Three reptiles walked into a bar ... and what ensues seems to go on forever ...

 

Many other people have noted the absurdity of "rapid unscheduled disassembly" as part of the relentless mangling of the English language by corporation and American media speak, but in a way there's probably no better way to evoke Elon Musk's almost infinite capacity for blowing himself and his businesses up ...

There are however a couple of notable absurdities in Uncle Elon land ... people going on Twitter to moan about finding themselves on the reprehensible X. Just give it a miss, give it up, walk away, leave it alone... and exactly the same syndrome arises when you bathe an attention-seeking narcissist in the attention that he craves. 

Henry Ford was pretty much the same, and the pond has long thought about dropping a note under Telsa windscreen wipers saying "I didn't buy a Ford either", while wondering if the dimwit owners might manage to work out the connections ... (a reading of My Life and Work by Samuel Crowther and Henry Ford might help and what do you know, it's on Project Gutenberg or more to the point, Ford's own work, The International Jew, "the world's foremost problem", at Gutenberg in txt here). 

The pond notes that it's recent postings showing some empathy for the Palestinian plight - on the silly notion that if you're against Benji and his thugs you must be anti-Semitic - could, by the simple-minded, be taken by a reptile as being pro-Hamas, but they don't actually put the pond in the Ford or uncle Elon camp. 

In fact, the pond can claim exceptional generosity on Semitic matters, after it was rammed up the rear by four recalcitrant Jewish ruffians one Saturday down St Kilda way. The foolish larrikins, the late teen rascals, had made off with their dad's car on a Saturday and hit the road for adventure, and instead hit the pond up the bum. On a Saturday! 

Leaving aside the stupidity of thinking Saturday is some sort of sacred day - down there with those who fawn over Sunday or who think Friday is fish day - these Orthodox souls were terrified at the trouble they were in. The pond was remarkably genial and even accepted an offer of cash in the paw, so there'd be no insurance claim or any paper trail that would reveal to their dad that they'd exposed their souls to mortal peril ... not by crashing the family car, but by doing it on a Saturday. Luckily there was a Richmond crash repair merchant who loved cash in the paw, and did a quick fix up - the pond was a regular customer for a time thanks to Melbourne drivers - and everything was resolved ...

The moral is that sensible arrangements can be reached by people of good will. And why has the pond started with this feeble attempt at levity? Well it's going to be a long, wretched, insidious and offensive haul this day, with much one-eyed confusion and conflation. 

As a starting example, it's taken the remarkably thick Biden administration a long time realise that being all in with Benji and his thugs isn't a good look. Questions are starting to be asked, as in Andrew O'Hehir's piece for Salon, Joe Biden at history's crossroads: Is backing Bibi's Gaza war a fatal mistake?

But you won't see any of that penetrating the thick hide of the reptiles this day, a hide best reserved for fancy shoes and handbags.

It's taken an astonishing amount of time to get to the Politico story Biden orders top aides to prepare reprimands for violent Israeli settlers in West Bank, which followed on jolly Joe himself taking credit for scribbling a piece for WaPo, Joe Biden: The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas, (paywall) wherein he blathers on about a two state solution, a horse that bolted from the stables decades ago, and manages to mix up the mess in Europe with the mess in the middle east.

It's the old conflation and confusion trick. Putin and Hamas are not the same, and what's going down in Ukraine is not the same as what's happening in Israel, which happens to include a number of ghettos or gulags if you will, dressed up in polite company as "enclaves" (the kind of company that used to put drapes over table legs to stop manly men getting overly excited).

Meanwhile, Fintan O'Toole was having none of it in a piece in the NYRB a week ago, Biden’s Selective Outrage, (paywall), The rhetorical choice to pair Israel and Ukraine has not created a common moral cause. It has exposed a double standard.

...There has been nothing secret about Israel’s intent to punish the whole population of Gaza by depriving them of electricity and water. On October 9 the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, announced a “complete siege” of the Strip. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel.” The following day the Israeli Army’s coordinator of government activities in the territories, Major General Ghassan Alian, addressed the population of Gaza in Arabic: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
We do not have to guess how the Biden administration would have responded to such statements had they come from Moscow rather than Tel Aviv. In November 2022 Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, spoke to the security council about Russia’s destruction of civilian infrastructure in Ukrainian cities, which had left millions of people without power or clean water:
"It is hard to overstate how horrific these attacks are…. I felt that toll when I met a ten-year-old named Melina, who lived in a facility where displaced families were gathered to prepare for a bitterly cold winter. A facility which itself had once been hit and damaged by Russian missiles."
Later that month the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, used even stronger language to condemn Russian attacks on vital infrastructure: “Heat, water, electricity—for children, for the elderly, for the sick—these are President Putin’s new targets. He’s hitting them hard. This brutalization of Ukraine’s people is barbaric.”
When the target is Ukraine, the Biden administration has apparently endorsed efforts to prosecute Putin for attacks on civilian infrastructure. In March Biden explicitly supported the ICC’s decision to issue an arrest warrant against Putin on charges that he had committed war crimes, even though, as Biden acknowledged, the US itself refuses to be subject to the court. In July, when the US began to share evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with the ICC, The New York Times reported that “American intelligence agencies are said to have gathered information including details about decisions by Russian officials to deliberately strike civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.” Assuming such reports are accurate, this means that the Biden administration has been actively helping the ICC prepare a possible indictment of Putin for deliberately depriving civilians of electricity and clean water. 
Ukraine has already convicted some captured Russian soldiers of war crimes. In January The Washington Post reported that these included “two who admitted shelling residential buildings in the first weeks of the war.” The US has repeatedly asked the international community to pay attention to the visual evidence of what bombs do to the places where ordinary people—and especially children—try to live their lives. In July, for example, Thomas-Greenfield told the UN security council that “Russia’s forces have rained missiles down on Ukraine causing unconscionable death and destruction. We have all seen the images of bombed-out homes and schools and playgrounds.”
The Biden administration has, moreover, gone further than accusing Russia of war crimes; it has suggested that countries supplying Russia with weaponry used against Ukraine may face the same charges. In January, while accompanying Biden on a state visit to Mexico, the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said that Iran had chosen “to go down a road where their weapons are being used to kill civilians in Ukraine and to try to plunge cities into cold and darkness, which from our point of view puts Iran in a place where it could potentially be contributing to widespread war crimes.”
In July Sullivan told NBC News where America’s “moral authority” in relation to Ukraine comes from. He implicitly conceded that it did not rely on international treaties, since the US has not signed some of them. It came, he suggested, from the obvious unacceptability of Russia’s decision to place Ukraine “under a brutal, vicious attack…with missiles and bombs raining down on its cities, killing its civilians, destroying its schools, its churches, its hospitals.” The implication is clear: the moral authority of the US rests on its opposition to certain kinds of violence, specifically the deliberate destruction of civil infrastructure and the killing of civilians with bombs and missiles. If this so, the foundations of American moral authority now seem very shaky indeed.
Each recorded fatal Israeli airstrike on Gaza since October 7 has reportedly caused an average of ten civilian deaths. The Biden administration has acknowledged that killing innocent people at this rate is unacceptable. As Blinken put it on a visit to India, “Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks.” By the logic it applied to Iran, the US has to take responsibility for its indirect part in those deaths. Yet there is no evidence that it is willing to hold itself to the moral standards it insists on for others—and very little evidence either that the influence it seeks to wield behind the scenes in its dealings with Netanyahu has had much effect on the ground in Gaza. The administration’s tacit moral case—that its backing for Israel’s war allows it to save Palestinian lives by restraining what Biden, on his visit to Tel Aviv, called “an all-consuming rage”—seems more and more like wishful thinking.
Ukrainians must have a wish of their own: that Biden had left them out of it. He has done their cause no favors. The Gaza crisis has already knocked Putin’s war off the front pages and shoved it down the list of priorities for most Western governments. As the conflict in Ukraine looks increasingly attritional and settles into a bloody stalemate with no obvious endpoint, it has become harder for democracies to sustain the idea that this is not a proxy war between power blocs but a genuine struggle for decent values and an international order based on universal laws. What will those Western governments say this winter when Putin again tries to destroy Ukraine’s power grids? Can they say, as they have before, that these attacks are horrific and barbaric? Or must they now preserve an awkward silence because such language has lost the power to express a shared sense of revulsion at all inhumane acts, whoever perpetrates them?

The pond realises this has been a much longer cold opener than usual, but it wanted to get any signs of sanity out of the way before turning to those three reptiles ... the Caterist, the Major and cackling Claire ...

Actually the pond has never had a strong sense of belonging to a tribe of reptiles fawning over the Chairman Emeritus and his flock, and it took a strong flourish of discipline by the pond not to join voices suggesting the Caterist bugger off to where he came from, that being a rhetorical position often embraced by lizard Oz readers ...

Instead the pond had to endure the usual ranting ...

What level of moronic scribbling must the pond endure each day? Why must the pond endure blather about the woke, for want of a better scribbler? Why must a man who purports to be an intelligent analyst deplore the intelligent as a form of self-loathing? What is this about cancel culture, when down below we will see that cackling Claire is busy wanting to cancel things ...

At this point the reptiles inserted an image, which led in due course to another, which was guaranteed to divide the pond, because it's impossible to imagine an image more offensive ... a former politician pandering and point-scoring ... and doing the Jewish-ness thing ...

The pond did wonder if Golding's solution might have wider possibilities ...

Alas it was tried long ago with little Johnny, and somebody probably tried it on the Caterist too, and came up with diddly squat, just more rambling and ranting ...

The good name of our ancestors foisting equal rights and obligations on Aboriginal Australians? Who makes this shit up? Yes, it's a rhetorical question, it's a Caterist blow-in, that's who ...

Meanwhile, on another planet ...

...The US would like a time limit on the war, but Netanyahu will not stop shooting until he can claim Hamas is wholly eradicated – a practical impossibility. He frequently talks about a “long war”. It’s his best hope of staying in office and out of jail.

Dismissing Biden’s warnings, he aims to retain control of Gaza indefinitely. As ever, he rejects a two-state solution. Fewer than 4% of Jewish Israelis trust Netanyahu to tell the truth about the war, one poll found.

The US has begun, belatedly, to take a tougher line and Israeli forces may be obliged, in time, to show more restraint.

But as long as Netanyahu holds power, Biden and western leaders will face a continuing wall of defiance in Jerusalem that prolongs the suffering in Gaza, damages their credibility at home, harms their interests abroad and poses the ever-present risk of a wider war. US officials fear the West Bank may soon explode.

Whether the question is Gaza’s future, Palestinian statehood, the Iranian threat or honest democratic governance, Netanyahu is a liability, more so now than before the war. Memo to Joe: there can be no peace while Bibi rules.

There are sane voices out there and then there are the reptiles and the Caterist ...

Oh dammit, why doesn't this chicken-livered ravager of diversity just bugger off to where he came from ... and so to cackling Claire, and here the pond acknowledges that she's just a substitute fielder, because the pond simply couldn't go with garrulous Gemma ...

Apparently thousands of civilians and thousands of children haven't been killed, and so garrulous Gemma needn't gag ... but there's a fair argument she's mental ...

Meanwhile, as we've spoken of cancel culture, cackling Claire was in a banning mood ...

Um, actually Russia had meddled in the 2016 election - there's more than enough evidence - why there's even an FBI most wanted ... the pond has always wanted to run a 'most wanted' poster ...

... and their preferred candidate got up, so you could say it was successful, but moving along ...

Um, actually, it's not the education system. For thousands of years churches and preaching preachers have taught that humanity can be divided into neat groups defined by moral status.

She's such a doofus, but the pond did love this moral equivalence, two steely-eyed fanatics ...

Actually the pond wondered if the one on the far right with the dead fish-eye look might be the most dangerous of them all, but enough, moving along with the cancel culture ...

If the pond might be so bold, there was an interesting story in the Graudian the other day ...‘These are biblical lands promised to us’: Jewish settlers in West Bank hope Gaza conflict will help their cause

Human rights groups say settlers, empowered by their right-wing government, are exploiting the Israel-Hamas war

...A total of 138 Israelis and 1,012 Palestinians were killed on the West Bank from 2008 to September this year, according to the UN. Since 7 October, Israeli internal security services are aware of four cases in which the settlers shot and killed Palestinians, the local Haaretz newspaper has reported.

A kilometre or so to the south of Zanuta is the line where the West Bank – occupied by Israel after the 1967 war – ends and the internationally recognised territory of the Jewish state begins.

For many settlers, this delimitation is aberrant. They refer to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria, two ancient Israelite kingdoms. These terms are also used administratively by the Israeli government.

“These are the biblical lands that were promised to the patriarchs thousands of years ago, and they walked on these lands, and now it is my generation that walks here,” said Damari.

The settlers deride the widely held view that their presence is not only a major obstacle to any possible progress towards peace, however unlikely at this current moment of conflict, but also a source of much of the violence sweeping the occupied territories.

This year was already the deadliest in at least 15 years for West Bank residents, with some 200 Palestinians and 26 Israelis killed, according to UN data. Earlier this month, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, blamed the violence on “a tiny handful of people [among the settlers] who take the law into their own hands”.

Nathalie Sopinsky, originally from Delaware in the US, has lived in the settlement of Susiya for 16 years and leads a first-response medical service for settlers.

Sopinsky said she had been extremely busy with “normal injuries, terrorism injuries” but had made a “lifestyle choice” to live in the occupied West Bank.

“There is no traffic, plenty of parking,” she said. “I go out to walk with my daughter in the morning. There are goats and shepherds. It’s all fresh and natural.”

It's great, isn't it, how terra nullius can produce a lifestyle choice ...but back to the banning Claire ...

Speaking of Germany, as we must, the pond was reminded of another Graudian piece, by Deborah Feldman, Germany is a good place to be Jewish. Unless, like me, you're a Jew who criticises Israel ...

..The people who were horrifically murdered and defiled on 7 October belonged to the left-leaning, secular segment of Israeli society; many of them were activists for peaceful coexistence. Their military protection was forfeited for the sake of radical settlers in the West Bank, many of whom are militant fundamentalists. For many liberal Israelis, the state’s promise of security for all Jews has now been exposed as selective and conditional. Similarly in Germany, the protection of Jews has been interpreted selectively as to apply solely to those loyal to the rightwing nationalist government of Israel.

In Israel, the hostages held by Hamas are seen by many as already gone, a necessary sacrifice relevant only insofar as they can be used to justify the violent war that the religious right has been waiting for. For Israeli nationalists, 7 October was their own personal Day X, the beginning of the fulfilment of the eschatological biblical prophecy of Gog and Magog, the arrival of a war to end all wars, and end all foreign peoples. Many of the families of the victims of 7 October, who have called for an end to this cycle of horror and hate and violence, who have begged the Israeli government not to seek revenge in their name, are not heard in Israel. And since Germany sees itself as unconditionally allied with Israel as a result of the Holocaust, those with power and influence in its society seek to establish similar conditions for its public discourse at home.

And again ...

...I thought of the Holocaust survivors who had raised me and the lessons I had learned from the literature of survivors such as Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Jorge Semprún and many others, and I implored the vice-chancellor to understand why the only legitimate lesson to be learned from the horrors of the Holocaust was the unconditional defence of human rights for all, and that simply by applying our values conditionally we were already delegitimising them.

At some point, I told him, “You are going to have to decide between Israel and Jews.” Because those things are not interchangeable, and sometimes even contradictory, as many aspects of Jewish life are threatened by unconditional loyalty to a state that only sees some Jews as worthy of protection.

And now back for a final short cackle ...

In all that, the pond might have overlooked Claire's cackle about the glories of the mango Mussolini going on a banning spree, without any comment about the mango Mussolini himself, as an authoritarian with fascist leanings ... but dammit the pond just has to slip in Jake Lahut's Donald Trump's New Campaign Talking Point: Save the Donuts, or if you will, Donut Stop Believing, or if you will The former president seems to be fixated on whether America's favorite breakfast treat can survive ... (paywall)

...“The people that bake the donuts, the restaurants, everything requires energy. And it's a very big cost,” Trump said during a July interview on the Fox Business. “Now, everything's causing inflation. Now we have bad supply lines. Our country's a mess. We'll close up the border and become energy-independent. Then we're going to be energy-dominant.”

But an International Monetary Fund study on food prices in 2022 found other factors to be far more influential on the cost of food than the oil market. The effects of climate change on crop harvests, the war in Ukraine, and interest rate hikes all accounted for a much higher share of the price hikes than oil prices did.

If anything, climate change is expected to jack up food costs globally—a development that could very well affect Trump’s beloved donuts. A new report from the European Central Bank found that food prices could increase as much as 3.2 percentage points through 2060 because of climate change and the increased droughts and storms it will cause.

Trump not only believes climate change is fake but spent his presidency undoing climate policy from the Obama administration, from rolling back protections under the Clean Water Act to withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord.

Although the source of Trump’s donut fixation is unclear, it’s usually been the case that his tangents at rallies or in interviews originate from absurd episodes or unusual interests from his life in business.

Take windmills, for example.

Trump didn’t like the sight of offshore windmills from his golf resort in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and became obsessed with trashing them. Most often, that involved dragging the bird community into the discussion.

"I know more about wind than you do,” Trump admonished President Joe Biden in their second debate. “It's extremely expensive, kills all the birds, it's very intermittent, it's got a lot of problems." (American outdoor cats, it turns out, according to data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, are far more lethal than windmills on birds, taking down an estimated 2.4 billion per year compared to just some 230,000 for wind turbines.)

Still, there might be something to the recurring motif of breakfast in these more recent Trump speeches. Recently, he’s shown some love for another American morning staple when riffing on fossil fuels and the economy.

“They say bacon has gone up five times, meaning five times in the last year and a half, five times,” Trump said during the same speech in New Hampshire, despite bacon remaining at roughly the same price it was in the 1980s, when adjusted for inflation.

“Even I am cutting back on bacon, it’s too expensive,” Trump claimed. “I’m cutting back on it.”

Put it another way ...Illinois governor 'deeply concerned' by Trump rhetoric reminiscent of Nazi era.

Or put it another way ...

And now the pond is way overlength but must make room for the Major, but there'll be no need for commentary, because as is usual for the Major, it's all the fault of the ABC ...

Also as usual the Major is very selective in his reading. None of the scribblers mentioned by the pond will find a home with the Major ... but whaddya know, just after cackling Claire blathered about simplistic talk of moral camps, the Major leads with a demand for moral clarity and moral camps ...

Yes, the Major blames it all on the ABC, apparently unaware of anything else, and the reptiles help pad his work out with sundry images that needn't detain the pond for long ...

It's bad enough to have to read the Major's words let alone have them turned into a picture book for simpletons ...

Now note here the Major's cunning and confusing conflation of "in effect", when in effect there's no in effect ...

Or perhaps if you want to follow that path, "in effect" Jewish fundamentalists have a lot in common with Hamas fundamentalists when it comes to tolerating LGBTQ (apparently the Major hasn't got up to the "+"), much like the reptiles made out for years berating the different and the other, and still in effect manage the regular story bashing TG folk, though the pond usually ignores them because they upset the pond's TG friend ...

Existential threat? What was that the pond read about a lifestyle choice? Never mind, the pond promised not to interrupt or make proceedings any longer ... let the apologist keep on with his work ...

And meanwhile Benji's minions bomb the shit out of the civilians in an indiscriminate way, sending them south with the promise they'll be out of harm's way, only to then bomb the south...

Oh just a final interruption ... Nakba generation relive trauma of displacement in Gaza ...

...Gaza’s south is still very dangerous: an airstrike near the southern town of Khan Younis killed at least 26 people on Saturday. Food, water, fuel and medicine are in short supply, and Israel has said it is expanding its operations against Hamas to areas south of Gaza City, raising fears for the hundreds of thousands of civilians who have sought refuge there.

And again ...

...The IDF’s relentless air and ground campaign, launched in response to Hamas attacks in Israel that Israeli officials say killed 1,200 people and saw about 240 captured as hostages, has already killed 12,300 people, more than 5,000 of them children, according to the Hamas government.

More than half of the strip’s population has been displaced during the six weeks of fighting. Images of dishevelled, distressed families walking south through ruined streets and being searched by soldiers have been powerfully evocative of the Nakba.

The Israeli military has repeatedly said civilians will be allowed to return home when the war is over, but the assurances mean little to Palestinians such as Umm Ghadeer who are still dealing with the consequences of what happened in 1948.

Last week Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right minister in the Israeli government, said Gaza would “not survive as an independent entity” and Palestinians should leave for other countries, driving home fears across the region that Israel seeks to destroy the hope of a Palestinian state altogether.

The long absent lord knows what they could return to, such has been the destruction and devastation.

But then it's just a lifestyle choice for some ... as we come to the end of the Major and not before time ...

Meanwhile, in another country far removed from the Major ...

Last week Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right minister in the Israeli government, said Gaza would “not survive as an independent entity” and Palestinians should leave for other countries, driving home fears across the region that Israel seeks to destroy the hope of a Palestinian state altogether.

A Palestinian state? Not while there's a Benji and fellow travellers of the Major Mitchell kind ...

And in all that fuss, the pond must end with an immortal Rowe because there are other things afoot in this fine land, not that you'd know it from reading the reptile commentariat, or what passes as the 'leet inner Surry Hills reptile intelligentsia ...