In which the pond offers astonishing enlightenment, a tremendous bargain basement priced serve of reheated reptile leftovers ...

 

Forgive the pond but today above all requires a step back in time so the pond might complete its coverage of the lizard Oz's weekend edition ...

Sadly this means something must give, and it's Major Mitchell and associated matters...

It's with relief that the pond can report that the police aren't looking into jihad preacher Major Mitchell, who ended his piece with the news that a dead Palestinian was entirely their own fault ...

Good on Karvelas on Friday morning for challenging UN human rights rapporteur Francesca Albanese over UN claims of genocide by Israel against Palestinians. Genocide has a formal legal meaning and Palestinians are the fastest growing demographic in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
This is not to deny every Palestinian death is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy brought on deliberately by Hamas’s barbarism.

Indeed, indeed ...

Second thoughts, why not just nuke the joint? Where's the harm in that?

But what could have denied the Major and his billy goat buttisms a spot in the pond's Monday sun? 

Well the pond simply had to place on record the bromancer's letter from London, an epic, lengthy screed reporting on that conference offering enlightenment to anyone willing to swallow fundamentalist gruel...

Is that not enticing? Is that not astonishing? Is that not a revelation? Is not enlightenment close at hand? Is not the entire rewriting of Xian Western culture and politics of more than minor import? How could anyone, even the most cynical of jaded pond readers, not be beguiled? At least a little tempted?

Sure, that London conference has already sailed into the sunset and become a distant memory for many, and in days of yore the bro's piece would have already been used as fish and chip wrapping, but the bro's spin is a marvel to behold, and might well restore the pond's fortune and make it a legendary place to visit ...

While doing the roll call, the pond should note there were a couple more snaps of the Messiah, one consorting with the legendary Ando of Gunnydah and a couple of nonentities, and the Messiah himself in messianic pose ...

There were only a few snaps, because the bromancer had astonishing revelations to impart and so needed the space, the lebensraum as it were, something any Israeli settler might understand as a concept ...

Nappy training! Just the thing for children in Gaza, Ukraine and sundry other places to stand as a benchmark of western civilisation! Such an elementary test, and yet the ability to duck and weave and avoid bombs might seem a more advanced and useful skill ...

Sorry, the pond regrets having wandered off to a cartoon it missed, but this time with the bro is so intense that every so often the pond might feel the need for relief ...

Watch out, woke, there's a different spirit abroad! A clarion call, a cry of defiance, an insolent repudiation, and best of all, a celebration of modern thinking ...

Is it not already clear why the pond was deeply moved and excited, and distraught that this had to be held over until the Monday?

Strong, exciting, powerful words, designed to send the bromancer possibly, or even probably, into a state of wild excitement. 

Well it might mean that, it probably does, the pond doesn't have the foggiest clue what it actually means, and can't possibly begin to explain it, just as transubstantiation is beyond the pond. Here, have a wafer, possibly laced with LSD, certainly with gluten, and it will all become clear to the coeliacs among us ...

Now let us be a little abstruse ...

Indeed, indeed ... death to the Iranian tyrants ... it's the Xian thing to do ...

Gaza's children face catastrophe as death toll nears 4,000, UN warns, is of course already out of date, but when has an Xian ever blinked at the thought of a righteous killing? 

Heretics, witches, bitches, schismatics, gays, deviants, splitters, they've all been in need of a righteous wrath at some point or another ... but back to the revelations and the enlightenment ... 

Ah yes, the bible ... the pond is reminded of Marci A. Hamiltion in The Graudian, with Mike Johnson, theocrat: the House speaker and a plot against America ...

The new House speaker, Mike Johnson, knows how he will rule: according to his Bible. When asked on Fox News how he would make public policy, he replied: “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.” But it’s taking time for the full significance of that statement to sink in. Johnson is in fact a believer in scriptural originalism, the view that the Bible is the truth and the sole legitimate source for public policy.

He was most candid about this in 2016, when he declared: “You know, we don’t live in a democracy” but a “biblical” republic. Chalk up his elevation to the speakership as the greatest victory so far within Congress for the religious right in its holy war to turn the US government into a theocracy.

Since his fellow Republicans made him their leader, numerous articles have reported Johnson’s religiously motivated, far-right views on abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights. But that barely scratches the surface. Johnson was a senior lawyer for the extremist Alliance Defending Fund (later the Alliance Defending Freedom) from 2002 to 2010. This is the organization responsible for orchestrating the 303 Creative v Elenis legal arguments to obtain a ruling from the supreme court permitting a wedding website designer to refuse to do business with gay couples. It also played a significant role in annulling Roe v Wade.

The ADF has always been opposed to privacy rights, abortion and birth control. Now Roe is gone, the group is laying the groundwork to end protection for birth control. Those who thought Roe would never be overruled should understand that the reasoning in Dobbs v Jackson is not tailored to abortion. Dobbs was explicitly written to be the legal fortress from which the right will launch their attacks against other fundamental rights their extremist Christian beliefs reject. They are passionate about rolling back the right to contraception, the right to same-sex marriage and the right to sexual privacy between consenting adults.

Johnson’s inerrant biblical truth leads him to reject science. Johnson was a “young earth creationist”, holding that a literal reading of Genesis means that the earth is only a few thousand years old and humans walked alongside dinosaurs. He has been the attorney for and partner in Kentucky’s Creation Museum and Ark amusement park, which present these beliefs as scientific fact, a familiar sleight of hand where the end (garnering more believers) justifies the means (lying about science). For them, the end always justifies the means. That’s why they don’t even blink when non-believers suffer for their dogma.

Setting aside all of these wildly extreme, religiously motivated policy preferences, there is a more insidious threat to America in Johnson’s embrace of scriptural originalism: his belief that subjective interpretation of the Bible provides the master plan for governance. Religious truth is neither rational nor susceptible to reasoned debate. For Johnson, who sees a Manichean world divided between the saved who are going to heaven and the unsaved going to hell, there is no middle ground. Constitutional politics withers and is replaced with a battle of the faithful against the infidels. Sound familiar? Maybe in Tehran or Kabul or Riyadh. But in America?

Yep, in Amerika, and in the lizard Oz too, though it's pleasing to think that both the Chairman Emeritus and the mango Mussolini are likely among the unsaved ...

Gravely ill?

As required by the litany, et cum spiritu tuo, whenever Jordan's "illness" gets a mention these days, the pond can't help but revert to Lindsay Beyerstein's piece for the New Republic back on March 10th 2020 under the header What Happened to Jordan Peterson?

The Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson has been described as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world.” He is an exponent of the Jungian concept of the hero’s journey, in which an ordinary person heeds a call to adventure and goes out into the world to struggle and suffer, only to return with heightened self-knowledge. (He has described himself, without apparent irony, as being “raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta.”) His stern ethos of self-help and bootstrapping has made him a darling of the so-called intellectual dark web, and a gateway drug for countless budding right-wingers who have stumbled upon one of his lectures on YouTube.

So it was something of a surprise to learn, in early February, that Peterson had spent eight days in a medically induced coma at an unnamed clinic in Russia. Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila, a 28-year-old food blogger, posted a brief but dramatic video claiming that she and her father had traveled to Russia in early January seeking an unorthodox treatment for his physical dependence on the drug clonazepam. Dependency goes against the core tenets of Peterson’s philosophical brand: stoicism, self-reliance, the power of the will over circumstance and environment. “No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life,” he admonished in his bestselling self-help book 12 Rules for Life. 

According to Mikhaila, he nearly died several times during his medical ordeal. After weeks in intensive care, he was unable to speak or write and was taking anti-seizure medicine.

The news was met with bafflement by doctors and laypeople alike. What was Peterson doing in a drug-induced coma in Russia? Based on interviews with medical professionals and a close reading of various statements that Mikhaila and Peterson himself have made on podcasts and social media, it is clear that Peterson ended up in Russia after an extended battle to wean himself off clonazepam. And it seems likely that Peterson, a self-proclaimed man of science, succumbed to the lure of a quack treatment—with devastating consequences.    

Peterson’s saga has mostly been covered in conservative news outlets, which have relied almost exclusively on a disjointed narrative put forth by Mikhaila, a nutrition “influencer” with no medical credentials who claims to have cured her idiopathic juvenile arthritis, clinical depression, and a C. difficile infection by eating nothing but meat, salt, and water. Peterson promoted his daughter’s snake oil diet and even embraced the program himself. In July 2018, he told celebrity podcaster Joe Rogan that he’d been eating nothing but beef, salt, and water for two months at his daughter’s suggestion, following a year of eating almost nothing but steak and salad. It’s unclear whether Peterson continued to follow this extreme diet. 

Peterson’s health problems first surfaced in September 2019, when his family announced that he had undergone a stint in rehab in upstate New York. According to Mikhaila’s update from Russia, he was prescribed the sedative clonazepam, a benzodiazepine, by his family doctor in 2017 for anxiety stemming from a “severe autoimmune reaction to food.” Peterson’s doctor allegedly increased his dose after Peterson’s wife was diagnosed with kidney cancer in April 2019. Peterson supposedly didn’t realize he’d become dependent on clonazepam until he suffered agonizing withdrawal symptoms when he tried to quit the medication cold turkey during the summer of 2019...

And with that the pond can turn to the final bro gobbet, enlightenment complete ...

Ah, the pond's already featured the ark joke, but did anyone else note a stunning bro oversight. Did he mean it? Was it malicious, or mere idle thoughtlessness?

The pond had to do a word check to make sure, but there was not a mention, not a single sign, of the onion muncher, and his brief blaze of glory at the conference. 

The bromancer had done a roll call, celebrated various celebrities, gone the full 9 yards with Jordan, and yet not one mention of the climate science denialist in his hour of power? Was this deliberate? Was the famous bromance between fundamentalist Xians a thing of the past?

Dammit, the bro should have honoured his past love, or at least given him a mention ... must the pond fix everything for the reptiles?

The pond also admits, with grave regret and a quest for absolution, that the pond missed the dog botherer outing on the weekend ...

The pond can report with some fair degree of relief that after the unfortunate matter of the Voice, the dog botherer is now back in peak condition and tip top form and ready to rail at anything and everything.

Speaking of Covid, has there been better entertainment than the recent circus, as captured in the Graudian's Cummings vs MacNamara: the backstage clash at the heart of the UK's Covid response ... or the Beeb's What we learned from a shocking week of Covid testimony ...

Meanwhile, on another planet, the ABC was furiously scribbling Another COVID-19 wave is coming. Here's how case numbers are trending and who needs a booster ...

As a devoted follower of reptile disinformation, the pond isn't actually interested in real data, and was immediately terrified by the sight of a man in a mask in a snap accompanying the dog botherer's piece ...

Moving right along, because the dog botherer has a lot to cover and a lot of misinformation to celebrate ...

At this point, the dog botherer comes out with one of those gigantic billy goat buttisms that makes the lizard Oz such a splendid read ...

"None of this is to deny the problem of misinformation" is surely a great reason for the dog botherer to return to a familiar bone and gnaw away at distorting climate science and its implications for the umpteenth time ...

As for the planet? 

Paul Marshall, the co-owner of GB News, who is currently contemplating the Telegraph, runs a hedge fund with $2.2bn of fossil fuel investments. Is it any wonder that climate scepticism runs through GB News’s coverage like an oil slick, with a third of its presenters reportedly spreading climate science denial on air in 2022 and more than half criticising climate policies? Could that be why Marshall’s quasi-respectable libertarian UnHerd website routinely criticises climate action? Or maybe Marshall just hates all life on Earth and wants it to die, irrespective of the financial benefits he gains from mass extinction. But why? Well, it can’t have been easy being the father of the ex-banjo player from Mumford & Sons. “That was really good, Winston. Really good. But I’ve just got to go and discredit Thunberg.” Must we all suffer for Marshall’s shame?

We’re doomed. And our overlords are evil. Next Halloween, I’m going as the ex-banjo player from Mumford & Sons. (Graudian away with Lee here).

The pond felt like a joke because we're all doomed, and besides the dog botherer spent his last short gobbet displacing the bromancer and that Jennings chap and sundry other reptiles by turning his gimlet eye on defence ...

And so ends the fact-free slanging and shouting from the dog botherer's partisan silo, and in all the excitement it might seem that the pond has forgotten all its proud Monday traditions to present a pile of reheated reptile swill.

But dammit, there'll always be room for the quarry waters flood whisperer, expanding on and enhancing in the Caterist's inimitable way the dog botherer's war in renewables. 

Make room, make room, there's a man with government cash in his paw, and he has a story to tell ...

Blowing in the wind? A tremendous joke, up there with that snap of those sinister wind mills, always to hand to terrify lizard Oz readers - the pond hears they cause death to the gullible - but the question remains, are we talking Bob Dylan, or Peter, Paul and Mary?

Sorry, on with the flood water whispering to hand, and lots of gloom and doom, presented with typical Caterist relish (would you like a little mustard to add spice to a heated planet?) ...

And what of the planet? Just the usual ... Storm Ciarán: six dead in Italy; Spain evacuates 800 as wildfire spreads – as it happened

The links between climate change and winter storms in Europe are complex, but as seas and air temperatures get warmer, we expect some winter storms to bring more rain, and potentially cause more flooding...

...At some locations in the UK, climate change means that existing threats will become more likely and more dangerous, such as on some coasts as sea levels rise, or in areas prone to landslips or river flooding. Resilience to storms means taking action to prepare for the worst possible conditions while the going is good, and that can seem expensive and unnecessary to many people when the sun is shining.

The sun is always shining in the flood whisperer's quarries, except when villains cast a shadow ...

Phew, downsized so that the Caterist can be appreciated unencumbered ...

The pond doesn't want to be negative about climate change. 

Let's look on the bright side. As a third rate sociologist, the Caterist is simply doing his bit for history and archaeology ...

As ice patches and glaciers melt in Norway’s mountains, hastened by climate change, ancient artefacts that were once lost on the snow and ice are now emerging, having been frozen for millennia.

Thousands of artefacts have been discovered at an ice patch, which was the site of a forgotten Viking pass.

Sorry, did that distract anyone from the flood waters in quarries whisperer? But there's still a gobbet of obstinate Caterist thinking to go ...

An epic day, a splendid feast surely, though the pond will concede that sacrifices had to be made so that the best might be enjoyed ...

The reptiles have already moved on ...

... and so in due course will the pond.

The fundamentalist from the Shire and simple Simon will do their best to distract, and soon enough the bromancer will return from that London conference, and the war with China can begin in earnest, and perhaps erupt by Xmas ...