China.’ We want to keep it that way. In fact, he has given China a huge gift. That is the American withdrawal from T.P.P.” Jin, whose remarks later circulated, told his audience, “As the U.S. retreats globally, China shows up.”

There were statistics aplenty ...

By some measures, the U.S. will remain dominant for years to come. It has at least twelve aircraft carriers. China has two. The U.S. has collective defense treaties with more than fifty countries. China has one, with North Korea. Moreover, China’s economic path is complicated by heavy debts, bloated state-owned enterprises, rising inequality, and slowing growth. The workers who once powered China’s boom are graying. China’s air, water, and soil are disastrously polluted. 
And yet the gap has narrowed. In 2000, the U.S. accounted for thirty-one per cent of the global economy, and China accounted for four per cent. Today, the U.S.’s share is twenty-four per cent and China’s fifteen per cent. If its economy surpasses America’s in size, as experts predict, it will be the first time in more than a century that the world’s largest economy belongs to a non-democratic country. At that point, China will play a larger role in shaping, or thwarting, values such as competitive elections, freedom of expression, and an open Internet. Already, the world has less confidence in America than we might guess. Last year, the Pew Research Center asked people in thirty-seven countries which leader would do the right thing when it came to world affairs. They chose Xi Jinping over Donald Trump, twenty-eight per cent to twenty-two per cent.

Where's your talk of an autocratic fascist now, reptiles? You've scored a loser dropkick who looks ugly up against Xi Jinping?

And there was a final sting in the tail of the story ...

Late one afternoon in November, I went to see a professor in Beijing who has studied the U.S. for a long time. America’s recent political turmoil has disoriented him. “I’m struggling with this a lot,” he said, and poured me a cup of tea. “I love the United States. I used to think that the multiculturalism of the U.S. might work here. But, if it doesn’t work there, then it won’t work here.” In his view, the original American bond is dissolving. “In the past, you kept together because of common values that you call freedom,” he said. Emerging in its place is a cynical, zero-sum politics, a return to blood and soil, which privileges interests above inspiration. 
In that sense, he observed, the biggest surprise in the relationship between China and the United States is their similarity. In both countries, people who are infuriated by profound gaps in wealth and opportunity have pinned their hopes on nationalist, nostalgic leaders, who encourage them to visualize threats from the outside world. “China, Russia, and the U.S. are moving in the same direction,” he said. “They’re all trying to be great again.” 

That's more than enough analysis and insights for the pond. Too much pain.

This year the pond should probably just recycle intelligent analysis, but that's not in the pond's mission statement, and so with a sorrowful sigh - so many disappointments so early in the year - it's back to the reptiles, though the pond can only manage to dip a toe into the day's headlines.

Speaking of dropkicks, the pond had a hearty laugh at Erica the other day ...

Huuugge? We're all talking Donald now? Shouldn't it have been a yuge success?

Well what do you know?

Erica was right. You see, when not pandering to the Donald, the lizards of Oz like to pander to the onion muncher - it seems they're determined to keep him at the top of the pond, proudly leering out at the world from his perch in the banner ...

 

And along with the onion muncher being front and centre on both the tree killer and digital edition, there came the resident climate science confusionist offering an insight of such astonishing banality the pond couldn't proceed any further with it ...

The pond had a vision, or perhaps a surreal dream, or a nightmare, featuring Lomborg gradually disappearing beneath an acid wave still blathering about the need for R and D ...

What else? Well there was the usual lock 'em up, throw away the key and "let God sort 'em out in Her infinite wisdom" mob on parade ...

Can someone give Peter Faris an autographed copy of Dirty Harry's magnum? 

Jail? Blow 'em away, that'll sort 'em out ...

But the pond did enjoy the idea that it had nothing to do with colour and that it was all about young criminals ...

Sure, and the Bolter isn't a racist ...

Along with the 'get off my lawn, young punk' mob, there was the "bung on a do with the Iranian mob and let the Donald sort them out" strutting their stuff...

... because everything that the United States has tried in the middle east has worked out spiffingly well, though that illustration did catch the new world of the reptiles ...

Demonic or what?

The "bung on a do" mob sounded of a piece with some standard Muslim bashing the previous day ...

Sherry Sufi? That name rings a bell ...

A former Liberal federal candidate who has said Indigenous recognition would "divide the country" and linked same-sex marriage to polygamy has been elected chair of the Western Australian Liberal Party's policy committee. Some senior Liberals have expressed concern at the result, five months out from the State election. Sherry Sufi, who was forced to resign as the Fremantle candidate over his comments, beat retired Senator Alan Eggleston in a vote for the position at the party's State Council on Saturday. (ABC here)

Ah, just your standard publicity-seeking sandgroper fuckwit, usually more at home amongst the Speccie mob, or blathering about Australia Day and lamb ... (at least until the lizard Oz decided it needed to out-Speccie the Speccie mob ...)

By the way, how did it work out for the Liberal party with this loon at the policy helm? Say what?

In the aftermath of the election, the WA Liberal Party appeared to be in shock at the magnitude of the defeat (seven ministers had lost their seats). No one seemed prepared to put themselves forward as leader, and there were recriminations as to how the campaign had been run, how the party had been performing, and how the Government had handled some of the big issues. Former Corrective Services Minister Joe Francis fronted the media three days after the election, saying: ‘...there’s a void right now from the Liberal Party where people are either [in] denial about the magnitude of the victory of the Labor Party or in denial about what went wrong, or in denial about what the future may hold ... (much more here).

Not to worry. The pond is still in holiday mode, and deep analysis is a tad difficult ... and there didn't seem to be many other issues troubling the reptiles.

Oh wait, there was one ...

Fortunately Troy was standing by to join in the general reptile hand-wringing, clucking and tut-tutting ...

Yes, the man who gave the country the hideously deformed and completely grotesque NBN - no doubt soon to become the privatised monopolistic PMG 2.0 - decided to have a flutter on another postal vote, presumably voluntary, and as useful as sticking a wet finger into the air.

Feeling frivolous, the pond decided to join the onion muncher and the reptiles in a bit of Malware bashing ... after all, where's the harm?

Malware's a sleeping bear, and when prodded awake, rises to alarming height in a towering rage?

 Oh, it's a satirical thrust ... so let the thrusting continue ...

Not least boosting productivity and competitiveness?

How about Islamic bashing, racial fear and embracing the inner Trump as the new way forward?

That'll do wonders for productivity and competitiveness, not to mention world harmony ...

Of course the reptiles cunningly skipped a generation with all their satirical thrusting, but the cold dead heart of the Panahi turned up in the Terror this day ...

King Chuck? Courtier, is there a bucket handy?

Stick Malware with a Keating fork, just to see if he's done ...

Yep, he's done alright, the big sook and the even bigger race-baiting hypocrite ... so afraid of doing or saying anything on his own in the way of policy that he resorts to a useless postal opinion survey at the drop of an eastern suburbs toff hat ...

And now what a relief, as it seems that the Pope has returned from his holydays and is already on the prowl, with more papal insights and benefits here ...

Indeed, indeed, time to end clerical rule ... but can it be done?

Hucksters, hustlers and snake oil salesmen are everywhere, and at the top of the WSJ and the lizard Oz pages, and the scamming and the delusions never end ...

Worshippers who streamed into the doors of New Destiny Christian Center in Apopka, Florida on Easter Sunday got the surprise of their lives when their senior pastor offered them an opportunity to cheat death, the Christian Post reports. For a little over a thousand dollars, folks could purchase a “resurrection seed” she told them was set by God. Like the “resurrection stone” out of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, this seed would presumably resurrect anyone who has died. “I don’t know what is dead. I don’t know what the enemy sent a death to. I don’t know what decision that caused death to come upon whatever the situation you’re facing, but I do know that God has sent me to you to bring resurrection life,” she told the crowd along with scripture on Lazarus. 
“To tell you that I believe that as we put our faith together before Easter Sunday on March 27, there’s gonna be resurrection life in your life.” She told the audience that she doesn’t generally get so specific about money, but it was God that gave her specific instructions on the dollar amount. “There’s someone that God is speaking to, to click on that donation button by minimizing the screen. And when you do to sow $1,144,” she told the crowd. “It’s not often I ask very specifically but God has instructed me and I want you to hear. This isn’t for everyone but this is for someone. When you sow that $1,144 based on John 11:44 I believe for resurrection life. You say, Paula, I just don’t have that, then sow $144. I don’t have that. Sow $44 but stand on John Chapter 11:44.” 
Then like an infomercial proclaiming “but wait! There’s more!” White promised those buying the “resurrection seed” that they would also get some special prayer cloths that might cause “miracles, signs and wonders.”

Miracles, signs and wonders? How about a little cuddle?

Oh it's going to be a long, long year ...