In which the pond does a Tootle and wanders off the reptile tracks...

 

The pond struggled this morning, it really struggled. It strayed off the reptile turf, and found it hard to get back to eating the lizard Oz grass.

After a correspondent's note, the pond started listening to James O'Brien on LBC, and he was on about a headline in The Times ...

Extinction? The pond thought the reptiles had already arranged that with climate change, or here if you like, but it seemed like a fruitful topic, until the pond saw the infallible Pope's cartoon this morning ...

Is that you Clippy? Where are you Clippy? Come on back Clippy ...

Worse followed. While listening to O'Brien, the pond started to browse, and came across another topic,  this time raised by Peter Jamison's feature in WaPo, The revolt of the Christian home-schoolers, They were taught that public schools are evil. Then a Virginia couple defied their families and enrolled their kids. (sorry, paywall).

It was a ripper read and moving past the tales of physical punishment and discipline and the relentless patriarchy and the disapproval of parents and family feuds, the pond found this moment the most poignant, after the featured couple had moved their children into a public school:

...About 10 minutes remained before the Bealls would have to pile into their minivan, and the children needed to get dressed — in their pajamas.
It was Groundhog Day, a damp night in February, and a low fire glowed in the hearth of the Bealls’ living room. Aaron and Christina sat on the floor playing card and board games with their kids, while Ezra sat on the couch, wearing headphones and absorbed in a game on his laptop.
Soon they would be leaving to attend their elementary school’s “For the Love of Reading Family Night,” held in the school library, where students were encouraged to come dressed for bedtime.
As Oliver rose to change (Ezra, the oldest, would not deign to put on his jammies), Aimee told her parents how her second-grade class had learned that day about Punxsutawney Phil.
Aaron looked at her in bewilderment.
“Phil?” he asked. “Am I out of the loop?”
His daughter stared back at him in disbelief.
“He’s famous!” Aimee said. She explained Phil’s role in predicting the length of winter.
“I knew about groundhogs,” Aaron said. “I just didn’t know about Phil.”
“He’s really famous,” Aimee said.
Christina smiled at her husband.
“Home-schooler,” she said.
These were the gaps Aaron and Christina had become accustomed to finding as they learned about a world whose boundaries extended far beyond the one in which they had been raised. There were so many things they had not learned, and perhaps would never learn.
Stacks of books on the living room’s end tables testified to their belated efforts at self-education: popular works by the biologists Neil Shubin and Robert Sapolsky, as well as “Raising Critical Thinkers” by Julie Bogart, a leading developer of home education materials who has criticized conservative Christian home-schooling groups. Aaron and Christina were still young, but they knew enough about the demands of life, work and family to understand that they could not recover or reconstruct the lost opportunities of their childhoods.

What's the odds they'd never seen Groundhog Day? Hollywood, California, Disney, the Great Satan, unlike the almost Amish lifestyle on view in Florida, preached and followed by the mango Mussolini and Ron DeSanctus tribe ... (irony alert).

But this was the punchline:

To the Bealls, who truly knew what it was like to learn through the lens of ideology, concerns about kids being brainwashed in public schools were laughable.
“People who think the public schools are indoctrinating don’t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated,” Aaron says. “It’s not even comparable.”

Put it another way. People who think the ABC is indoctrinating don't know what indoctrination is. The pond is required to read the lizard Oz. The pond is daily indoctrinated. It's not even comparable.

So with a hearty yelp, a hallo, a yoicks and a tallyho, it's time to see what the indoctrinators are up to today ... but the pond suddenly refused the first fence on offer ...

 

 

Even the pond's befuddled brain knew that wasn't possible. You couldn't read petulant Peta and simultaneously make the right call ...

You could learn to be a bigot, but that was likely not the best way to make the right call.

After that refusal, the pond immediately tried to do a runout, as aged ponies are wont to do ...

The reptiles are now fully into tranny bashing? There was another immediate refusal by the pond. It was too Florida by far ...

And the mere sight of Jennings of the fifth form sent the pond kowtowing and cantering off into the distance ...

Things were looking grim. Could the pond have a Musk moment (even though it always preferred peppermint Life Savers, before graduating to XXXX thanks to a German grandmother who liked it both peppery and minty) ...

Not really. There's only so much fun you can have with hubris and Ozymandias.

How about CNN? Truly the most pitiful of all, but they did offer Trump captured on tape talking about classified document he kept after leaving the White House?

Or how about Vanity Fair? 

The New York Times’ Elizabeth Holmes Profile Is Causing Drama in the Newsroom: “What the Hell Happened Here?”
As Holmes headed to jail Tuesday, business editor Ellen Pollock was put on the spot to defend a soft-focus profile of the disgraced Theranos founder, telling staff she didn’t “give a ***k” about the criticism.

Sheesh, the refusal to license "fug" from Norman Mailer's estate is causing the pond and the Google bot deep concern.

What about the Tampa Bay Times and the anti-woke brigade? 

Florida education debates rage on as hundreds attend Hernando school board meeting,  At the center of the storm was superintendent John Stratton, who survived attempts to remove him.

Why Florida's almost up there with Uganda, thanks to Ron DeSanctus and the orange one ...

Ingoglia said the lawmakers had no choice but to get involved.
“Certain school board members and certainly this superintendent are turning a deaf ear to the concerns of parents and grandparents in this community,” he said in an interview before the meeting, which he did not attend.
He sent out text messages through his Empower Parents political action committee, urging concerned residents to show up and voice their concerns over issues such as the teacher who showed fifth graders a movie that included a gay character. That story gained national attention after Rodriguez, an Ingoglia ally, complained to the Florida Department of Education about the teacher, who has resigned.

An actual gay? Cue a pond fainting fit ...

What an inspiration, and no doubt the local reptiles will also look to Uganda for inspiration ... once they've had their fill of tranny bashing.

But after all the grazing, finally the pond had to settle, so perversely it selected a piece of recycled fodder from The Times ...

How is Kissinger still a thing? Yet there he was, as bold as brass in a snap in the story ...

The pond realised it should have been reading The Nation's Henry Kissinger, War Criminal—Still at Large at 100.

Or perhaps David Corn in Mother Jones, pursuing the same theme with Henry Kissinger at 100: Still a War Criminal.

But there was an upside. 

The pond could sample a bit of the Daily Beast's Team Putin Spars Over Baffling Russian ‘Victory Plan’ in War (paywall friendly).

By this time, the pond had almost forgotten it was reading Roger of The Times having a debate with a notorious war criminal ...

An otherwise subtle historian? That's what they're calling war criminals these days?

Might as well be watching Russian TV ...

Amen to that, but that means the sooner sociopathic Vlad the impaler is gone - and not replaced by an AI generated clone - the better it will be for the world.

Meanwhile, Roger of The Times was soldiering on to a final gobbet ...

Kissinger will disagree? They take war criminals seriously at The Times?

Meanwhile, speaking of quisling sell-outs and lickspittle sell-outs, the lizard Oz editorialist was also at it, and the pond could thereby fulfil its brief and pretend it had actually paid attention to the reptiles this day ...

Restraint is essential at this stage? 

Well no. To borrow from Corporal Jones, if they don't like a drone up 'em, tough cheddar.

To use language and historical figures the reptiles might remember and understand, during the Blitz, Winnie didn't say, "feel free to bomb away Adolf, being British we understand that Chamberlain-style restraint is essential at this stage."

Easy for the reptiles to preach restraint, but if a drone happened to take out their fortress in Surry Hills, they might be singing a different tune ... perhaps along the lines of "we shall drone them on the beaches, we shall drone them on the landing grounds, we shall drone them in the fields and in the streets, and we shall drone them in the hills ..." (the original's here).

And with all that done, it was time for yet another distraction, this time thanks to the immortal Rowe ... and if you want to blame anyone for the pond doing a Tootle and wandering off the reptile tracks, blame James O'Brien ... he'll talk about anything and everything ... and what do you know, there's the whole of yesterday's show on YouTube, for gluttons for punishment ...