In which there is no Sunday meditation redemption ...

Did the pond hope yesterday for some sort of meditative redemption on Sunday with prattling Polonius?

Foolish pond. Should Dorothy Parker be unveiled as a Charlie Brown, always expecting the football to be there?

Is prattling Polonius really Lucy in disguise? 

Phew, let's not go there, next thing you know the pond will end up in the sexual fluidity of indie film-making of the Straight Up kind …

The pond should admit a few things from the get go. The pond is of an age, the pond doesn't much mind if young things get screwed by the gig economy or by oldies, they'll inherit the earth, what's left of it anyway, whatever tedious old farts of the Polonius kind have to say … so who cares? Let the screwing begin ...

Eek, even the notion of a virtual hug of prattling Polonius is enough to induce a feeling of nausea in the pond … but even more nauseating is the way the reptiles have made this their industrial relations weekend, and being a tedious man with nary an original idea in his bones, that's why Polonius joined the Murdochian caravan … even if he begins by mocking Scottie from marketing ...

Did someone mention fairness? Did someone mention the Chairman? Did the pond link to the Weekly Beast yesterday?

... for the locals who try to read news about their local communities it may come as a shock to discover they have to pay for a subscription first – because all the previously free news in the local rag will be behind a paywall. The era of the free local paper really is coming to an end.
It is unclear how much the publications will shrink in the service they provide. News Corp has declined to detail how many staff will remain on each digital-only publication, or even if they will each have a dedicated reporter/editor based in the area.
The company also declined to confirm how many people were made redundant by the restructure this week but Weekly Beast understands there are at least 150 journalists, photographers and designers affected and the number is 500 overall when you include all the managers, advertising, circulation, payroll and administration staff.
But the toll may he higher. The executive editor of News Corp digital, Bryce Johns, told the ABC up to half of regional journalists at the company would lose their jobs.
“That will still leave us with a team of more than 300 journalists in regional Australia,” he said.
Some of the laid-off staff are feeling wounded because, when the papers were suspended on 1 April, they were told to take all their holidays (six weeks for editorial staff) and stand down until the crisis was over. So they waited hopefully, only to be told on Thursday the papers were never coming back and they were out for good...
...Of all the reactions to the restructure, former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s was one of the strongest, and typically harsh towards the Murdochs.
“Together with all Queenslanders and I think all Australians from regional areas, we’re mad as hell because Murdoch has betrayed regional Australia,” Rudd told Channel Seven on the Sunshine Coast. “Murdoch has a personal fortune of $17.6bn, and he’s used the Covid crisis to walk away from newspapers up and down the Australian coast, in the bush, right across the country because he couldn’t make it pay.”
Some on social media celebrated the huge cuts at News Corp because they hate Rupert Murdoch. However the most polarising journalists and culture warriors – think Andrew Bolt, Chris Kenny, Sharri Markson and Miranda Devine – are not going anywhere, as far as we know anyway. This was a restructure which saw the foot soldiers, who do the on-the-ground reporting from local courts and councils cut loose, not the big players.
We can still look forward to Devine’s commentary from the US where she is embedded at the New York Post. Take this ode to Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany for instance.
“What enrages the Washington press corps is that she is smart, well-prepared, articulate, unafraid, and always looks a million bucks,” Devine wrote. “Unlike her predecessors, she cannot be intimidated.”
No mention of McEnany’s frequent gaffes including that the coronavirus will not come to America.

Presumably Polonis isn't going anywhere either, despite his frequent gaffes, which amuse pond readers inclined to actually examine his thoughts ...

And there you go, Polonius strikes again. It's true that the pond is lazy by only looking at that last line, but who else but Polonius could scribble about the "current likely downturn."

"Likely?" 

When the pond last looked, dictionaries tended to define "likely" as 'such as well might happen' or 'probable'.

Here's another way to use "likely" about the actual, current, really happening right now, downturn …

But the resentment of public servants is true to form, because everyone should suffer, and all should be ruined, and never mind that the private sector has been sucking on the teat of government, because everyone is a Keynesian for the moment ...

What's even funnier is that Polonius immediately forgot he'd scribbled "likely", and instead wondered how the current, 'present and correct suh' economic downturn might last … but that's the joy of meandering along with Polonius.

How soon before he turns to blaming the ABC? As if pond readers didn't know …

What a bitter, crotchety old humbug he's turning into, the seething resentment getting more Oscar the grouch by the week … and he wonders why he doesn't get many hugs of any kind …

Here, have a cartoon hug celebrating sharing and togetherness …

Well, the pond is always in for a penny, in for a pound, and our Gracie was also in the 'upheaving of work rights' club … what with being a good Murdochian …

Some of the laid-off staff are feeling wounded because, when the papers were suspended on 1 April, they were told to take all their holidays (six weeks for editorial staff) and stand down until the crisis was over. So they waited hopefully, only to be told on Thursday the papers were never coming back and they were out for good…

How employers suffer … tell us Gracie ...

Say what, did the pond just cheat and skip ahead, and read that we're all going to get a pay rise, and all we have to do is ask, or maybe we don't even have to ask, maybe we just have to turn up, and it will fall from the sky? Or maybe it'll be slipped into the Xmas stocking, and the children will rush out to buy an extra carton of popcorn? So it seems, but if you believe that, make sure you leave a stiff rum and a slice of fruit cake out for Santa, because he gets hungry and thirsty handing out the cheques ...

Life has never been like that? Life has always been like that  …

Some of the laid-off staff are feeling wounded because, when the papers were suspended on 1 April, they were told to take all their holidays (six weeks for editorial staff) and stand down until the crisis was over. So they waited hopefully, only to be told on Thursday the papers were never coming back and they were out for good…

… though the pond was inspired by our Gracie's notion that if a company simply wants to give workers a pay rise, they can simply hand it out at their discretion. And with an ever so humble doffing of the cap, and "thankee guv'nor", the humble and grateful worker can shuffle off into dotage knowing that they're in company with caring Murdochans looking after their workers from cradle to the grave …

Why, it brought to mind memories of Dickens and the good old days …

Hmm, the pond doesn't know where Great Expectations came from, except perhaps that our Gracie has great expectations about everyone's responsibility to help the Chairman accumulate another billion or three before he shuffles off ...

Yes, the entire point of your life is to contribute to profit and enterprise, and accept a small serving of gruel in return, and it's your responsibility to strive towards more gruel, and along with your humble reward - be thankful you ignorant peasants - a few more squillion for the Chairman ...

Well that ends the pond's weekend of industrial relations, reptile style. 

Sorry young 'uns, you're either being screwed now, or you will be screwed in the future, strive to make yourself a serf and help others make billions and all will be well and perhaps in due course you can scribble unctuous, righteous columns for the lizard Oz, if it happens to survive …and if you're in luck, you'll get a totally unexpected pay rise by Xmas, simply because you have a generous employer, and not some Scrooge for a chairman. And if you believe that, remember to be sure to put out that pillow case so Santa can put your pay rise cheque in it ...

Meanwhile, others will just have to make do with a strict cartoon diet …

In which the pond does the hard Saturday yards in the hope that of redemption with a Sunday meditation ...

There, it's done, right at the get go, the cult master in all his glory …

Now it's true that the cult master seems to be undercutting just about everything that nattering "Ned" scribbles in his usual tedious, portentous, solemn way … but is there any way imaginable that the pond could ignore the call of the cult master, or walk past the Ancient Mariner, stopping the remaining lizard Oz readership in their social distancing tracks, and determined to bore them to death ...

Why the short first gobbet? Well the reptiles themselves recognised that readers needed a distraction, so they slipped in  video, just to help those about to lose 11 minutes of their life for no particular purpose … but the pond decided to delete it, what with it being a useless screen cap and all, and not playing, and therefore serving no purpose ...

You see what happens when the pond does include a screen cap of a distracting video? It's impossible not to get one without making Scottie from marketing look like some shifty, furtive, caricature of a sly speaker in tongues, calculating and disreputable …

Okay, by now the pond really has totally forgotten what "Ned" is banging on about … time to take a big hit ...

Yes, it's whether you should use KY while screwing, or simply accept the new reality that all bets are off, and you're going to be screwed any which way, and especially junior employees, who should, being young and therefore not comely, just be grateful to be screwed at all …

Or something like that, because the pond's attention had already begun to wander, and seek distractions, and as we seem to be speaking of the hospitality industry…

Well the pond can't speak to that, the interview's outside the paywall here … but suggests that there's a good case for the lizard Oz to die, or at least fade away, or imagine nattering "Ned" as the Cheshire cat, stuck up in a tree, but no, there's another huge gobbet to hand ...

The pond will admit it has a short-term agenda … distracting from that which it set in motion, and dammit, it's going to keep on distracting, perhaps with an infallible Pope …

Oh that potato head, it kills the pond every time ...

The pond guesses that Chairman Rupert has a tactical decision to make too. Having killed off regional information networks, should he just kill off the lizard Oz and take his billions elsewhere? Or should he stick with his pre-COVID class warfare, and crank it up to a new level, by explaining that serfdom is the new and best solution ...

This is where the pond gets confused. The union movement is supposed to be getting smaller by the day, getting more and more irrelevant, and yet somehow, everything is falling apart because of the union movement …

If only we could all just move to the gig economy, forget about confusing rights and entitlements, tedious business like holiday and sick pay, which involves calculations of a computer kind… because, while the pond is no lawyer, if you want to talk about complicated and confusing processes, shouldn't Robodebt at least get a mention? Maybe just settle that with squillions and it'll all go away ...

Never mind, the pond has filibustered its way through "Ned" and there's just one short gobbet to go ...

If you thought "Ned" was a challenge, here's where the going gets really tough ...

Whenever the dog botherer starts off by talking about "harsh truths", the pond instantly knows it's code for "moronic muttering", and is therefore prime pond material, given the pond's mission to bore the socks or stockings or pantyhose off stray readers …

Of course the pond could have gone with the oscillating fan, doing the nanny state routine ...

But that's for sissies, that's for pussies …

The pond is a risk-taker, the pond throws caution to the wind, the pond wants it tough and hard and manly, like a manly Rowe, astride the situation …

More Rowe here, but the pond can only fudge and delay the dog botherer for so long, here comes the rant, alright, little darling, it's going to be a long cold lonely winter, little darling, doo doo doo doo … it'll feel like years, little darling, here comes the rant, and the pond says it's alright ...

Private sector workers?

Sssh, no mention of News Corp please, it would seem like unseemly begging. Perhaps a cartoon coin tossed in the cup would offer some solace?

Let's face it, you should be grateful you're getting a cartoon at all.

What makes you think you have any rights or entitlements? You've got the dog botherer and a cartoon, forget about putting parritch on the table, and enjoy the verbiage meal … and remember this has nothing to do with Bob Hawke, this is to do with screwing the unions and public servants, and good luck with that, just as you might wish good luck to Foxtel, and Binge pretending it has nothing to do with that tainted brand, and the pond trusts everyone has read the Weekly Beast and News Corp carnage … but if you have, it's on with the doggie lover ...

Has anyone noticed how serious this is? The dog botherer hasn't once been sidetracked into a rant about climate science …which perhaps explains why the pond keeps seeking distractions ...

And so to the real point of the dog botherer's missive. Next time we must emulate the Donald, and aim for a much higher body count. It's the only decent and proper thing to do …

It would be like taking climate science seriously, and doing something for the planet. What's the point, because who knows what level of disaster we might have achieved if we'd really tried, and done nothing …. and perhaps the doggie lover's dream of doing nothing, or doing as little as possible, so we can experience a catastrophe in all its Hollywood glory, might yet come true ...

Indeed, because the premiers have nothing to do with the national cabinet, and a fine line must be drawn between dangerous premiers (Labor) and misguided premiers (Liberal), but here, have another tweet …

And why does the pond trust the dog botherer in all that he says?

Well you see he's talked to a single former federal public servant, and that public servant knows how to use jargon, of the input stupid, output stupid, garbage in, garbage out, kind, and he thinks the same way as the dog botherer, and so, it goes without saying, QED …and destructive madness, as opposed to say a US or British response, where destructive madness takes on an entirely different meaning, along with a car trip to Durham ... and a YouTube Financial Times lawyer's picnic …

What, you didn't go there? Never mind, there's only short burst of destructive madness to go ...

Luckily, we've seen how that philosophy has played out, and is still playing out in the United States, but just as luckily, the Donald has arranged a whole new set of distractions in our hour of need …

In which the pond discovers assorted frogs on a Friday ...

More Rowe here, but even weirder Donald news here, behind the WSJ paywall. maybe or maybe not…

Donald Trump sometimes traffics in conspiracy theories—recall his innuendo in 2016 about Ted Cruz’s father and the JFK assassination—but his latest accusation against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is ugly even for him. Mr. Trump has been tweeting the suggestion that Mr. Scarborough might have had something to do with the death in 2001 of a young woman who worked in his Florida office when Mr. Scarborough was a GOP Congressman.
“A lot of interest in this story about Psycho Joe Scarborough. So a young marathon runner just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on his desk, & die? I would think there is a lot more to this story than that? An affair? What about the so-called investigator? Read story!” Mr. Trump tweeted Saturday while retweeting a dubious account of the case.
He kept it going Tuesday with new tweets: “The opening of a Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough was not a Donald Trump original thought, this has been going on for years, long before I joined the chorus. . . . So many unanswered & obvious questions, but I won’t bring them up now! Law enforcement eventually will?” Nasty stuff, and from the Oval Office to more than 80 million Twitter followers.
There’s no evidence of foul play, or an affair with the woman, and the local coroner ruled that the woman fainted from an undiagnosed heart condition and died of head trauma. Some on the web are positing a conspiracy because the coroner had left a previous job under a cloud, but the parents and husband of the young woman accepted the coroner’s findings and want the case to stay closed.
Mr. Trump always hits back at critics, and Mr. Scarborough has called the President mentally ill, among other things. But suggesting that the talk-show host is implicated in the woman’s death isn’t political hardball. It’s a smear. Mr. Trump rightly denounces the lies spread about him in the Steele dossier, yet here he is trafficking in the same sort of trash.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, had it right when he tweeted on the weekend: “Completely unfounded conspiracy. Just stop. Stop spreading it, stop creating paranoia. It will destroy us.”
We don’t write this with any expectation that Mr. Trump will stop. Perhaps he even thinks this helps him politically, though we can’t imagine how. But Mr. Trump is debasing his office, and he’s hurting the country in doing so.

Why now? Why for Morning Joe? Why even bother to begin? Why not have started when the pussy grabbing began? 

So many lies, so much sociopathic lunacy, and now the WSJ has a mild regret, and Hannity begs people to wear masks as the Donald mocks reporters who do?

Weird times, and the pond felt the urgent need to get back to normalcy, and a dose of the local reptiles, only to find the cult master wasted on trivia …

Another BAPH state blatherer, carrying on about tourists? Not a word of it, remember the reptile line about those wicked folk in Queensland and WA.

For this they assign the cult master? Enough already … come on down Henry, let's get real and litty …

50 years? Joh? By golly there might even be a chance to re-fight the Vietnam war …

Now from the get go, the pond should admit it really has no interest in the matter, and doesn't give much of a toss, and way back when, always disliked student activists, political or religious, of whatever stripe, whenever they harassed the pond at uni. 

But once our hole in the bucket man takes an interest in a case, the pond is always in …because he's certain to wander off on some moor, and therein the pond and Holmes will find some boggy interest ...

Yes, yes, all that, the pond embraces Charlie and whimsical eccentricity and all that, but what about 'Nam? We started with student protests, surely we must point out that these students were wrong, and 'Nam was lost by the deep state?

Say what? It wasn't the deep state, it was the bloody tykes and other Xians that ruined the war effort? The pond almost fainted. Where was the cult master, why was he off on duty in Tasmania, when he could have been portraying fiendish activist tykes stabbing a dagger into the heart of the wear effort ...

Speaking of barbarians, and blatantly ignoring the horrors of what the United States did to Vietnam and ordinary civilians, perhaps the pond might call on the infallible Pope for help?

And what news from another front?

Sorry, there's freedom to speak, and then there's the freedom to ignore the bushfire Royal Commission, and so on and on blathers good old Henry ...

Good old Henry does realise that he's a minion working for the Chairman who helped give the world the Donald, doesn't he? It seems odd to be trotting out Mill and Goethe, given where the pond started this day with the WSJ, but that's our Henry … assiduously helping out, and aiding the Murdochians, and in his own way helping them achieve what Joh also achieved, which was to appoint a rogue senator, destroy his enemies, be routinely, profoundly corrupt, and escape prosecution by dodgy means, and be celebrated by certain sections of the media for his dirty deeds …

It's a funny sort of day, no doubt about it, because for filler, the pond must now turn to a man for whom the pond has genuine contempt, perhaps with a dose of fear and loathing as well …

Oh fiddle de dee, the pond saw today's bellicose Trump coming, so your point is? You intellectual gnat, you tick on the side of the bovine ABC?

Now there's a prime dose of Switzer bullshit. The lizard Oz was never a ping-pong table, it was always gung ho, and token efforts at balance were a bit like Fox News inviting on a Democrat only if there was a decent supply of skewers to hand. 

Do these loons think that the past is forgotten, that misdeeds and follies can be batted under the table? Does Switzer even remember that Miranda the Devine in those days scribbled for his alleged "anti-war competitors", and was as proud a white feather warrior as Dame Slap?

That's just one of many reasons the pond can't stand Switzer, though his sucking up to the ABC is perhaps the most odious example of his desperate desire to be relevant.

Anyhoo, anyone with enough stomach can get a dose of Mearsheimer here, scribbled as that rough beast the Donald slouched towards Washington, without having it refracted and diluted through the mindless morass called Switzer … and as you might expect, it's all "American First" stuff, and making peace with Vlad (done deal) and embarking on the war with China (not quite there yet, because after all, Xi is so helpful and transparent) …

Here's what morons of the Switzer school fail to understand. If it's a choice between Xi and the Donald, pardon the pond if it takes neither …

The United States is deeply fucked, perhaps even more deeply than China, and that's saying something. 

There was a very tidy piece on inequality in the States done by Evan Osnos for the New Yorker, which ran online under the header How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump … currently outside the paywall. It really struck a nerve, at least with locals, and if you can get past the blaze of ads, there's a story about it here …

And that's about the only point Switzer serves, as padding for interesting material, but the pond must return for a final serve of cold war warrior, modern style ...

Today's United States, not withstanding its own limitations and internal weaknesses, shows every sign of wanting to fuck the planet in the most comprehensive way possible … and you don't get away from that with a but billy goat butt "although Donald Trump has been chaotic and incompetent" …

If Trump's environmental vandalism, along with Murdochian climate science denialism, fucks the planet, what then for great power politics and security? 

What then for those who try to hide in the ABC, refugees from Murdochian la la land? Do a Wordsworth?

And so to a little sorbet from the lizard Oz editorialist to wrap things up … and to answer that question about Bob Hawke before the footman delivers a fatal snicker …

Yes, yes, all that, and good padding for a cartoon from the infallible Pope ...

But can we settle that Bob Hawke matter?

At last a definitive answer. It's got nothing to do with Bob. 

But what then could it involve, what with that papal jetty looking a little rickety? 

Rather than the Murdochians, in the throes of economic failure, withering on the regional vine, perhaps the pond should turn to Wilcox for the answer ...