A big day for the pond, what with the Lynch mob contending with our Henry for pond attention, not to mention the genocide ...

 

Of course the pond had to sneak a look at ITV's four parter, Mr Bates vs The Post Office (hint, VPN or "other sources"). 

James O'Brien has been going right off, and reckons the first episode has clocked up some 9.2 million views, while Marina Hyde has also been scribbling furiously.

It turns out that it's a fair average bit of social realism about a genuine scandal, innocents persecuted, and politicians suddenly eager to cash in and never mind the billions that Rish! flung at Fujitsu while already aware of the scandal.

The pond had a deep sense of superiority regarding the hapless Poms. Everyone will immediately recall the stunning four parter made by ABC TV about the Robodebt scandal which tore strips off the government of the day, and is still echoing down the corridors of power. 

The pond was mortified when it went in to pitch the show to the ABC, with the logline, "Debt v. Robots", only to find that it had already got up with the logline "I am, you are, we are a tremendously patriotic broadcaster intent on driving people mad with our government loving jingles".

What's that? You can't remember seeing the show? Strange, on second thoughts neither can the pond. Perhaps you need to visit Reddit to catch up on cardigan wearing commissioning news:

Who’s funding it? The bootlickers at Murdoch media? Seven while they’re paying tens of thousands of dollars of rent for rapists? ABC, who are government funded? No, there isn’t going to be a mini series.

Ah well, never mind, if we can't match the Poms at telly shows, at least we can hold our own with impersonal robotic government scandals ... and so on to the reptile news of the day ...

The pond deliberately showed the top of the digital edition in all its glory to note an absence, a profound genocidal absence, which will be mentioned later, down the page...

The pond has grown used to reptiles absence during the silly season. 

As world records were announced, Lloydie of the Amazon was conspicuous by his absence. The last we heard from him was back on 15th December last year blathering on about wishful rhetoric regarding fossil fuels ...

Meanwhile, on another planet ...

The pond has also grown used to presences it wished weren't present, like tykes blathering about the Victorian legal system - as if talk of Pell can hide what the institution did, and still does, to its victims - and the mutton Dutton, falling for the reptiles' culture war yarn about Australia day.

The pond had featured that story, expecting some all day sucker to get tossed into the briar patch ... and sure enough, along came a sucker ...

It was beyond predictable, and Golding had the perfect joke to match the eruption ...

On and on Captain Spud, and the story, went ...

There was a sensible line of discussion available to Captain Spud but as usual you have to turn to the cartoonists to find any sanity ...

The pond isn't the only visitor to supermarkets to have noticed the gouging, but instead Captain Spud ended up in a culture war cul-de-sac, a reptile beat-up designed to keep the angertainment flowing ...

What a stupid, malevolent, malicious, unrepentant, dumb former Queensland plod he is ... and next stop for the pond was below the fold ...

With a startled grimace, the pond realised it was Friday and so the hole in the bucket man was out and about, but what alternative did the pond have?

Fitz on the fritz and rabbiting on about greenies? Yeah, nah and a double yeah nah for the lizard Oz editorialist's twin offerings.

What's that? At least there's the Lynch mob out and about and ready to hang someone? Fair cop, it was a dinkum way to stave off the Friday hole in the bucket man inevitable ...

The pond can rely on the Lynch mob to produce a comment or three and at the same time the pond can use him to touch on other matters on parade in the US landscape ... like this one ...

Yep, the country is full of weird Lynch mobs ... but we have our own, blathering on about woke doors ...

Meanwhile, you could read in The Messenger about that other matter involving one of the two contenders with the Mango Mussolini in that last pitiful GOP debate, also ignored by the reptiles ...

Dan Gooding writing under the header Florida School District Pulls Dictionaries Because They ‘Describe Sexual Conduct’ and the lede Webster's Dictionary for Students among the tomes being reviewed for compliance with Florida's new sex-education law made note of it...

A school district in Florida has taken dictionaries off its libraries' shelves because of fears they violate the state's recent legislation on books depicting or describing sexual conduct.

The Escambia County School District, part of the Florida panhandle, reportedly took The American Heritage Children's Dictionary, Webster's Dictionary for Students, and Merriam-Webster's Elementary Dictionary away from kids as part of its review into Florida's HB 1069 bill.

The dictionaries' definitions of words such as "sex" would potentially put them in violation of the law, which placed restrictions on children being taught about sexual conduct.

On Wednesday, campaign group PEN America took the district to court over its decision, which saw over 2,800 books pulled off district library shelves and put into storage. A number of parents with children at Escambia schools joined the lawsuit.

“School libraries are not state propaganda centers," Katie Blankenship, PEN America’s Florida director, said in a press release. "They are meant to be sites of inquiry, where students can encounter a diverse range of ideas, gain access to information, and inspire discussion, debate, creativity, and critical thinking.

"We will not stand by as these critical spaces are undermined by political agendas and censorship.”

PEN said that other books on the list included the Guinness Book of World Records and Ripley's Believe it or Not.

Dear sweet long absent lord, not the Guinness and Ripley ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles started offering up snaps to distract from the Lynch mob ...naturally featuring a snap to be feared by any dinkum white nationalist passing by ... and a couple to be celebrated ...

Not Captain Spud again already! 

The pond waded on through the Lynch mob swamp, determined not to mention the two edged sword of plagiarism, which had already produced much comedy, what with the plagiarist accuser's wife falling victim to the accusation of plagiarism ...

What a prize loon he is, and it so happens that the pond's logarithms recommended further reading of a substack by Judd Legum in Popular Information ...

..The dictionaries, according to the school district's data, remain locked away. Their exclusion demonstrates the preposterously broad language of HB 1069. Dictionaries do contain descriptions of "sexual conduct." Merriam-Webster, for example, defines sex as a "sexual union involving penetration of the vagina by the penis" or "intercourse (such as anal or oral intercourse) that does not involve penetration of the vagina by the penis." But the idea that we need to exclude dictionaries from schools to protect children defies all logic. 

District staff responsible for the review at each school were given a checklist to determine whether a book should be withheld from students. The checklist suggests reviewers consult "Book Looks," a right-wing website relied on by Moms for Liberty and other groups to justify the banning of books from school libraries. It was created by "Moms For Liberty member Emily Maikisch," according to public records reviewed by Book Riot.

Along with dictionaries, the books removed from Escambia County school libraries as a result of this process include eight different encyclopedias, two thesauruses, and five editions of The Guinness Book of World Records. Biographies of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Nicki Minaj, and Thurgood Marshall are also locked in storage.

Classic texts like Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, The Adventures and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile are no longer available to Escambia County students. Twenty-three novels by Stephen King have been removed. The dragnet has also swept up books popular with the political right including Atlas Shrugged and two books by conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly. 

The reality in Escambia County serves as a rejoinder to DeSantis, who has described concerns about book removals as a "leftist activist hoax" and a "false political narrative." 

At the same event, Florida Department of Education Commissioner Manny Diaz argued "[r]emoving clear instances of pornography and sexually explicit materials, often within arms reach of our youngest kids, is not book banning." How would Diaz describe removing the dictionary?

DeSantis justified his statements by claiming that no school district in Florida had removed more than 19 books. At the time, 148 books had been removed in Escambia County as part of the challenge process. Now, in part due to DeSantis signing HB 1069, more than ten times that many books have been taken off the shelves in Escambia County. And Escambia County is not an anomaly. Orange County, Florida, which includes Orlando, has removed at least 678 books from library shelves.  

Yep, it's the barking mad fundamentalist Xian conservative way ... but you'll only hear the sound of crickets from the Lynch mob ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, it's the long march through the institutions, Melbourne University brand, with only the Lynch mob standing at the gates, ready to organise a lynching, and suddenly the pond began to wish the Lynch mob gone away, so it could do its usual Friday dance with the hole in the bucket man ...

Luckily there was just a short gobbet to go ...

What a loon. Captain Spud is already busy on the Australia Day culture wars and has no need of bizarre American tribalism, though if the reptiles suggest it, he'll no doubt be up for it ... 

And so helter skelter, it's on to a lavish serve of Islamophobia courtesy the hole in the bucket man, abandoning Thucydides yet again ...

Anyone who can remember the crusades, or Xian treatment of women for centuries, and so on and so forth, will already be starting to chortle, but the pond wanted to return to what was missing in the reptiles' news at the top of the digital edition ... though you could find the story in the Graudian and elsewhere ...

It's a useful counterpoint to the Islamophobia and bigotry on parade in the hole in the bucket man's piece ...

Of course the pond has a fair contempt for all forms of religion and never tires of the old joke “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

Meanwhile, there was more news of that ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, system of apartheid and genocide ...

At this point the pond should note that it caught the last presentation, and the name of the presenter might be misleading, but here she is, and she did a fine job, with the Irish accent restrained, and even a stab at opening and closing in French ...

She wrapped up her argument with a potent image ... a note scribbled on a whiteboard in a hospital ...

.. followed by the sight of of the fate of the whiteboard and the news of the author's death ...

Meanwhile, back with the hole in the bucket man, the Islamophobia was still in full flow, as if barking mad Xians somehow had righteousness on their side ...

That's beyond the valley of the comical. Saint Paul was the compleat and perfect misogynist ...

...I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is the same as having her head shaved. For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head.

A man ought not to cover his head,[b] since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. It is for this reason that a woman ought to have authority over her own[c] head, because of the angels. Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God. (Corinthians 11)

It wasn't just a mere mandating of modesty, if was fundamental to the whole misogynist scheme, as the United States seems determined to turn itself into a living example of The Handmaid's Tale ...

And that's before we get on to talk of it being better to marry only in order to avoid hell. 

The pond can still remember eternally angry Dominican nuns sweating in the Tamworth heat, patrolling up and down the classroom in full habit, and it had nothing to do with mandating modesty, and much to do with fanaticism of the kind best left to a Ken Russell film ...

Or perhaps a Monty Python sketch, but never mind, back to the genocide news, ignored by the hole in the bucket man ...

At this point the reptiles decided that the hole in the bucket man needed a little visual distraction ...

The pond thought it could match that ...

Those images courtesy of a survivor of an Irish industrial "school" ...

But our Henry never did hear that bit about not being the first to throw stones, especially when your own glass house deserves a bloody good shattering and so there was a final stone, gobbet if you will, of Islamophobia in his paw ...

Whatever you might think of Islam - the pond doesn't think much - the ability of so-called Xians to indulge in the repression of women - come on down Texas and assorted southern states - and support genocide here and there - and maintain the ancient habit of book banning and routinely abuse children and yet mourn for the frock loving Pellists, and all the many other sins, errors and omissions time and space stop the pond from mentioning ... not to mention the insufferable righteousness ...

... it all reminds the pond of an injunction that our Henry should follow, 

...And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire. Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven. For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost. How think ye? if a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray? And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray. Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.

Well if he won't pluck out a bigoted eye, could he at least pluck out a bigoted column?

And after that reading, the pond will end with a reading of the infallible Pope of the day ... going where Captain Spud, deeply enmeshed in reptile nonsense, should have gone, but swept away and beached by the reptiles, is too stupid to go ...