In which the pond returns to Hades ...

 

 

Day two of the keen Keane challenge ...

...Meantime, there’s a fascinating test for the press gallery ahead. The gallery has worked hard to churn out more than 370 articles about Kimberley Kitching since her tragic passing — or about 19 a day. On that basis, we should be swimming in a sea of tens of thousands of words about Fierravanti-Wells and Morrison for weeks to come — her revelations about how Morrison and his cronies engineered the overturning of Michael Towke’s preselection in Cook, his alleged racist views about Towke’s background, the briefing of journalists (later the basis for successful law suits by Towke) using material supplied, Fierravanti-Wells says, by Labor’s Sam Dasytari, and the whole saga of Morrison’s attempts to halt rank-and-file preselections in the NSW Liberal Party.
Plenty of material to work with there, you’d think. 

Crikey - dead to the pond when Grundling on about Ukraine - did its best to keep it alive ... dragging in the difficult to Tame ...

 

Ah yes, the running off to little Johnny moment ... there's how to cover it, you useless worm ...though perhaps they should have run off to Peter Costello ...

 

 

Now Imogen, really, the pond had hoped to blather on about other things, rather than do a count and watch this space ... you know like when that shameless tosser Lachlan blathered on about many things, and the next thing you know the mango Mussolini, beloved of News Corp and Faux Noise, was performing treason yet again and enraging Charlie Sykes ...

 

 

 

 

What a fine rant, and yet Faux Noise and larrikin Lachy still support the treasonous mango Mussolini ...

Okay, Imogen, enough of that already, on with watching the space and doing the count. First the tree killer edition front page ...

 

 

 

 

Nope, nothing there, just more kash in the reptile klaw from Klive ... (put the letters together and you'll katch the drift).

How about the commentary section?

 

 

Nope, just the usual Friday crowd, and bubble-headed booby Claire apparently unaware that SloMo's mob was going to turn everybody from renters into home owners by the end of the month ... hah, fooled yah ...

How about top of the digital page?

 

 

Nope, just simpleton Simon saying, apparently still unaware he might be suffering a conflict of interest by carrying on with Bid. 

Does he have the first clue what he stands for, apart from the corruption of journalism in Australia?

So to the triptych of terror, as the pond's hopes grew fainter ...

 

Lordy, lordy, there was one strange sight ... Killer Creighton not leading with talk of the evils of masks ... and the pond supposes that talk of the Hughes fuckup sort of gets into Fierravanti-Wells turf, but sorry unTamed one, keen Keane, and Imogen, the pond has done the count and watched the space, and it's a dead duck ... a spruce goose no longer on the loose ...

The best the pond could offer was an infallible Pope as He buried the matter ...

 

 

What a treasure the infallible Pope is ...

And so back to usual pond business, and the pond will acknowledge the truth of this correction ... I’m not so sure that the pond has been shut out of Mount Olympus but has instead been unable to get past Cerberus and into Hades.

Sadly the pond got past Cerberus and is back in Hades .... but let us begin gently with a bromancer plunge ... it's short and it's silly

 

 

Hang on, hang on, did the pond just read a headline proposing that we send Zelensky tanks, and the bromancer was the proposer? 

So all that guff that the bromancer scribbled about the complete uselessness of Oz tanks was just guff? Or was it some kind of weird reverse slap to the cheek, Will style? A gesture with good intentions for one, but actually full of malice ...

 

 

 

Um yes, mobile troop carriers, good idea, and a lot of other things, but tanks? 

We've seen what a good anti-tank device can do to your average Russian tank, and now we're wanting to send combination curios, museum pieces and vanity projects to Ukraine?

So it seems, or perhaps it was just a chance the reptiles to hang out another click bait video to dry ...

 

 

 

Actually dear bromancer it has the certain ring of an insult, wanting to send our curios, museum pieces and vanity projects to Ukraine. 

Yes, we all know your contempt for tanks, you even persuaded the pond about their complete uselessness in a time of asymmetrical warfare, but shipping that contempt to Ukraine is surely beyond the pale ...

And now to prove that the pond has truly returned to Hades, a serve of the hole in the bucket man ... and the usual garbled serve of history and philosophy, because truly our Henry wears his larnin' heavily ...

 

 

Now being a reptile treatise, there is of course no external link, though there are many easy enough to find, such as this one at NPR ...

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST: Just before his army launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a long and bizarre speech in which he denied one simple fact, the existence and sovereignty of Ukraine. But to many observers of Putin, the claim sounded familiar. It aligned closely with the writings of one man, Russian intellectual Aleksandr Dugin. David Von Drehle is a columnist for The Washington Post. And in a column published this past week, he says Dugin's views help explain Putin's ambitions in Ukraine. David, welcome to the show.
DAVID VON DREHLE: Thank you for having me, Ayesha.
RASCOE: You wrote that Dugin is commonly referred to as, quote, "Putin's brain." Can you give us a sense of Dugin's ideology?
VON DREHLE: Dugin is a good old-fashioned mystical fascist of the sort that kind of flourished after World War I, when many people in Europe felt lost, felt like the Old World had failed, and were searching around for explanations. And a certain set of them decided the problem was all of modern thinking, the idea of freedom, the idea of individual rights. And in Dugin's case, he felt that the Russian Orthodox Church was destined to rule as an empire over all of Europe and Asia. And eventually, in a big book in 1997, he laid out the road map for accomplishing that. He's continued to be intimately involved in the Russian military, Russian intelligence services and Putin's inner circle.
RASCOE: And so you talk about how this ideology has manifested in Putin's actions, this idea that Russia should basically, as you said, rule over all of Europe and Asia.
VON DREHLE: Well, he felt that this was the great land-based empire and that it was in competition with a great sea-based empire that was led by the United States and Great Britain. So step one was to weaken the U.S., weaken Great Britain and disconnect us from our ties to Europe. And if you look at the way Putin has manipulated the internet over the past 20 years, the rise of social media to drive division and heat up the culture wars in the United States, to influence the Brexit movement in Great Britain. All of these things are steps to weaken the West because it's Russia's destiny to draw Europe toward Russia.
RASCOE: And how does Ukraine fit into this line of thinking?
VON DREHLE: Yeah, well, Dugin and then Putin has given voice to this, as well. They say that Ukraine is not a separate country, that it's another Russian Orthodox-dominated country. But from a strategic standpoint, it is the nation on the north shore of the Black Sea. And Dugin says that Eurasia, as he calls the future Russian empire - Eurasia has to have complete control of the Black Sea.

And so on, and that works for the pond because if nothing else Putin is a grandiose sociopath of the old-fashioned Tsar kind, and if Eisenstein were around to day, he'd know how to give him the baroque grand guignol treatment, with music by Sergei Prokofiev, though it might create trouble with the spirit of Stalin ...

In a world where reason and rationality might rule, there was absolutely no reason to fuck Ukraine, attempt to fuck Europe, make things tough for jolly Joe, side with the mango Mussolini, and incidentally further fuck a planet troubled by the realities of climate science. To blather on about this being just a power trip is to ignore the depth of the delusion ...

A rough sketch of Vlad the invader at work by Eistenstein ...

 

 

 

 

Sorry, for a moment there the pond forgot it was back in Hades ... aren't geek hackers wonderful, so caring, thoughtful and obliging, and cheerily sending the pond back to hell ...

 

 

Apparently it hasn't occurred to the hole in the bucket man that the conventional picture of sociopaths should include the notion that they're capable of including all sorts of delusions and delusional thinking into their world view, especially if they're an isolated megalomaniac dictator of the first water, where the only company they keep is forelock tugging yes men ...

...I mean, it's clearly - it's delusional thinking. It's messianic. It's, you know, apocalyptic. It's highly religious. We're seeing all these qualities in Putin lately to a degree that we haven't seen before - this idea that he's on a religious mission to basically universalize the Russian Orthodox faith through power and violence. As I said at the end of the column, it's a delusion. But when dictators with nuclear weapons have delusions, we have to pay attention to them.

And at this point our hole in the bucket man began to proclaim his own delusions, beginning with this reptile photo insert ...

 

 

 

Yes, well we all know what happens to protestors in Russia at the moment. The pond is astonished by the bravery of the opposition ... 

...There is a thing that many people in the West don’t understand: the risks that ordinary protesters face in Russia. Now, if you go to protest, you will very likely be detained, highly likely arrested, expelled from university or fired from your job. You are risking a prison term, like real prison, for three or five years. It has changed over the last six years dramatically. Two years ago, the largest risk for a protester was to get arrested for 10 days. Now it’s 15 years. Ten years ago, the largest risk for a protester was to get fined 500 rubles [approx. $6].
Still, over 15,000 people were detained during anti-war rallies in the first couple of weeks, which means that hundreds of thousands of people attended. There were arrests in over 130 Russian cities. And very importantly, every protester in a country like Russia represents maybe a thousand people who are sympathetic but can’t afford to risk going to prison for five years; can’t afford to get fired from their job. So we know that many people are supporting us, but for very natural reasons, because they live in a totalitarian regime, they can’t turn out and participate. For many years, it was completely safe at least to share information about the situation on social media. Now you will risk lengthy imprisonment for this as well.

It's not the same as being against the mango Mussolini while working for News Corp. You can just pick up port and leave, though very few reptiles are prepared to risk their jobs as lickspittle lackeys ... even as the likes of Chris Wallace can't ignore or stand the stench and the loonacy any more ...

And so to our hole in the bucket man's delusions ...

 

 

The polls consistently show?

The polls in Russia are deeply corrupt, and mean as much as the fraudulent election polls, which is to say diddly squat or spit on a griddle.

Back in the day, the only alternative for the young, the liberal, the intelligentsia and the Jewish was to head abroad ...

 

 

 

 

And that's how the pond was blessed with Some Like It Hot ...

But it seems it's easy to sit in armchair and pontificate about what must be done against a brutal dictator, ever more isolated and delusional ...

 

 

Oh yes, we have fought dictators before, and the best and the brightest ended up in Hollywood ... 

And with that, it's time for a Rowe to wrap up this day in Hades ...

 

Why David Rowe mentioned bullies too ... perhaps the pond should keep counting Imogen?

 

 

 

 

Oh heck, just a taster from the cawing Crowe ...

...The second force runs deeper even if it seems mundane. Raised in the NSW industrial city of Wollongong to an Italian migrant family, Fierravanti-Wells does not belong to the comfortable world of Liberal Party clubs and elite city schools. She is an outsider who has put years into the party and seen others lifted ahead of her. To be blunt: the ones without the migrant backgrounds moved up. When she goes on the attack she does not hold back.
The third factor at work is an old wound that seems deadlier the longer it festers. Fierravanti-Wells supported a conservative ally, Michael Towke, as the candidate for the federal seat of Cook in 2007 and helped him win a ballot among party members. His rival? Scott Morrison, among others. The outcome? Towke 82, Morrison 8.
That set off one of the dirtiest campaigns in living Liberal memory. Morrison and his supporters fought to overturn the ballot by alleging Towke had paid membership fees when recruiting mates to the party, breaking party rules. Under parliamentary privilege, Fierravanti-Wells says Morrison suggested the electorate would not want a candidate who was Lebanese. Morrison denies the claim.
(Towke, who works in business these days, does not return calls about this. He grew up as a Maronite Catholic and went to Marcellin College in Randwick. He has two degrees from the University of Sydney, in arts and engineering, and served in the army reserve.)
Liberal headquarters backed Morrison, overturned the ballot and handed the safe seat to the future prime minister but the anger about what happened has followed him throughout his career. It helps explain why Fierravanti-Wells wanted Peter Dutton to gain the Liberal leadership in August 2018 and why Morrison would not have her in his ministry after he won.
The party’s current internal dispute over choosing federal election candidates, pitting Morrison against the conservatives in the High Court over whether branch members get a vote, only adds to the bitterness over the past.
Fierravanti-Wells makes one of the most explosive claims possible in the current political environment – that Morrison is a bully – and will not stop. Even worse for the Prime Minister is that other women agree with her, including Jacqui Lambie and Pauline Hanson in recent days. That could look like a problem with women.

A problem with women? You don't say, cawing Crowe, but what about a simpler problem? 

What about a problem with a deeply cynical opportunist, allegedly fundamentalist Xian, except when he lies about his friends, who is really just a third rate marketing man liar from the Shire who couldn't even hold a job at Tourism? Can someone point him out?