In which the reptiles bung on a big pre-Xmas special, with an abundance of loonery...

 

Just as the pond is looking forward to a break and a quiet Xmas, the reptiles have decided to bung on a do ... with the digital edition this day a ripper ...

The highlight was that centrepiece. 

Apparently the reptiles were caught unawares by extensive news and much reporting of a cyclone barreling towards north Queensland ... and so ...

How did no one know this was going to happen? Easy.

They stuck to reading the lizard Oz, thinking it a source of news, as opposed to a daily source of climate science denialism.

Meanwhile, on another planet, far removed from reptile delusions ...

That story can be found at The Conversation ... and that's about as much as the pond needs to say about that, because there are plenty of other reptiles to deep grill today, though the pond should pause to note the infallible Pope celebrating this particular reptile triumph ...

Or, if you want another movie title, Reptiles in charge of a lying machine ...

Slowly winning in Gaza? Well there's a cue to a Wilcox cartoon if the pond ever saw one ...

... and a cue to Nesrine Malik's What does it mean to erase a people - a nation, culture, identity? In Gaza, we are beginning to find out ...inter alia ...

...I ask because the corollary of the question “what makes a people?” is “what erases one?” And what is unfolding in Gaza has made that question an urgent one. Because alongside the horrors of death and displacement, something else is happening – something existential, rarely acknowledged and potentially irreversible.
It looks like this. Earlier this month, Gaza’s oldest mosque was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. The Omari mosque was originally a fifth century Byzantine church, and was an iconic landmark of Gaza: 44,000 sq ft of history, architecture and cultural heritage. But it was also a live site of contemporary practice and worship. A 45-year-old Gazan told Reuters that he had been “praying there and playing around it all through my childhood”. Israel, he said, is “trying to wipe out our memories”.
St Porphyrius church, the oldest in Gaza, also dating back to the fifth century and believed to be the third oldest church in the world, was damaged in another strike in October. It was sheltering displaced people, among them members of the oldest Christian community in the world, one that dates back to the first century. So far, more than 100 heritage sites in Gaza have been damaged or levelled. Among them are a 2,000-year-old Roman cemetery and the Rafah Museum, which was dedicated to the region’s long and mixed religious and architectural heritage.
As the past is being uprooted, the future is also being curtailed. The Islamic University of Gaza, the first higher education institution established in the Gaza Strip in 1978, and which trains, among others, Gaza’s doctors and engineers, has been destroyed, along with more than 200 schools. Sufian Tayeh, the rector of the university, was killed along with his family in an airstrike. He was the Unesco chair of physical, astrophysical and space sciences in Palestine. Other high-profile academics who have been killed include the microbiologist Dr Muhammad Eid Shabir, and the prominent poet and writer Dr Refaat Alareer, whose poem, If I must die, was widely shared after his death.
“If I must die,” he wrote, “let it be a tale.” But even that tale, a tale bearing witness to truth, to be weaved into Gazan and Palestinian national consciousness and history, will struggle to be told accurately. Because the journalists are being killed too. As of last week, more than 60 of them. Some of those who survive, like Wael al-Dahdouh of Al Jazeera, have had to keep working through the death of their families. Last week, Dahdouh was himself injured in an airstrike on a school. His cameraman did not survive. The Committee to Protect Journalists, an American non-profit, has said that those reporting on the war risk not only death or injury but “multiple assaults, threats, cyber-attacks, censorship, and killings of family members”.
As the ability to tell these stories publicly comes under attack, so do the private rituals of mourning and memorialisation. According to a New York Times investigation, Israel ground forces are bulldozing cemeteries in their advance on the Gaza Strip, destroying at least six. Ahmed Masoud, a British Palestinian writer from Gaza, posted a picture of him visiting his father’s grave, alongside a video of its ruins. “This is the graveyard in Jabalia camp,” he wrote, where his father was buried. “I went to visit him in May. The Israeli tanks have now destroyed it, and my dad’s grave has gone. I won’t be able to visit or talk to him again.”
A memory gap is forming. Libraries and museums are being levelled, and what is lost in the documents that have burned joins a larger toll of recordkeeping. Meanwhile, the scale of the killings is so large that entire extended families are disappearing. The result is like tearing pages out of a book. Dina Matar, a professor at Soas University of London, told the Financial Times that “such loss results in the erasure of shared memories and identities for those who survive. Remembering matters. These are important elements when you want to put together histories and stories of ordinary lives.”
Remembering matters, and it’s easy to forget, among the scenes of death and destruction since October, that the Gaza Strip is a real place that, even though it existed behind a fence and under severe restrictions, was not only just an “open-air prison”. It has Mediterranean cities of tree-lined boulevards and bougainvillaea, and a coastline that provided respite from heat and blackouts. Much of that is now destroyed or bulldozed...

And so on. So much winning, so much ethnic cleansing, so much collective punishment ...

All this and the pond hasn't even begun to tackle the big three, but here they come ...

The bro pretends to walk the talk regarding the mango Mussolini, but like many in the GOP, the pond has a bet riding on this story that says he'll offer up at least one token of hope ...

Meanwhile, on another planet, far removed from the bro, here's what the world can expect from an empowered authoritarian and his lickspittle lackeys ...

At this point the remnants of the graphics department began providing the bro with plenty of cheap snaps, including one from a movie ...

How did Bobby turn up? That's easy, that's the bro doing foreign policy in depth, by turning movie reviewer and doing a Kermode and Mayo...

Indeed, indeed ...

And now here comes that movie reference ...with a 59% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, not that that means anything, given the way the site's practices have been revealed. 

Somehow, "charming but slight" turns into the bro as movie reviewer, and it becomes "this marvellous film" ...

Meanwhile, the crazies are gathering in anticipation ...

And then came the bro line the pond had been expecting.

"Trump is so unpredictable, anything is possible, even a relatively useful presidency".

Square that how you will with the bro starting out with talk of "too crazy", "so crazy, so obsessed with revenge," "dangerously unpredictable," "surely chaotic" ...

Okay, okay, it's easy enough, the bro is barking mad and not just north by north west or when you see a hawk meet up with a handsaw ...

And if all that wasn't enough there was Dame Groan, doing an exceptional groan ...

Ah, immigration, the old bee in the Groan bonnet is still buzzing loudly.

Serious question for Dame Groan cultists. Who produces on a weekly basis the very best impression of Chicken Little, with news of the sky falling? Is it Dame Groan or is it nattering "Ned"?

The pond can't decide. Dame Groan does as good an "we'll all be rooned" routine as can be found anywhere in the land ... and yet that old buzzard "Ned" will always try to match or beat her at the game ...

Meanwhile, back to being rooned, though perhaps not quite in the same way as being in Gaza ...

Ah, the chickens, which is a relief, because clichés also routinely have a habit of coming home to roost ...

At this point, the reptiles decided to introduce a little visual relief ...

... but the Groaner was determined that there be no relief ...

Luckily Wilcox was on hand to provide a practical solution and a practical game children could play ...

And so to the final Groan, and the opening "But it gets worse" made the pond think that perhaps "Ned" has met his match ... because indeed it does get worse, with a final huge groan ...

Never mind, at least the rich will be okay ... thanks to valiant Dame Groan and the reptiles ...

And so to Killer, once again infesting the killing fields, and picking up a story which allows him to do a little fellow travelling with anti-vaxxers ...

Just for the record, the pond should note that it recently got its booster shot for the new strain, and experienced no side effects, though it had to do it at Priceline, because somehow chemists got an inside run and supplies ahead of GPs ...

Also for the record, the pond should note that Ken Paxton is a corrupt crook, so deeply enmeshed in stench that even his colleagues couldn't stand it and tried to get rid of him, but failed ...

As for the story, Killer's is dated the 19th December, but there was a story about it in the Daily Beast dated 30th November, so we're really talking ancient, tired, killing fields re-hashing and beat-up here...

The Beast yarn ended this way (sorry about the paywall) ...

Yes, we're deep in weird territory here ...

Speaking of cranks and nutters, the pond did enjoy Martha Gill's King Charles has appointed a homeopath. Why do the elite put their faith in snake oil?

...Dr Michael Dixon has championed such things as “thought field therapy”, “Christian healing” and an Indian herbal cure “ultra-diluted” with alcohol, which claims to kill breast cancer cells. Methods like these might be “unfashionable”, he once wrote in an article submitted to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, but they should not be ignored.

In the mid 19th century, dozens of homeopaths served as personal physicians to monarchs around the world

Homeopaths are fond of calling their ideas “unfashionable”, as if by some inverse law of popularity this makes them more likely to be correct. But in fact homeopathy is surprisingly fashionable for all the good it doesn’t do. YouGov found in 2021 that around half of Britons were “open-minded” about the practice – a figure that was slightly higher in the US and slightly lower in Australia and the Netherlands. In 2022 the global market for homeopathic products was valued at $11bn (£8.6bn).

Gill thought she had an explanation ...

Two factors, I think, are at play. The first is that elites tend to overestimate the value of their instincts. King Charles and Cindy Crawford spend their time surrounded by suck-ups. They are themselves exceptions to the rules that govern others. If a gut feeling leads them to “thought field therapy”, rather than modern medicine, they might be more inclined to believe it.

And the second is something first observed by Charles Percy Snow in his famous remarks about the “two cultures” in the west. Ignorance of literature and the arts will exclude you from “highly educated” circles, but it is perfectly acceptable to have no grasp of basic science – the second law of thermodynamics, for example, or how to define “acceleration”. Combine overconfidence and an ignorance of science and you get an aristocracy convinced that crushed bees and aconite are the answer to their problems.

In any case, it is bad news. Alternative medicine is useless but not always harmless – when cancer patients put their faith in tinctures, and chanting can cause fatal delays to proper treatment. It needs to be resisted.

The pond suspects there's another factor at play. Anyone sensible realises that after you're dead, you're a long time gone. No one has returned from the afterlife to report on what's there, and even the ones that are alleged to have done so, one famous one in particular, are notably silent about what to expect, what sort of vision awaits ...

So the rich especially rich alleged Xians, do their very best to stave off the inevitable. There's religious faith, and then there's faith that money can buy you extra time ... and next stop, horse pills and bleach.

All that said, Killer presents a different case. His deep fear of masks has led him into the killing fields ... and into very strange company ...

Any one who read that Daily Beast story would have noted the line The Texas Department of State Health Services has calculated that the COVID death rate for fully vaccinated Texans remains 12 times lower than that of the unvaccinated.

But not Killer, as the reptiles began the usual show of distracting snaps ...

We're in rich turf here ...

Meanwhile, Killer was still off in the killing fields ...

The pond was reminded of another story in the Daily Beast, The Real COVID Crime Is the Lies DeSantis’ Lapdog Spreads.

It wasn't about Killer, though he surely passes the test for being called a lapdog ... inter alia ...

...If the grand jury has unearthed any crimes against Floridians involving the vaccine, none of them have reached public attention. Sabella’s chambers did not respond to a Daily Beast inquiry as to when the court might report what, if anything, the grand jury found.

Meanwhile, the closest thing to wrongdoing involving the lifesaving jab in Florida has been committed by DeSantis’ own surgeon general. Dr. Joseph Ladapo has been accused of altering a state-sponsored study in 2022 to make the vaccine appear a greater threat to young men than the data indicated. He cited these fudged findings when recommending that men 18 to 39 forgo the vaccine because of what he described as an “abnormally high risk of cardiac-related death among men in this age group.”

In September, Ladapo committed another act of medical malpractice when he joined DeSantis in live-streaming a call on the social media platform X, saying that the latest COVID booster has not been proven safe and that possible benefits do not outweigh the risks for anyone under 65.

“NO WAY FDA,” read a message at the start of the call.

Along with appointing Ladapo the state’s top health officer, DeSantis arranged for him to become a tenured professor at the University of Florida. The school responded to the anti-vax livestream five days later in an email to its faculty.

“The UF community is encouraged to visit the UF Health website to find vaccine locations,” the message read.

On Dec. 6, Ladapo addressed an open letter to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Mandy Cohen and Food and Drug Administration Director Dr. Robert Califf, stating as fact a falsehood that had been widely dismissed as nonsense. He claimed the COVID vaccine is contaminated with dangerous bits of DNA that can cause cancer.

On Wednesday, Cohen replied to Ladapo’s letter with a visit to a Walgreens pharmacy in Orlando.

“Floridians can hear directly from me about what the CDC is recommending and we are recommending vaccines for everyone,” she told reporters.

Back when he was first appointed, Ladapo introduced himself to Florida state Sen. Tina Polsky by refusing to wear a mask in her office despite her repeated requests that he do so because she had a health condition.

“I’ve said from day one of meeting this man, I don’t think he’s serving the public health of our state,” Polsky told The Daily Beast on Friday.

And Ladapo has repeatedly confirmed that initial impression.

“He’s the top doctor, top scientist in our state, and he pushes his conspiracy narratives,” she said. “He has lied and deleted information in scientific studies and, in my mind, he is giving us misleading information.”

In reward for his mendacity, Ladapo received a double salary. He makes $250,000 as surgeon general and another $262,000 as a professor who appears to teach no classes and performs little research. He recently purchased a $1.7 million home in Pinellas County, a four-hour drive from the surgeon general's office in Tallahassee and a two and a half-hour drive from the UF campus in Gainesville.

“So he doesn’t live in Tallahassee where his job is and he doesn’t live at UF where he’s supposedly some kind of professor,” Polsky noted.

She added, “And now he’s spending time campaigning for the governor instead of doing his job,” he said.

She was referring to news that Ladapo is scheduled to make several appearances on DeSantis’ behalf in the U.S. Virgin Islands later this month. The GOP primary there is third in the nation.

One of DeSantis’ many political calculations since 2021 was to switch from pro-jab to anti-vax. He started out so in favor of the vaccine that he staged a first shot with a 100-year-old World War II vet. He then did the same with a 94-year-old.

“In case you missed it,” the accompanying press release was headed.

When that no longer played well with the Republican base, DeSantis brought in Ladapo, who had become prominent among the loonies insisting hydroxychloroquine could cure COVID.

Now, less than a third of Floridians have received the latest booster. The national rate is 43 percent.

Polsky is most worried by the impact DeSantis and Ladapo are having on the overall rate in childhood vaccinations, which are at a 10-year low.

“If we don’t have a certain level, we lose herd immunity and some of these diseases could come back,” she said. “So to me, that is just the biggest disgrace.”

And so to a final Killer spurt, keeping the very best anti-vax company ...

"The court of public opinion"??

So much for science ...

Yep, we're deep into the killing fields,, and weird company ...