In which the pond is trolled by the dog botherer, indulges cultists with a groaning, and returns once again to climbing the Everest of "Ned", with a little visual relief and the hope of a happy ending ...

 

You are about to enter the asylum, or so they say ...

Or maybe you entered the asylum long ago, and was amazed to discover it was run by reptiles. 

Anything is possible in the bizarro land known fondly as the lizard Oz, or more quaintly, as that dung heap of Murdochian crap ...

And to continue mixing the metaphors, the dung beetles have been very busy this weekend, and it will take a Herculean effort to shovel out just a little for inspection by the pond's correspondents ...

First the pond must rule out areas deemed out of bounds, or GUR, as the pond once was told meant something to people who believed a shark could be a role model. 

The pond won't be mentioning  Robodebt: five years of lies, mistakes and failures that caused a $1.8bn scandal. The reptiles have deemed it unmentionable and disappeared it into the cornfield. 

And the pond will assume that everyone has done their preliminary reading for the course, always on a Friday, and this week starting with Antisocial media: ABC goes on warpath over coverage of Lisa Millar’s misogynist trolls, but including other tasty items.

Nor will the pond be mentioning Lachy, lying in his usual way, because lying is just the standard Murdochian business model, and so this noise, "A news organization has an obligation, and it is an obligation to report news fulsomely, wholesomely and without fear or favor,” Murdoch said at a Morgan Stanley investor conference in San Francisco. “And that's what Fox News has always done, and that's what Fox News will always do, was just a really lame attempt at a comedy styling.  

While the pond was severely tempted, it won't be heading off to Vanity Fair to read Fox-Dominion case may star Lachlan Murdoch's defamation suit down under ... such a stupid boy, too stupid to waste much time on. Is there something in being handed-down filthy rich that encourages rampant stupidity?

Nor will the pond dwell at length on Uncle Elon's stupendous self-own ... a couple of twits using twitter to tweet about the chief twit will cover that cacophony ...

Before the pond gets really going on the day's chores, it will however start with a quiz. 

What reptile thought it was good to offer this as an inducement to entice an aged readership to indulge in a bout of dog bothering? Here's some truths you can send to your green left media-consuming friends to help free them from their woke cloistered world ...

The use of "woke" is a dead giveaway, and shows we're dealing with a prize parochial loon from Adelaide, yet to catch up with the news:

A GOP war on 'woke'? Most Americans view the term as a positive: USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds by 56%-39%, Americans say 'woke' means being aware of social injustice, not being overly politically correct...(here)

It's such a fuckwitted attempt at trolling, this talk of "woke", that only a boy from Adelaide, always trying to be a smart arse, but not too smart and so usually an arse, would attempt that sort of feeble importation, especially as it gets you into book banning turf, down there with Adolf and Ron DeSanctimonious's mob ...

It reminds the pond of the attempt long ago to import "librul" as a term of abuse, which foundered on the way that Ming the Merciless had set up the Liberal party, and regularly blathered about the virtues of liberalism. 

If you head back to 2009, you can read this in the Graudian ...

Oscar Wilde's notion that Britain and the US are divided by a common language is especially true of the use of the term "liberal". Stateside, Goldberg's title is provocative oxymoron; here it's flat-out contradiction. There, "liberal" is regularly used by conservatives to abuse anyone left of Paul Wolfowitz. In Britain, it has no such force: here, liberalism is underscored by Mill's principle of liberty, whereby the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. There are problems with the principle, but it can offer a bulwark against just those forms of totalitarianism Goldberg indicts and which he suggests were foundational for modern American liberalism.
Mussolini and Hitler didn't dig Mill. And yet, for Goldberg's thesis to make sense in Britain, they would have to. His book, as published here, is a triumph of the terminological will whereby words mean just what the author means them to. It was actually a Briton, HG Wells, who coined the term "liberal fascism". In 1932, Wells told Young Liberals in Oxford that piecemeal Fabian socialism and parliamentary democracy had failed to deliver, so should be scrapped. "I am asking for liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis," he said. What can we say about this other than that it was a then-deluded, now-forgotten speech, and that Wells would have done better to read more Mill? And yet Goldberg takes it as a key text for his own now-deluded, soon-to-be-forgotten thesis...

Well yes, and so on and so forth and etc, and being a devoted follower of Humpty Dumpty, the pond makes words mean what they should mean, and so when the pond reads "woke" it immediately understands the meaning is "I am a fuckwit", or possibly "I am a prize parochial dog bothering maroon from Adelaide" ...

And with all that exegesis out of the way, it's time to get on with the feeble, half-baked, half-arsed attempt at trolling ...

Oh for fuck's sake, just fuck the pond dead, but please do it quietly and gently. 

The pond knows no one else cares but once upon a time the reptiles had a graphics department, and now they go shopping of the shelf to get a shitty iStock image from Getty, and this is meant to mock the "woke", as opposed to the graphics department's pathetic budget?

And that's supposed to give the pond a grip on reality?

But that was just the beginning of the trolling ...

Oh not a bloody listicle ... the pond was reminded of that dictionary definition that included as an example "a Buzzfeed UK listicle entitled 'The 22 Types of Hipster You Encounter in London'". 

If only they'd been able to use as an example  of the way to use the word as "a parochial maroon from Adelaide's pathetic listicle in the lizard Oz"...

Inevitably the first item in the listicle featured climate science denialism, and a positive joy, a singular relish of the fucking of the planet, even as record-breaking Tropical Cyclone Freddy lined up to slam Mozambique again ...

You see, if you don't accept or care about the science, you can dance on the planet's grave in delight, and you can nuke the fridge of costs yet again ...

The pond has heard this tune from the parochial Johnny one note bore from Adelaide so many times, the next troll in the listicle was almost a relief ...

Truth to really tell? Nobody knows, and given that dictator for life Xi runs a tight ship, it's likely no one will ever know, and all the rest is speculative bullshit, tainted as much by conspiracy theories as genuine science ...

On with the next troll ...

Eek, comrade Dan in a mask. Thank the long absent lord, Killer's not around, or likely he'd have a fainting fit on the spot ...

Meanwhile, the pond couldn't help doing a sneak preview taken from the Angelic one, who will make an appearance tomorrow ...

...the second reason that a blunt politics versus health scenario is not valid in the case of Melbourne is simply the biggest public opinion poll of all is an election. Andrews was returned at the election with a comfortable majority.

Whether you thought the response of the Andrews government massaged public opinion during the pandemic, it is unlikely that opinion went against the way the government handled the pandemic to supporting it. If the public had really opposed Andrews’ handling, the government would have been thrown out. 

Out of the mouth of the Angelic one, and how it sticks in the reptile craw. All the hard yards done to bring down comrade Dan and there he still is, and still the dog botherer impotently rages on, perhaps because it's a way of generating some sexual excitement in a dull life ...

On to the next troll ...

Already past jaded, the pond ran a couple of items together, but didn't want to forget that opening line "our natural disasters are not unprecedented."

Yes, this as unprecedented Cyclone Freddy just set a new unprecedented record ... and as sinister types began to mutter about climate change ...

Around the world, climate change is making hurricanes wetter, windier and more intense, scientists say. Oceans absorb much of the heat from greenhouse gas emissions, and when warm seawater evaporates its heat energy is transferred to the atmosphere, fuelling stronger storms.

Freddy has set a record for the highest accumulated cyclone energy, a measure of the storm's strength over time, of any southern hemisphere storm in history, according to the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.

The storm has generated about as much accumulated cyclone energy on its own as an average North Atlantic hurricane season, said Nullis.

"World record or not, Freddy will remain in any case an exceptional phenomenon for the history of the South-West Indian Ocean on many aspects: longevity, distance covered, remarkable maximum intensity, accumulated cyclone energy amount, (and) impact on inhabited lands," said Sebastien Langlade, a cyclone forecaster at the Regional Specialized Meteorological Centre in La Reunion, in a statement from the WMO. (Reuters)

The pond won't hang around anxiously waiting for the dog botherer to produce a precedent for Freddy, or wonder why we're on a long path of recovering from a millennium drought, it will move on to the final troll ... which inevitably featured a stock shot of ghastly, Satanic, direly threatening, neigh terrifying, windmills ...

 

Food for thought? That's what the reptiles call a serve of mindless pap of the Frosties or Cocopops kind from a provincial maroon?

And now as a special treat for cultists before serious folk get down to doing the really hard yards with nattering "Ned", a serve of the Groaner, groaning away on a Saturday, perhaps serving as a substitute for the mourned, lost Gracie, off entertaining the troops elsewhere ...

The pond doesn't mean to harp, but speaking of press releases, did the reptiles have to fit up Dame Groan with a stock photo as a way of conveying her stock ideas?

As for the rest, Dame Groan would say that, wouldn't she? She's alright, she's been down with Santos, and been the token figure on sundry boards, and now as a token columnist in the Catholic Boys' Daily, gets to blather away in the lizard Oz about how she's alright Jill ...

Another iStock photo, and will someone tell the graphics department Getty trades in that brand as iStock, and not Istock? 

Sorry, sorry, prattling Polonius is on the morrow, and so the pond must keep its pedantry in check, but does hope that the cultists appreciate the sacrifice the pond is making by running with this groaning. If only she'd do a FIFO, and if not to the Pilbara, then at least the black stump ...

Okay, done and dusted, and the pond will leave the eating of the cupcake for others - the pond realises it's all the fault of women, except of course exceptional women of the groaning kind - and must move on to the Everest known as "Ned", and this is where the yards get really tough, and yet the pond must do it ... just as the frog hitched a ride with the scorpion, and drowned in a pond of verbiage ...

Yes, it's another cheap-arsed illustration from the once proud graphics department, this time apparently purloined from the US Navy ... perhaps as a way of signalling that these days putting together a rag and extracting money from punters is a step heavy with pitfalls ...

And then came two extremely large snaps of obvious figures ... so the pond shrank them down to a more useful size, what with them being bleeding obvious, and clearly a way of trying to break up "Ned" and make his blather more visually lively or at least palatable, in the manner of putting sugar atop a bowl of parritch ...

The pond had reached breaking point, and hit on an idea. The pond had been assembling cartoons to run with its Sunday meditation, but it didn't have the slighest interest in what Chicken Little "Ned" had to say, because it would be the usual blather about vast implications and heavy pitfalls and so on and so forth, always the grandiose so that "Ned' could sound very poo-bah and self-important, and at the very peak of affairs of state, so why not throw in some cartoons to help liven up the old chook's offerings?

Yes, that could work. "Ned" would hate being reminded of his kissing cousins Stateside, and the pond could find a way to get through a standard serve of hysterical "Ned" tosh ...

Oh yes, vast chasms, remaining doubts, near Herculean agenda, and so on and so hysterically forth, and ...

At this point the pond should acknowledge that the graphics department were thinking the same way ... that "Ned" was nigh unendurable and there needed to be some visual relief, so they flung in a threatening spectre, and naturally the pond downsized it ...

Instead of a threatening spectre, why not a cartoon?

And so with "Ned's" American kissing cousins in mind, the pond returned to "Ned's" adjectival career at News Corp ...

Ah, thar he blows, it's never long before "Ned" must turn to the leets and the experts so he can fill his stodge with imported guff ... is it a trend?

What a good week it's been ... at least until "Ned's" Everest came along ...

Yes, yes, many imponderables, and a few spectres, and rich ironies, and anger too, and serious constraints, and complications and provoked angst, and strong critics, and is it time for a cartoon?

That reminds the pond that stayers might be interested in heading off the track for a canter with How Murdoch Runs Fox News, in His Own (Often Terse) Words (NY Times but outside the paywall here).

In late 2020, Rupert Murdoch was holed up in the English countryside with his now ex-wife, far from Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. The pandemic seclusion left him “bored,” he recently said in a deposition, with little to do “but write stupid emails.”

Those “stupid emails” now make up an extraordinary paper trail that has exposed the inner workings of Murdoch’s Fox media empire, revealing how he shapes coverage at his newspapers and cable networks and interacts with some of the most powerful figures in the Republican Party.

People who have worked with Murdoch said he never did much of his most important business over email. He preferred whenever possible to convey his wishes in person. But the pandemic changed that, leaving a trove of emails that lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems have used to build their $1.6 billion defamation case against Fox News....

It's great fun, and probably more amusing than the two short gobbets of blather to go ...

Ah yes, looks dubious, hole in budget, political pendulum swing like a pendulum do, "Ned" on bicycle two by two, and as the pond draws to a close, it's time for local cartoonists to help relieve the tedium. 

Perhaps an infallible Pope?

Yes, that'll do the trick, and so the next short gobbet is just a doddle ...

Indeedy do, dynamic responses, bold policies, buzzwords, buzz, buzz, growth, bigger, most bigly, not enough people on the planet, must fuck the planet, integral step in defence, heart of force projection, a few subs and we'll show Xi and a billion plus Chinese what's what, and you can be sure of one thing, if we can only project "Ned's" drone across the land, there'll be peace in the world, except perhaps for the sound of snoring, or people startled awake by an immortal Rowe ...

It's always in the detail, though it's a pretty big detail, and it takes the pond back to the grand days of The Bulletin way back when ... a perfect fit for "Ned" and the reptiles, a band playing near you ...