And another one bites the dust ...

 

Continuing the pond's irregular series of contenders for the Herman Cain awards, the pond was astonished to discover that there was an actual set of awards with their very own Twitter account ...

 

 

 

What's more, he was judged a hall of famer ... yes, there's also a hall of fame with its very own tag ...

 

 

Hot links and all that jazz at C and L here for those with a morbid interest ...

Meanwhile, off to Israel for another hot competitor ...

 

If you can't get it at the Daily Beast, you can read it at Yahoo ...

One of Israel’s top anti-vaxx activists has died of COVID-19, two days after posting a final message to his followers that ordered them to “keep fighting” against the shot that could have saved his life.
Hai Shoulian, 57, spent much of the pandemic organizing protests against coronavirus rules—including mask mandates and Israel’s vaccine-passport scheme, the Green Pass. He lost his life to COVID-19 on Monday morning after spending 10 days at Tel Aviv’s Wolfson Medical Center.
His brother, Avi, told The Daily Beast that his family felt like they had been torn apart, as he headed to his brother’s funeral on Tuesday. “Our dad used to say that every table has four legs and we were four, that was our family motto,” he said, tearfully. “And since yesterday we’re three.”
Avi said his brother’s death certificate lists the coronavirus as the cause of death. He said he decided to speak to the media to encourage his brother’s followers to take the vaccine “and save their lives.” The brother added: “I wish I managed to convince him to save his own life.”
In his last Facebook post, Hai Shoulian complained about how awful his symptoms were, but remained defiant against the vaccine.
In a video showing him receiving oxygen support, he wrote: “I’m in a very bad shape, it is serious... If I take the oxygen out I can’t walk three meters. I can’t talk or respond to people. It took me about an hour to figure out who I am. Where am I and what am I doing here... Lack of oxygen is a terrible thing.”
Despite his condition, he managed a final stand against Israel’s Green Pass, saying: “It has nothing to do with the coronavirus. It has nothing to do with vaccines. It has to do with coercion... Keep fighting.”
The anti-vaxxer’s traditional name, Hai, is intended to protect its bearer—it means “alive” in Hebrew. In his final message, he signed off: “I believe that I will make it through this, with God’s help. In my estimation it will take another two weeks, maybe three.”
Two days later, he died from the virus.
When he first fell sick last week, Shoulian claimed that police had poisoned him after he was arrested during a protest against the Green Pass. “I’m telling you, this is an attempt to wipe me out and if something happens to me know that’s exactly what happened,” he said.
Shoulian went bankrupt at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, according to his younger brother. He blames that for his brother’s decision to become a prominent anti-vaccine campaigner. “If his business had been in good shape, I still think he probably wouldn’t have gotten vaccinated,” Avi said, “but he wouldn’t have been out on the street protesting. He’d have been busy with work.”
Despite the cause listed on his brother’s death certificate, Avi tried to convince the police to order an autopsy of Shoulian’s body to rule out foul play, saying: “Another thing I suspect—and it is only a suspicion—is that he could have been poisoned not by the police but by someone else.”
Shoulian is survived by his mother, three children from a first marriage, his second wife, Yulia Kaprera, and her young son, who is entering the first grade.
National case numbers have been rising in Israel since the end of July. Only 17 percent of eligible Israelis remain unvaccinated, but they account for 65 percent of all cases of serious COVID illness, according to statistics released by the Israeli ministry of health on Tuesday.

Paranoid and defiant, right to the bitter, and painful end ...

Where do people get these weird obsessions?

The pond doesn't know about Israel, but there are clues regarding the United States ...

The story of the bold, bare faced, inveterate veteran liar is at the Graudian here, and it ended this way ...

 

 

Dear sweet long absent lord, now we're down to talking about a rapper's talk about swollen balls? 

Why the pond could be off reading Marina Hyde take down GB News. The saucy, impudent wench has a way with words ...

Inevitably, like its sworn wokerati enemies, GB News turned out to be spectacularly touchy. I myself was involved in a most enjoyable back-and-forth with its lawyers earlier this year over some deeply anodyne passing comment in a column of mine. I always feel the tone of exaggerated self-flagellation is best in such apologies, but the readers’ editor wisely handled matters more conventionally. I note from my archives that my final expert opinion on the matter was “honestly they are a load of pretentious twats … well we’ll see who ends up being right lol”.
And it has all remained a lol-ing matter, which seems over far too soon. I do prefer to have time to get down to the riverbank before the corpses of my enemies float past. (Side note: the BBC should now hire Neil straight back.)

Oh there's much more all of it rich, but speaking of twats, as the pond likes to do, balls also found their way into John Crace talking of Boris and balls ...

...Later in the afternoon, Boris Johnson gave a press conference to deliver much the same message to the rest of the country. When these pressers began in March last year, Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance seemed rather overwhelmed by their proximity to the prime minister. Now they have more than got Johnson’s measure and have no qualms about keeping him in check. So though Boris repeated the spiel – along with added “shots in the locker” and “tilts in the tiller” nonsense – about not being complacent, and there being a slightly vague plan A and plan B, it was the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser who gave the most direct answers.
Whitty made plain the link between vaccination and staying alive and stressed it wouldn’t take much to overload the NHS again. Vallance went further still, arguing it was best to go harder and earlier than you might want to when tackling the pandemic. Across the Channel were countries with similar levels of infection that were coming down because their governments hadn’t been afraid to act. He looked at Boris with something approaching disdain. He seemed to be thinking that the UK could get similar results if we didn’t have such a deadbeat for prime minister, who couldn’t even get his own MPs to wear a mask.
The presser ended on a surreal note of Whitty telling the singer Nicki Minaj that she ought to be ashamed of herself for tweeting that the vaccination made gonads unfeasibly large and men impotent. Boris refrained from pointing out that it hasn’t done much harm to his own fertility. But then he also declined to say whether he would be reshuffling his cabinet in the next couple of weeks.
So we can take that as a yes.

Yet somehow the inveterate professional highly paid brazen liar thought Minaj on balls was  some kind of a talking point? Boris's balls to that ...

The poor old Fauc found himself facing a ballsy question and thought it was just balls... (follow the link for the CNN video)

A sign of the times? Here's another sign from long ago, and still the false idol exerts his power ...