In which the pond does its best to focus on prattling Polonius and Killer but keeps getting distracted ...

 

Increasingly, the pond would rather be elsewhere ...

That feeling gets stronger on the weekend, when the pond is likely to encounter Marina Hyde in full flight ...

The tide is coming in fast on Rishi Sunak – and it’s full of sewage delivered a great bon mot ...

...as I was typing this, Zac Goldsmith resigned as a minister, declaring himself “horrified” that it was impossible to get anything done on the environment any more as Sunak personally was “simply uninterested”, pointing out that the prime minister had chosen to attend Rupert Murdoch’s summer party as opposed to the Paris climate summit.
As for Sunak’s ability to withstand these diurnal derailments, the signs don’t look encouraging. He increasingly resembles not so much a prime minister as a collection of blandishments that fall on the wrong side of the fine line between platitude and twatitude...

Twatitude! As a riff on platitude. What more needed to be said about any reptile scribbler?And with a bonus mention of a 'leet Chairman Rupert party ...

And if Marina won't do, there's always the Graudian showing off the reason it still gets called the Graudian ...

The pond couldn't think of an immediate use for 'twatitude', or perhaps there were so many uses that thoughts of use bogged down under the weight of choice, and sadly "ciuntry" strayed dangerously close to Hamlet talking of country matters ...

The weekend is also the time the pond spends with The New Yorker, perhaps boning up for the next encounter with holey Henry, using Nikhil Krishnan's Aristotle’s Rules for Living Well, (sorry, possible paywall),which, as well as talking of arseholes (in American), offered the advice that philosophy was like slow cooking ...

...When I stayed on as a graduate student and edged into the strange and wonderful world of Oxford’s scholars of ancient philosophy, I attended seminars where hours were spent parsing a single Aristotelian sentence. At one session, a nervous participant asked, “Would you think it precipitate if we moved on to the next sentence?”

Move along the pond did, perhaps precipitately, and there was Amy Davidson Sorkin asking How Much Hotter Can Texas Get?

...A 2021 study in The Lancet reckoned that the number of people who died of heat-related causes around the world exceeded three hundred and fifty thousand in 2019 alone. This month, extreme heat waves have also descended on Beijing and Uttar Pradesh. As the planet as a whole gets warmer, there is a higher baseline when something like a heat dome settles in, placing communities in closer proximity to disaster. The raw heat itself, in addition to hurricanes, drought, and sea-level rise, may hasten the moment when living in certain regions becomes unsustainable.

Contrast the pond's feelings when it turned to prattling Polonius. 

There's always the danger that he'd regress past his obsession with the ABC into another familiar pathological obsession, his fanatical devotion to the long forgotten frock wearer, and a snap would be sure to trigger the pond and send it back to the ancient days when Pellism was a thing ... and sure enough ...

Why does Polonius always get around with a log on his shoulder (a chip wouldn't do)? 

Why is a Sydney-sider obsessed with Victoria and comrade Dan? Why would anyone apart from Polonius quote the Dershowitz, as fatuous a fop as currently does the rounds in the US, with the notable exceptions of Rudy and Sidny ... 

Dershowtwitz is only amusing when reading The New Yorker's 2022 yarn/interview Alan Dershowtiz's Martha's Vineyard Cancellation ... featuring his relationship, or not, with Larry David ... or perhaps Connie Bruck's 2019 piece in the same place, Alan Dershowitz, Devil's Advocate ... featuring a great portrait in frock...

... and wondrous trivia ...

...Dershowitz wrote a book about the case, “Reversal of Fortune,” which was published in 1986. Nora Ephron, reviewing it for the Times, noted wryly, “Throughout, in the venerable tradition of defense lawyers who write books about themselves, Mr. Dershowitz made brilliant decisions no one else would ever have been brave or intelligent enough even to consider.” Dershowitz wrote a letter to the editor complaining that Ephron was deriding his work in order to help get a friend’s book about the same case published. (The friend published no such book—and, Ephron replied, wasn’t even a friend.)

The pond is pleased that Polonius can still send the pond haring off on interesting byways, but the question remains. Why Victoria, why comrade Dan, why the Victorian Police, all from the Sydney Institute bunker?

Isn't there something local he might mention? The visit to HMAS Gladys the incorruptible?

Sorry, the pond can't get enough of that one, and if Polonius can repeat himself incessantly, then dammit, so can the pond ...

Most people would agree that the Victorian plods are on the nose, but then many people outside Polonius's institute for the obsessed would agree that NSW plods are on the nose, and so are Queensland plods, and so, in recent days, have the SA plods returned to form ... 

You're not really pulling your weight if you don't get a mention in Corruption Pervades Police Forces in Australia and the United Kingdom ...

It turns out that it was all a feint, a ploy so that Polonius could yet again rant and rage about the cruel suffering of the Pellist, a matter the pond was well over...

There are two laws everywhere ...

.

..and the Pellist is dead and now long gone, and for love of the long absent lord, couldn't Polonius just let it go, or at least get back to blaming the ABC for everything, or perhaps join the pond's correspondent in reading German Catholic church 'dying painful death' as 520,000 leave in a year...

Meanwhile, the lizard Oz editorialist was on the case ... providing evidence that AI had indeed taken over reptile duties, and was capable of putting together an editorial just like any you might have read at any time in the new millennium ...

Indeed, and the sooner more reptiles are sacked, and sent off to live on the dole, the more can realise that perhaps there's a use for a social welfare net ...

And so to the bonus, and here the pond struggled, before settling on a stale serve of Killer Creighton ...

The pond has no dog in this fight. Back in the day at Tamworth High, Aboriginal students were sent off to portables across the oval to do their studies, before being sent off to the local bad boys home as training for later work duties in prison, with some lucky winners participants in a black deaths in custody case ... out of sight and out of mind ...

What's more interesting is that the reptiles should have introduced a snap of an angry and deeply bitter man at this point ...

Back to The New Yorker, this time in Jeffrey Tobin's (remember him?) Unforgiven, Why is Clarence Thomas so angry?

A touchstone of Clarence Thomas’s career on the Supreme Court has been his hostility to what he calls élites. When the Court, in 2003, upheld the use of racial preferences in admissions at the University of Michigan Law School, Thomas dissented, writing, “All the Law School cares about is its own image among know-it-all elites.” This past June, Thomas joined a majority of his colleagues in rejecting attempts by Seattle and Louisville to maintain diversity in their public schools, and wrote a separate concurring opinion to reflect his scorn for such plans. “Nothing but an interest in classroom aesthetics and a hypersensitivity to elite sensibilities justifies the school districts’ racial balancing programs,” he said. “If our history has taught us anything, it has taught us to beware of elites bearing racial theories.”

This theme is expanded upon in Thomas’s new memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son” (Harper; $26.95). In his book, Thomas is clear about whom he blames for the pain of his confirmation hearings, when he had to defend himself against Anita Hill’s accusations. “In one climactic swipe of calumny,” Thomas writes, “America’s elites were arrogantly wreaking havoc on everything my grandparents had worked for and all I’d accomplished in forty-three years of struggle.”

Triumph over the élites, Thomas writes, took faith in God and, especially, courage. This, too, has been a longtime theme for him, and he elaborated upon it in the annual Francis Boyer lecture of the American Enterprise Institute on February 13, 2001. Only two months after Bush v. Gore, the cream of the new Administration, led by Vice-President Dick Cheney, gathered in black-tie to hear the Justice speak at a Washington hotel. Thomas was going to share with them his reflections on “the question of courage in American political life.”

“Too many show timidity today precisely when courage is demanded,” Thomas asserted. He told the group that he had suffered the consequences for speaking out on “a number of sacred policies, such as affirmative action, welfare, school busing.” Those “who challenge accepted wisdom should expect to be treated badly. Nonetheless, they must stand undaunted,” he said, before concluding, “Today, as in the past, we will need a brave ‘civic virtue,’ not a timid civility, to keep our republic. So, this evening, I leave you with the simple exhortation: ‘Be not afraid.’ ”

Ah yes, the dangerous 'leets, but be not afraid to keep their company ...

Sorry, the pond loves photo realism when dedicated to noble causes and noble sights, and now on with the next Killer gobbet ...

Ah the lofty constitution ...

In case that's deemed a tad hard to read ...

Although the Constitution did not refer directly to slaves, it did not ignore them entirely. Article one, section two of the Constitution of the United States declared that any person who was not free would be counted as three-fifths of a free individual for the purposes of determining congressional representation. The "Three-Fifths Clause" thus increased the political power of slaveholding states. It did not, however, make any attempt to ensure that the interests of slaves would be represented in the government.

Transcript

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons...

Nothing's changed, with the GOP currently intent on setting up state autocracies and controlling who might vote ... and what an inspiration the three fifths clause was ...

Northern opponents correctly pointed out that slaveholding states had more representatives than if only the free white population was counted. By 1793, slaveholding states had 47 congressmen but would have had only 33 if not for the compromise. During the entire period before the Civil War slaveholding states had disproportionate influence on the Presidency, the Speakership of the House of Representatives, and the U.S. Supreme Court because of the compromise. By the 1830s abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison of Massachusetts used the clause in their argument that the Federal government was dominated by slaveholders.

And at that point, back to the Killer for a final gobbet, wondering if race is a meaningful concept, as only a white reptile could do...

Is that last Killer line a dog whistle to the originalists? 

The pond has always been bemused by the originalists, much like the way, in the absence of royalty and a monarchy, that the country transformed the Presidency into an ersatz kingship. 

If the original wording was immaculate and unchangeable, and never mind changing circumstances, customs and situations once deemed beyond the pale, why have there been so many amendments?

The three-fifths clause remained in force until the post-Civil War 13th Amendment freed all enslaved people in the United States, the 14th amendment gave them full citizenship, and the 15th Amendment granted black men the right to vote.

But you can't take systemic racism out of the system with an amendment or a law, and so came Jim Crow and endless systemic bigotry and prejudice, lynchings and police killings, and so the pond turned to Kim Wehle for a final word in The Bulwark, with Affirmative Action Ruling: SCOTUS Decision Is Bad News for Equal Opportunity.

It's not so much that the Supreme Court has quashed the notion of diversity, so much as the arcane routines that must now be deployed, much like the arcane routes a woman must follow if she wants to assert the right to control her body, gain the health care she needs, and if that involves an abortion, so be it ...

...To understand the Court’s new “quality of character or unique ability” test for college admissions, consider what Harvard and UNC were doing, which is now illegal. Harvard’s last-stage admissions process involved a so-called “lop” test. Tie-breaking decisions were made based on four criteria: legacy status (that is, whether a candidate’s relatives attended the school and, presumably, donated loads of money), athletic prowess, financial aid eligibility, and race. Moving forward, the lop test has been lopped down to just the first three of those criteria.

As for UNC, race was one of forty factors that admission officers considered holistically. The first readers of applications formulated non-binding recommendations based on those criteria and wrote up justifications for their recommendations. In those writeups, Roberts wrote, readers were allowed to “offer students a ‘plus’ based on their race, which ‘may be significant in an individual case.’” Moving forward, any of the other 39 criteria can still be a “plus”—just not race.

In applying to colleges, students can still talk about their race if they believe it’s part of their character or unique abilities that otherwise make them good candidates for admission. Speaking about the ruling on Thursday, President Joe Biden offered a workaround: identifying “the adversity a student has overcome,” including “a student’s lack of financial means.”

Critically, however, Roberts added a caveat to his “quality of character or unique ability” test: “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.” The new battleground will accordingly be fought over the specific text of the essays included in individual applications. Practically speaking, the Court left it up to individual application readers—not lawyers or judges—to make the initial call as to what essays are or are not legal. Students who are denied admission based on the mistaken belief that their essays contain information that the school cannot legally consider will inevitably be left in the lurch. Litigation will surely follow.

For now, notwithstanding the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment, the new law of the land is that consideration of race in school admissions is illegal. Wrote Justice Brown Jackson in a fiery dissent: “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

Well yes, except in Killer's Persil-white world ...

Meanwhile, the court has decided to go full Taliban on the matter of gay rights, and might well be hired to adjudicate on matters in Uganda and Afghanistan, per WaPo (paywall for the full story) ... “The opinion of the court is, quite literally, a notice that reads: ‘Some services may be denied to same-sex couples’”, using a phoney case contrived to allow the court to give a ruling ...

Go Taliban, go discrimination, go bigotry, but at least it allows the pond to close this Sunday meditation with a few cartoons ...

Perhaps the last one didn't fit, but you won't see that in the house of mouse version ...