In which there are several distractions, and a. little snort of coke, before the pond gets down to its herpetology studies ...

 

At last some fires got lit and the circus came to town ...

Even the reptiles. had to take note, though Dame Slap once again went MIA and instead there was a sprinkling of rice and dudders at the top of the digital edition...

You only have to google the name of the massage parlour mentioned in the Lehrmann matter to discover that a happy ending to your massage is a possibility, as you'd hope if you dropped thousands on the massages. 

And that revelations about cocaine use are not character-enhancing forms of reference to add to your CV while pursuing defamation proceedings.

Never mind, the pond has never gone down that reptile rabbit hole and will leave it to the immortal Rowe to provide a comment ...

Cue Michael Bradley in Crikey ...Seven’s chequebook journalism is a disgrace for which it should be held accountable (paywall), inter alia:

...The point is that none of this is new or obscure. Journalism operates with a social licence, the quid pro quo for the press freedom that the media so fiercely defends and society accepts is a key pillar of democracy. Licences have conditions; among the most important is the promise of impartial reporting.
The Lehrmann interviews were incapable of being represented as impartial, because they had been bought and paid for. Seven’s failure to disclose this and, far worse, its active concealment of the truth, perpetrated a fraud on the public. That was a gross breach of the terms of its social licence — as Barry said, “an absolute disgrace” — for which it should be (but won’t be) held to account.

There was an upside for the reptiles - mention of the ongoing genocide could drop right down the page, and as for the news of climate science provided by a pond correspondent, forget it Jake, this is reptile town ...

To this might be added news from Africa ... the pond plucked the nearest report off the shelf, this one in CNN,  Tens of millions facing hunger and water shortages as extreme drought and floods sweep southern Africa...

Forget it Jake, it's reptile town, but speaking of hunger and famine as a tool of war ...

... yesterday the pond noted that the reptiles had ripped off a forensic story about the recent slaughter from The Times. (sorry, the pond does't link to reptile yarns).

 It ended this way ...

...The IDF is said to have been trying to kill an armed Hamas fighter they believed was hiding in a food warehouse visited by the convoy. However, there is growing concern about Israel’s command and control in Gaza. Military sources told the Haaretz newspaper that “undisciplined, rogue commanders” were responsible for the strike.
A source in the intelligence branch said the IDF’s Southern Command “knows exactly what the cause of the attack was: in Gaza, everyone does as they please”.
After he had been presented with what he said were initial findings from Israel’s investigation into the deaths, Herzi Halevi, the chief of the general staff who leads the Southern Command, issued a sombre apology. “It was a mistake that followed a misidentification, at night, during a war, in very complex conditions,” he admitted. “It shouldn’t have happened.”
Even if Hamas fighters had been in the cars, Lincoln-Jones (Chris Lincoln-Jones, a former British Army major who has worked with the Israel Defence Forces) questioned why the attack had been authorised. “The British Army would under no circumstances have fired on that convoy, even if we could positively identify a Hamas gunman getting into one of the cars. You would know that every single person in the car would die. It would be inconceivable that the British or Americans would do that. The fact the Israelis destroyed all three cars is unforgivable.
“Hamas is a terrorist organisation completely beyond the pale. What Hamas doesn’t do is claim to be anything else than what it is. The Israelis claim to be a civilised, western-facing armed force. They are plainly not.” The Times

The reptiles actually quoting Haaretz? The pond almost fainted from the shock of it.

That sounded like a job for Henry, hole in bucket man whitewash specialist, but the old bigot did a Dame Slap and went to water ...

The pond had expected the hidebound bigot to mount a stern defence of the genocide this Friday, but there he was in the middle of the reptile ruck, below the fold and doing his best to hide...

The pond felt no need to go roving with Rove ... that circus was a three or maybe four or five ringed affair best left to the cartoonists ...

And that mention of the G-G affair by the corporeal Korporaal reminded the pond of a report in Crikey by Charlie, 'Queen of woke': Commentariat loses the plot over our new G-G (paywall) ...

Old news now. It's hard to compete with coke and hookers. The reptiles will keep carping, but for the moment coke is the winner, as you'd expect of the real thing ...

The pond made the mistake of clicking on that last link, dehotted in that screen grab, and ended up right in the middle of the Bolter's rant. It'll take a week to get the smell out of the keyboard, which is why the pond refuses to link to the reptiles...

By this point, it will have become obvious that the pond has been trying to avoid the old bigot, evading him in the same way that he spends this day avoiding the genocide, but finally the pond must get on with its herpetology studies ...

Of all the things that the pond had expected our Henry to address, this was a real twist. Still as a bigot skilled in the art of bigotry and distraction, the pond really should have expected it...

The last the pond had thought about this matter was back in the days of this summary in 2021 in the Scientific American, Canada's Residential Schools Were a Horror ... founded to carry out the genocide of Indigenous people, they created conditions that killed thousands of children ...

The recent discoveries of more than 1,300 unmarked graves at the sites of four former residential schools in western Canada have shocked and horrified Canadians. Indigenous peoples, whose families and lives have been haunted by the legacy of Canada’s Indian residential school system, have long expected such revelations. But the news has still reopened painful wounds.

Residential school survivor testimony has long been filled with stories of students digging graves for their classmates, of unmarked burials on school grounds, and of children who disappeared in suspicious circumstances. Many of these stories were heard by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), which was formed in 2008 and collected testimonies from over 6,750 survivors. The TRC’s 2015 Final Report made it quite clear that further recoveries of unmarked graves at the schools were inevitable.

The goal of Canada’s Indian residential school system, after all, shared that of its U.S. Indian boarding school counterpart: “Kill the Indian, and save the man.” More than 150,000 children were taken from their homes between 1883 and 1997, often forcibly, and placed in distant boarding schools where the focus was on manual labour, religious instruction and cultural assimilation. The TRC Final Report concluded that the Indian Residential School system was an attempted “cultural genocide,” but the escalating number of recovered unmarked graves points to something even darker. Given that more than 1,300 graves have been identified using ground-penetrating radar at only four of the 139 federally run residential schools, the current official number of 4,120 students known to have died in the schools will end up being only a fraction of the actual total. 

Apologists for the residential school system have argued in recent weeks that the children buried at these schools largely died of diseases like tuberculosis (TB) and that the schools did the best they could to provide education and medical care to First Nations, Inuit and Métis children during a time when their communities were being devastated by similar diseases. But even a cursory reading of the historical literature on residential schools shows just how wrong this line of thinking is.

The reality is that the conditions in the schools themselves were the leading contributor to the often-shocking death rates among the students. In 1907, Indian Affairs chief medical officer Peter Bryce reported some truly disturbing findings to his superiors. After having visited 35 government funded schools in western Canada, Bryce reported that 25 percent of all children who had attended these schools had died; at one school, the number was 69 percent. While Bryce reported that “the almost invariable cause of death given is tuberculosis,” he by no means saw this as natural or inevitable. Bryce, instead, placed the blame for these appalling death rates on the schools themselves, which were poorly constructed, lacked proper ventilation and frequently housed sick students in the dormitories alongside their healthy classmates. 

Bryce wasn’t alone in sounding the warnings about the schools. Throughout the system’s 100-plus-year history, school inspectors, school principals, medical officials and Indian agents repeatedly issued warnings about the unhealthy conditions in the schools. This archival record details the schools’ inadequate medical facilities, nonexistent isolation rooms and lack of school nurses. It also documents perennially overcrowded and dilapidated buildings with poor ventilation and insufficient heating as well as the woefully inadequate nutrition provided to students. 

The issue of food and nutrition, in particular, speaks to the ways in which the poor conditions in the schools undermined student health. As residential school historian J.R. Miller has written, “‘We were always hungry’ could serve as the slogan for any organization of former residential school students.” The TRC collected haunting testimony from survivors, including Andrew Paul, who described his time at the Aklavik Roman Catholic Residential School in the Northwest Territories: “We cried to have something good to eat before we sleep. A lot of the times the food we had was rancid, full of maggots, stink.”

Malnutrition, of course, compromised children’s immune systems, making them more vulnerable to TB and other infectious diseases. In the case of TB, studies have consistently shown that malnutrition of the type commonly described by Paul and other survivors leads to significantly higher mortality among infected individuals. And, as our own research has shown, it would also have led to a much higher lifetime risk of a whole range of chronic conditions including obesity, type 2 diabetes and hypertension.

Government and church authorities were well aware of the extent of hunger and malnutrition in the schools, both before and after Bryce’s damning report. In the 1940s, for instance, a series of school inspections by the federal Nutrition Division found almost universally poor food service in the schools and widespread malnutrition. After attempts to improve the training for school cooks ended in failure, the head of the Nutrition Division, L.B. Pett, chose to use the poor health of the children as an opportunity to study the effectiveness of a variety of experimental nutrition interventions (and noninterventions, as it turned out) into the diets of malnourished children.

The result was a series of nutrition experiments conducted on nearly 1,000 children in six residential schools between 1948 and 1952. These included a double-blind, randomized experiment examining of the effects of nutrition supplements on children showing clinical signs of vitamin C deficiency, with half of the students receiving placebos and the other half receiving vitamin tablets; an examination of the impact of an experimental fortified flour mixture that included ground bonemeal, among other things, at St. Mary’s School in Kenora, Ontario; and an examination of the effects of both inadequate and adequate milk consumption on a population of children with clinical signs of riboflavin deficiency at the Alberni School in British Columbia...

And so on and on, and the pond only quotes at length, because there's going to be a hefty serve of denialism to follow ...

The pond has no idea why the old bigot decided to put a mark in the sand and make his stand here, but the reptiles obliged with a couple of snaps, to add to the distraction ...

The old bigot then continued on with his rant ... and the pond is content to ape his style and note that detailing his column's glaring deficiencies would take too long ...

At this point, some readers will be wondering why the pompous old bigot hasn't dragged Thucydides into the proceedings. Wait no longer...

The pond wishes that the pompous bigot hadn't begun with Herodotus. 

The pond has a lot of time for the ancient fabulist, and no doubt he's a good model for our Henry, but as Richard Cohen, featured some time ago in these pages, noted in his Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past ...

“Herodotus several times writes that he does not believe this or other stories he tells but feels he must repeat them because they are too good to leave out. Talking of livestock in Scythia, he suddenly says, “a remarkable fact occurs to me (I need not apologize for the digression—it has been my plan throughout this work).” After the powerful anecdote of the boatswain, he adds that readers should not regard it as a historical fact (8.118–19); the tale is included because it embodies how a tyrant exercises “justice,” and its ideological significance outweighs, for him, its likely historical falsehood. Furnishing evidence for his wilder claims doesn’t interest him.”

“He relates, without qualification, that the semen of Ethiopians and Indians is “as black as their skin” and tells of winged snakes, phoenixes, and headless men with eyes in their chests (although he rejects stories of a race of one-eyed men, and of Indians with feet so large that they use them as sunshades). We read of the giant “gold-digging ants” of India and learn that because Egyptians venerate cows above all animals and Greeks eat cows, Egyptians will never kiss a Greek man on the mouth (2.41) and find out that “there are fewer bald men in Egypt than anywhere else, which is a fact that anyone can see for themselves” (3.12).

Libyans cure children in convulsions by sprinkling them with goat’s urine: “I am simply reporting here what the Libyans themselves say” (1.175, 4.187). He knew that what might appear irregular, peculiar, or paradoxical (even if accepted by the indigenous culture) would appeal to his audience. And he is often funny; repeating a Persian axiom, he tells us: “If you take a decision when drunk, review it when you are sober; but if you take a decision when sober, review it again when you are drunk” (1.133). (Centuries on, Ernest Hemingway would offer the same advice about writing fiction. The two men would have gotten along.) Herodotus also has a gift for aphorism: “In war, fathers bury their sons; in peace, sons their fathers” (1.87.4; this despite never having seen military service). Or: “A man who has great wealth but is[…]”

No wonder the modern fabulist found inspiration ... and a little later Cohen added more inspiration ...

“His general approach had its downside. He not only passed on doubtful information; he also invented material, even how he obtained it. Cicero (106–43 B.C.), who wanted to define history as a branch of rhetoric, while acclaiming Herodotus as the “father of history,” bracketed him with Theopompus (d. 320 B.C.), author of a twelve-volume history of Greece but a notorious liar, and refers slightingly to his “innumerable tales.” Aristotle weighed in by noting Herodotus’s “string-along style” and mentions his being a storyteller in a pejorative sense. Other ancients were similarly dismissive, and soon Cicero’s sobriquet was joined to Plutarch’s famous putdown, “father of lies.” As it was, Herodotus was charged with consciously creating an illusion of accuracy by mentioning specific details around stories that he well knew were made up. “Herodotus seems to be dancing away the truth, and saying, ‘I could hardly care less,’ ” commented Plutarch (c. A.D. 46–120) in an unbridled attack openly titled “On the Malice of Herodotus.”

Investigate and select as Herodotus might—and there are 1,086 examples of his self-recorded presence as eyewitness or investigator—he still found room for most local beliefs, legends, and folktales, only occasionally making “comment. When Arion of Methymna is described as being carried on the back of a dolphin, Herodotus concludes: “I have my own opinion about these claims” (2.56)—but nothing more, a prime example of his paralipsis—a useful word meaning the pretense of leaving things to one side. In telling Egypt’s history, he compresses ten thousand years (and three hundred kings) into a single paragraph. Generally he employs a broad brush for dates and times—“at this time,” “after this,” “up to my day,” “still now” are typical—but then he probably lacked access to more precise information. “Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all,” he says. He is conscientious about readability, not accuracy.

“His inexactness is particularly evident in the way he exaggerates the size, equipment, tactical acumen, and leadership of the Persian forces in order to show the Greeks triumphing against overwhelming odds. He describes an army so enormous that it bankrupted cities that attempted to feed it for even a single day. We are told that all previous military expeditions added together paled against the size of Xerxes’s forces. But were his suspiciously precise figure of 5,283,220 men true, a column marching in file would have stretched two thousand miles, with its head reaching Thermopylae in eastern central Greece at the same time as its tail was leaving western Iran. In those days, it took some four weeks for an army to cover three hundred or so kilometers. The Persian march would have lasted months.”

Please bear that in mind when reading the last gobbet from the pompous bigot ...

Oh, and genocide... don't forget the genocides ...

And so to end on a disturbing and astonishing insight.

It seems that the bromancer's war with China by Xmas might have economic consequences. 

The pond had no idea, the pond had always operated on the notion that war was an economic miracle, with no downside whatsoever, but Ben packed in some astonishing insights in this brief recycling of another's thoughts ...

Oh dear, that sounds terribly grim, and yet there must be war ... surely if the bromancer is to become Reichsmarschall there must be war ...

At this point, to help out those unaware of the shape of a  cargo ship,  the reptiles spent a motza at Getty Images to bring their readership a snap of a ship at sea ... it was so breathtakingly informative that the pond decided ti shouldn't be shrunk, so that all might enjoy its import, significance and meaning ...

And that left just a gobbet go to ...

Perhaps it might be better to avoid war? Sorry, sorry, the pond realises that the bromancer must reach his Reichsmarschall dream...

Meanwhile, the current war goes well ...