In which the pond does an elaborate detour before spending the usual quality time with an eternally denialist Major Mitchell and the floodwater whispering Caterist ...

Please indulge the pond in an extended Monday aside. You see, the pond's reading over the weekend was dominated by tales of the Musk rat. 

There was Timothy Snyder in The Graudian, Elon Musk likes to think he saved us from Armageddon. He’s just brought it closer.

Also in the Graudian there was Lloyd Green, For Elon Musk, the personal is political - but his march to the right affects us all.

And then in The New Yorker Jill Lepore delivered some quality smackdowns, such that the pond had no time to dwell on or brood about the news Letter suggests Pope Pius XII knew of mass gassings of Jews and Poles in 1942.

Ostensibly Lepore's excuse was that she was scribbling Walter Isaacson's new biography, but that's just the launch pad for some galactic takedowns of her own. 

The pond finds it hard to settle on just a few samples, but it's at The New Yorker here for those who want and can get more.. 

The pond has no way of knowing if it's behind the paywall, because the pond's subscription always kicks in, but if you want more, maybe you haven't used up all your freebies.

The first sample:

...Musk’s estrangement from his daughter is sad, but of far greater consequence is his seeming estrangement from humanity itself. When Musk decided to buy Twitter, he wrote a letter to its board. “I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” he explained, but “I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.” This is flimflam. Twitter never has and never will be a vehicle for democratic expression. It is a privately held corporation that monetizes human expression and algorithmically maximizes its distribution for profit, and what turns out to be most profitable is sowing social, cultural, and political division. Its participants are a very tiny, skewed slice of humanity that has American journalism in a choke hold. Twitter does not operate on the principle of representation, which is the cornerstone of democratic governance. It has no concept of the “civil” in “civil society.” Nor has Elon Musk, at any point in his career, displayed any commitment to either democratic governance or the freedom of expression.

Here the pond must put in a word for Twitter (known as X to those still stuck on the alphabet). It's still a great way to read a joke ...

That's up there were with endless news of the groping Boebert ...

Did Coulter go there? Oh lordy did she what ...

Never mind all that X'ing, because best of all were Lepore's Hitchhiker inspired smack downs. First there was a set up:

...“He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable,” the magazine’s (Time) Person of the Year announcement read. Musk and Grimes called the baby, Musk’s tenth, Y, or sometimes “Why?,” or just “?”—a reference to Musk’s favorite book, Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” because, Grimes explained, it’s a book about how knowing the question is more important than knowing the answer.

Then came the build:

...Musk, the boy, loved video games and computers and Dungeons & Dragons and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and he still does. “I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe,” Musk tells Isaacson. Isaacson doesn’t raise an eyebrow, and you can wonder whether he has read “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” or listened to the BBC 4 radio play on which it is based, first broadcast in 1978. It sounds like this:

Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former galactic empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, tax free. . . . Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural because no one was really poor, at least, no one worth speaking of.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is not a book about how “we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe.” It is, among other things, a razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism:

And for these extremely rich merchants life eventually became rather dull, and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon or the day was half an hour too long or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry: custom-made, luxury planet-building.

Douglas Adams wrote “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” on a typewriter that had on its side a sticker that read “End Apartheid.” He wasn’t crafting an instruction manual for mega-rich luxury planet builders... (Musk's father has been revealed as a rabid anti-semite and a happy voyager to apartheid land)

And then the closing two par pay off ...

...Musk gave Isaacson a different explanation for buying the company: “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary.” It’s as if Musk had come to believe the sorts of mission statements that the man-boy gods of Silicon Valley had long been peddling. “At first, I thought it didn’t fit into my primary large missions,” he told Isaacson, about Twitter. “But I’ve come to believe it can be part of the mission of preserving civilization, buying our society more time to become multiplanetary.”

Elon Musk plans to make the world safe for democracy, save civilization from itself, and bring the light of human consciousness to the stars in a ship he will call the Heart of Gold, for a spaceship fuelled by an Improbability Drive in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” In case you’ve never read it, what actually happens in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is that the Heart of Gold is stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is the President of the Galaxy, has two heads and three arms, is the inventor of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, has been named, by “the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6,” the “Biggest Bang Since the Big One,” and, according to his private brain-care specialist, Gag Halfrunt, “has personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts.” Person of the Year material, for sure. All the same, as a Vogon Fleet prepares to shoot down the Heart of Gold with Beeblebrox on board, Halfrunt muses that “it will be a pity to lose him,” but, “well, Zaphod’s just this guy, you know?” 

And who is Jill Lepore?

Jill Lepore, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is a professor of history and law at Harvard. She is the host of the five-part podcast series “Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket” on BBC Radio 4. 

The pond also thinks she runs a barber shop part-time and owns a razor-sharp cut-throat razor, and is inclined to get it out every so often just for the heck and the fun of it ...

But where, troubled punters might be asking, are the reptiles of the lizard Oz? 

Don't worry, they're here, with Mundine of the Sydney Institute at the top of the page calling for treaties now and the changing of the Australia Day, and right alongside him was that wily old bird, Major Mitchell ...

Luckily the pond didn't have to say about Mundine of the Sydney Institute because the immortal Rowe had already said it all ...

Down below in the commentary section the Caterist was also on duty, and amazingly there was a piece by the onion muncher, that almost forgotten relic of singular epic failure.

The pond decided it had to report on the thoughts of OM, but that such a dropkick epic loser should be assigned to a 4 pm slot, where only the most devoted pond readers might spot him. Consider this a tantalising teaser, a trailer for the blathering blowhard dropkick loser:

As for the Major, a correspondent has already pointed it out, but the pond is keen to note Andrew Stafford's What’s in a name? The renaming of the pink cockatoo is no small thing in Australia’s violent history.

Some might think it unfortunate for the pond to have named the Major after a mass murderer, but given this Major's propensity for mass murdering the planet, it fits well enough.

As for the old Major, you can read the Mount Dispersion wiki here, or a story at the ABC here.

And you can read the straight version of Sir Thomas at the ADB here, and tales of bloody dispossession at L'Age here, and incidentally discover that the explorer once travelled through Tamworth, centre of the known universe until the clowns elected Barners. As for massacres, you can see where Mount Dispersion fits in the wiki List of massacres of Indigenous Australians. It's quite a list ...

As for Stafford, he noted:

...It was certainly unfortunate to name such a beautiful bird after a mass killer. In 1836, at the euphemistically named Mount Dispersion, Mitchell encountered the Indigenous Kureinji and Barkindji people on the banks of the Murray River. His account of what happened there, unsparing in its brutality, stands in stark contrast to his rhapsodic description of the cockatoo:

“It was difficult to come at such enemies hovering in our rear with the lynx-eyed vigilance of savages … Attacked simultaneously by both parties, the whole betook themselves to the river, my men pursuing them and shooting as many as they could. Numbers were shot swimming across the Murray, and some ever after they had reached the opposite shore.”

It’s due mainly to this incident – Mitchell’s starring contribution to Australia’s frontier wars, for which he only ever received a mild rebuke – that BirdLife Australia has recently reverted to using the old name pink cockatoo in official correspondence. It’s part of a push by the organisation to examine the utility of eponymous names more generally.

What a grate, grating if you will, introduction to the lizard Oz's very own wily bird, Major Mitchell, still intent on killing the planet ...

The pond has read it all before, and that's why the pond indulged in a lengthy detour before getting to the Major. The lizard Oz is climate science denial HQ, and it's barely of passing interest now to note the way that onerous task has turned from celebrating coal to berating renewables.

By this stage the pond was so fatigued that it even left in the cheap snaps the reptiles used to break up the Major's rant ...

Sorry, of course the pond got it wrong, of course the Major was going to put in a kind word for coal and its ongoing use ...

Is he going to berate China for its addiction to coal? Of course not, he's going to use it as a club to launch his standard assault on renewables ...

And at this point the pond should note the extensive criticism of China that you'll read if you happen to X, though frankly the pond would prefer to Y or Z ...

“He was doing the very things that he claimed to disdain about the previous overlords at Twitter,” Weiss charged. She also pressed Musk over China, to his dismay. He grudgingly acknowledged, she told Isaacson, that because of Tesla’s investments, “Twitter would indeed have to be careful about the words it used regarding China.

“China’s repression of the Uyghurs, he said, has two sides.”

“Weiss was disturbed,” Isaacson writes.

Ah, so that explains this...

The Musk rat is even weirder and more dangerous than the Major, what with him an old hack sent out to retirement to rail against renewables, and the Musk rat making international news in Taiwan tells Elon Musk it is not for sale' after latest China comments ...

Meanwhile, has the Major got anything to propose as a way of dealing with global emissions? Of course not, when you're a dedicated denialist, all you need is FUD, and a large serve of it if you please ...

Many would be even more astounded to learn that SMRs aren't the magic bullet the reptiles have been promising for years, or that the solution to the world's problems is to pay to read a bunch of reptiles of the Major kind, pandering to Chairman Rupert's desire to rule the world ... and make out like a bandit in the process ...

The pond danced with joy when it read "Many consumers don't pay for their media..." 

Yep, and who could blame punters for refusing to pay for a Major Mitchell column. If you're into BDSM, head off to a dungeon for your kicks.

And so to the Caterist, and here the pleasure is to arrive at the moment when a paid up member of the inner city 'leets rails at inner city 'leets, while sticking out his shameless paw for federal government subsidies ...

As usual, there are two sides to the story, and only one ever told in the lizard Oz. For an alternative, and note bene Major Mitchell, it's free, head off to the Graudian for Conservationists welcome gillnet fishing ban in Great Barrier Reef world heritage area ...

Yep, it's an actual listed world heritage area, not that you'd know it from the Caterist, at least until some reptile decided to produce a map ...

Apparently Green didn't read the Graudian back in June, or see any need to do a Caterist and get his paws on some Federal government cash in the paw ...

The federal and Queensland governments will phase out commercial gillnet fishing in the Great Barrier Reef world heritage area by mid-2027 and create new net-free zones to better protect endangered marine species.

The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, announced the $160m plan Monday afternoon and said it would significantly reduce net fishing and high-risk fishing on the reef that injure and kill threatened dugongs, turtles, dolphins and protected shark species.

Plibersek will also ask the Queensland government to declare the hammerhead shark a “no-take” species for commercial fishers in Queensland waters, something long called for by oceans campaigners.

Part of the funding will be used to buy out gillnet licences, with the majority of gillnets to be removed by the end of this year and a total ban by mid-2027.

At this point the reptiles featured a demonic Plib in demonic cackling witch mode, so the pond downsized it ...

Then it was back to the Caterist ...

At this point the reptiles decided to produce that map of the Reef ...

Yep, it's an actual world heritage area ... and of course per the Major, if you read the fine print ...

 

... you'll see it's a badly cropped map from the Authority. That's how the reptiles do it, you see. Monetise government resources, stick them behind a paywall and charge for the pleasure ...

And so to the point where a paid up, certified member of the inner urban 'leet, when last heard residing in leafy Kirribilli on the lower north shore (though who knows, what with the floodwater in quarries whisperer's defamation payouts, the Caterist might be living in one of the caves along the foreshore), rails at inner urban 'leets ...

Just another day at climate science denialist HQ ... and by the end of it, the pond had the distinct feeling it was keeping the company of dinosaurs, but then through their diligence and hard work, we all might soon be extinct ...