In which the pond revisits the bromancer before tackling prattling Polonius, the Bjorn-again one, and nervous nellies in the reptile ranks ...

 

The pond did enjoy its time with the bromancer yesterday, and didn't even get around to referencing sundry stories, such as Linda Qiu's piece for the NY Times, Fact-Checking the Defenses of Trump After His Latest Indictment, which in its opening remarks pretty much summarised the bromancer:

Allies of former President Donald Trump and lickspittle fellow travellers of the bromancer kind have rushed to his defense since he was charged Tuesday in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
They inaccurately attacked the judge assigned to oversee the trial, baselessly speculated that the timing of the accusations was intended to obscure misconduct by the Bidens and misleadingly compared his conduct to that of Democratic politicians.

Okay, it didn't quite say that, but if the pond had noted it, the whole thing could have been reduced to a few lines.

The pond also hadn't exhausted all its cartoons, with even right-wing Ramirez drawing a line...

There's a price to pay for unfinished business, and it comes with a heavy Sunday morning meditative hangover ...

The bromancer fun must end and the pond must turn to prattling Polonius, he of the bizarre monomaniacal obsessive compulsive ABC fetish ... and there's a trigger warning attached, because while the pond has attempted to downsize and ameliorate the horror, there's no hiding it ...

Hmm, Howard Kurtz, the horror, the horror,  the pond seems to remember a story about him. Perhaps Salon could help ...

We all know the real point of this Polonial outing. Simplistic "Sharri" is just a pawn in the Polonial bigger game which is to find any excuse whatsoever to slag off the ABC, and his bête noire, Media Watch, which refused to have him as a host, all the more problematic because his own media critiques feature him dressing up as a dog (It's not clear if the Sydney Institute has a litter tray and a feed bowl to help him with this performance art). How could Media Watch have turned its back on a furry for its host?

So any cause will do if it serves the greater Polonial cause ...

Actually "Sharri" has routinely spread all sorts of speculative theories, sometimes proposing that it was an accident, sometimes suggesting it was deliberate ...

The pond has deliberately avoided all the speculation, on the basis that (a) in Xi's China, getting to the bottom of what happened is impossible, and likely will never be known, (b) of all the people to trust in an investigation, "Sharri", unhinged pit bull, is at the bottom of the heap, and (c) just let it go. Viruses cross over from animals all the time and precautions should be taken, labs need to stay alert for security breaches, and such is the state of the world, there will inevitably be fresh outbreaks of viral diseases which will have the potential to turn into pandemics, and most likely by far by way of transference. A note at the bottom of each Killer Creighton story about the efficacy of masks and vaccines in dealing with outbreaks would be appreciated ... and research into vaccines should continue unabated and the unhinged rhetoric surrounding them be routinely debunked by reference to actual science rather than Killer science.

Otherwise you get down in the trenches with the rabid unhinged pit bull and begin to sound off ... in this case about a "Sharri" doc ...

...Markson’s earlier articles claimed, on the sayso of unnamed US intelligence sources and “leaked” documents, that the virus had escaped the WIV in November 2019 by infecting several employees who were subsequently hospitalised, having presumably passed it on to persons unknown in the meantime, thus sparking the first recorded outbreak the following month. In the meantime, however, the US government has apparently stopped denying—though nor has it officially admitted—that multiple people including several of its own personnel became ill with what is retrospectively thought to be COVID-19 after attending the 2019 World Military Games, a quadrennial event akin to the Olympics, held at Wuhan that October. So on 15 September Markson published yet another exclusive in the Australian in which she told how Wei Jingsheng, whom she described as “China’s most famous defector” and “the father of [its] democracy movement”, had claimed in an interview for her book that he had “warned US intelligence agencies a coronavirus was spreading in Wuhan in November 2019—six weeks before China admitted there was an outbreak”, which he had “first heard of … at the time of the World Military Games”. According to the article, Wei told Markson that the Chinese government had “released” the virus, and was upset that US intelligence did not act on his warnings.

It is however never properly explained how Wei, a former US-backed agent provocateur who spent 18 years in jail for sedition before being deported (not “defecting”) to the USA in 1997 and has not set foot in China since, knew or could have known not only that a novel virus, but specifically a coronavirus, was “released” in Wuhan the Military Games. The article does not say, while the documentary gives two conflicting explanations: US-based exiled Chinese “human rights activist” Dimon Liu says Wei told her he had heard it from members of the Chinese-American diaspora community, while Wei himself tells Markson (via a translator) that he was informed by his “contacts high in the Communist Party”. Then in a 29 September Australian article, having presumably been made aware of the discrepancy in her timeline, Markson simply acknowledges that contrary to her previous assertion that the WIV employees had been hospitalised in November 2019, “Former [US] director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe said they actually fell sick a month before”—with no attempt to explain the error, despite her earlier report having supposedly been based on exactly the same intelligence.

That way lies madness. That's like arguing about the grassy knoll.

That's far too much attention being paid to "Sharri" - how she loves the attention and being a persecuted truth teller - and you could go on and on, following all the hares she's set loose - in that case the notion that the Chinese government might have 'released' the virus, (or even the kraken) or that it might have been an accident, per the Graudian's Sharri Markson’s book on Covid’s Wuhan lab leak theory raises more questions than it answers .

That's the satisfying thing about conspiracy theories for some. Confronted by Jack the Ripper, the JFK assassination, the Twin Towers collapsing, the Shakspere substitutes, and all the rest of them, there's no chance of a definitive answer, so the game can be played indefinitely, and at some point you cross the line and start watching Capricorn One to see how a trip from a flat earth to an equally flat Mars could be staged in a television studio ...

And at that point the reptiles slipped in a sight worse than Elliott Gould and James Brolin combined ..."Sharri" leading a rich fantasy life for the camera ...

Sorry the pond would have liked to shrink it down to a pin head, but that'll have to do ... 

Meanwhile, Polonius himself has decided to get into the conspiracy theory clouds, without any way of proving what he's on about ...

No, not convenient, just a desire to put an end to endless speculative cavortings, docs and books and columns, making a meal out of things with no end in sight. At some point when you get on to the grassy knoll, you have to deliver the goods or become a tedious bore.

As for that talk of closet Communist, Barry cited this:

In the end, you need to put up or shut up, and that applies to most conspiracies, but of course if you put up, the entire point is not to shut up, it's to score a rebuttal, so the conspiracy theorist can rebut the rebuttal, and soon enough you have a grand industry at work ...

Nobody has yet satisfactorily explained to the pond how two gigantic buildings could be successfully wired in a way that made them implode, and that the US government did it, and similarly "Sharri" has assembled a lot of evidence of the kind that climate science denialists do, without ever managing to uncover a smoking gun, let alone the bullets, the casings, or who fired the gun at what and why ...

Clearly Polonius recognised there was only so far he could go with this form of idle speculation, so he got out another piñata, not so much for the bashing of the piñata, but as a way of slipping in a few blows on the ABC ... 

Hang on, hang on, if Sutton wants to raise the money for a documentary, he should feel free. 

The Dark Emu Story wasn't an ABC inhouse production. It was a Blackfella Films production, and the principal production funding came from Screen Australia's First Nations Department, in association with Screen NSW and VicScreen.

If you're mug enough or vain enough to get yourself involved in a production which was clearly going to be sympathetic to Pascoe, you deserve all the licks you get. Go whinge and whine to the lizard Oz, that's the home for that sort of carry on ...

Documentary film-makers are going to pursue an angle, and if it's not your angle, and you feel slighted and hurt, like a precious snowflake, tough cheddar ... Polonius will supply you with a bandaid and soothing words ...

And then the pond just gave up on the whole ABC bashing racket, and turned to billionaire attempts to save the planet ... foreshadowed by the cartoon the pond ran yesterday ...

... was partly inspired by stories that ran in the WaPo (paywall) and elsewhere recently ...

And so on, and never mind uncle Elon and a new life on Mars for all and X, and all the rest of it, because this weekend Bill Gates and the Bjorn-again one sorted out the world in just two brief gobbets ...

Of course the point hidden in all this is to downplay any thought of tackling climate change, and yet on another planet far removed from Bill and the Bjorn-again one...

By golly the pond is pleased the cartoonist acknowledged his source, it's not often the pond can pay tribute to Friz Freleng and the gang ...

And now on with the last gobbet, because it doesn't take long to sort out the world when you're Bill and the Bjorn-again one ...

Ah, yes farmers thriving in a warm climate ... and things that have the most impact ... and yet on another planet far removed from Bill and the Bjorn-again one... there seemed to be a few other things that might have the most impact, and we're not talking about Bill and the Bjorn-again one ending the war in Ukraine and resuming the export of Ukrainian produce ...

When the pond went looking for a bonus, with gormless Gemma rabbiting on about long suffering men, and Swannie sticking up for landlords, the cupboard was pretty bare, but there was also this curious item ...

It seems that Macken might have had the frights and decided she needed to be funny about it, with that link to an unsettling story setting her off.

Naturally it was a link to the lizard Oz, because the reptile aim is to keep things in house ...

The pond could scarcely believe it. Lloydie of the Amazon nowhere in sight, and here was News Corp quoting the BOM without a qualm, apparently not realising that the organisation had mounted the most astonishing climate change conspiracy of this or last century (and don't let that talk of NCA Newswire fool you, that's just an online media branch of News Corp).

On and on they went, enough to put the frights into Deirdre ...

So all that was left was to have a laugh and joke about being in hell, as one does ...

And after the cartoon featuring a hellish earth, it was on to a comical routine about Hades and hellfire and such like, no doubt richly comic in the context of the Catholic Boys' Daily, what with climate science just being another branch of religion ...

The pond thought hard about reporting Macken for reptile heresy and her vague hints that things might turn nasty ...

What need to startle the possums with talk that it's coming and that we should start planning ...

The reptiles have long been on the side of the grasshopper, and there seems no reason to change, not when you can keep on being be irritated by all those righteous busybody ants, and there's always a good joke to be had about EVs to be had ...