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 ...