In which the pond confesses to not understanding much about the United States ... but sadly understands the Terrorists too well ...

 

First up the pond just wanted to thank a correspondent for this link ...

Not only did it complete the circle for the pond, but it reminded the pond of why it feels more comfortable as it wanders the world when it lands in plucky little Brexiting Britain... 

You don't get this as a toy ...

... and not be able to plug in to the UK Graudian and immediately get a feel for things. 

You can read Zahawi, Sunak, Johnson: this is rule by plutocrat. It’s like a stench that’s worse each day, and it makes perfect sense, even as it references an American writer:

Let me tell you about the very rich,” F Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. “They are different from you and me … Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.” For that reason they will always be an awkward fit in the world of democratic politics.
The past few days have provided ample reminders of what happens when the very rich take control. The stench emanating from this government reprises John Major’s last days of “sleaze”. But the sums of money back then look paltry compared to the extraordinary finances of the multimillionaires who now fill the Tory benches.
Nadhim Zahawi’s mysterious “error” in failing to pay capital gains tax landed him with a walloping 30% penalty; he agreed to repay an estimated £5m reportedly while chancellor, collecting everyone else’s taxes. No normal citizen could be “careless” about such a sum, so it’s time for Rishi Sunak to come clean about exactly what he knew about Zahawi’s tax affairs when appointing him party chair. Zahawi had been nominated for a gong in the new year honours list, but following the usual due diligence, his name did not appear, reports the Sun on Sunday.
Many will remember his startling expenses claim 10 years ago, when he was obliged to pay back money wrongly claimed for heating his horses’ stables. He declared himself “mortified” at that “error” concerning a £5,000 bill, so presumably he feels a thousand times more mortified over an error a thousand times greater. Since he claims that HMRC called his tax non-payments “careless and not deliberate”, let’s see the correspondence – as there was nothing “careless” about his multiple legal threats to Dan Neidle of Tax Policy Associates, who investigated his tax affairs.

It's just a simple case of being dodgy, a bit like a dodgy property developer in the inner west, or poker machines in clubs ... you do what you've got to do ... and if you get away with it, all to the good. Dress up in the right sort of uniform and you could be a spare Royal or the premier of NSW ...

It makes perfect sense, but the problem for the pond, as it sets out each day on a new experiment in depravity, is that it simply doesn't get the United States ...

How do you go from Jewish space lasers to this?

And what the fuck is this all about? Forget the use of "candy", that's just like talking about fall when you mean autumn. 

The pond understands that Americans have never heard of lollies or all day suckers or boiled lollies of the humbug kind ... mmm, the pond loves its humbug ... but even given that, how can a cable network entertainer talk about candy as sex objects?

A grown man finds animations of lollies sexy?  And then the lollie company folds, and even issues a statement, "a message", to try and justify its folding to the wokeness, which out of a sense of discretion the pond omitted? That's just really weird ...

The pond can understand this yarn - it's seen American Hustle and understands that grifters gotta grift and hustlers gotta hustle ...

Oh and the pond does understand this, sort of ... because it involves a dropkick loser and choker who was born to be a lifelong mistake ... a wannabe without an ethical bone in his body, who did learn the American hustle ...

Yes, there's someone who'll never learn from being a lifelong mistake, but there are some things that the pond will never understand, like a high rating American cable show host wanting to fuck a chocolate lolly.

On the other hand, the pond understands the Daily Terror only too well ... it's just a sleazy, low rent tabloid version of the lizard Oz, with hucksters and hustlers like the dribbling Joe as a feature ...

Enough already, it's just the lizard Oz and Dame Slap blathering about the voice, except it's being done by a truly low rent wannabe maroon, a hacker if you will, and the pond has no time for it.

And like the lizard Oz, the Terrorist runs stories without the slightest sense of irony, putting the fat owl of the remove doing his thing about women and that dreadful Kiki gal, up against a bit of handwringing about Liberals and women ...

Fair shake of the irony sauce bottle, and the other thing that the Terrorists share with the lizard Oz is an ability to imitate a murmuration of starlings, all whirling in the sky ... and as Oz day is pending, the pond thought a few samples in order, though once again, the pond will have. to do it old style, because the Terror fills its columns with an unseemly number of snaps, in lieu of any sign of intelligent life ...

First up a carping Vikki Campion, a name new to the pond ...

If you are ashamed of Australia Day, don’t take a day in lieu to reflect the holiday you don’t believe in.

Federal Labor has joined academia and enlightened corporates to tell bureaucrats they can opt to “work” Australia Day if the occasion triggers them, and claim a day in lieu when airfares are on sale.
While Albo claims it’s “fine to have some flexibility”, Australia Day has now been cheapened to an extra day off for academics, corporates and bureaucrats, guilt-tripped into a mythical misnomer of what the day represents, righteous about an erroneous view completely out of historical context.
We should acknowledge a terrible, suppressed history, but should not commit the counter-crime of forgetting the truth of the man behind it, whose remarkable tenacity birthed a free nation.
Thursday is not, as some activists will tell you, the day when Captain Cook invaded Botany Bay, but the anniversary of Governor Arthur Phillip’s landing, who, enlightened beyond his contemporaries, actively sought Indigenous advisers, trade and enforced law for convicts and Indigenous people to live harmoniously.
Australia Day is not, as some activists claim, a day that has been only celebrated since 1994 but has been marked every year since Phillip arrived with convicts and a garrison to guard them, woefully under-resourced.
As far back as 1818, government labourers were given a day off and “one pound of fresh meat” “as a “just tribute to the memory of that highly respected and meritorious officer”.
For an “invader,” Phillip chose Indigenous confidantes to translate and dine with, named land after them — including Manly and Bennelong — and even as the slave trade boomed globally, ensured the local population here did not meet the same fate.
When a man speared him through the shoulder at Manly, his order was: “No reprisals; it was due to misunderstanding”.
He was dismayed when his convict entourage at Parramatta were “so unthinking, or so depraved, as wantonly to destroy a canoe belonging to a fine young man”, noting it ended any chance of commerce between them.
He hung his countrymen for the crime — which seems counterintuitive if he was an invader. Phillip believed the Indigenous to be British citizens protected by law — in stark contrast to colonists enslaving native populations across the rest of the world. 
Most surprising is that the colony survived famine in such dire straits that convicts were hung from trees for stealing when the alternative was starving.
As the rhetoric builds each Australia Day, we risk forgetting why we have it at all.
As far back as 1818, it was to celebrate a man who navigated uncharted seas with a fleet of prison ships of poor convicts into an unfamiliar land, afforded little help from Britain to build a penal colony that has evolved into the free nation we have today.
He built houses and roads, raised crops and stock, all with unskilled convict labour who didn’t know how to farm or want to be here, and soldiers who endlessly complained about the temperature (42C in the shade), sun, mosquitoes and lack of food, fought with each other and allowed convicts to abscond.
We don’t execute hungry flour thieves as we did in 1798 any more, but judging Phillip’s executions then with the eyes of today would be like judging Indigenous men documented in the same period for killing their wives with blunt force trauma, treating them as possessions, not people, under the tribal conditions of the same time.
It would be an outrage to say that their descendants today are in line with the culture of then. So why do that to Governor Phillip and the unfortunate souls on the First Fleet?
Any examination must be done in context, not in a naive view of reading about then and judging it as if it is now.
It can only be compared to alternatives at the same point. South East Asia under the French, Congo under the Belgians, Indonesia under the Dutch, South America under the Spanish and Portuguese, serfdom in Russia, or slaves in the United States.
In the Congo, they were cutting off people’s hands, forcing boys to rape their sisters, and enlisting an entire nation in a slave rubber economy, razing their villages if they did not comply.
If you want to taint Governor Phillip’s legacy, you suggest the alternatives available in 1788 were more appropriate.
To run down Australia Day, is to suggest we have nothing to be proud of in the nation that we have created, that has given refugees a home and takes in hundreds of thousands of migrants each year, where 50 per cent of the continent is held by native title or first nation land owners, and where we have a whole government department dedicated to helping them maximise economic development on their land.
Considering Indigenous people in the United States own about 1 per cent of the land they historically occupied, 50 per cent of the country is not a bad outcome for less than three per cent of the Australian population. 
The belief Australia as the ancient locals knew it would have remained in isolation is hopelessly naive.
Our beginning could have been vastly different, incomprehensibly worse: from other nations or the British themselves.
After Phillip, torturous sadomasochists such as Captain Patrick Logan unleashed hell in other penal settlements, forced hard labour on starving, dehydrated chain-locked gangs dragging heavy balls in the burning Queensland sun, their backs lash-stripped of skin.
We cannot be proud of the brutality and executions of petty thieves on jail ships, as we cannot be proud of how colonialists after Phillip treated Indigenous people or how Indigenous men treated their wives and daughters, but we must be proud of where we are today, egalitarian, compassionate and, most of all, free.
If you cheapen Australia Day to an extra day off for the laptop class, you forget Governor Phillip, who raged against the tide of the times of how Indigenous people were treated in every other part of the globe during unrelenting colonisation.
Or you can rewrite history to get a day off when the airfares are cheaper.
Don’t let your triggered freebie get in the way of your hypocrisy. 

Anybody who can make it through that text will reel away at the many stupidities and historical inaccuracies, not least the Sydney-centric view of the country - as usual there's a wiki reference - and the rest of the flag-waving and the down playing and the what aboutisms and so on and so forth.

Have a break, have a cartoon ...

So the pond decided it would run with a piece by Petulant Peta doing the same thing ... just for comparisons sake, and understanding it will send some readers into a frenzy of fear and loathing ...

To make the most of this new year, I reckon all of us should collectively make two resolutions: first, to count our blessings more; and second, to be less negative about our magnificent country.
Where I holiday, on the bay, just south of Geelong, there are lots of migrant families. Over summer, they were on the beach, usually three generations, and the one thing you almost never heard was whinging about Australia.
In fact, when you think about it, you hardly hear any of the usual complaints – that Australia is basically a racist, sexist and homophobic country – from anyone who’s a recent migrant. I guess that’s because they only came here because they could tell that the good far outweighed the bad. Certainly, there was enough good in this country, compared to their place of birth, to justify all the disruption involved in making a new life in a far way land.
Isn’t that worth thinking about as we prepare to celebrate another Australia Day: that a country with a quarter of its people born overseas – a higher percentage than any other – must have so much going for it when so many people are voting with their feet to get here?
No one has to come here. The fact that so many do, and are so glad to have won the lottery of life when they make it, should make all of us proud; even as we do our best to make a great country even better.
As usual, in the build-up to this Australia Day, there’s been the usual complaints about the date. We can’t celebrate Australia Day on January 26, it’s said, because that’s insensitive to the Aboriginal people who were here first.
Lots of woke public companies have told their staff that they can take-off a different day if they don’t regard January 26 as a day to celebrate. Others, like Kmart, have now banned the sale of Australia Day merchandise adorned with our national flag.
And while polling this week showed that more than twice as many Australians regard January 26 as Australia Day rather than “invasion day”, more people under 30 saw it as a day of shame, doubtless because of politically correct brainwashing in our schools.
Can you imagine Americans running the Fourth of July down like this?
For a long time, we celebrated Australia Day as a long weekend, not the actual day itself. But in 1994, all states and territories came together (quite rightly) to mark Australia Day on January 26 because, it was then thought, pride in our country demanded no less. How is it that only a couple of decades after reaffirming the importance of this day to our nation, we’ve got activists and elites pushing their agenda of shame rather than unity?

Here the pond must interrupt, if only to note a slight discordance between witless Vikki and witless petulant Peta regarding the date, before returning to the ranting ...

It’s true that British settlement ultimately meant doom for a hunter-gatherer way of life. And that there was violence on the frontier of settlement. And that many of the settlers looked down on Aboriginal people. This was the case with colonial settlements – French, British, Dutch, Belgian and others at this time – across the globe. Yet it’s also undeniable that
Governor Phillip’s official instructions from London were to “live in amity” with the original inhabitants and that white men were hanged for the murder of black people as early as 1838, after the notorious Myall Creek massacre, showing that justice was colourblind under our imported rule of law.
We can rethink history but we can’t change it. We certainly can’t undo the British settlement and the subsequent development of Australia; so the best way forward – surely – is to make the most of it, especially given that the country that’s evolved here is a magnet to people from all over the world.
When Governor Phillip raised the flag and toasted the king on January 26, 1788, it didn’t just mark the beginning of the dispossession of the original inhabitants as the haters would have us believe. It marked the arrival on this continent of a civilisation even then distinguished, however imperfectly, by the rule of law, respect for individual rights and the demand for representative government.
It was the beginning of a country that has so far transcended the racism and systemic brutality of those times that people identifying as Aboriginal have a greater representation in our parliament than they do in the population; and have been elected because their fellow Australians have regarded them as suitable, regardless of race. It’s another sign of how little race is held against anyone in modern Australia.
So whatever might be in need of improvement, let’s stop running down our country for something it’s not. And let’s stop quibbling about the date for celebrating our country, keep it on the day that modern Australia began and, if you ever need reminding about how good it is here, ask a new migrant.

After all that, the pond feels entitled to take an American holiday and attempt to understand and connect with the place ... courtesy the WSJ ...

The pond slowly began to get it ... bearing in mind this bit of history ...

... the pond's time with the Dominican nuns began to explain a shared tradition ... more money to the tykes to keep the Ponzi scheme alive ...

Yes, go to a Catholic school and you can learn to guzzle beer and desperately try to feel up girls and women, and no doubt when pissed as a parrot sing along with Frank Zappa about Catholic schoolgirls, or with a bit of luck end up on the Supreme Court ...

There's more, with links here, and now the pond reckons it's earned its time with Ross Douthat ... though this outing is of an unseemly length already ...

The pond has to admit that the graphics department at the NY Times does a way better job than the lizard Oz, which is clearly run on the smell of an oily rag. But why this obsession with Douthat when the pond's partner had announced that running with Douthat was grounds for a divorce?

Well there are two kinds of people in this world ... people who divide the world into two kinds of people and people who don't ...

Yes, there are two sorts of columnists in this world ... stupid people who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those amused by clichés and shoddy, lazy thinking, thereby inviting the pond to run with a meme ...

Know your meme ... and after that the pond lost interest because it was just another listicle...

As soon as a columnist does a listicle featuring rules, the pond immediately reaches for its Glock, or tries to work out how to break them, or at a pinch, will run with an immortal Rowe ...

Oh there's another thing the pond gets, having long endured the technology wars and suddenly ended up with an Android phone ...

And so to a final gobbet, which won't take long ...

And so to an audio visual moment, which likely many will have already seen. It's just for the first little animation, which explains succinctly why the pond never bothers to argue with idiots who mistake crocodiles for logs ...

And here's another thing the pond doesn't understand about the United States, because the pond grew up within the panto tradition imported from Pommieland, whereby it was considered a hoot for the pond's teacher to dress up in drag and go on stage in South Pacific, and where thugby leaguers wouldn't consider it a night out without getting dressed in drag and doing an oopsy daisy and how's your father ...