In which the Major returns, and the pond indulges in a grand tradition ...

 

 

 

 

At last the Major is back, on a Monday most will be taking as a holyday, but what frabjous joy that he should have signaled his return with "A sense of proportion used to the hallmark of serious journalism".

 

Cue a grand pond tradition with the Major ...

 

 

 

 

Yes, there's serious journalism at work.

And so to the Major's effort today, which in the proud tradition of Killer Creighton, is a form of Covid denialism, or perhaps more accurately Covid relativism, full of stupidity, or idiocy if you will.

In recent times, climate science denialism seems to have lost its appeal for the likes of the Major, but the Major isn't just one of the world's great climate scientists, he's also up there as an epidemiologist ...

 

 

It was of course way back in 1996 that the Major deskilled the Courier Mail in a way only the Major could, and then provide some epic deskilling in the lizard Oz, but rather than argue with the Major, the pond would rather complete that Crikey story ...

 

 

What fun, but now it's time for more of the Major's expertise, and a reminder that if the Major had his way, and was running the show the way they ran it in the UK and the USA - oh Donald, what a bleach of a hydroxy good time - this country would be well and truly fucked ...

 

Medical research shows?

To understand the Major, it's essential to go back in time, as a way of discovering his Foxist tendencies. There are any number of stories ...

 

 

Back in the day, the heavies at News Corp realised that the virus was a bit out of the ordinary and cancelled the Chairman's birthday party, and instituted work practices for staff safety, while leading viewers down the garden path at Fox News.

Just for fun the pond selected a portion of that Salon story by Igor Derysh:

..."We expect to continue receiving reports of more positive tests given New York is now at the epicenter," the memo said, according to Deadline. "The vast majority of our workforce is now telecommuting so they have not had to weather the issues around each positive case."
But as Fox News executives worried about the impact of the virus, the network assured viewers, who could be at risk of severe illness from the virus because they are are disproportionately elderly, that the outbreak was no worse than the common flu.
Echoing President Donald Trump's attempts to downplay the threat of the virus, the network's hosts assured the audience the problem was not serious.
Some Fox News hosts seized on Trump's claim that the media coverage of the virus was a "hoax" to bring down his presidency. When the market began to collapse in late February, Fox pundits attempted to blame the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the Democratic primary race for scaring investors.
Fox hosts accused the media of pushing "false, fear-based narratives" are "driv[ing] coronavirus panic."
Fox News medical contributor Marc Siegel declared that the "worst-case scenario" for coronavirus was "it could be the flu" on March 6.
Host Jeanine Pirro argued one day later that the virus was less serious than the flu.
"All the talk about coronavirus being so much more deadly doesn't reflect reality," she claimed. "Without a vaccine, the flu would be far more deadly."
"The more I learn about [coronavirus], the less there is to worry about," Fox host Pete Hegseth said on March 8.
A day after Murdoch canceled his party, Fox Business host Trish Regan made the wild claim that concerns over the virus were "yet another attempt to impeach" Trump.
Regan's rant prompted the network to pivot, leading to a widely-shared montage of Fox hosts raising alarm over the same virus they had attempted to downplay just days earlier. Trump also appeared to stop trying to downplay the virus around the same time.
But just as Trump went on to pivot again to arguing that economic pain caused by the virus was worse than the virus itself, so did Fox News.
"You know that famous phrase, 'The cure is worse than the disease?'" Fox host Steve Hilton said Sunday before his remarks were echoed in Trump's tweets. "That is exactly the territory we are hurtling towards. You think it is just the coronavirus that kills people? This total economic shutdown will kill people . . . Flatten the curve but not the economy, and do it before it's too late."
Host Laura Ingraham also argued that within the next week "we need to be heading back to work, school, stores, restaurants and churches with new protocols in place."
"The risk if we don't is that we lose far more in terms of death, pain and suffering than this pandemic will bring," she said.
The network's coverage put its audience at risk, Smith argued in The Times.
"Fox failed its viewers and the broader public in ways both revealing and potentially lethal," he wrote. "In particular, Lachlan Murdoch failed to pry its most important voices away from their embrace of the president's early line: that the virus was not a big threat in the United States."
Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Public Health Institute, told Smith he believed some viewers would die because of the network's coverage.
"Yes, some commentators in the right-wing media," he said, "spread a very specific type of misinformation that I think has been very harmful."

That was way back in March 2020, and yet now here we are with the Major in the New Year of 2021...

 

 

Or perhaps just look at the UK and the United States, or Brazil, for results which can be produced by leaders as fucked in the head as the Major ...

And now by good luck, the reptiles put up the Oreo early enough for the reformed, recovering feminist to catch the pond's attention ...

 

 

 

What on earth is a triumphant tennis player doing at the top of an Oreo column?

Why on earth is there that apocalyptic header about loss of civility debasing the West? Is she going to go on a rant about John McEnroe, who was debasing things way back in the 1980s.

Is she going to rail against the bigotry and homophobia of Margaret Court, and the debasing of whatever little merit or meaning there might be to invasion day and the dubious gongs handed out to vile people?

Of course not. That's not what reformed, recovering feminsts do. They get a bee in the old bonnet, and go off ... 

 

The pond has no idea what the Oreo took before scribbling this piece, but couldn't resist heading off to a bizarrely laid out listicle which provided reminders that tennis is just tennis, and always has been, with a tennis that included the notorious Bobby Riggs, hustling Margaret Court, who was as silly then as she is now, and the likes of Gussie Moran and Jeff Tarango and Ilie Nastase ... and good old Jimmy Connors, how could the pond almost forget to mention Jimmy?

And then there was Bill Tilden ...

Bill Tilden dominated men's tennis in 1920s and much of the 1930s. He was as big a star as Babe Ruth or Jack Dempsey.
But his legacy is tainted. He was attracted to young boys in his later years, according to a New York Times article. He was virtually broke when he died in 1953, at age 60.
"As a public figure, perhaps a more apt comparison for Tilden is to the pop star Michael Jackson, whose musical legacy, while unassailable, was mitigated for some by his conduct," The New York Times wrote.
Tilden was sentenced to a year in jail in 1946 for contributing to the delinquency of a 14-year-old boy, according to the New York Times, and he was arrested again in 1949 for making sexual advances to a young male hitchhiker.
Tilden was controversial even during his playing days. As noted in excerpts from Frank Deford's book Big Bill Tilden: The Triumphs and Tragedy, the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association threatened to ban Tilden, who wrote for various publications and had an adversarial relationship with the USLTA while still in his prime.
He also was accused of being arrogant and inconsiderate, according to a CNN profile.

The listicle has the links for assorted references (needing highlighting) but what was the Oreo saying?

Has she turned herself into an Emily Post, or gasp, even worse a Victorian?

 

 

 

But what would a reformed, recovering feminist make of the text that accompanied that book, with plenty of other illustrations here ...

Suburbs and servants

Following social rules was even more important for middle-class women. Unlike men, they couldn’t draw status from their jobs. While husbands commuted to work every day, wives were left at home, often in one of the newly-built suburbs that were beginning to fringe the major cities. Semi-detached houses had names such as ‘Blenheim’ or ‘Windsor’ and were designed to ape the stately homes of the aristocracy. Not only was paid work for the middle-class woman frowned upon, she was also discouraged from doing housework, which was left to a growing army of specialised servants including housemaids, nursemaids, cooks and footmen. Even women at the bottom of the middle class, the wives of clerks and schoolteachers, expected to have a maid-of-all-work to do the dirtiest tasks like scrubbing the steps and peeling the potatoes.

Conspicuous consumption

The real function of a middle-class wife was to display her husband’s financial success by stocking her home with material possessions – what’s been called the ‘paraphernalia of gentility’. Carpets, pianos and paintings, the fancier the better, were all advertised in the new women’s magazines such as Sam Beeton’s Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and sent a message not only about their owners’ wealth but also their patriotism. Buying luxury goods boosted domestic trade and bound the growing British Empire together through the importation of precious materials and expensive fabrics from the other side of the world. Being a consumer had become a civic duty.

The lady of the house herself became a walking billboard for her husband’s material success. She might change her clothes several times a day, wearing different outfits for breakfast, making calls and dinner. Her body, too, conveyed an important message about her social class. Her smooth white hands and cumbersome crinoline skirt hinted that she had not been busy with housework.

Indeed, indeed, etiquette, civility, and bizarre Victorian hypocrisy, because really, has there been a more deluded and weird society than that of Victorian England?

How silly of the pond. Stupidity is timeless.

We now have the Oreo rabbiting on about the debasement of culture, as if there was some mysterious golden age ..

 

What an extraordinarily stupid woman. The pond doesn't say this of course to intrude on the good manners sustaining interpersonal civility vital to democratic societies ..

It's just a rather awkward tendency note the facts. Stupid is as stupid scribbles.

And so much as it would like to do, the pond is unable to revert the days of old, when the Earth was young and full of hope ... perhaps even revert to the Garden of Eden, and the way women ruined everything for men, as a recovered, reformed feminist would recognise.

As proof of the Oreo's astonishing capacity to embrace contradictions, the pond offers the Oreo's very supportive scribbling in favour of a notorious pussy grabber. 

This was the delusional Oreo rabbiting on about the Donald in the lizard Oz back on 5th October 2020, rabble rousing in the Donald way... the pond can't do all of it, but here's a taster ...

 

So what is it? Civility, gentility and etiquette, or a good burst of pussy groping while ranting about the rabbit hole of PC bigotry? Is there a Margaret Court in the house? The Oreo would be delighted to have a cup of tea and a plate of scones with her ...

Rather than brood about it anymore, the pond will close with an evocative Rowe, with more Rowe evocations here ...