In which the pond stages a revolt and leaves correspondents to their own devices ...

 

The pond is revolting ...

Oops, after taking some advice from George Orwell, perhaps the pond should re-phrase it to make clear that the pond has a full gut and is indulging in a day's abstinence. 

Perhaps the pond didn't make that clear enough ... not sex, nor eating, but consumption of reptiles (and having tasted crocodile the pond realises it's not missing much).

Enough of the reptile stew already. Just look at what's on offer at the top of the digital edition...

There was Dame Slap back to her old tricks in Lehrmann-related matters, and there was a smirking Chambers, gloating at the way that years of News Corp assaults had left Albo bloodied ... though strangely none of the reptiles launched the obvious attack, because it would have seen them on the side of the woke ...

Down below it was the same story ... and the gruel on offer helped explain why the pond was revolting...

You see? 

No Dame Groan, she was last sighted on 22nd April and no Mein Gott, he was last sighted on 26th April. What about a return from the dad by Lloydie of the Amazon? Nah, he was last sighted on 12th April! Even worse, the Riddster of the IPA last made an appearance on 21st March. 

The Bjorn-again one wasn't much better, with his last appearance back on April 13, with a couple of companions and with a snap of Melania as the opening image ...

The pond confesses it overlooked this offering on a simple basis ...

As for what was actually on offer, what depressing offerings they were ...with just six slots and one of them taken up loading the same bullet in the same Chambers and the lizard Oz editorialist chambering the same round about the honey moon being over, and blather about TG in a way invariably coloured by transphobia, and ancient Troy almost taking the cake by talking of the liar from the Shire's "honesty".

Almost, because the bromancer took most of the cake by blathering on about Islamic terrorism using the faux word "Islamist".

The pond is tired of noting that the bromancer is a fundamentalist Catholic bigot, and that there's currently a genocide in Gaza going down ...

This is where the pond baulked and refused to leave the stables ...

There is a philosophy, Catholic integralism, that similarly argues that the state should be explicitly subservient to Catholic teaching. None of its tiny number of adherents proposes violence to achieve its aims.

When you think about the number of regimes who've indulged in violence to achieve their aims, and with the blessing of the Catholic church, you'll understand why the pond decided to leave the room.

During the dictatorship, chaplain Christian von Wernich was convicted of complicity in 7 homicides, 42 kidnappings, and 32 instances of torture. Some Catholic priests supported the Montoneros, with figures like Father Alberto Carbone preaching Marxism. Juan Ignacio Isla Casares, a Catholic youth leader, orchestrated the ambush and killing of five policemen with Montoneros' help near San Isidro Cathedral in 1975. (wiki)

This was the bromancer capper ...

I’ve never heard any serious objection to the term “Catholic pedophile priests” when describing those monstrous priests, surely the tiniest minority of Catholics you can imagine, who, against all Catholic teaching, abused children. Identifying a white supremacist group doesn’t imply most whites are racial suprema­cists.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, ­George Orwell’s hero Winston Smith claims the ultimate freedom is to say that two plus two is four. Every day British politicians recite the mantra that Islam is a religion of peace. These many pronouncements haven’t stopped terrorism. There is no good policy that proceeds from a refusal to tell the truth. Islamist terror is Islamist terror.

And fundamentalist Catholic bigots are eternally bigots, but the point?

Okay, okay, the pond stopped short of demanding that News Corp be named a terrorist organisation, and all the scribblers for the lizard Oz be tagged as terrorists, as dangerous as explaining how to make a bomb out of agricultural fertilizer, but it was tempting...

The pond should note that the bromancer was MID at Crikey in a piece by Tim Moore about appalling Sky News headlines (paywall) ...

One throws up one’s hands in despair at the daily Murdoch harangues on our devices, particularly via the reporting of its outlet Sky News, where “Disgrace” is a common epithet. This week, Sky News ran the headline “‘Disgraceful’: Labor’s defence announcement sees ‘no effective increase’ in expenditure”; the previous week, it headlined an article about the government’s appointment of an investigation into the World Central Kitchen deaths as “Labor’s reaction to Australian aid worker’s death was ‘disgraceful’”.  

Well, yes, and the pond has been trained each day to imbibe each day at least one column explaining how we'll all be rooned. The pond is inclined to depression, but a dose of the reptiles always produces a half glass full response. We might all be rooned, but at the moment the pond isn't eating grass in Gaza.

Never mind, then came the capper ...

...the Sky News headlines — those about Labor’s “disgrace” — have almost none of these.  Notably absent is any attribution. In fact the only way of knowing these are reported statements is the minimal use of direct quotation. Otherwise, the constructions stand as bald, fact-like and damning statements about government actions.

It is depressing and unsurprising to learn that, in both cases, the “disgrace” quote comes not from any actual player in the events but from untiring Labor critic and resident News Corp belligerent Greg Sheridan. The occasion of the uttering wasn’t a press conference or other significant political event either; it stemmed from a chat between Sheridan and Sky host Andrew Bolt. Thus, characteristic Sheridan rants on Sky in the evening are turned into “hard news” headlines for consumption the next morning. Without shame, the line between news and opinion vanishes.

Without shame, though of course it's shameful to expect any shame. If the bromancer ever experiences any shame, he's adept at hiding it behind all those exclamations of "this is nuts..."

The only other column below the fold was a whinge about the census, coming from a certain gentleman...

The ABS appears to be seeking to weaken the accuracy of one of these measures by changing the census question about faith. The most significant change is the removal of tick box options for people who wish to record their religion.

The proposed question “Does the person have a religion?” can be answered by a tick box for “No” but there is no box for “Yes”.

Instead, the “No” tick box is followed by a space where a person can write in their religion. The write-in-only option is an unwarranted complication for people who wish to record their religion. It will result in a greater number invalid, indecipherable or ambiguous responses. The current practice of maintaining a listed order of tick boxes for the eight largest religious groups determined by counts from the previous census is a consistent approach that ensures data efficiency and accuracy.

It's what you'd expect in the Catholic Boys' Daily - apparently the faithful flock are too lazy to scribble their religion in the space provided.

The pond made the mistake of plunging in because it hadn't realised who this """ Timothy Costelloe was ... only to discover ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, that's an unfortunate look for a frock wearer, but it's something for the pond's sandgroper reader ... as the point of the extended whine became clear. Gotta keep up the numbers so the Ponzi scheme would keep on working ...

The census has been, and must continue to be, a comprehensive and accurate tool for supporting services and activities provided by religious groups and government to meet Australians’ needs. The Catholic Church is deeply concerned about the significant effects the reformulation will have on the data collected and calls on the government to reconsider its proposed changes for 2026.

Archbishop of Perth Timothy Costelloe is president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.

And yet, with luck, the numbers will continue to fall ... thanks to the ones too lazy to scribble in the census form "barking mad fundamentalist DLP voter, lizard Oz reader and bromancer lover ..." or perhaps just "tyke", spending a little time here before enjoying all the pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye.

But the pond is anxious that correspondents keep corresponding, and so would like this to be considered an open day.

From the pond's reading, Tracy Connor offered this in the Daily Beast (paywall) about the guv who apparently failed to watch the John Wick movie, which carefully explained how you can do pretty much anything, except hurt a car or shoot a dog ...

She really is that evil

There are plenty of ways to deal with an aggressive puppy: Hire a trainer. Return the dog to the breeder. Drop it off at a rescue. Only someone with very little heart or soul would instead drag the poor creature to a gravel pit and shoot it in cold blood, and then brag about it in their book. Also, who “hates” a dog—except Cruella de Vil?

She really is that dumb

Is it possible that Noem actually thinks killing Cricket was the right thing to do—and that everyone else would agree with her? Well, if she is anything like her hero Donald Trump and surrounds herself with sycophants, the answer might very well be yes! Political pundit Mickey Kaus says he heard that Noem used to love telling the story of Cricket’s violent end, even though people warned her she should stop because it was so disturbing. She apparently thought she knew better, which is pretty stupid.

She really wants to sell some books

Look, even if you’re getting discounts on your veneers by flacking for the dentist on social media, it never hurts to have more money. And instead of apologizing for killing Cricket when that part of the book was revealed, Noem used it to urge people to preorder for more “politically incorrect” stories. Unfortunately for her, she may have doomed her chances of more than doubling her $121,000 governor’s salary as veep.

She really didn’t want to be veep

Let’s face it: Being Trump’s No. 2 is the worst job in the world. Just ask Mike Pence. While Noem has been auditioning for the job with all the zeal of an Apprentice contestant for years—remember the mini-Mount Rushmore with Trump on it that she gifted him?—it’s possible she’s gotten cold feet. You’d think that being banned by the tribal lands in your home state might disqualify you, but maybe Kristi didn’t want to take the chance of being Trump’s whipping girl for four years.

While at the Beast, courtesy of Justin Barargona, the pond caught up on various riffs defending the guv, (paywall), including 

...former Fox News Radio host Todd Starnes may have had the most ridiculous defense of the MAGA governor. He pulled out an oldie but goodie from the 2010s era of conservative media outrage.

“Obama ate a dog. Now, what were you saying about @KristiNoem?” Starnes snarked.

Also at the Beast, and in the absence of trial proceedings, the pond caught this item (paywall) ...

Far-right cable news network One America News apologized to Donald Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen Monday after retracting a report that suggested he—rather than Trump himself—had been the one who carried out an affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels.

The affair in question, and a subsequent hush-money payout to Daniels orchestrated by Trump and Cohen, is at the center of Trump’s first criminal trial, which opened two weeks ago in New York City.

Advertisement

“OAN today has retracted its March 27 article entitled “Whistleblower: Avenatti Alleged Cohen­ Daniels Affair Since 2006, Pre-2016 Trump Extortion Plan,” and is taking it down from all sites and removing it from all social media,” a note from the network reads. “This retraction is part of a settlement reached with Michael Cohen. Mr. Avenatti has denied making the allegations. OAN apologizes to Mr. Cohen for any harm the publication may have caused him.

“The article, quoting a source, falsely claimed that Mr. Cohen and Ms. Daniels “were having an affair since 2006” and that, according to a source, ‘the whole hush money scheme was cooked up by [Mr. Cohen] to extort the Trump Organization before the 2016 election.’ These statements were false. OAN regrets their publication.”

And so on. It's just another part of the circus, what with the clown Avenatti trying to alleviate the boredom of being in the clink by doing a reverse pike for the orange Jesus ...

Speaking of the Murdochians and the Beast (paywall), there was also this ...

According to the letter, a detailed 14-page missive that Biden’s counsel sent to Fox Corporation on April 23, the right-wing network has engaged in a years-long conspiracy to defame the president’s son in the name of profit.
The notice demands that Fox News—whose obsessive coverage has mentioned Hunter Biden more than 13,000 times in the last four months alone—take immediate steps to remedy scads of coverage over the last five years that Biden’s attorneys say has falsely maligned him.
They specifically mention hundreds of articles and broadcast segments based on now-debunked bribery allegations from an indicted FBI informant, a fictional mock-trial series, and the promulgation and exploitation of racy images of Biden which, according to the letter, violate laws against “revenge porn.”
“While routinely defaming and disparaging Mr. Biden, FOX has simultaneously sought to profit by the unlawful exploitation of Mr. Biden’s image, name, and likeness for commercial purposes and reprehensible dissemination of salacious photographs depicting Mr. Biden,” the letter states.
It further warns that “FOX’s failure to expeditiously comply with the foregoing removal demands will subject FOX to significant liability for its continued and blatant copyright infringement,” as well as potential damages for defamation.
Attorneys for Biden told The Daily Beast on Monday that they have not heard from the network since the letter was delivered last week and are prepared to file a lawsuit shortly.
“For the last five years, Fox News has relentlessly attacked Hunter Biden and made him a caricature in order to boost ratings and for its financial gain. The recent indictment of FBI informant [Alexander] Smirnov has exposed the conspiracy of disinformation that has been fueled by Fox, enabled by their paid agents and monetized by the Fox enterprise,” Biden’s counsel told The Daily Beast in a statement. “We plan on holding them accountable.”
Fox News didn’t immediately return The Daily Beast’s request for comment.

Could there be another round of high comedy, and even a settlement?

Meanwhile, last night, while browsing, the pond caught the departure of Humza Yousaf, who refused to take questions and whose departure sent TalkTV types into a frenzy of delight ... except that the pond had read Alexandra Topping in The Graudian about them both being topped, in GB News won its battle with TalkTV but both face uncertain future...

In April 2021, the boss of the Murdoch-owned News UK, Rebekah Brooks, wrote in an internal letter that “it was not commercially viable” to launch a traditional news channel. Then, in April 2022, the company launched TalkTV.
As it closes and moves online on Monday, after a reported loss of at least £90m since it launched, those backing its main rival, GB News, may look on the TV channel’s demise with glee. But experts argue that the move marks a moment of reckoning for the broadcasting upstarts – and the future of both hangs in the balance.
Talk – TV has been dropped from its name for the move online – has promised “a refreshed lineup of no-nonsense presenters at the home of common sense” on YouTube, connected TVs and via the Talk website and app. But its spring schedule does not include Piers Morgan, who announced in February he was leaving his daily evening show to focus on the Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube channel. It will also be without Vanessa Feltz, who will be replaced by Jeremy Kyle, or Sharon Osbourne, who has not been on screen since the end of September last year...

Forgive the pond for doing a spoiler, and jumping to the end, but that's the most delicious bit...

...GB News, backed by the hedge fund boss Paul Marshall and the Dubai-based investment company Legatum, recorded operating losses of £42.4m in its most recent accounts, a 38% increase on the year before. That takes reported losses since its launch in June 2021 to £76m; last week, the former GB News chair Andrew Neil said GB News could never be profitable on its current path.
“Even a guy like Marshall won’t want to wear those losses every year.,” said the media analyst Alex DeGroote.

The losses also risk undermining the political influence of a broadcaster that has paid Conservative MPs, including high-profile presenters such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, more than £660,000 in appearance fees and salaries since it launched, he said. “At what point does the influence tail off because the world and his wife knows that you’re haemorrhaging cash?”
Locking itself to a larger media player – perhaps a “fairly conservative old newspaper business” – may be the most sensible path towards security, he added, noting Marshall’s decision on Friday to stand down from GB News’s board, perhaps to allay fears around plurality in advance of a likely bid to buy the Telegraph.
Meanwhile, its erstwhile rival is publicly bullish – News UK’s Brooks has consistently stated the company is planning to build for a future of “delivery of news and views … via streamed and online video”. For some media experts, however, TalkTV is now on a path of managed decline.
I just wonder whether it’ll be kind of quietly packed away within the next couple of years and allowed to die a dignified death,” said Barnet

Dignified? 

Do what any dinkum guv would do, take it out to a gravel pit and shoot it, and if you happen to miss, and leave the animal wounded, make sure that you don't have a spare bullet to hand, take time to go get another one so that the animal can suffer a little more ...

You can of course be kind, like the cracking Crace in Humza Yousaf’s unravelling tenure shows how short and brutish political lives have become.

Perhaps things will get better when the trial resumes, but the domestic reptiles have steadfastly refused to engage and Benjamin Wallace-Wells refused to get excited in The New Yorker in Donald Trump's Sleepy, Sleazy Criminal Trial ... (possible paywall)

..For those who are paying attention, this trial is shaping up to be an interestingly sleazy spectacle. The case hinges on whether Trump illegally interfered with the 2016 Presidential election by paying the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels not to reveal publicly that she and Trump had had sex, and by conspiring to have the National Enquirer family of tabloids buy off potentially damaging accusers before their stories were publicized. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and current antagonist, and an emotionally operatic presence, will testify; so will Daniels, a cooler customer. The first witness was David Pecker, the former C.E.O. of National Enquirer’s parent company, who described a meeting in August, 2015, at which he, Trump, and Cohen had discussed how he might “help” Trump’s campaign. Pecker said that he had promised to publish positive stories about the billionaire and negative ones about his opponents, and to be “your eyes and ears.”
By Pecker’s account, his magazines paid thirty thousand dollars to a former doorman at Trump Tower, to keep quiet about a hard-to-credit story that the Presidential candidate had fathered a secret child with a maid, and a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to a Playboy model named Karen McDougal, to not go public with her more convincing account of a nine-month affair with Trump. (Trump denies all the affairs and any wrongdoing.) “The boss will take care of it,” Pecker said Cohen told him, but, when Trump was slow to reimburse him, the tabloid king refused to act as an intermediary in the effort to buy off Stormy Daniels, leading Cohen to approach her directly. Shortly before the Inauguration, Pecker said, the President-elect invited him to a meeting at Trump Tower—with the soon to be Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chair; and James Comey, the F.B.I. director—where Trump thanked Pecker for all he’d done. The two worlds that Trump has defined, of tabloid manipulation and of Republican politics, were thus fully intertwined.
These elements—adulterous sex, secret payoffs, a Presidential candidate facing thirty-four felony counts—could make for a trial of the century, but, because much of this story has already appeared in investigative reports, including by The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow, and in congressional testimony, it is missing a crucial ingredient: surprise. Some liberal pundits have wondered whether bringing the case was worthwhile. “I have a hard time mustering even a ‘meh,’ ” the election-law scholar Rick Hasen wrote in the Los Angeles Times, noting the potential for political backlash and the higher-stakes cases to come. (Those cases may become slightly narrower—last week, the Supreme Court seemed receptive to Trump’s arguments that some of the actions for which he has been charged are protected by Presidential immunity.) But the hush-money case is one in which a Presidential candidate is accused of using his wealth to make his election likelier, and whether he committed crimes is a question worth pursuing, especially in the minds of voters who say they wouldn’t vote for a felon. (That’s sixty per cent of independents and a quarter of Republicans, according to a Reuters/Ipsos survey.) The sleepy scene at the courthouse doesn’t suggest a pro-Trump mob so much as a dawning truth: that, for the first time in a decade, Trump is struggling to command attention.
Even in Manhattan, the action is elsewhere. A few miles uptown, at Columbia University, the student protests over Israel’s war in Gaza have drawn international attention, and provoked a media frenzy that has overshadowed Trump’s trial. (The coverage of the protests, a little bizarrely, has also crowded out news from the actual war.) With polls showing the Presidential race essentially tied, Biden might prefer to run against the omnipresent Trump of the 2020 election cycle, whose lies and threats were easier to get people to notice. The dynamic of the trial could carry over to the election: Trump is diminishing, but the public is tuned out, because everyone already knows exactly who he is.

Never underestimate the ability of the American media to get distracted, especially as none of them happen to be eating grass in Gaza.

But in this Seinfeldian day of revolt, the pond would like to end on an up note and that was provided by the keen Keane in Crikey, who came up with an absolutely spiffing idea ...

A nuclear solution for Dutton: You get a reactor! And YOU get a reactor! Everyone gets a reactor!, Rather than bribing a few voters to have a large nuclear reactor next to them, why not put small modular reactors in every single electorate? It's only fair.

The pond has been pushing this idea for months, and has even cleared a little space in the back yard, though it must be admitted that talks with the neighbours about enhancing the size of the local grid are proceeding at a snail's pace.

Even so, please allow the keen Keane to pitch his proposal ...

...forget only putting a reactor in six electorates — put one in every electorate. It would be much fairer than subjecting only a handful of voters to bearing the costs of the net zero transition by having a nuclear reactor nearby. This, surely, is the benefit of SMRs — they can be put where energy users are rather than at locations that will require extensive and expensive transmission lines.
Dutton’s pitch to voters would be simple: 151 SMRs across the country. Some electorates could even have two or three, depending on the energy use there, but everyone would get a reactor nearby. Instead of reactors in Gippsland, and the Hunter Valley and Gladstone, there’d be a reactor in Sutherland and Penrith and dotted across the outer western suburbs of Sydney, and one in Frankston and Belgrave and the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, and one in Ipswich and Fortitude Valley in Queensland and right up the coast, and reactors across Adelaide and liberally scattered over Perth and five of them in Tasmania.
Most Australians would not need to be more than a few kilometres from a nuclear reactor; only people living in regional communities would live some distance from one — unless they got two or three of them. By leveraging off the advantages of SMRs, this is the sensible and fair solution to the Coalition’s problem that people don’t want a possible nuclear accident down the road. Everyone shares the burden equally.
And if there’s a safety incident with your local SMR, they’re only little, so the radiation would only affect a few square kilometres of a major city or suburb. We’re not talking Chernobyl here. Evacuate the schools and the hospitals, tell people to leave their homes for a few days, close the businesses for a couple of weeks, distribute the iodine pills — it’s a small price to pay for the transition to net zero. The kids might even enjoy the holiday while their school is scrubbed clean of radioactive particles.
You know it makes sense. But does Peter Dutton?

Exactly, the pond is on board, has the space in the yard, and is raring to go and is appalled at the way that Captain Spud and his team have gone limp dick about it all. 

So for that matter have the reptiles, and that's the reason this day there is no mention of nuking the country to save the planet in the pond... (except of course if you're a pedant, you might consider this a mention, but the larger point is that no columnist is to hand in the lizard Oz, and a passing mention by the Caterist yesterday doesn't count).

All that's left then is to revisit ancient Troy's celebration of the liar from the Shire, with the immortal Rowe taking up his talking point with an Albo twist... (trust the pond, even while in the grip of depression, there's no reason to be a liar or a pusher of pie in the sky in the bye and bye).

Talk about a haunting, with those faces in the mirror, but as always, the pond was drawn to the detail and the sort of make-up needed these days ...

Moving along, the pond has a triptych of reptiles as a way of easing into the week ...

 Viggo Tarasov: I heard you struck my son.
Aurelio: Yes, sir, I did.
Viggo Tarasov: And may I ask why?
Aurelio: Yeah, well, because he stole John Wick's car, sir, and, uh, killed his dog.
Viggo Tarasov: [pause] Oh.

Iosef Tarasov: [to John Wick in Russian] It was just a fucking...
[gets shot dead, then sounds of crickets]

Moving along, fun with moggies ...

...Somerset constituents hoping for a glimpse of the Rt Hon Jacob can be confident of seeing him four nights a week on telly, a deal paying over £29,000 a month. A top theme, last week, was underage drinking in the UK, the World Health Organization’s concern allowing him to advocate, reflexively, giving kids the occasional “sip of champagne”. “Oh, and it has biblical sanction,” said Rees-Mogg, showing he’s lost none of the playful sanctimony that once beguiled the BBC. “After all, Jesus Christ our lord and saviour turned water into wine, not orange juice, soy milk, or any other beverage without alcohol in it.”
Why would anyone, recalling Jesus Christ’s recommendations on hypocrisy, whited sepulchres, who “enlarge the borders of their garments”, not at this point switch him off, if only out of piety?...

Moving along, Camilla Long contributed this to The Sunday Times, faithfully reproduced by the lizard Oz: After the soap opera of #MeToo, this would be the unhappiest ending. A hundred and seven women said Harvey Weinstein had harassed them, assaulted them or raped them, so why was he only convicted of three – and now just one? It’s not simply a failure of the justice system. It’s because, right from the start, ordinary people saw the MeToo movement for what it was: Tinseltown rubbish.

Is it wrong of the pond to suggest that her editor demand a blow job before she's allowed to write her next column?

Moving along, how many reptiles does it take to put together this sort of story?

Albo’s cricket team of spinners. How many media advisers does it take to shape the narrative of a prime ministership? Eleven, apparently.

Two, apparently, because without tag-teaming reptiles, one would get afraid in the dark.

Moving along, rugby league was once a working class game with working class values, and working class strength, but not anymore. It is woke and it is broke. Anyone for a brawl out the back of Maguires?

Moving along, today is a quiet day on the pond, with just a staple diet of the usual offerings. 

After the excesses of the weekend, it's time to ease into the week ... and the moment the pond saw what was below the fold, the pond knew what had to be done ...

Jimbo of the deep north. How could anyone resist? And naturally after the hors doovers, there'd be a Caterist to follow ...

Open access? Jimbo's trumpeting open access from behind a paywall?

Never mind, there was a snap to go with the opening gobbet ...

And here the pond must record a disadvantage. The pond has never used Twitter, X if you will, and Y? Not interested, never have been, never will be.

The pond always thought putting ideas into 140 characters or less (280 in later times) verged on the moronic.

So the pond has to rely on hearsay, with the only tweets the pond encounters usually embedded in other stories.

There, for example, was Kate Lyons scribbling in The Graudian, The demise of Twitter: how a 'utopian vision' for social media became a 'toxic mess':

It was “a breakthrough moment” for the platform, says Axel Bruns, professor in the digital media research centre at Queensland University of Technology.

“That really was the moment where numbers absolutely took off.”

These days, Oprah still has an account on the now-renamed X, with 41.7m followers. But since November 2022, a month after Elon Musk’s acquisition of the site was finalised, she has posted just once – in January 2023, when she told Chelsea Clinton she was “still laughing out LoUD for real 😂” over Clinton accidentally wearing two different black shoes to an event.

That's a breakthrough moment?

Nonetheless, the pond must bow to the superior vision of Jimbo, at one with the petulant man boy with not so crypto fascist leanings ...

The trouble of course is the notion that the man child narcissist is actually interested in "true" information, whatever that might be ...

A little further down Lyons scribbled ...

...The trust and safety teams were among those fired by Musk in the wild weeks after he acquired the company for US$44bn and walked into the headquarters on his first day holding a ceramic sink. A video of Musk’s entrance was posted to the site with the caption: “Let that sink in”.

Many of those who had been blocked from the site for breaching its online rules, including Donald Trump, had their accounts reinstated (though Trump’s account was later blocked again).

The verification process changed dramatically. Instead of people being granted blue ticks because they were a public figure or worked for a recognised news site, ticks were now available for purchase.

The approach to moderation also changed. Musk’s spat with the Australian government reveals something about his vision for X, which he sees as a bastion of free speech.

They’re very reluctant to engage in any kind of moderation,” says Bruns. “To some extent that represents a broader sense in the US about free speech that it is an absolute good above all. Whereas elsewhere in Australia and Europe and many other places there’s much more about needing to balance the rights of free speech and the right to freedom from harmful speech. And for many otherwise quite liberal people in the US, that sounds like censorship, essentially.”

Ironically, X has suspended accounts of people who have criticised Musk, including the accounts of several high-profile journalists from CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post who had been critical of him in 2022. At the same time, he banned an account tracking the whereabouts of his own personal jet using publicly available data.

“Elon wants it both ways,” says Barnet. “He wants it to be the original Twitter, which was indeed, absolutely crucial to the news cycle”, but also to “take away the pillars, the processes that Twitter had worked out over years and years are what is conducive to a community that can find facts.”

“I think it’s turning into a toxic mess,” says Barnet.

And there's the rub. Uncle Elon isn't that interested in "true" information, he's interested in what rocks his boat ... and the bigger the shit storm the better...

Oh sheesh, not the Covid thing. Will that ever get tired or must we all become RFK Jr warriors? Still, it's heartening to know that Jimbo of the deep north actually believes in censorship, it's just that he should be the censor, and the subjects should be of his choosing ...

At this point, the reptiles interrupted with a snap of a demonic, terrifying, witch-like figure, looming like an image from 1984 ...

And then it was on to a very short final gobbet from the deep north, and oh sheesh, not the Voice thingie too...

Meanwhile, back with Lyons for her wrap ...

Research from Pew found that in the first few months after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, 60% of US Twitter users took a break of a few weeks or more from the platform. A quarter of those surveyed said they did not see themselves using the site at all within a year.

Even the most prolific tweeters were using the platform less, with a 25% dip in the number of tweets they posted per month.

Whether the trend has continued is a harder question to answer, in part because under Musk, it has become prohibitively expensive for researchers studying social media to keep up their work.

For many years, Twitter made application programming interfaces (APIs) available to academic researchers and private sector organisations for a price. About a year ago, the cost to access these APIs skyrocketed.

Aaron Smith, director of data labs at Pew, says that his centre has developed a “fairly rich body of work” on Twitter over many years, but since the prices for accessing tweets increased – he says the annual fee to access the API is now “larger than our team’s entire research budget for a couple of years” – they have not been able to do any more research about the platform.

Bruns says academics are in the same boat. “You just can’t do any particularly explorative research, looking for hate speech bots or misinformation on the platform. Essentially, [X] pretty much priced themselves out of the market.”

He says this is a shame, as academic research on Twitter used to enable the platform to identify and clean up pockets of hate speech and misinformation, which will now go even more unchecked.

“It’s certainly already starting to transform into something that’s more similar to … platforms like Gab or Parler, or even [Trump’s] Truth Social where you’ve got far, far right people furiously agreeing with each other and furiously hating on everyone else.”

Even the former employee has since deactivated her account. “I think what it is now is a really dangerous space, it’s uncontrollable,” she says.

“I miss it sometimes. I always thought it was an amazing newswire for journalists and citizen journalists … I don’t know, I find myself sitting with breaking news and wondering where to go. There’s a hole that has been left behind. I’m hoping someone will try and fill that gap.”

And then it was time to leave the University of Queensland behind, and move on to the Caterist being Caterist in his usual flood waters in quarries whispering way ...

Usually the pond tries to downsize reptile illustrations, but that "rendering" was so richly comical that the pond felt the need to give it room to stretch off to the distant horizon ...

This "computer generated rendering" has turned up at the ABC and at the Graudian, where it was called "an artist's rendition", and it seems to have supplanted the image that Sun Cable previously supplied, which accompanied a story about the company's voluntary administration back in 2023 ...

Why does the pond carry on so? Cleary Sun Cable has delusions of grandeur, but the point for the Caterist is to terrify punters at the way the landscape has been transformed. 

Yet if you looked at the original space, you'd likely see desert ... while up in the Hunter Valley,  what was once prime agricultural land becomes ...

And then you begin to wonder, with Jimbo, what exactly is "true" visual information.

Never mind, on with the Caterist doing his usual schtick, which is to say a pox on renewables ...

At this point the reptiles interrupted the flood waters in quarries whisperer with a couple of snaps, alleviating the need for the pond to settle the incipient hysteria ...

Then it was on with the quarry whisperer's stern denunciation, a bit like Polonius prattling on about the ABC. The pond has read this sort of stuff so many times that the pond is both impervious and a tad jaded...

Hmm, so all these things are happening around the world, but Australia shouldn't try to do anything, because it's full of dropkick losers and belly floppers of the Caterist kind?

You can see the animal cunning. Why bother competing with Arizona, why not just get a nice sinecure scribbling nattering negativity ...

Don't get the pond started on Arizona or its tax structure or for that matter building developments with inadequate water ...

While all families in Arizona help pay for health, education and public safety through state and local taxes, low-income and middle-income families pay a larger portion of their income in taxes than do wealthier families after accounting for deductions and credits. When all types of state and local taxes are combined—income, sales, and property—families with income in the lowest 20 percent pay twice what families in the top 1 percent do—$13.10 for every $100 of income and $9.63 for middle-income families compared to $6.47 for the highest-income families. This upside-down tax system is regressive. (a lot more here).

It's the usual Caterist way, gabble off a bunch of figures as if that was the end of the matter, and then inevitably the Caterist went the lion ...

What always strikes the pond as odd is the way that the reptiles want to bung on a war with China by Xmas, but steadfastly refuse to contemplate the sort of industrial infrastructure which might be readily converted to a war footing. Better to import the drones from China so we can bung on a do with China.

Never mind, it's time for a last short gobbet ...

Oh sheesh, not nuking the country to save the planet from climate science cultists in the grip of a woke religion. It's getting as tedious as reliving the Covid years ...

And now some punters might be wondering what happened to the Major. Relax, early in the morning he was in the highly esteemed extreme far right slot of the digital edition, top of the world ma and in his usual explosive fury, a veritable Cagney of a columnist ...

The pond was left with a choice ... cackling Claire or the Major ... and naturally being a devoted herpetologist, there was simply no point in listening to the woman ...

Sheesh, not another round with Uncle Elon.

The pond hastily looked for another source and came across Arwa Mahdawi's What a surprise! Free speech absolutist Elon Musk doesn't really love free speech ...

While some of his biggest businesses are plagued with problems, Musk’s attention seems to be elsewhere. Half the time he seems to be tweeting about how he’ll never go to therapy or dramatically unfollowing his ex on X. The rest of the time the billionaire appears to be consumed by his favourite hobby: funding ridiculous lawsuits.

Last year Musk, who likes to refer to himself as a “free speech absolutist”, grandly announced that he would help pay the legal bills for people who felt they were “unfairly treated” for posting on Twitter. Musk was inundated with people asking for help and, last week, X officially announced that it was funding a lawsuit filed by Chloe Happe against her former employer Block – the financial technology company set up by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter. While it’s not clear why Block terminated Happe, the lawsuit alleges it was because of her behaviour on Twitter.

“Block fired Chloe because of the political opinions she expressed on X,” the official X News account tweeted. “Chloe had two pseudonymous accounts on X, @bronzeageshawty and the now-deprecated @samsarashawty … because some of the opinions she expressed in her X accounts did not conform to the prevailing political orthodoxy, Block fired her, in violation of the law.”

So what were those brave views that X is defending? Well, there are two key tweets (both of which Happe subsequently deleted) that are at the center of the lawsuit. One, described in the court filing as the “Restroom Post” said: “Looking fear in the eyes today as I’m using the ADA gender neutral restroom in the office and a retarded tranny in a wheelchair knocks on the door.”

The other tweet is described as the “Refugee Post”. In this one, posted soon after 7 October 2023, Happe pretended to be a “citizen” of Kurdistan (which is a region, not a country) and joked about refugees from Gaza coming to the area. Happe regularly uses this particular pseudonymous account to pretend to be a woman in Kurdistan with a sheep-herding husband and tweet “witticisms” like: “beautiful big tittie kurdish women just don’t fall out of the sky you know.”

Regardless of what you think about Happe’s comments, this seems like a bizarre case to throw your weight behind. I mean, let’s be very clear here: one of the richest and most influential men in the world has decided to invest his considerable resources in fighting for a woman’s right to say “tranny” and “retarded” online.

A cynic might say the motivation behind this lawsuit is not so much free speech as it is childish trolling. Musk, after all, has routinely demonstrated that he has the maturity of a 12-year-old. This is a man, let us not forget, who whited out the “w” on the Twitter office sign because he thought it would be funny for people to work at “titter”.

Time to have a titter with the Major ...

Hmm, how is the genocide in Gaza going? Unfortunately the news about the genocide in Ukraine isn't that good...

Situation on frontline has worsened, Ukraine army chief says ...

Couldn't the Major have spared a moment to notice, instead of sucking up to Uncle Elon, currently in China sucking up to Xi, or more precisely, Li?

Never mind, time to get the snaps out of the way ...

The Major does understand that Twitter is a haven for anti-semitism? 

Under Musk's watch: a 1,000% surge in anti-semitic content on X platform ...

Of course there's anti-semitism and then there are barking mad fundamentalists on both sides attempting a genocide, not that the Major notices or cares ...

With the Major yet again up his own bum - how his bum has been extensively briefed - and brooding about his lost past - still no word on that Order of Lenin medal - just to finish up Mahdawi and her thoughts about sunlight, Musk-style ...

Despite the fact that he styles himself as a free speech warrior, Musk has also made it very clear that he’s not keen on certain forms of free speech. He will defend someone’s right to use transphobic and ableist language online to the very end but God forbid anyone should exercise their freedom of speech to say anything bad about him! The thin-skinned billionaire has forced employees to sign restrictive non-disparagement agreements and Twitter has been accused of suspending the accounts of journalists who have covered the platform. There are also claims that the platform has censored Palestinian public figures and suspended accounts which have been critical of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Musk has also weaponized the law to try to shut down his critics. Last month, for example, a judge dismissed a case X had filed against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a non-profit that has published reports detailing a rise in hate speech and racist content on X since the Musk takeover.

“Sometimes it is unclear what is driving a litigation …” wrote Charles Breyer, the US district judge, in the ruling. “Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose … This case is about punishing the defendants … X Corp has brought this case in order to punish CCDH for CCDH publications that criticized X Corp – and perhaps in order to dissuade others who might wish to engage in such criticism.”

Musk actively trying to suppress criticism while posturing as a free speech warrior? Gosh, it’s almost like the man is a raging hypocrite.

Then back to the Major for a little more bashing of Islamics, one of his favourite sports ... and yes, we're talking "true" again ...

Our fastest growing social media platform? Isn't X a rat-infested sewer run by a narcissist hypocrite? Still, the pond is pleased that the Major is pleased that a major platform for neo-Nazis and anti-semites is expanding (if you can believe Musk, what with his business model in all sorts of trouble).

The pond regrets using this infallible Pope when it really should have featured this day ...

Inevitably at this point the Major produced a gigantic billy goat butt ...

Indeed, indeed, and what luck that young people flirting with radical ideas must pay for the pleasure if they want to enter the inner sanctum of Musk-worshipping reptiles ...

Sadly with the press of a trinity of reptile masters this day, the pond has perforce had to go without its usual dose of cartoons, but this one caught the eye as a good closer ...

And so to that "Ned" Everest, shimmering in the late afternoon sun, beckoning to mountaineers ...

 

The pond promised a weekend serve of "Ned's" natter, or more aptly "Ned" endlessly quoting others, including that great authority, the windmill hater with an office in Goulburn, the beefy boofhead, and so it has finally come to pass, there being a season under the sun ...

But the pond shouldn't do spoilers, not when it's time to plunge right in the deep end, full of alarming and truly terrifying visions, beyond apocalyptic ...

What a splendid, truly dazzling artwork and Eisensteinian montage, so colourful and evocative, to help climbers get off to a solid start, and move on from base camp.

The final mile should be relatively easy for those who know that the reality is grimmer, everything is dangerous, there are nightmare scenarios unfolding as "Ned" scribbles, none of which will sound much like a famine in Gaza or a rapidly melting planet...

Luckily the next gobbet is short but already the quotes are flowing and things are red hot, and whatever you do, don't poke the bear ...

At this point the pond assembled all the snaps designed to alleviate boredom ...

Then the full chicken little fear-mongering and extensive quoting could get under way in earnest. Warning, sobriety alert ... turmoil and panic and possibly falling sky ahead ...

Amazing how endless quoting of others can turn you into a pundit.

But as for the vast turmoil and the fallout, are we in Ukraine yet?

Sorry, the pond just had to throw that one in, because without the snaps, the terrain can seem endless and endlessly the same ...

A disappointing gobbet. Not nearly enough panic, or nightmare scenarios, though there was the odd big. bump on the narrow path, with risks on all sides, and surely after the summer, there will be winter in the garden, that's before the spring, if there ever is another spring ...

Thank the long absent lord the beefy boofhead has arrived with news of deep pain. Why he's always been a splendid futurist, as one harking back to 2002 will recall in Huge wind farm that Angus Taylor rejected marks its official opening.

As for maths, why the beefy boofhead is a master (possible paywall) ...

Oh it's fundamentally challenging, it is ...

That's pretty dull stuff ...  what about another dollop of the beefy boofhead doing his best for the planet?

Then it was back to sounding the alarums and talk of credentials and such like...

Indeed, indeed, and forget that blather about a surplus, as if a surplus would placate the reptiles in full fear-mongering "Ned" flight, but the pond is certain that things will get better, because a saviour is at hand ...

And with that the pond has filibustered its way to a final gobbet of saucy doubts and fears, and possibly a nightmare or three ...because, you know, this is deep-seated fear mongering and the end is nigh ...

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.

For reptiles shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,

Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,

Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;

Having a form of reptile godliness, but denying the power thereof ...

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places, and there shall be a Labor government and a Labor budget, and idle chatter about a surplus ...

All these are the beginning of sorrows.

The forces are immense, terrifying, will you ever sleep again?

Meanwhile, there's rioting in the streets and violence everywhere and vulgar youffs are carrying on like pork chops ...

Here endeth the lesson or the climb, whatever you imagined you were doing ... when you might well have been going for a quiet stroll in the fading twilight, before it all ends in a lather of sweating "Neddisms" ...