In which the pond is triggered, and takes some time to get around to "Ned", some two party ningnong and the bromancer's war with China ...

 

Apropos of a note regarding the pond's work not yet being done, yesterday the pond visited the RPA and was shocked and disturbed to discover everyone was still required to wear masks on entry ...

To what avail? And another thing, when will the medical profession get over this bizarre fetish for wearing masks during operating procedures? Where's the harm if a few germs drop on an open wound?

Everyone knows that the efficacy of masks is disputed on almost a daily basis in the lizard Oz as an idle superstition.

Sure doctors waste time spending seven years or more studying medicine and doing internships and maybe 24-7 service in an emergency ward, but a little learning is a dangerous thing. There's nothing they couldn't learn by dropping in on a Joe Rogan podcast for five minutes or spending ten listening to the deepest thoughts of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (They might even discover mass shootings are linked to prescription drugs and that vaccines can cause autism and assorted other conspiracy theories).

Oh they'll quibble and cavil, as if they know anything. When in doubt regarding your medical knowledge, trust an environmental lawyer. Better still, trust Killer Creighton or the Caterist, with a deep medical understanding honed over years of writing columns. Weigh up a third rate sociology degree against wasted time at university studying medicine, and there's only one conclusion. Better still, Killer has degrees in economics, so he's entirely suited to explaining how masks are a very expensive con job. He's full of sage advice.

Another thing: the pond is convinced that mask-wearing is somehow related to the prevalence of assorted tough-to-fight staph forms in hospitals. Settle. Of course the pond has no evidence, but isn't that the scientific way? Advance a theory, just ask questions, and soon enough the proof will come along. Or not, as the case may be, but what fun asking the questions.

Sorry, that little outburst came from the pond being made to wear a mask, going against years of reptile warnings. Sure it kept the face warm on a cold day, but it also fogged the pond's glasses, and that might have led to a fatal injury, not to mention the harm done by fatal ingestion of carbon dioxide, which is good for the planet and plants, but can be tricky for the metabolism.

What else triggered the pond at the start of this day? Well the pond took a look at the top of the lizard Oz digital page and threw a hissy fit and decided its work was pretty much baked to the point of burning ...

See if you can spot any report on the disgraceful behaviour of the far right government of Israel, aerial bombing a refugee camp with "precision"? You can find it elsewhere: Israel’s Jenin assault displaces thousands as violence spirals on. That's what a modern gulag, ghetto if you will, looks like.

See for that matter if you can spot any mention of Monday was hottest day for global average temperature on record, as climate crisis bites

See if you can spot a mention of the UK government's response to the news: Revealed: UK plans to drop flagship £11.6bn climate pledge.

What about fundamentalist US bigots spurring on Kenya to match Uganda in demonising gays, as if Ron DeSantis joining the Taliban wasn't enough? I Was Team DeSantis Before His Disgusting Anti-Gay Ad . It took an ad? Not the war on the mouse house? Can you ever take the stoopid out of stupid?

Never mind, now check out the top of the digital edition this day ...

Nope, nada, ,zilch, nothing about the headlines the pond woke up to that were being noted in the BBC World service news hour ... and as for the head commentary team, there was just "Ned" nattering about the Voice, and Dame Slap blathering on about "true equality", as blondes are wont to do.

The pond notes that the cricket saga was front and centre, but the pond could trump that with a most excellent hyding ... Who’s for political Bazball with Rishi? Voters? Tories? Anyone?

Yes, yes, you can follow the link and read it all, in full, but please, allow the pond the indulgence to quote, so it might tempt a stray reader to wander off and avoid herpetological studies ...

...Anyway, maybe we should have expected an intervention from Downing Street on this matter, given that Rishi Sunak had already made an appearance on Test Match Special on Saturday. This involved an interview with Jonathan Agnew, another heavily oxidised individual, during which the PM talked with sledgehammer allegory about himself, through the prism of cricket. England captain Ben Stokes was praised for taking “essentially the same group of players with a different approach to playing and leadership … As someone who has to also lead in a different way it was just an interesting case study, how you take the same group of people and get so much more out of them.” Yes yes – we get it: “Hold your nerve.” I think the point was supposed to be that Sunak isn’t merely failing spectacularly on all his own five pledges, and managing the UK further down the road of decline. He’s actually playing some political version of Bazball, and you should, officially, be extremely into it.
Alas, as indicated, that was not the end of the prime ministerial pronouncements. “The prime minister agrees with Ben Stokes,” ran an official statement from his spokesman on Monday. “He said he simply wouldn’t want to win a game in the manner Australia did.” Again: great to take lessons in ethics from a guy currently trying to ram through a policy of freighting refugees off to cuddly Rwandan president Paul Kagame. As for the notion that it’s not how Sunak would have won, that doesn’t mean a whole lot coming from a guy whose recent form includes losing to Liz Truss. WinViz is no longer even offering a percentage for Sunak’s prospects in a general election, which will probably take place after a campaign of bellowing culture war banalities at a populace who honestly just want to see their GP inside of eight weeks.
The spokesman went on to confirm that Sunak believes Australia’s actions were not within the spirit of cricket. As someone whose wife’s tax affairs were for so long within the letter of the law, but certainly not the spirit of it, you’d think Sunak would avoid these little forays into matters that don’t concern him. Furthermore, it seems glaringly odd that he should find time to have a public view on this business, when he couldn’t find time to vote on the standards committee’s damning report into Boris Johnson’s Partygate lies, nor allow his spokesman to opine on whether or not he even agreed with it. Is true leadership having a view on a stumping but not on whether it’s actually bad to lie to parliament? It is now. Maybe you can appease your way to victory: something for our international sports players to consider.
For now, it must be hard for outsiders not to be struck by anything other than a sense of unwitting English smallness that stretches from the inner sanctum of Lord’s to Downing Street and beyond. Sunday’s scenes were the kind of unedifying thing some of those aggressive members prefer to think only happens in all the sports on which they look down, or during prime minister’s questions. The footage from the staircase and the Long Room show a large crowd so entitled and gripped by some fundamentalist belief in their own superior decency that they behaved in this way even though they knew the TV cameras were on them.

Throw in the infallible Pope for the day and the pond would consider it a solid day's work ...

Was there anything in the tree killer edition?, the pond can hear someone in the back row asking ...

Nope, it's stopped being a newspaper, and that line "Now's the time to be informed" is a black cosmic joke, and speaking of the cosmos, it took the BBC to note the work of a Uni of Sydney scientist, Scientists see early universe in slow-motion for first time.

What else? Well there was Anthony Swofford writing Culture Warriors Banned My Memoir About Being a Young Marine, which ended this way ... (and can be found in full at that non-paywall site)

...I thought I possessed a number of unique and original insights about the making of young Marines and going to war and what combat does to a young psyche and soul. I thought that on most days I could manage to turn out a page or two of good sentences. I wrote the best book I could. I wanted my book to teach young people things about war I hadn’t been taught or hadn’t wanted to learn when I was a 17-year-old looking to escape a dull suburban life that felt like a prison. I wrote an honest book, and I thought that that honesty would be the book’s spine and help sustain it in the world.
That 20 years later a politically stacked school board can, over a matter of a few months and a two hour meeting, cancel access to my work and the experiences of me and my fellow marines feels deeply un-American.
But perhaps now I have a new group of comrades, banned writers: Ibi Zoboi, Raina Telgameier, Laura Steven, John Steinbeck. The ranks will grow. The book bans will keep coming, although, as in Ottawa County, the banners like to play with language, and call them removals because that must sound less restrictive.
Make no mistake, they are banning books, but really they are restricting access to ideas. And when one small group of people ban a larger group of people access to ideas, we are in for a closing of the American mind. What begins with banning books ends with a firescape of constitutional rights ablaze. But the fire is already here on your block.

Any more science you want to know? Good, shut up in the back row, stick with Dr Pond, and we'll get on with the day's reptile duties, albeit with a painful reluctance ...

Oh shyte, that's it, that's what's on offer below the fold?

Might as well go with "Ned's" natter ...

The silly old dotard, well into his dotage, doesn't have a clue, and a capper would be if the reptiles yet again inserted a snap of Ming the Merciless ...

Think the pond's joking or prescient? Nah, the pond just cheated and looked at the next gobbet ...

What the fug?, as Norman Mailer might scribble when afraid of the Google thought police, now they're doing potato jokes in soft focus?

And what is it with Ming? It's gone beyond the valley of the tiresome, this endless pictorial mythologising...

On the pond ploughed, with the lyrics "you don't know what's happening, do you Mr Ned", still ringing in the ears, or was that "a horse is a horse is a 'Ned' of course" ...

So much blather and so much wringing of hands, is it any wonder that the almost forgotten lizard Oz graphics department decided to interrupt with a huge snap, which the pond had to cut down to size ...

... and with that done the "Ned" ordeal was almost over ...

How rich is it for the pompous, portentous old loon to lecture others about sounding like ecclesiastical authorities, while himself sounding like a baleful ecclesiastical authority on the many heresies of others. Irony was pronounced dead long ago, but this day they stuck a crucifix through its corpse ...

And so to an eccentric item, simply because the pond's got nothing better to do with its time ...

A stunning opening by the lizard Oz graphics department, with a flashback to 1996. As for the text, is it still possible to blather about a two-party system? It seems it is, though the pond was more entranced by the flailing, failing lizard Oz graphics department ...

Ah, the pond sees, it's all the fault of womyn ... thanks, lizard Oz graphics department.

As for the blather about bystanderism, does it occur to this inane scribbler that the pond can vote for whomever the pond likes, and sometimes did, especially when the pond remembers its fondness for the Happy Birthday Party ... (yes, it really did exist, see Susie Creamcheese and the Happy Birthday Party. Frank lives and can be found in Adelaide).

Meanwhile, the big reveal, this stolid scribbler is a Mr Potato lover ...

Simply doesn't have a clue, and naturally the graphics department thought it might help save the say by inserting a huge snap ...

At least it kept the gobbets to a digestible size ...

Oh dear, the pond knew that mention of Federation would send the graphics department off in search of a copyright-free image, and sure enough ...

What makes this all so funny, sad and peculiar? Well the pond hasn't heard this sort of guff about the two party system since the days of the DLP splitters in the 1950s ... as if dire warnings are going to see splitters return to Captain Potato's party of the Toorak and Vaucluse faithful.

The pond is well over it ...

Proved illusive? Sorry, the pond would have preferred "proved elusive", in the interests of verbal stability ...though the pond will concede that its search for anything remotely resembling sensible commentary proved illusory ... what illusive, and possibly allusive, times we live in ...

And while on an apology tour, the pond should note that it cut the bromancer dead yesterday, and would have been better off doing the same today ...

Well yes, they can just bugger off, but as always with the bromancer, there's a punchline coming, and it's not a long rant, so the pond will bet there soon enough, after another snap and a gobbet...

Well yes, but after the next gobbet, we'll get to the policy punchline ...

And now, as a build up to the punchline, was it not so long ago that the bromancer was on a war footing?

It was, it was, and it led Michael Pascoe to joke ...

Standby for Peter Hartcher wearing fatigues and flak jacket on Insiders, Greg Sheridan appearing via candlelight from his basement bomb shelter, and editorials in The Australian demanding conscription be reinstated along with compulsory high school army cadets and bandage-rolling classes in primary schools.

And that’s before the Murdoch tabloids get to work assisting Peter Dutton with headlines and cartoons not out of place back when the White Australia policy was bipartisan and the Communist Menace loomed large.

So where are we now? Well that leads to the punchline ...

"Should rethink this position"? Should "probably draw back"?! 

"Probably"?!

What a weak-kneed, half-baked, half-hearted word. Where's the lion, where's the stout-hearted warrior, where's the war monger of yesteryear, or yester December 2022? 

Where's the proud assertion, "certainly, emphatically and with full vigour must draw back, and prepare for war with China by Xmas"?

Well that's the pond's dummy spit for the day, time to don a mask, or at least a helmet ...

What a boon it's been for the cartoonists ...in full at the end of the link, just a sampler ...