In which the pond offers the first reptiles for the new season of herpetological studies ...

 

 

The pond thought it was being trolled, what with talk of a wind drought, but it was only a kindly correspondent getting in early. 

Still the pond couldn't believe it, and couldn't believe it had decided to return to its herpetological studies the day after such deliciousness came into sight ...

The pond simply had to go back a day, so that it might move forward ... 

This was yesterday's reptile feast, studiously ignored by the pond ...

 

 

What a cast, with the war on China still on, and a loving message to Vlad the impaler, and good advice to Albo - go barking mad with Clive, just like the reptiles - and above all, the Killer and Dame Groan, groaning away, the same as ever ... and thar she blowed ...

 

Yes, there it was, right there in the middle, an "extended wind drought". The pond's correspondent had got it right. The impossible suddenly became the possible and the real, and the pond was swept back in time to fond memories when there was a wind glut ...

 

 

Of course what Germany and other parts of Europe need is a windy Dame Slap ... and whatever you do, don't look up!

That was enough of the groaning, the drought had broken, but how could the pond miss out on Killer, also tidily summarised by the pond's correspondent?

Sure it was as monotonously predictable as Dame Groan groaning away about renewable energy, but wasn't that the entire point?

As with the groaning, the pond could only sample a little of the Killer's love for lovers of horse paste and hydroxy ...

 

Perhaps this is the moment to mention that the pond had been reading Thomas Homer-Dixon in The Globe and Mail. 

The piece was headed, The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare, with the sub-header The U.S. is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war. What should Canada do then?

It's behind the paywall, but there are ways and means. Sadly the pond can only find the space for a few samples ... ones most relevant to the Killer and his chums ...

I’m not surprised by what’s happening there – not at all. During my graduate work in the United States in the 1980s, I sometimes listened to Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk show host and later television personality. I remarked to friends at the time that, with each broadcast, it was if Mr. Limbaugh were wedging the sharp end of a chisel into a faint crack in the moral authority of U.S. political institutions, and then slamming the other end of that chisel with a hammer.
In the decades since, week after week, year after year, Mr. Limbaugh and his fellow travellers have hammered away – their blows’ power lately amplified through social media and outlets such as Fox News and Newsmax. The cracks have steadily widened, ramified, connected and propagated deeply into America’s once-esteemed institutions, profoundly compromising their structural integrity. The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war.
Now, adopting Mr. Limbaugh’s tried-and-true methods, demagogues on the right are pushing the radicalization process further than ever before. By weaponizing people’s fear and anger, Mr. Trump and a host of acolytes and wannabees such as Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have captured the storied GOP and transformed it into a near-fascist personality cult that’s a perfect instrument for wrecking democracy.

Now back to the Killer ...

 

Unelected tech bros? What about unelected scribblers for News Corp? Pumping up the horse paste and the hydroxy and the fascism?

And it’s not inaccurate to use the F word. As conservative commentator David Frum argues, Trumpism increasingly resembles European fascism in its contempt for the rule of law and glorification of violence. Evidence is as close as the latest right-wing Twitter meme: widely circulated holiday photos show Republican politicians and their family members, including young children, sitting in front of their Christmas trees, all smiling gleefully while cradling pistols, shotguns and assault rifles.
Those guns are more than symbols. The Trump cult presents itself as the only truly patriotic party able to defend U.S. values and history against traitorous Democrats beholden to cosmopolitan elites and minorities who neither understand nor support “true” American values. The Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. capitol must be understood in these terms. The people involved didn’t think they were attacking U.S. democracy – although they unquestionably were. Instead, they believed their “patriotic” actions were needed to save it.
Democracy is an institution, but underpinning that institution is a vital set of beliefs and values. If a substantial enough fraction of a population no longer holds those beliefs and values, then democracy can’t survive. Probably the most important is recognition of the equality of the polity’s citizens in deciding its future; a close runner up is willingness to concede power to one’s political opponents, should those equal citizens decide that’s what they want. At the heart of the ideological narrative of U.S. right-wing demagogues, from Mr. Trump on down, is the implication that large segments of the country’s population – mainly the non-white, non-Christian, and educated urban ones – aren’t really equal citizens. They aren’t quite full Americans, or even real Americans.
This is why Mr. Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him – a falsehood that nearly 70 per cent of Republicans now accept as true – is such potent anti-democratic poison. If the other side is willing to steal an election, then they don’t play by the rules. They’ve placed themselves outside the American moral community, which means they don’t deserve to be treated as equals. There’s certainly no reason to concede power to them, ever.
Willingness to publicly endorse the Big Lie has become a litmus test of Republican loyalty to Mr. Trump. This isn’t just an ideological move to promote Republican solidarity against Democrats. It puts its adherents one step away from the psychological dynamic of extreme dehumanization that has led to some of the worst violence in human history. And it has refashioned – into a moral crusade against evil – Republican efforts to gerrymander Congressional districts into pretzel-like shapes, to restrict voting rights, and to take control of state-level electoral apparatuses.
When the situation is framed in such a Manichean way, righteous ends justify any means. One of the two American parties is now devoted to victory at any cost.
Many of those with guns are waiting for a signal to use them. Polls show that between 20 and 30 million American adults believe both that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump and that violence is justified to return him to the presidency…

Well yes, and so horse paste and hydroxy is just part of the nonsense being spun by the reptiles serving Chairman Rupert and his son ... show them how it's done, Killer, with some killer insights ...

 

Of course Homer-Dixon only mentions Canada, but then we already have a natural born liar, a politician with inclinations to demagoguery, speaking in tongues and wearing caps, so we're beyond woefully unprepared:

…A terrible storm is coming from the south, and Canada is woefully unprepared. Over the past year we’ve turned our attention inward, distracted by the challenges of COVID-19, reconciliation, and the accelerating effects of climate change. But now we must focus on the urgent problem of what to do about the likely unravelling of democracy in the United States.
We need to start by fully recognizing the magnitude of the danger. If Mr. Trump is re-elected, even under the more-optimistic scenarios the economic and political risks to our country will be innumerable. Driven by aggressive, reactive nationalism, Mr. Trump “could isolate Canada continentally,” as one of my interlocutors put it euphemistically.
Under the less-optimistic scenarios, the risks to our country in their cumulative effect could easily be existential, far greater than any in our federation’s history. What happens, for instance, if high-profile political refugees fleeing persecution arrive in our country, and the U.S. regime demands them back. Do we comply?
In this context, it’s worth noting the words of Dmitry Muratov, the courageous Russian journalist who remains one of the few independent voices standing up to Mr. Putin and who just received the Nobel Prize for Peace. At a news conference after the awards ceremony in Oslo, as Russian troops and armour were massing on Ukraine’s borders, Mr. Muratov spoke of the iron link between authoritarianism and war. “Disbelief in democracy means that the countries that have abandoned it will get a dictator,” he said. “And where there is a dictatorship, there is a war. If we refuse democracy, we agree to war.”
Canada is not powerless in the face of these forces, at least not yet. Among other things, over three-quarters of a million Canadian emigrants live in the United States – many highly placed and influential – and together they’re a mass of people who could appreciably tilt the outcome of coming elections and the broader dynamics of the country’s political process.
But here’s my key recommendation: The Prime Minister should immediately convene a standing, non-partisan Parliamentary committee with representatives from the five sitting parties, all with full security clearances. It should be understood that this committee will continue to operate in coming years, regardless of changes in federal government. It should receive regular intelligence analyses and briefings by Canadian experts on political and social developments in the United States and their implications for democratic failure there. And it should be charged with providing the federal government with continuing, specific guidance as to how to prepare for and respond to that failure, should it occur.
If hope is to be a motivator and not a crutch, it needs to be honest and not false. It needs to be anchored in a realistic, evidence-based understanding of the dangers we face and a clear vision of how to get past those dangers to a good future. Canada is itself flawed, but it’s still one of the most remarkably just and prosperous societies in human history. It must rise to this challenge.

But enough of all that, and on to today's reptile survey, with the reptile news promising a splash of cash ... because, pace Homer, when it comes to pork, is there nothing a pig can't do?

 

 

There's a few things to note in all that stuff. 

The reptiles are still taking Clive's cash in their claw, and it was Greg Brown's heroic duty to report the thoughts of windfarm-loving beefy boofhead Angus ... because, natch, the coalition has been doing an astonishing job when it comes to the take-up of electric vehicles in this climate science aware country ... please, don't look up ...

But best of all was the pork-barreling man's offer of cash in the paw, which means a hefty subsidy to the private sector to let 'er rip ...

And so the pond was left to wonder how a cartoonist might feel, knowing that the horse called Irony had already left the stables and was half way around the track before his cartoon came out ...

 

As for the rest, it was a dull lot ...

Sure there was a Jennings jerking away at the war on China, and that mention of Theranos gave the pond a good laugh, what with the Chairman having been taken for a ride by the scam, just as he'd shown his ability with MySpace and his sense of history with Hitler's diaries ...

The Theranos rip was in the SMH, behind its feeble paywall,  and then there was this note in Vanity Fair, featuring News America Marketing, and concluding thusly:

“Why didn’t the Murdochs deal with Ailes before the scandal came to light?” Folkenflik wrote me. “Or O’Reilly? One answer is that each man made them a lot of money.”
It’s why the NPR media reporter and former Baltimore Sun stalwart believes Roger Ailes and O’Reilly aren’t any “one-off.” Ditto the British hacking scandal.
Rupert Murdoch let Ailes create a culture that was only reined in when its outrages could no longer be publicly avoided. And, when things get too close for comfort, he takes out his checkbook.
“He’s got strong ideological beliefs, but Murdoch has no values above profit, loyalty and pragmatism,” said Folkenflik. “And that means, of course, he most values whoever is able and willing to advance his journalistic outfits so they can advance the political figures he happens to support so they can make decisions to benefit his business holdings.”
Remember that next time you’re in the dairy or frozen food sections of your nearby grocery.

Oh well, the pond can remember all that, when it turns to Dame Slap, out and about on a Wednesday in her usual way:

 

 

 

The pond should interrupt here to note that it hasn't read more than a page of Rowling. 

A page was enough to discover that she was one of those leaden populist scribblers inclined to a clunker writing style. Sure, it was popular, but so was H. Rider Haggard in his day, and the pond would no more ask Haggard for advice on matters of sex than Queen Victoria. We all know what his pitch was ...

 

 

 

 

Much as the pond loved certain writers at certain times, a lot of them were populist clunkers. 

Agatha Christie is still a mystery, and still providing fodder for the likes of mindless movie twerps like Kenneth Branagh. She was weird enough to take a powder for awhile, but her mystery disappearance doesn't elevate her views on sex, life, politics or the world.

The same might be said of other populist writers - P. G. Wodehouse for example, so naive that he got himself into a fascist pickle. 

And then there were other clunkers, of the Richmal Crompton kind. Only when the pond went back did it remember that William's family had comical servants. 

And then there was the Bunter mob, produced by Charles Hamilton, aka Frank Richards, a real powerhouse of a wordsmith, but also churning out lashings of stereotypes at a penny a caricature. 

As for the likes of W. E. Johns, you only had to read a line to realise that as a writer he made a good first world war pilot ...

And so on and so forth, but in short if Dame Slap references "the power of the art" of Rowling, please pardon the pond if it lets out a loud scream into a mindless, meaningless universe ...

 

 

 

The pond can understand that when young, a sense of taste and style is still forming. But none of that explains or forgives Dame Slap rabbiting on about Rowling as if she was some form of deep philosophical genius, when in reality she's just a bigoted twerp, out of her depth and out of her time, though it has to be said that the MAGA cap donning Dame Slap is pretty much in the same category,.

If only they'd follow Agatha Christie's example and disappear from the field of battle for awhile ...

 

 

 

Oh fucketty fuck, first day back on the pond, and it had to be Dame Slap, doing her usual mealy-mouthed IPA inspired bullshit, full of ancient bigotries, fears and loathings.

Never mind, it's not the pond's business to pick 'em. Instead, just as the Killer serves up horse paste, the pond must serve up Dame Slap horseshit ...

 

 

Next week, Dame Slap extols the talking done by P. G. Wodehouse in his philosophy-inclined novels, deeply supportive of the British class structure (oh wait, did Rowling set her twaddle in a school of the Etonish Boris kind? Should the pond don a stylish cap to make Dame Slap comfortable?)

 

 

 

 

And so to a concluding cartoon, and what with the immortal Rowe and the infallible Pope on hols, the pond offers a left-over seasonal gift, and a sea shanty ...

 

 

 

Regrets of the pond. 

Is it weird that the pond has resumed its reptile studies? It might just as easily have taken up the grog again ...

Sing me hearties, sing with Dame Slap, for it were as tedious to return as to go o'er ...