In which the bromancer sets the progressive pace, and things get sillier from there ...

The pond just wanted to start by pointing out the terrible quality of domestic loonacy the pond has to deal with these days at the lizard Oz.

Two editorials to fill up the swamp? And that Levy chap isn't a contributor. That piece was written for the WSJ, so a more honest label than contributor would have been 'pilfered from our US cousins'.

This is all by way of explanation and excuse as to how the pond ended up with the bromancer, though to be fair, this day's outing is a classic example of howling at the moon, jumping the shark, nuking the comrade Dan, and in colonial days, mention might even have been made, of being a 'roo short in the top paddock, or in a strictly non-imperialistic way, of leaving the plantation ...

Just there at the beginning is your basic stupidity, thinking that somehow this is all about progressives ... as if the virus gives a toss about political partisanship, and railing at sexism in fairy tales, when surely railing at sexism in the Donald, Donald supporters of the bromancer kind, and the Murdochian media at large could keep anyone busy for aeons ..
 

Um, could the pond interrupt this impressive rant with news from abroad ...

Oh it's too rich ...

Twitter says it permanently suspended a QAnon account belonging to a family friend of the prime minister, Scott Morrison, for “engaging in coordinated harmful activity”.
Twitter is in the middle of a broader crackdown on QAnon content and is attempting to reduce the amplification of accounts spreading “clear and well-documented informational, physical, societal and psychological offline harm on our service”.
BurnedSpy34, a prominent and prolific member of the Australian QAnonscene, was recently permanently suspended.
The man behind the account, Tim Stewart, regularly tweeted content associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory to his tens of thousands of followers, including bizarre and unfounded claims about Alexander Downer and Julie Bishop, among others.
“The account you mentioned below has been permanently suspended for engaging in coordinated harmful activity,” a Twitter spokeswoman said.
Last year, the Guardian revealed that the owner of the account was a long-standing family friend of the Australian prime minister and his wife, Jenny. The families’ association was driven by the friendship between Stewart’s wife and Jenny.

And there's more here, if you want A grade loonacy ...

 Before returning to the bromancer, the pond would also like to note that the situation elsewhere has seen its ups and downs ... most recently with Boris the Liar's reign ...

Yes, there's talk of a moonshot, as things get grim in that progressive land, it being, it goes without saying, all the fault of progressives ...

Hapless Boris is desperately trying to avoid a second lockdown - he's such a progressive you know, it's in his bones - and so Boris Johnson pinning hopes on £100bn 'moonshot' to avoid second lockdown ...

Just a glimpse of another world before returning to the really weird bromancer ...

Speaking of borders, the pond couldn't but help get distracted by this story ...

 It's all in Brexit bill criticised as 'eye-watering' breach of international law and while the pond's at it, might it recommend ... Boris Johnson lets rip another demented monologue in Commons

Boris being Boris just couldn’t help screwing things up. He announced the creation of a new vigilante squad of Covid marshals – presumably recruited from the track and tracers who had spent the last few months sitting next to a silent phone – who would be ready at a moment’s notice to burst in to people’s homes and arrest any stray grannies or grandads that had broken “The Rule of Six”. And yes it was going to be tricky for him too, as it would mean he couldn’t see all of his kids at the same time either. Even assuming they wanted to see him too.

So what you’re basically saying is that Christmas is cancelled, several journalists observed. Boris looked panicked. Only in July he’d said everything would be back to normal by Christmas and he hates to be the bearer of bad news. So he just started making things up. Forget the failed app and all the other broken promises, he said. Forget that he had once dismissed mass testing as a waste of time.

Now he was going for broke with Operation Moonshot. By Christmas everyone would be able to give themselves a daily test and then people could do what they wanted. Think of it like a pregnancy test, Boris said. Though hopefully with fewer positives than he usually got. Hell, theatres could even do tests on the whole audience and just allow in those who were negative. It was a completely bonkers piece of pantomime.

Pantomime? Oh that's because he's a deeply progressive chap, and was possibly influenced by fairy stories to tell porker after porker...

Yes, the pond has digressed, but only to look at the fate of progressives around the world, and look now, only one bromancer rant to go ...

Oh fair go, fair crack of the whip, fair share of the sauce, his performance is surely no worse than that of other progressives such as the Boris and the Donald, on whom the bromancer sprays much sympathy and hope ...

And so to the war on China ...

SloMo must? Well there's your problem, right there. You thought you had a car you could speak orders to, and it might even follow some, but that feature wasn't available on the pond's FX, EJ or Kingswood, and certainly not the SloMo Shire Holden ...

Could the pond just intrude here with an immortal Rowe for the day, knowing that there's more restorative Rowe here?

Sorry, please go on, man of the bridge ...

Sorry, man of the bridge, you lost the pond with SloMo has 'adroitly handled' ... since as a mug punter, a loser and a dropkick, he failed the basic task of coming up with a coalition that might have tackled Xi, and instead decided he was some kind of super hero himself ... and we know where that sort of thinking leads ...

And so to the total on the tape, and the man of the bridge's reckoning ...

Coal? But we're already at war, and not one reptile has embraced the pond's solution of an all-out trade war featuring iron ore and coal.

Might we suffer a scratch or three? Possibly, but since when has the Black Knight not been the best example of all for our foreign policy? Surely SloMo must consider himself a Black Knight? Oops, there's that pesky 'must' again, when QAnon devotees will do what the conspiracy tells them ...

But speaking of iron ore, and so Gina's mob, and the IPA and all that conspiracy rag, the pond just had to note a tragedy today, a small one, but any tragedy should be noted, and tears shed ...

Yes, the cult master has been shanghaied, press ganged into the service of the IPA, and clearly he was in deep distress, because the pond can't think of a shittier work than the one offered by the cult master this day ... though experts in the cult master might have a deeper understanding ...

As for the rest, it's just the usual IPA stuff about how we should just go away and die, as so honourably expressed by that right to lifer, the onion muncher. Even the Kiwi Catholics here thought it a trifle odd ...

The economic cost of lockdowns means families should be allowed to let elderly relatives with COVID die by letting nature take its course. 
The comments come from staunch Catholic and former Australian Liberal Party Prime Minister, Tony Abbott.Abbott claims COVID is costing as much as A$200,000 (~NZ $220,000) to give an elderly person an extra year’s life.
He says the sum is substantially beyond what governments normally pay for life-saving drugs.
“In this climate of fear, it was hard for governments to ask ‘how much is a life worth?’ because every life is precious, and every death is sad, but that has never stopped families sometimes electing to make elderly relatives as comfortable as possible while nature takes its course.”
Abbott says the aim of preserving almost every life at any cost is a case of Governments shifting their goals from preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed with COVID patients to achieving zero transmission.

And so on, and on, and so much for the right to life, but back to the IPA calculating your right to die ...
 

The pond hadn't thought it would be reminding the IPA and Gina's mob so soon of that obvious Crikey answer ...

Never mind, on we go ...

 Indeed, indeed, there's no doubt we should have followed the US model ... and opened up everything, went hell for leather ...

Put it another way ...

But at last we reach the final gobbet, and still alive, no thanks to Gina's mob and their research, which surprisingly failed to discover the generally conservative attitude Australians have taken to the virus, perhaps because they actually want to live, and don't have the cynical hypocrisy of an onion muncher ...

 

But you don't live with the virus, you die with it ... but speaking of catching the empty bus, luckily we have the infallible Pope on hand to help Wild understand ...

Oh never mind, we've been there many times before, and with any luck, Wild will catch a dose of it, and learn what it's like to live with the virus ...

And now, because the reptiles have rambled on too long already, the pond apologises, because it couldn't resist this bit of recycling ...

Why did the pond run with it? Yep, it's a chance to catch up on some cartoons ...

 

And there were the usual Ruski Vlad jokes ...

But back to the text sandwiched between attention-seeking links ...
 

And there were even boating and nutshell jokes ...

But none of them were the main game, even if it takes another WSJ gobbet to get there ...

The main cartooning game this week? No doubt the bromancer will be on hand to explain the trend ... but meanwhile, the pond will just indulge in some binge viewing ...