In which there's no Caterist, but surely enough for a Monday with the reptiles ...

 

Say what? Again no Caterist on a Monday? The pond held its nerve, it knew that in some mysterious way, somehow the long absent Lord and the ever present reptile spin machine would provide ...

Right from the get go, the pond knew it could relax. There right in the top far right corner of the digital edition was a celebration of how to put in the boot by a Cash in an increasingly cashless society ... 

...Clennell asked why the coalition had not audited federal funding for projects of Indigenous Australians while in power for nine years (as it is now calling for the ALP government to do).
“Andrew,” she sighed. “We never had Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. For the first time in Australia’s history we have someone of lived experience fronting Australia and being able to carry the conversation and, quite frankly, we now need to back Senator Nampijinpa Price in.
“This is, quite frankly, a historic moment for Australia.”
The peanut gallery on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, fired up as news items were published online under the headline: “Lib senator Michaelia Cash makes awkward blunder in interview about referendum.”
“Oof – what about her former WA colleague Ken Wyatt?” The West Australian’s federal political editor, Katina Curtis, wrote.
“This is unbelievable,” The Guardian’s Josh Butler chimed in. “Cash was in cabinet with Ken Wyatt – literally last year. Do facts just not matter any more?”
Butler’s got a point. Cash wasn’t being truthful, but it wasn’t a mistake, or “gaffe” or “misinformation”.
Failing to mention the former Indigenous affairs minister, who was also her former WA Liberal colleague and who does have “lived experience”, was no mistake and had everything to do with him sensationally quitting the Liberal Party earlier this year in protest over Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s decision that the Liberals would officially oppose the referendum.
Wyatt’s subsequent behaviour angered some sections of the party – especially in WA – which preselected, endorsed and helped him win elections for more than a decade, to become Australia’s first Indigenous lower house MP and the first Indigenous cabinet minister.
Wyatt campaigned with Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister, and ALP member for Perth Patrick Gorman and Curtin’s teal independent, Kate Chaney, in Perth for the Yes23 campaign.
“Michaelia is the most dedicated Liberal. She takes zero prisoners. None. Nada,” one senior WA Liberal told Diary.

Well it was misinformation, which comes from not being truthful, but in microcosm, it does reveal what happens to pesky, difficult, uppity blacks ... and fittingly the reptiles ended with an anonymous apparatchik celebrating the sinking of the boot into one of them ... and so jokes about how to deal with rats in the ranks now seem to be part of Captain Spud's modus operandi ...

Always time for a shunning, always time for a disappearing ...Ken? Never heard of him ... and there's the way your dedicated Liberal deals with unsavoury characters when everyone knows that The Price is Wrong is the new, tremendously successful telly game show ...

Then there was Killer's Letter from America, always a must read ...

Didn't they once have a civil war about slavery? Wasn't it fierce and don't its effects linger to this day? Sorry, must have been another country ... but at least in this outing Killer slowly seems to be getting over his aversion to masks and talk of Covid ... (don't sprinkle too much irony on your muesli) ...

Ah, the Manhattan Institute. For some reason that rang a bell, and sure enough back on the 18th June 2021 Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote for The New Yorker, How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory, with the lede To Christopher Rufo, a term for a school of legal scholarship looked like the perfect weapon. (paywall)

The pond can only offer a sample, showing how to get ahead in the Manhattan Institute ...

...Since his appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” last fall, Rufo’s rise had matched that of the movement against critical race theory. He’d become a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, for which he had written more than two dozen document-based articles—mostly about anti-bias training in the government, schools, and corporations—which, he told me, had together accrued more than two hundred and fifty million impressions online. (“That’s a lot,” he said.) Carlson has been an especially effective ally; he relied on Rufo’s reporting for an hour-long episode this spring on “woke education,” and invited Rufo to join as a segment guest. Conservatives in state legislatures across the country have proposed (and, in some cases, passed) legislation banning or restricting critical-race-theory instruction or seminars; Rufo has advised on the language for more than ten bills. When Ron DeSantis and Tom Cotton have tweeted about critical race theory, they have borrowed Rufo’s phrases. He has travelled to Washington, D.C., to speak to an audience of two dozen members of Congress, and mentioned in passing that earlier in May he’d had drinks with Ted Cruz. In the 2016 Presidential election, Rufo had cast a dissenter’s vote for Gary Johnson. In 2020, he voted to reëlect Trump. Rufo said, “I mean, how can you not? It would have seemed rude and ungrateful.”

Now that's the sort of company a self-respecting Killer could keep ...not just Tuckyo, but the Manhattan Institute and talk of woke ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles tried to distract the pond with snaps of old Satan himself and brave cops marching for the right to rough up pesky, difficult, uppity blacks ...

For a minute, the pond thought all those masks might have set Killer off, but he's pretty much off all the time ...

The pond felt like doing a bit of counter-programming about the state of the divided United States, or more to the point, the divided GOP ...

... but never mind, the machine is out of order, and so is Killer ...

Actually, if the pond might be so bold ... FBI Releases Supplement to the 2021 Hate Crime Statistics

In March 2023, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a supplement to the 2021 Hate Crime Statistics, an annual compilation of bias-motivated incidents in the United States initially published in December 2022.

“Preventing, investigating and prosecuting hate crimes are top priorities for the Justice Department, and reporting is key to each of those priorities,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement. “The FBI’s supplemental report demonstrates our unwavering commitment to work with our state and local partners to increase reporting and provide a more complete picture of hate crimes nationwide.”

The 2021 supplemental report includes hate crimes data from an additional 3,025 law enforcement agencies. Overall, law enforcement agencies reported 10,840 total incidents and 12,822 victims, demonstrating that hate crimes remain a concern for communities across the country.

Nationally, reported hate crime incidents increased 11.6% — from 8,210 in 2020 to 9,065 in 2021. This data reflects the reports of 14,859 law enforcement agencies representing 91.1% of the U.S. population.

The FBI’s 2021 Hate Crime Statistics Supplemental Report released in December 2022 marked the first year using annual hate crimes statistics reported entirely through the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).

As a result of the shift to NIBRS-only data collection, law enforcement agency participation in submitting all crime statistics, including hate crimes, fell significantly from 2020 to 2021.

In order to increase agency participation for the 2021 data year, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program accepted hate crime data submissions from the summary reporting data collection system as well as additional NIBRS hate crime reports from agencies across the country.

According to this year’s data, 63.1% of single-bias incidents were motivated by the offenders’ bias toward race/ethnicity/ancestry, which continues to be the largest bias motivation category. Anti-Black or African American hate crimes continue to be the largest bias incident category, with 31.1% of all single-bias incidents in 2021 ...

And so on, and that's the trouble reading Killer, it sends the pond haring off into all sorts of directions, and there's another one coming up ...

Incontrovertibly false? The pond has never had the slightest interest in promoting stories about the Orlando massacre, but as usual, it turns out that when contemplating the many motives of a sociopath, things get murky ...

...On the day of the shooting, Mateen's father, Mir Seddique Mateen, said that he had seen his son get angry after seeing a gay couple kiss in front of his family at the Bayside Marketplace in Miami months prior to the shooting, which he suggested might have been a motivating factor. Two days later, after his son's sexual orientation became a subject of speculation, Mateen's father said he did not believe his son was homosexual. Mateen's ex-wife, however, claimed that his father called him gay while in her presence. Speaking on her behalf, her current fiancé said that she, his family, and others believed he was gay, and that "the FBI asked her not to tell this to the American media".

Who knows, it's just a wiki, and there were many motives outlined in that section of the wiki, including that the knowing selection of the club as a target was based on the knowing that it had lax security ... but if Killer is going to be comfortable quoting the barking mad Glenn Greenwald (yes gays can be barking mad), and blathering about a crime wave caused by the Covid lockdowns (always with the Covid), then the pond might as well cite a cartoon as an impeccable academic source...

And after that entertainment, the pond, with bowl in hand, was heading to Surry Hills saying "please reptiles, may I have another ..."

Huzzah, right below the Jennings, kissing cousin to the bromancer, urgently seeking war with Chinai by Xmas, there was a rare sighting of the beefy boofhead, Mr Windmills himself, with an office in Goulburn ...

How could the pond pass up this chance to get some pearls of wisdom from the beefy boofhead?

Really? The pond would have been better off waiting for tomorrow's Groaning from Dame Groan. She really knows how to do a groaning, and the beefy boofhead might have been better off borrowing one of her columns ...

The source of the problem? Perhaps it was deeply Freudian, but the reptiles couldn't resist inserting at that point an extremely huge snap of the beefy boofhead himself ...

Were they suggesting he was the sauce of the problem?

Of course it might not just have been all about an in-joke about the beefy boofhead's team being the sauce of the problem, because the reptiles later ran with another huge snap, again cut down to size, suggesting another sauce, to use according to taste ...

The pond knew why the reptiles had deployed the snaps. The beefy boofhead's contribution was pretty thin gruel, and dressed up in the form of a listicle ...

The pond began to fear it might have been trapped in a bar with a drunk rabbiting on about the siren call of crony capitalism...

Uh oh, not another wiki ...telling tales of family cronies ...

After leaving Port Jackson Partners, Taylor developed several businesses with family members and fellow investors, largely connected to irrigation and agriculture. Management of these businesses were relinquished on his taking his seat in parliament. Some of these continue, whole or partly owned by the holding company of Taylor's family Gufee Pty Ltd, a family trust which is declared on Register of Members' Interests.

To be fair, these cronies have kept their capitalism pretty well hidden by way of trusts,but enough of siren songs, folks gotta make a living, and the pond was vastly relieved to discover there was only a 'fourth' and then a 'finally', and then it was done and dusted, like one of those bloody windmills destroying the landscape down Goulburn way ...

OK, nothing to see here, except perhaps that the right wing agenda is clear ... blather about vested interests, while being a supreme example of a vested interest. It would do until a decent Groaning came along...

And so to a belated celebration. Was it a dream? Had the town taken down Barners?

“You smashed it,” he told party workers in Tamworth, while his aides frantically briefed that while the results were fantastic, there was much more work still to be done. (Graudian)

It was no more than a hope and a dream, but the pond was exceptionally pleased at the role that Tamworth had played in the UK and was delighted that finally the pond's tireless promotion of the mighty T had paid off, and that Tamworth had even appeared in a Graudian cartoon, albeit a gnat among the elephants in the room ...