What to lead with? What to guess might be top of the lizard Oz this day?
Could it be how Israel knows a lot about collective guilt and collective punishment? Might that not lead to collective hatred and contempt?
Nah, not a likely Oz story. That's been disappeared.
What about some light relief? Sorry, for that the pond must turn to Kate Briquelet's DeSantis, Furries, and Trump Merch: I Went to the Moms for Liberty Summit for a laugh. It's quite a read and would be hugely funny if it wasn't so downright weird and paranoid. Luckily it can be found outside the Beast paywall here
The pond is always hanging out for news of the great furry conspiracy:
...The New Jersey woman chimed in that at a high school just 40 minutes away, “teachers have to honor the furries and kids who say they’re cats, and they have to let them bring litter boxes to school.” She was referring to the subculture of people who invent alter-egos as anthropomorphized animals and which the GOP has seized on to generate moral panic. (Claims of litter boxes in schools, it should be noted, are widely and repeatedly discredited.)
The North Dakota mother said her son’s high school had furries, too. “He's taken pictures of them,” she said. “There was a kid that was wearing a tail and the principal, we talked to him about, you know, the dress code …. Like, these are the kids. But they just let him be, let him wear this tail everywhere he went.”
It reminded the pond of that ancient Oz film where Miranda Otto thought she was a horse. It turns out that a bunch of deviants had conspired to get behind the scenes, leading to this moment ...
...Late Saturday night, the atheist infiltrators joined me for a debrief at a hotel bar.
One, whom we’ll call Tina, was inspired to attend the summit after she saw the M4L protest lineup. She thought, “Someone should be on the inside reporting back on what’s going on in there.”
Once she arrived, she ran into a registered Republican whom she knew from atheist circles. He asked not to be identified for this article as he mulls running for office and instead preferred the pseudonym Hollingsworth. “Sometimes if you can keep your meal down,” Hollingsworth said, “extremist politics can be entertaining maybe in the same way that a severe accident on the roadway might be—”
“Titillating,” Tina offered.
“So, how badly am I going to regret this language?” Hollingsworth asked me.
That's only designed to titillate, the real meat is in DeSanctus, but speaking of severe accidents, there's also the climate ...there was Graham Readfearn in The Graudian, with Ocean temperatures around Australia 0.5C above June average as UN declares an El Niño.
A study in January found that the ocean gained 10 zettajoules more in 2022 than the year before – enough heat to boil 700m kettles every second.
Oh too gloomy, how many kettles would it take to fill the Albert Hall?
And then there was Damien Gayle with Tuesday was world’s hottest day on record – breaking Monday’s record.
Naturally the infallible Pope was on hand to buy ringside tickets ...
What sayeth the reptiles, while noting that Lloydie of the Amazon has been MIA since the 19th of April 2023 ...
Yep, events in the West Bank still disappeared, climate still disappeared, petulant Peta in her usual prominent perch, with the usual paranoid parroting, and it was much the same in the tree killer edition ...
There was another snap of the plucky, brave lads, ready to take it up to the colonialists, and it reminded the pond what a boon the fuss had been for cartoonists ...
The pond had also learned about the Tebbit test, and shed a tear for long lost days of pompous English lords and racists ...
But thus far the whole pond outing this day has been an epic Seinfeld episode, featuring nothing and the disappeared. Perhaps some member of the lizard commentariat might produce a monumental pile-up after an encounter with some black ice ...
Nope, zip, zilch, nada, and fair warning, for those with no stomach for the worst of the worst, for those who struggle to keep their meal down at the sight of roadkill, at this point the pond realised it must do what it must do, and must leave the tent, and wander in the valley of paranoid petulant Peta darkness ...
First up the pond must congratulate what's left of the lizard Oz graphics department. It takes exceptional skill to dig out an image featured as long ago as 28th January 2014 in the BBC yarn
China's internet vigilantes and the 'human flesh search engine.'
Back then it was credited to AP.
Why so shy, reptile graphics department? Honour your splendid budget and acknowledge your sources ... or did you pick up on the idea by visiting the Graudian, who loved the image?
Oh the HUN was into it too, and dozens of others, what a money spinner that one was ...
And that's how memes spread ... but at least it was a brief distraction from paranoid Peta and that extremely rich, to the point of nausea, paranoid persecution complex ...
O noble reptiles, standing against the ravaging hordes ... and speaking of health hysteria - what virus, who, what, where, when? - at this point, the reptile graphics department led with a classic image of a skulking, deviant mask wearer ...
The pond has already said enough on the way that masks are likely the chief cause of all illness in the world - the pond's medical team is busy on the data - and had to downsize the image for fear of agitating stray readers ...
Back to the paranoid persecution complex ... and the suffering of the IPA, which apparently is "right-leaning" or perhaps "right-tilting", which is to say - here the pond must translate - barking mad far right loonacy of the Gina kind ...
Perhaps celebrate invasion day on another day? Sorry, at this point, there was another huge snap of another diabolical threat ...
Of course it's tricky for News Corp and the lizard Oz, what with being a font for climate science disinformation, anti-vax delusions, mask fear and loathing and all the rest of the Covid ratbaggery, not to mention sundry forms of hate speech and all the rest of the reptile misinformation baggage ...
Actually that means there's a solid foundation for petulant Peta's paranoia and persecution complex ... she's in the business of misinformation and disseminating fear and loathing and reptile mythologies in lieu of facts ...
At this point there was another huge snap of a figure designed to instil fear in the lizard Oz readership. The great aunts under the wisteria on the back verandah on Kensington road fainted at the horror ...
The pond isn't likely to repeat this petulant Peta experiment again any time soon and hopefully next Thursday there'll be a different reptile distraction.
There's something wilfully moronic about the endless misuse and abuse of poor old socialist-to-the-day-he-died George Orwell ...
Perhaps instead Animal Farm, because the pond can see a distinct resemblance between Napoleon and his brood, and Chairman Rupert and his brood ...
Never mind.. the pond had promised itself that the very next time it saw a reptile run out the "woke" flag, as in "woke big business" - such an absurd and meaningless abuse of the English language - it would revive an old cartoon to celebrate ...
Now the pond didn't worry about actually arguing with the ravings and rantings of the paranoid Peta - that only intensifies the persecution complex - but she did rabbit on about the Voice, and so the pond decided to help by turning to another rant ...
Come on down lizard Oz editorialist ...
Amused bystanders will be bemused by that talk of the swamp and Donald-style politics. Why the pond has it on good authority that Captain Potato's talk of 'leets is Donald-approved ...
Ah yes, where did the pond hear that sort of talk?
Poor old Ken ... and it's even more ironic, because it's the reptiles who've turned up the dial to eleven ...
But if Captain Potato can produce a suitable transformation by shouting 'leets from the rooftops or screeching at the 'woke leets' while on Commonwealth Avenue, then go for it ...
... and so to a final blast from a lizard Oz editorial so far up itself, sanity was lost from sight ...
What an appalling rag it is, and sometimes the pond, in moments of bleak introspection, wonders why it bothers, but then remembers that it's all just a way of providing some spacing between the cartoons ...
Dot said "... what with being a font for climate science disinformation, anti-vax delusions, mask fear and loathing and all the rest of the Covid ratbaggery, not to mention sundry forms of hate speech and all the rest of the reptile misinformation baggage ...", which now, in the US, is not to be challenged by Government, and lets nyoozcorpse, Perulant Peta and Gigi off the hook, after "Judge rules White House pressured social networks to “suppress free speech”
ReplyDelete"Missouri and Louisiana sued Biden over attempts to limit COVID misinformation."
Groan.
Add Wrong Speech - misinformation - to First Amendment Free Speech Rights.
Gigi et al will be thrilled.
"Science-Based Medicine has described the Brownstone Institute as spreading misinformation against vaccines and in favor of disproven treatments.[26]"... ""... and I thought, 'That’s it! This world will never be governed. It cannot be governed.' It was beautiful." ~ Tucker, the spiritual godfather of the GBD.
---
"Judge rules White House pressured social networks to “suppress free speech”
"Missouri and Louisiana sued Biden over attempts to limit COVID misinformation.
...
"In addition to the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general, the plaintiffs include professors Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, who co-authored the October 2020 "Great Barrington Declaration" that opposed COVID lockdowns and urged a focus on reaching herd immunity. They and other plaintiffs claim they were censored by social networks.
"The ruling was criticized by Jameel Jaffer, an adjunct professor of law and journalism who is executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. "It can't be that the government violates the First Amendment simply by engaging with the platforms about their content-moderation decisions and policies," Jaffer told The New York Times, calling it "a pretty radical proposition that isn't supported by the case law."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/judge-rules-white-house-pressured-social-networks-to-suppress-free-speech/
"In 2021, Tucker founded the nonprofit Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, a think tank that opposes various measures against COVID-19, including masking and vaccine mandates. Senior roles were given to Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya, two of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which Tucker also helped to organize. The institute has described itself as "the spiritual child" of the Great Barrington Declaration. Writers of Brownstone articles have included Sunetra Gupta, the third co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, Paul E. Alexander, a former Trump administration health official, and George Gilder, a senior resident fellow at AIER.[24][25] Science-Based Medicine has described the Brownstone Institute as spreading misinformation against vaccines and in favor of disproven treatments.[26]
...
"... and I thought, 'That’s it! This world will never be governed. It cannot be governed.' It was beautiful."[22]
Personal life
"Formerly a Southern Baptist, Tucker is a convert to traditionalist Catholicism.[28][29] He was managing editor of the Church Music Association of America journal Sacred Music from 2006 to 2014.[30][31] From 2013 to 2015, he edited CMAA's website New Liturgical Movement.[citation needed]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Tucker
What will the Supreme's say when this gets to them?
Hmmm: GBD is Great Barrington Declaration and also Global Burden of Disease ... yes, I guess that fits.
DeleteAnonymous - the ‘Brownstone Institute’ is strangely insidious. A few months back our Killer Creighton brought to our attention a work by one Conny Turni, apparently tenured at University of Queensland, and Astrid Lefringhausen - of no nominated academic attachment.
DeleteThat was supposed to be a review of effectiveness of vaccines against Covid 19 in Australia. The ‘Journal’ in which it appeared is from a US-based publish for profit business, and I recorded the passage to publication as -
The actual ‘review’ is readily downloaded, and shows that it was ‘Submitted: 10 Sep 2022; Accepted: 12 Sep 2022; Published: 21 Sep 2022’
so it is, at very best, a pre-publication. You don’t get a lot of ‘peer review’ in two working days, let alone a Saturday and Sunday, which is what September 10 and 11, 2022, happened to be.
Amongst many, carefully selected, sources, the Turni Lefringhausen work cites ‘The Brownstone Institute has established the most updated and comprehensive library list of 150 of the highest-quality, complete, and robust scientific studies and evidence reports/position statements on natural immunitey as compared to the COVID-19 vaccine-induced immunity. The consensus of these studies is that immunity induced by COVID infection is robust and long lasting.’
It then goes on to compare that immunity with what results from vaccination - unfavourably to vaccination, of course.
From my own time supervising and assessing research, I admit that I twitch when any speaker or author introduces their sources as ‘most updated’, ‘the highest-quality’, let alone ‘complete’ or ‘robust’. This too often indicates a fresh graduate trying to speak with borrowed authority. I am puzzled that a person apparently in the position of Turni should use such phrases. Just what further influence does Brownstone Institute have over those who think they are using it - like Gigi Foster having it publish her ‘The Great Covid Panic.’
Thank you for your informative research, as always Chad. It is kinda fascinating, in a tediously repetitive way, to note how the Right-wingnuts go about persuading themselves that they can fool the world into agreeing with their make-believe bullshat time after time.
Delete“At least in the US there is pushback.” Hang on, is Petulant Peta celebrating activist judges? I thought that was a big no-no for all True Conservatives? Oh, right - only those who might’ve accused of being “Lefties”.
ReplyDeleteAnd ACMA is our very own Orwellian Nightmare - that pissweek wet noodle of a supposed oversight and regulatory body? The worst thing on offer in their Room 101 would be a photocopied “please don’t do it again” letter.
To misappropriate an old old advertising slogan, “A little Peta goes a long way”. Hopefully it will be a long time before it’s necessary to revisit these scrappings at the bottom of the Reptile jar.
To
And let us hope she does go a very long way, and very fast, and never to return.
DeletePetty Peta: "...the Labor-lite Morrison government was typically slow and tepid to adot this leftist official activism." Oh she's a joy, isn't she: so now Hawke-Keating were really 'Liberals' and Morrison is now 'Labor'. Oh yeah.
ReplyDeleteAnd "The Albanese government sees any argument against the [small v] voice as misinformation, if not actual hate speech." But that's because it is, dear Petty, that's because it is. So when you say "...woke big business (in this case exclusively foreign-owned) are teaming up with a left-wing government...". "Foreign-owned" like the Murdoch media empire ? However did we let that happen, and however many "foreign-owned" - oh, and it goes with saying: "woke" - big businesses have invaded us ?
Today's Mr Ed: "Ms Burney ... is likely to have antagonised as many people as she convinced." Oh, ok, let's put that slightly differently: she is likely to have convinced as many as she's antagonised. I'm sure she'll be chuffed that you reckon she's convinced that many people which, if you're right about current low levels of Voice support, means she's reversing the Yes support slide.
ReplyDeleteBut hey: "...the financial forces now being marshalled reflect the fact more than 50 per cent of the Australian people say they currently reject the voice and resent being told how to vote." I think he meant "told which way to vote" rather than "told how to vote"; most people know how to vote by putting their mark in a square as the vote paper tells them.
But as to "more than 50 percent reject" well News.corp's most recent poll - Newspoll late in June - shows that actually less than 50%, in fact 47%, "reject the voice". But truth and accuracy were never important to reptiles, were they.
\\https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/support-for-voice-slips-to-lowest-level-poll-suggests-referendum-on-track-for-defeat/news-story/ee5d511e66d6e5075eb32fbd5581db0d
The Willcox thoughts of how the aboriginals were treated is so true. I remember traveling through Mooroopna many years ago and it was pointed out to me that the aboriginal settlement was next the Shepparton tip with humpies dotted around the area. And it was in a flood prone area.
ReplyDeleteEurope has a lot to answer for in its colonising of under developed countries and the least that should be expected of those that now inhabit those countries is to recognise the dispossession that the original inhabitants have suffered.
GB - heading off on a tangent, as is my wont, but in the direction of items of more interest - the rise and fall of nations - this week’s ‘New Scientist’ (#3445) has main article on using ‘Seshat:Global History Databank’ in the hope that crunching more and more numbers will, somehow, reveal better understanding of why so many empires, which left impressive stone monuments to themselves, ultimately failed.
ReplyDeleteNo surprise - as in other lines of study, crunching more numbers does not necessarily reveal new wisdom - it helps to have an hypothesis or two to guide you in lining up the data. But there are some interesting observations on things like nutritional condition of human remains, and more grounds for doubt that each empire of great structures necessarily had to be preceded by agriculture. A site that you have mentioned a couple of times, Göbekli Tepe is covered, but has not yielded definitive conclusions on its purpose or how it was supported, apparently from an essentially hunter-gatherer culture.
There is a steady message to remind readers that all the glorious monuments of ‘our’ human existence were made in the 10 000 years since the last ice age, and, overall, needed the benign climate of those millennia to build those items, even if they were later abandoned.
The implicit caution is that we should think very hard about putting that benign climate in peril - but, whaddya want? A planet to live on, or lower power bills?
Anyway - might fill in a visit to your local library
The repetitive failure of empires is mostly unexplained, isn't it. But over the years I've come more and more to consider the prevalence of epidemics and pandemics and how these are customarily ignored in recounting history. For instance the Plague of Justinian is mostly recounted in passing but not as the major cause of a failed Roman revival that it was. And in an article I recently mentioned ("Ancient Britons built Stonehenge – then vanished") it wasn't only "empires" - the Stonehenge builders supposedly being dark skinned.
DeleteWhat slowly seeped into my consciousness was the American Civil War in which many more 'soldiers' died of sickness than in battle - basically because they were crowded together, and diseases transmitted at speed. So, as homo saps saps started to come together in larger, static groups, and eat all kind of 'wild animal' food (just like a China wet market) we could have expected more transmissible diseases together with circumstances to expedite their transmission. But because we didn't have writing much back then, we've got no records to help inform us.
I could well imagine typhus doing a good job of population control from those first gatherings of humans to build cities and places of worship or internment. Even though we have, 'officially', known about typhus for six centuries, steadily recording it killing more combatants in many wars than were killed by the enemy - we still do not have a readily-available vaccination against it.
DeleteAnd we certainly didn't have any such thing for it and many others six millennia ago - though Jericho was already a millennium or three old by then. But how many d'you reckon died of the black plague over its many epi and pan-demics? At least 1/3rd or more of Asian and European humanity at the time. Amazing what that did to worker's wages though.
DeleteAnd maybe that's why it was so easy for a small bunch of Spaniards to conquer southern America: smallpox (amongst others) is a wonderful killer - at least while it survived. How long d'you reckon it was before the various varieties of "colds" ceased to be significantly fatal ? And influenza ? It's still quite fatal for many every year. As is tuberculosis and malaria.
And so on and so forth.
And talking about malaria, which has apparently been around for 30 million years or so ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_malaria ), it still kills about half a million young (under 5yo) kids in Africa every year,
Delete‘Safe and effective’: first malaria vaccine to be rolled out in 12 African countries
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jul/06/safe-and-effective-first-malaria-vaccine-to-be-rolled-out-in-12-african-countries
Just as well there's so many of us or we'd have gone extinct a long time ago.
And influenza is still with us too:
Delete‘Rollercoaster of a sickness’: how a horror flu season is catching Australian families off guard
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jul/06/rollercoaster-of-a-sickness-how-a-horror-flu-season-is-catching-australian-families-off-guard
It's always the young with not yet fully developed immune systems that cop it most.
It gets worse;
ReplyDelete"In 2018 he [Tucker] became a research affiliate of the Blockchain Innovation Hub, a study center at RMIT University.[2]"
And look who he sneaks in:
Mackinac Center
"Joseph Overton (1960–2003), a senior vice president of the Mackinac Center, stated the political strategy that later became known as the Overton window. Overton said that politically unpopular, unacceptable policies must be changed into politically acceptable policies before they can be enacted into law.[7][8] The Center was ranked among the top 5 percent of almost 1,900 think tanks in the United States by the 2018 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report.[9][10]
.
Board of directors
Current members of the Mackinac Center's board of directors include:[32]
....
Dulce Fuller, Member; Chair of the Southeast Michigan Committee of The Heritage Foundation
Daniel Graf, Member; Financial analyst at Amerisure Mutual Holdings
Richard Haworth, Member; Chairman of Haworth, an office furniture and architectural interior company based inHolland, Michigan
- Kent Herrick, Vice Chairman; President of ThermogyJ.C. Huizenga, Member; Chairman of and founder of Huizenga Group, Member of the Acton Institute board of trustees [The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty is an American research and educational institution,[2] or think tank, inGrand Rapids, Michigan, (with an office in Rome) whose stated mission is "to promote a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles".[3] Its work supports free market economic policy framed within Judeo-Christian morality.[4][5]]
- Joseph Lehman, President; Vice chair of the National Taxpayers Union and a director of the Fairness Center [The Fairness Center -The Fairness Center is a nonprofit law firm that provides free legal services to those hurt by public-sector union officials. We advocate for our clients" ... "The organization has reportedly received funding from right-leaning donors such as Charles Koch, the Scaife Foundation, and Donors Trust. 3 https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/the-fairness-center/ ]
- Clifford Taylor, Chairman; Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court from 2005 through 2009
https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/the-fairness-center/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackinac_Center_for_Public_Policy
At the Australian end of the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub, we find Chris Berg and Sinclair Davidson, almost remembered for their joint tome on privatising the ABC - and any other broadcaster not spraying us with commercials - published by, of course - Connor Court. They are joined by Tim Wilson, who did the country a favour by losing the seat of Goldstein - which had only been held by Liberal members - in last year's election, so has now discovered (?) his real destiny is to gather esteem as an academic, researching IPA stuff.
ReplyDeleteIt is worth repeating that, in promoting their book on privatising the ABC, Sinclair Davidson said that Australians should be pleased to have their 'entertainment' and, (who knows?) news lathered with almost incessant commercials, as proof that they live in one of those wonderful free enterprise economies.
ReplyDeleteWell I do sometimes watch Channel 7 news (which shows at 6:00 pm every day of the week) and it does have a lot of 'commercials', but they follow the new way with them. Once upon a time, the commercials came at the start of a program and then at the end. But now they go for a concentrated bunch of commercials on several occasions during the program.
DeleteI think they do that so that the channels can schedule their "commercial breaks" at the same time - eg at 10 minutes in, then 20 minutes etc for Ch7 news - so that there's no point in us changing channel once the commercials start because every channel - except ABC boc - is showing a bunch of commercials all at the same time.
Ingenious, those advertising types, aren't they.
Brownstone Collective = Coprolite Collective?
ReplyDelete