In which the pond reaches several tipping points thanks to prattling Polonius and garrulous Gemma ...

 

Before plunging into the black pit of doom and despair - aka a Polonius sermon - the pond thought it might start with an uplifting anecdote,  culled from Rivka Galchen's piece for The New Yorker, Trials of the Witchy Women, Across seven centuries, women have been accused of witchcraft—but what that means often differs wildly, revealing the anxieties of each particular society. (possible paywall).

For all the burnings and the bigotry, hate, fear and superstition, there were some odd moments, and even the occasional win ...

...One can also glimpse the fears of the persecutors in the confessions they forced out of the accused. Consider the witchery accusations made by King James. His mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, was said to have been involved in the murder of her second husband, James’s father. Later, James’s foster father was poisoned, then his successor was executed, and then the next successor was accused of seducing the young King, when he was a teen-ager. In 1587, Mary was executed, and in 1590 James instigated a witch trial against a healer named Agnes Sampson, accusing her of trying to murder him and his Danish bride by causing storms to sink their ships. In James’s mind, the evil forces in the world were set on his murder. Eventually, Sampson confessed to collaborating with witches from Copenhagen, attending a series of meetings planning his destruction, being present on his wedding night, and having attended a witches’ Sabbath in which she and a circle of witches passed around a waxen figure of him, which they then gave to Satan. It’s as if James and Sampson became a storytelling duo conceived in Hell.
In one witch trial under James, the jury acquitted the accused, so James put the jury members on trial, until they agreed to change their ruling. 

Other courts were less kangaroo. Gibson illustrates one in the opening chapter. The setting is Innsbruck, Austria, in 1485, a time when the power balance between the Pope and the Archduke of Austria is stable but uneasy. An inquisitor named Heinrich Kramer arrives with paperwork from the Pope, allowing him to set up an inquisition to root out witches. He gives sermons decrying the murderous witches all around and exhorts the townspeople to be vigilant in reporting any witchy activity; he also keeps track of who attends his services. The local authorities aren’t pleased to have Kramer there, but they can’t dismiss him, not with his papal paperwork. One day, Helena Scheuberin, a confident and outspoken woman, passes Kramer on the street and says to him what lots of Innsbruckers were likely thinking: “You lousy monk! I hope you get the falling sickness!” Other accounts report that she said, “When will the devil take you away?” Kramer initiates an investigation of Scheuberin, who not only hasn’t been attending his services but has also been heard to say that demonology is heresy.
Scheuberin has accumulated a few enemies over the years. She attended the wedding of a suitor she had rejected, and the man’s wife says that she hasn’t felt well since then. There’s also the family of a knight she is said to have had an affair with; he died young, not long after the affair, and his relatives are suspicious. Kramer puts together a case against Scheuberin (and six other people). He declares himself the judge, but the local authorities intervene, and insist on the bishop’s hearing the case. The accused are jailed, the wheels of injustice turn.
A big crowd attends the trial. In court, Scheuberin initially says that she won’t swear on the Bible. (Some Catholics viewed the use of holy objects in that way to be heretical.) Kramer proceeds with his questioning. Soon the subject of inquiry turns away from witchcraft. “Are you of a good way of life?” he asks. Yes, she says. “Were you a virgin at the time of your marriage?” Scheuberin refuses to answer.
After what was likely a suspenseful silence, the bishop’s representative intervenes. The sex lives of Innsbruckers are, he says, “secret matters that hardly concern the case.” Kramer is out of step with the norms of the area. The mood has palpably changed. An expert lawyer from out of town, Johann Merwart of Wemding, announces that he will be representing the accused, all seven of them. Merwart challenges Kramer’s paperwork, which is in disarray. (It’s the sunny obverse side of a bureaucratic nightmare.) By the end of the day, the accused are released, and Kramer is under investigation.

Moral? There's always a hope that the investigating reptiles will one day find their world turned upside down, and the investigators will find themselves being investigated.

Park that hope for the moment, because now it's on to the traditional Sunday meditation with Polonius's prattle ...

Apart from the confession that Polonius is a member of the inner Sydney city 'leet, the pond realises that diligent readers will be astonished that thus far Polonius hasn't blamed the ABC for anything, and then proceedings were further interrupted by a snap of a demonic figure certain to terrify the aged reptile readership ...

Doesn't look so terrifying shrunk down a bit ...

Meanwhile, the pond was caught in the Sisyphean task of resolving reptile contradictions. Yesterday, the pond recorded a reptile remark: "The divide between Labor and Liberal continues to grow, as does the ideological differences among Australians."

Yet today the sanguine Polonius scribbled "Australia is an empirical nation in which ideology plays a small role."

Never mind, it's on to Polonius, channelling the IPA, while offering a billy goat buttism in the process: "It's easy to dismiss polls commissioned by right-of-centre institutes such as the IPA", hastily adding the same about left-centre equivalents, to provide a cloak of balance, but giving the game away by not describing the IPA correctly - surely "far right barking mad servants of Gina" would have been both more apt and evocative...

But the pond is doing spoilers, let the master scribbler scribble ...

Ah, always the polite understatement.

"A difficult time".  Such a genteel, refined capacity for the bleeding condescending obvious.

Never mind the Nazis, against whom Cooper protested, just remember that at the time Aboriginal people were non-people, non-citizens, nullities to be herded into reserves and missions, gulags if you will, our very own form of apartheid ...

Wot wot, a difficult time ...

Cooper held an 'Aboriginal Day of Mourning' on 26 January 1938. It coincided the 150th anniversary of the landing of the First Fleet and raised awareness of what this meant for the Indigenous population. The day evolved into a National Aborigines Day, or Aboriginal Sunday, first observed in 1940 on the weekend before Australia Day. Today, the celebrations of NAIDOC Week have their roots in Cooper's original day of remembrance. (here)

Meanwhile, the reptiles provided a snap showing the right way to celebrate ...

The pond had thought that Green and Gold - Pantone 348C and 116C to be precise - were the national colours, but it turns out that they're red, white and blue, and there's only one flag ...

By this time punters will be impatient for the first mention of the ABC, a bit like anyone who sees a bin and immediately wants to see a bin chicken at work ...

That's a truly, deeply weird argument, roughly akin to the pond noting that save for the potato famine and the relentless persecution of the Irish by the British, the pond would not be among us ...

Out of rape, pillage and destruction springs hope? It's a curious echo of the hopes of A. O. Neville, who understood that killing off the blacks might be a tad problematic and unseemly, and so breeding them out was the way forward ...

In 1937, the chief protector of Aboriginals in Western Australia, A. O. Neville, a man generally recognized as a decent, progressive bureaucrat but who nevertheless believed in “breeding out the color” (commonly called “[expletive deleted] them white”), spoke at the first national governmental conference on Aboriginals, an occasion Robert Marine, associate professor of politics at La Trobe University, Victoria, has described as “a terrible moment in the history of the 20th-century Australian state.”

At the conference, Neville asked: “Are we going to have a population of one million blacks in the Commonwealth or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there were any Aborigines in Australia?” The key resolution at the conference, “The Destiny of the Race,” passed unanimously, called for the total absorption into the white community of all non-full-blood Aborigines. Taking part-Aboriginal children from their mothers and families by force was part of this ambition. Over the years, various regulations had been invoked to make this possible. (here)

And so on to the stolen generation, which the likes of the Bolter will assure you never happened ... except ...

This cannot be over-emphasized: The Australian government literally kidnapped these children from their parents as a matter of policy. White welfare officers, often supported by police, would descend on Aboriginal camps, round up all the children, separate the ones with light-colored skin, bundle them into trucks and take them away. If their parents protested, they were held at bay by the police.

Sometimes, to avoid harrowing scenes of parents clinging to the sides of the trucks, and to frustrate attempts to hide the children when the trucks drove into the camp, the authorities resorted to subterfuge. They would fit out the back of a truck with a wire cage and a spring door — like an animal trap. Then they would park the truck a short distance from the camp and lure the children into the cage with sweets scattered on its door. When enough children were in the cage, they would spring the trap door and drive rapidly away.

Aboriginals tried to save their children by blackening their skin so that they did not look half-caste. “Every morning, our people would crush charcoal and mix that with animal fat and smother it all over us, so that when the police came they could see only black children in the distance,” witness No. 681 told the National Inquiry into “stolen children” (1995-97). “We were told to be on the alert and, if white people came, to run into the bush, or stand behind the trees as stiff as a poker, or else run behind logs or run into culverts and hide.

Mothers were equally stricken. “Bringing Them Home,” the 1997 report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission into stolen children, tells of an Aboriginal woman so ashamed of being unable to prevent her children being taken from her that she carried on her person, until the day she died, references testifying to her good character. And of an Aboriginal family who for 32 years carried out a ritual mourning ceremony every sunrise and sunset to mark the loss of their daughter.

Now there's something to celebrate on Oz day, preferably with a Union Jack, and there's another reason to celebrate because at last Polonius manages to work the ABC into his celebration of breeding ...

Of course there's an elephant in this Polonial room or institute ... 'Shattered': lingering pain of Mundine divorce:

Warren Mundine has been accused by his ex-wife of saying that she was ''too Aboriginal'' in the final bitter disintegration of their marriage five years ago.
Mr Mundine, who has been chosen by Tony Abbott to head the government's new Indigenous Advisory Council and with plans to radically change the direction of uneconomic Aboriginal communities, denies making the comment, saying it would be a ''bizarre'' thing for him to have said.
But Sydney University academic Lynette Riley, speaking for the first time about the break-up of their 26-year marriage, said, ''He absolutely said it. It is seared into my brain. I was really shattered. I always thought of Warren as my soulmate. I thought we were always heading in the same direction.''
Unforgiving in her comments about Mr Mundine's rise, in an intimate and revealing profile of the indigenous leader published in Good Weekend today, she said: ''I think he has sold out his family and his culture. I think he gave up his good Aboriginal wife and kids so he could do that.''
In February, at a lavish wedding at Sydney's Luna Park attended by 450 people, including miner Andrew ''Twiggy'' Forrest, Mr Mundine married corporate lawyer Elizabeth Henderson, divorced daughter of Gerard and Anne Henderson, directors of the conservative think-tank The Sydney Institute.
Mr Abbott recently described Mr Mundine as ''a natural leader and a forthright advocate for indigenous Australia''.

That's more than enough of that, and time now to turn to the bonus, because Polonius alone would be intolerable, so the pain has to be cranked up to the excruciating with a serve of garrulous Gemma ...

Gemma can always be relied upon to set the pond's teeth on edge ... this time by trotting out "tipping point," a term best reserved for climate science .. as in Climate tipping points are nearer than you think – our new report warns of catastrophic risk

It’s now almost inevitable that 2023 will be the warmest year ever recorded by humans, probably the warmest for at least 125,000 years.

Multiple temperature records were smashed with global average temperatures for some periods well above 1.5°C. Antarctic sea ice loss is accelerating at frightening rates along with many other indicators of rapid climate change. Does this mean 2023 is the year parts of the climate tip into a much more dangerous state?

Most people expect that if a system, like someone’s body, an ecosystem, or part of the climate system, becomes stressed, it’ll respond fairly predictably – double the pressure, double the impact, and so on. This holds in many cases, but is not always true. Sometimes a system under stress changes steadily (or “linearly”) up to a point, but beyond that far bigger or abrupt changes can be locked in.

An example of such “nonlinear” changes are “tipping points”, which happen when a system is pushed past a threshold beyond which change becomes self-sustaining. This means that even if the original pressure eased off the change would keep on going until the system reaches a sometimes completely different state.

Think of rolling a boulder up a hill. This takes a lot of energy. If that energy input is stopped then the ball will roll back down. But when the top of the hill is reached and the boulder is balanced right at the very top, a tiny push, perhaps even a gust of wind, can be enough to send it rolling down the other side.

The climate system has many potential tipping points, such as ice sheets disappearing or dense rainforests becoming significantly drier and more open. It would be very difficult, effectively impossible, to recover these systems once they go beyond a tipping point.

We along with 200 other scientists from around the world just published the new Global Tipping Points Report at the COP28 UN climate talks in Dubai. Our report sets out the science on the “negative” tipping points in the Earth system that could harm both nature and people, as well as the potential “positive” societal tipping points that could accelerate sustainability action...

You won't find any of that in grumpy Gemma, and you needn't feel the need to tip ...

At this point the reptiles slipped in a shot showing the destruction of Gaza ...

And the pond hit a tipping point, with some interesting data, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza seen as among the most destructive in recent history, experts say, though already 9 hearty bombing days out of date ...

The Israeli military campaign in Gaza, experts say, now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history.

In just over two months, researchers say the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group.

The Israeli military has said little about what kinds of bombs and artillery it is using in Gaza. But from blast fragments found on-site and analyses of strike footage, experts are confident that the vast majority of bombs dropped on the besieged enclave are U.S.-made. They say the weapons include 2,000-pound (900-kilogram) “bunker-busters” that have killed hundreds in densely populated areas.

And ...

By some measures, destruction in Gaza has outpaced Allied bombings of Germany during World War II.

Between 1942 and 1945, the allies attacked 51 major German cities and towns, destroying about 40-50% of their urban areas, said Robert Pape, a U.S. military historian. Pape said this amounted to 10% of buildings across Germany, compared to over 33% across Gaza, a densely populated territory of just 140 square miles (360 square kilometers).

“Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history,” said Pape. “It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.”

The U.S.-led coalition’s 2017 assault to expel the Islamic State group from the Iraqi city of Mosul was considered one of the most intense attacks on a city in generations. That nine-month battle killed around 10,000 civilians, a third of them from coalition bombardment, according an Associated Press investigation at the time.

During the 2014-2017 campaign to defeat IS in Iraq, the coalition carried out nearly 15,000 strikes across the country, according to Airwars, a London-based independent group that tracks recent conflicts. By comparison, the Israeli military said last week it has conducted 22,000 strikes in Gaza.

And so on ... and as grotesque Gemma is about to talk of schools ... another tipping point ...

The percentage of damaged buildings in the Khan Younis area nearly doubled in just the first two weeks of Israel’s southern offensive, they said.

That includes tens of thousands of homes as well as schools, hospitals, mosques and stores. U.N. monitors have said that about 70% of school buildings across Gaza have been damaged. At least 56 damaged schools served as shelters for displaced civilians. Israeli strikes damaged 110 mosques and three churches, the monitors said.

Does glib Gemma pause to reflect? Of course not ...

How about this for a tipping point? It's the opening par in The GOP Is Actively Supporting Russia’s Ukrainian Genocide (paywall):

If you want to debate the merits of whether using the phrase “from the river to the sea” is genocidal now that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that is his government’s goal for Israel, have at it. Netanyahu has through his words and his actions made it a legitimate issue to discuss.

Sure enough the pond followed the link to Rolling Stone ... and discovered ...

So there it is, as bold as brass, out there in the open, shameless, the intent clear, ethnic cleansing and genocide in action ... but not a tipping point for glossing over Gemma ...

Speaking of genocide, that other one should also be mentioned ...

...There is no debating, however, that Russia’s intentions in Ukraine are genocidal.

And given the active and unyielding support Donald Trump and his supporters on Capitol Hill are showing for Russia these days, that makes them actively complicit in Vladimir Putin’s efforts to continue to commit crimes against humanity.

Dmitry Medvedev—who was once the president of Russia and who currently serves as the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council—made his country’s horrific intentions clear once again when, in a Telegram post he wrote, “The existence of Ukraine is fatally dangerous for Ukrainians…they will understand that life [with Russia] in a large common state, which they do not want very much now, is better than death. Their deaths and the deaths of their loved ones. And the sooner Ukrainians realize this the better.”

Meanwhile, the other hallmarks of the genocidal goal of wiping out a society and all traces of its existence continued in Russian-occupied Ukraine, where officials have banned Ukrainian language books and materials from schools. Meanwhile, Russians continue their systematic kidnapping of what they themselves estimate are hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children. These children are then taught to hate Ukraine, forced to speak Russian, and recite anti-Ukraine propaganda and songs.

Hamas’ kidnapping of Israelis including children was despicable. What Russia is doing to Ukraine is the same crime at an industrial scale. It is nauseating and does not get nearly the attention it deserves. Neither do the deaths of Ukrainian civilians due to ongoing Russian attacks targeting population centers and well-known, well-marked civilian centers—including hospitals, schools, hotels, and shopping malls. Late last year the number of civilian dead passed 10,000 with more than 18,500 injured since the current intensified phase of Russia’s illegal war began nearly two years ago, in Feb. 2022. The number is horrendous, even if it does pale in comparison to the unprecedented civilian toll that has resulted from Israel’s current invasion of Gaza.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., Republican leaders seem committed to doing everything in their power to support Russia’s abhorrent campaign against the people of Ukraine.

Despite the clear message from the White House that aid to Ukraine must be approved by the Congress by the end of last year, the GOP has dragged its feet and denied approval to the aid package urgently requested by President Joe Biden. They do this, in part, because their party leader, Donald Trump, has long established ties with Russia and a history of denying aid to Ukraine. (You may recall that an illegal effort to do so got him impeached.)

Under pressure from Trump—and despite being briefed on the necessity for the aid package—House Speaker Mike Johnson has dragged his feet approving the aid. First, he said it was because he wanted to address security on our southern border. When Democrats and even Republicans in the Senate appeared willing to do that, he then said he did not want to proceed on that. When President Biden pressed, he dug in.

In private calls with GOP members, Speaker Johnson has said he now wants to resist the border deal he has previously characterized as a prerequisite to providing further funding for Ukraine until there is a GOP president.

While some are hopeful a breakthrough may come in the days ahead, other Republicans are threatening to fight it. Close Trump ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said she would move to “vacate the chair” (fire Johnson) if he sought to tie a border deal to assistance for Ukraine. Greene has long opposed helping Ukraine, spouting Russian propaganda lines and suggesting that stopping U.S. support would actually lead to peace.

The impact of not providing more U.S. support for Ukraine would be devastating, eviscerating Ukrainian military capabilities and emboldening the Russians.

Even were a deal on aid to Ukraine reached, much damage has already been done. Our allies’ faith in the continuity of U.S. support has been shaken. Efforts to block aid for Ukraine have also been undertaken by Putin and MAGA friend Viktor Orban of Hungary, and he has gained support from others, including, most recently, Slovakia.

All this is emboldening Russia at a moment when they should be facing ever greater resistance from the West, given the threat Putin poses not only to Ukraine but to NATO and the world. The aid to Ukraine has brought great returns. But currently, Russia is starting to make small “confirmed gains” despite valiant Ukrainian efforts to repel them.

And so on, but gruelling Gemma had done her work and the pond had reached all kinds of tipping points ... not least a recurring dream that hell would be like being trapped with Gehenna Gemma for a day ...

Get off the couch? Just stay on the couch, because it's way better than being in Gaza, where couches are in short supply, not to mention food, shelter, water and health care ...

...Even when communications return, “it is intermittent and not stable,” said Hamza Al-Barasi, who was displaced from Gaza City.
The blackout has also made it difficult for information to get out of Gaza on the daily death and destruction from Israel’s offensive. The assault has pulverized much of the Gaza Strip, home to some 2.3 million people, as Israel vows to crush Hamas after its unprecedented Oct. 7 raid into Israel. In the attack, about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 250 others taken hostage. Israel has said more than 130 hostages remain in Gaza, but not all of them are believed to be alive.
Israel’s offensive, one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history, has killed nearly 25,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities, and uprooted more than 80% of the territory’s population.
Israel has also cut off all but a trickle of supplies into the besieged territory, including food, water and fuel, causing what U.N. officials say is a humanitarian disaster. (here)

And meanwhile, the bickering continues ...

A member of Israel’s War Cabinet cast doubt on the country’s strategy for releasing hostages held by Hamas, saying only a cease-fire can free them, as the prime minister rejected the United States’ calls to scale back its offensive.

The comments by Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief, marked the latest sign of disagreement among top Israeli officials over the direction of the war against Hamas, now in its fourth month.

In his first public statements on the course of the war, Eisenkot said that claims the dozens of hostages could be freed by means other than a cease-fire amounted to spreading “illusions” — an implicit criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who heads the five-member War Cabinet and who insists that pursuing the war will win their release.

Yes, a couch will do nicely, because the pond doubts that garrulous Gemma has the first clue about moral compasses, and even less clue about how to align them when confronted with genocide in action ...

And now as all this talk of genocide has limited the pond's chance to run its usual sample of cartoons on a Sunday, here's a sample saved to the end, with the first an echo of yesterday ...

By golly that's a goodly likeness and the mango Mussolini would be pleased,  possibly as proud as punch or off to shoot at anyone indulging in a tea party ...

There are other portraits doing the rounds, also fitting ...

... while the pond has been pleased to avoid mentioning slavery, the chief cause of the civil war, or the deeply racist clauses in the constitution, or the way that racism has been a bedrock of the United States since its inception, because you never know who might be asked to be VP ...

Then there's the noble efforts in Ukraine thanks to the GOP, always a lover of genocides, and reliably infatuated with aspirational, wannabe, banana republic, tin pot, con artist, snakeoil salesmen dictators ...

And finally one for the reptile media road, or how The New York Times has helped doom the country thanks to its reliable both siderist ways ...