A place holder post with usual business to be resumed soon ...

 

This morning the pond is going to plunge into the maelstrom known as easy access to Kingsford Smith airport ... so as a place holder, the pond thought it might note a few stories from the weekend edition of the lizard Oz that the pond didn't have time or space to cover.

The pond will hopefully survive the airport experience - one of the great jokes, up there with the transformation of Parramatta road because motorways - and hit the computer in time for a Caterist and associates update around noon.

One of the lost or MIA stories featured below won't be grating Gemma, in full grater mode with this splash...

It's the use of "pseudo" that particularly grates, together with the notion that a discussion about Gaza necessarily involves championing Hamas, as anyone outside the lizard Oz would realise. 

Sure grating Gemma is yet more evidence that the bias in the reptile hive mind noted in that Media Watch story continues to grow like the plague that infested the alternative world in the TV miniseries The Last of Us (wasn't Anna Torv a dinkum scene stealer, though kudos to Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey too).

What's going down involves two bunches of fundamentalist bigots, with both wanting to do genocide, but only with with the equipment and the person power to do it, and they're moving fast with collective punishment and collective displacement and collective murder...

Merav Leshem-Gonen, the mother of Romi Gonen, a hostage, called the gathering “shocking.”
“Deporting another ethnic group – isn’t that what was done to us in Europe? Are we not here to discuss antisemitism, are we not here to be better?” Leshem-Gonen said, according to The Jerusalem Post.(Daily Beast paywall)

Anyone except garrulous Gemma, with an empathy gene the size of a pinhead, would appreciate the humanitarian crisis currently doing down is a disaster of the first water. 

On the weekend, the pond was reading Mosab Abu Toha's piece for The New Yorker, My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza, (paywall), with the lede In my homeland, where we used to cook and celebrate together, my relatives are eating animal feed to keep from starving.

As the pond has rabbited on endlessly about the crisis, just a few samples ...

In December, a U.N. report said that ninety-three per cent of Gaza residents—more than two million people—were experiencing crisis levels of food insecurity, or worse. “In Gaza, pretty much everybody is hungry,” Arif Husain, the chief economist at the U.N. World Food Program (W.F.P.), told The New Yorker in January. To meet the need, aid groups would need to triple or quadruple the flow of supplies into Gaza, he said—something that seemed possible only with a humanitarian ceasefire. “In my life, I’ve never seen anything like this,” Husain said. After that, Hamza sent me a video of our parents, who are staying in the Jabalia refugee camp with some relatives. My mother was sorting out clean grains from a dirty pile of rice. Apparently, someone had salvaged it and sold it to my family at the market.
On February 9th, Hamza sent me a WhatsApp voice message. He had succeeded in buying three kilograms, or six and a half pounds, of wheat flour on the black market. It had cost him a staggering forty U.S. dollars, he said, and would probably run out quickly. Still, there was a note of triumph in his voice.
Three days later, on social media, Hamza posted a photograph of what he was eating that day: a ragged brown morsel, seared black on one side and flecked with grainy bits. “This is the wondrous thing we call ‘bread’—a mixture of rabbit, donkey, and pigeon feed,” Hamza wrote in Arabic. “There is nothing good about it except that it fills our bellies. It is impossible to stuff it with other foods, or even break it except by biting down hard with one’s teeth.”

The New Yorker even provided an example, which looks better than the grass and weeds some have reportedly been turning into a useless broth, but still somebody should post a sample to grating Gemma ...

And again ...

...U.N. agencies no longer dare to send aid trucks north. In early February, CNN reported that Israeli forces had fired on an unrwa food truck in central Gaza, prompting the agency to halt deliveries to the north. Last weekend, the W.F.P. resumed its own deliveries, but desperate people crowded its trucks; later, people took food and beat one of its drivers. Its convoys have now been halted again for safety reasons. “The decision to pause deliveries to the north of the Gaza Strip has not been taken lightly, as we know it means the situation there will deteriorate further and more people risk dying of hunger,” the W.F.P. said. “Gaza is hanging by a thread.”

So the pond won't be catching up with gormless garrulous Gemma, a maroon with the empathy and class of your average dung beetle, wallowing in humanity's ability to turn everything to manure ...

Instead the pond will turn to the swishing Switzer, a lickspittle lackey, toadie and useful idiot of a kind matching even Tuckyo Rose himself ... with the splash hinting at what was to come ... how to kow tow to a  sociopathic dictator and blame the victim ...

The pond has such a profound contempt for Switzer (and the ABC for giving him a platform for nine years) that some days the pond imitates a cartoon character, going red in the face and eyes popping out with comical sound effect. This was one of those days ...

For a moment, the pond thought it was a fiendishly clever and cunning plot by the reptiles to make the pond think that the bromancer was an astute observer of world affairs.

You now like the swishing Switzer's talk of the invasion starting two years ago, when Vlad the sociopathic impaler invaded and annexed Crimea way back in 2014, and then conducted low level warfare,  partly by proxies,  in other parts of Ukraine in the following years ...

And what the swishing Switzer means by blather about "broader historical context" is "how many ways can I kiss Vlad the impaler's arse?" 

As if getting the pond in a rage about a couple of US warmongers would do the trick ...

Of course the art of the lickspittle is always to start with a billy goat butt, this time in the form of "That does not justify Russia's brutal assault..."

Your average lickspittle, and Switzer is astonishingly average, will then set about proving how right it was for the deeply wounded, hurt and injured sociopath to stage a brutal assault ...

This involves listening to a version of history much like Tuckyo Rose endured in his two hour insight into the mind of a rambling weirdo dictator ... (don't forget to fornicate with a loaf of sourdough bread while doing the history) ...

There is of course a profound irony in Vlad's efforts resulting in a much expanded NATO with a much longer border between it and Russia ... but before carrying on, best get some more snaps out of the way ...

Spoiler alert, there's a reason the mango Mussolini is mixed up in that lot ... the swishing Switzer is something of a tangerine tyrant lover ... but it'll take a little more of the slavish following of the victimhood of Vlad the impaler to get there ...

What a maroon, and to paraphrase Jon Stewart, what a dick.

No need to drag Godwin's Law into it. There was a reason the Russians sent in a row of tanks, lined up on the road like the ducks at a Tamworth show shooting gallery.

They thought it would be a doddle, as noted in this review of 2022 ...

When Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he was expecting a quick and decisive victory that would cement his place in Russian history and reverse the verdict of 1991 by extinguishing Ukrainian independence once and for all. Instead, the year draws to a close with his army demoralized by successive defeats and Russia’s reputation as a military superpower in tatters.

In the first days of the invasion, it soon became clear that things were not going according to plan. Far from greeting Russian troops as liberators, the Ukrainian nation rose up in defiance. Kremlin intelligence forecasts predicting the rapid collapse of the Ukrainian military also proved wildly inaccurate. On the contrary, Ukrainian forces fought back with unexpected skill and ferocity, leading to catastrophic Russian losses.

By the end of March, Russia had conceded defeat in the Battle of Kyiv and withdrawn entirely from northern Ukraine. Putin responded to this setback by regrouping his decimated forces in eastern Ukraine and concentrating on completing the occupation of the Donbas region. Despite initial success due to Russia’s overwhelming artillery advantage, this offensive had largely stalled by midsummer with the initiative passing to Ukraine...

As any fuel would kno apart from this prize maroon, Putin's advisors thought it would be a doddle and then it turned out not to be and now we have a war of attrition because he doesn't care how many people he kills in his grandiose plan to revive the Soviet empire ... but when you're in the company of a lickspittle Putin patsy, expect Vlad the impaler lines to splutter into the ether worse than a glazed Tuckyo staring off into the void ...

Oh for FFS, a sociopathic dictator's megalomania is now "Russian strategic sensibilities"?

Then came the Donald, the understander of banal truths ...

What, no mention of the Soviet ill-timed war in Afghanistan?No mention of the occupation of Transnistria? No mention of the 1990s Abkhazian war? No mention of the war on the Chechens? No mention of the invasion of Georgia? No mention of the intervention in Syria? 

Maybe Vlad should understand the need for real limits on power and influence ...

Europeans have a better, decidedly uncomfortable, idea of what to expect, and the one time they really needed the US, the GOP isolationists are intent on deserting them, not withstanding the way that the US led their allies into assorted follies, including Iraq and Afghanistan ...

So the simpering, appeasing Switzer is a Josh Hawley J. D. Vance kind of guy ... except when it comes to China, and then you can toss all that blather about restraint out the window ...

That line about the mango Mussolini was irresistible, much like Vlad the impaler trolling that he'd much prefer Jolly Joe as president (the pond has money riding on the revelations about Russian intelligence actively campaigning for Joe).

Actually the US don't have any blood involved in Ukraine (apart from a few wild card actors) and the treasure is minuscule up against the amount spent on the military ... but in the company of a quisling, always carry a white flag, dressed up as "restraint" ...

And there you go Europeans. Don't look to the swishing Switzer for help should Vlad come knocking. You're not important, instead we should join with the bromancer and have a war with China by Xmas....

What a self-interested dick he is, and what a cunning ploy by the reptiles to suggest that Tuckyo is a statesman worth emulating ...

And so to some relief after that irritating surrender monkey.

Even casual observers will have noted that the pond is inclined to atheism. 

Not in your face atheism, so much as the live and let live kind, if it weren't for the way that Xian missionaries keep up the proselytising, and the demonising of harmless minorities and the urging of Xian white nationalism on the world ...

So it's always a joy when the reptiles have a memory lapse ... and it came in this form ...

What's notable about this? Well for starters it implies in the header that there's something to the #MeToo movement and people revealing their #MeToo moments ...

In itself, that'd send Dame Slap into hysterics ...

And Hillsong was also in the header, the Elmer Gantry of our times, though sicker than anything Elmer ever dreamed about ... so the pond was hooked.

It's long, "Ned" length, but it was by David Hardaker, whom the pond would once have associated with the ABC, so it was another deviation from the usual reptile path ...

The pond isn't going to comment on the cult, or the assorted grifters and victims featured in snaps ...

About all that needs to be said is what a remarkably common thing this sort of thing is for cults ...

But the pond must maintain focus ...

You need cultists to fight a cult? Might it not be better to avoid all cults? Never mind, do carry on ...

What's alarming is the way that the cultists don't just stop at women. 

One is very close to the presidency of the United States ...The 'Profound Influence' of Christian Extremists on Mike Johnson ... (Daily Beast paywall)

Luckily Hardaker stays on the track of the local cult ...

Of course the pond was shattered when it discovered long ago that an Australian was behind some of the more egregious nonsense and was in thick with Mike Johnson ... Jeffrey Goldberg, "Were There Dinosaurs on Noah's Ark? (The Atlantic paywall).

It's truly, deeply weird and there are illustrations (a blog review of the book of the film of the creationist bible) ...

There goes the pond, wandering off again, when the Hillsong saga should be more than enough ...

There were more snaps of the cult in action ...

It was perhaps wrong of the pond to compress them while expanding that snap of the dinosaurs on the Ark, but hey, he is pretty close to the Presidency and a few deaths at the hand of his god would give him the gig ...

Meanwhile, the pond supposes it could have run snaps taken from The Handmaid's Tale ...

But the reality's bad enough in the cult ...

This will be familiar to followers of the fall-out surrounding the cult, but it's a tale worth telling again as a warning ...

Ah yes ... a never ending story ...

But sadly there were just two gobbets to go ...

A healthy cult? As if, but the pond did wonder how all this came about, not the cult bit, but the reptiles suddenly going all #MeToo and running a piece bagging the cult ... and at the end it became clear ...

It had nothing to do with the reptiles. Even the Chairman Emeritus had sold off the publishers Allen & Unwin ...

This was an actual journalist doing journalism and if the lizard Oz was willing to promote his story of the cult, he was happy to go along ... and so this can also be considered a plug for the book, out 27th February through Allen & Unwin ...

Sadly the chances of the pond plugging a story in the lizard Oz about a currently very active US cult is between zero and nil ...