Sssh, don't mention the genocide ...

 

The pond couldn't help but notice the attention paid to Dame Slap by pond correspondents yesterday, and sure enough, there she was, as pleased as punch to be in the far right t"op of the lizard Oz digital world ma" spot this day ...

Of course she was scribbling about the Lehrmann scandal, though she couldn't bring herself to mention him in the splash,  and that brought an immediate red card, though the pond will note she was MID in The Weekly Beast ...

To save anyone interested the bother, the annotations referred to by the venerable Meade  ran this way ...

It’s Bruce McWilliam here. I did type a long reply to your email this morning, which is off the record, but as I’ve left Seven I think something happened between receiving your email and me pressing "send" on the reply so I’m going to reply again from memory I was pretty pleased with my first version, so forgive me if this is not as good.
I’m a friend of Janet Albertson* who I think is a great journalist and I’ve copied her on this reply. I was pretty amazed that Fairfax would go to the trouble of devoting more than 2 1/2 pages, including the front page in writing this it is obviously a pile on, but never mind I don’t take it personal. 

* While he has misspelt her surname, McWilliam is referring to The Australian's Janet Albrechtsen.

And that was about it for Janet Albertson ,,, though the fun of having her name spelled that way prompted a desire by the pond to scribble about Jane Albrechthsen ...

Moving along, the sight of nattering "Ned" looming above the door saying nevermore like that bloody raven made the pond furious with Christopher Warren in Crikey ...(paywall).

The gist of it was that the Murdochians were in the ropes in the UK ... inter alia ...

...TalkTV has always looked like a media mogul’s solution in search of an audience problem. With just a touch of schadenfreude, the Murdochs’ long-term critic, The Guardian, reported the closure with a note that the channel had a “disappointing start with ‘zero viewers’ during primetime broadcasts, meaning its audience was too small to register on the official rating agency”.
By December last year, it had crawled to 2 million viewers, well behind the dominant BBC News with 11.4 million. 
Things aren’t much better over at what was once the company’s global flagship, The Sun, with latest estimates putting its (now unreported) circulation at about 700,000 — behind its major tabloid competitor the Daily Mail, and well down from the 3.5 million it proudly reported back when it could (and did) claim that it was “The Sun Wot Won” elections.
This week’s financial reports for The Sun’s operating company, News Group Newspapers Ltd, show a loss in the 2023 financial year of about $127 million, following on from $242 million in 2022, as social media’s abandoning of news links cuts into the paper’s online audiences.
Its accounts include a provision for about $150 million for potential ongoing liabilities in the hacking scandal — or “allegations of voicemail interceptions” as the company’s accounts would have it.
The scandal has already cost the family’s companies more than $2 billion. The ongoing legal troubles feature Prince Harry, fresh from a win over Mirror Newspapers, with the latest bid to rope Rupert Murdoch and other executives personally into the case for misleading evidence. (A “scurrilous and cynical attack on their integrity”, according to News UK.)
Monopoly of its chosen markets has long been the traditional family route to success. It worked in Australia for Sir Keith, and for 40-odd years it worked for Rupert in the UK — dominating in tabloids through The Sun and The News of the World and building satellite broadcasting through Sky (now owned by Comcast).
The only enduring success lies in the digital subscription strategy for The Times and Sunday Times. Its operating company, Times Media Limited, shows profits of about $120 million over each of the past two years, coming close to offsetting the losses of The Sun. But it’s at the cost of a hard paywall that has meant sacrificing the influence that comes from setting the serious news agenda.
A hundred million here, a hundred million there. It looks like the rollicking adventures of the plucky “Dirty Digger” in the mother country his grandfather left in the 19th century to bring religion to the colonies could be winding to a close.

The pond has been reading promises of the evil empire winding to a close for decades now, and still the old bugger lives on, and still the pond must suffer, because the pond is on a promise to cut back on the pond when either the Dirty Digger carks it, or the evil empire fails, or is taken over, and yet here we are, with the pond heading below the fold in search of something, anything that would help evade "Ned's" natter ...

Sod it, just the oscillating fan, the toad from. the deep north, some business blather and Polonius, always reserved for the pond's meditative Sunday, and the dog botherer going over the same ground as "Ned."

Mamma told the pond that there'd be dire days like this ... not one reptile ready to meditate on a recent passing?

Not one reptile ready to meditate on women's rights, seeing as how they're rabbiting on about Taliban types?

Not one reptile ready to talk about the start of the orange Jesus's trial, currently scheduled for this coming Monday,  US time?

Sod it, the pond must play the cards on offer, with a deep reluctance ...the pond always hated open misère, such a boring way to play the game, and rightly banned in good schools, but sometimes the cards are so pitiful, all you can do is put them on the table and get on with it ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, is there no end to the narcissist navel-gazing emanating from the reptile hive mind, made worse by the opening illustration being a snap of the reptile front page. The pond decided to clear the deck of all the visual detritus ...

The pond then copped a short burst ...

That mention of Ireland offered the excuse the pond was looking for, a chance to do a little counter-factual programming.

The reptiles would mention something, and the pond would ferret through Al Jazeera, and then come up with news of the Gaza genocide and related matters... such as Ireland ...

You can see how this works, it's just a quick way of stepping outside the hive mind ... and the pond doesn't have to do anything except cut and paste ...

Meanwhile, on another planet ...

Back to the dog botherer ranting away ...

As for that mention of Spain in the pond's previous straying from the reptile hive mind...

Remember the pond is only doing this to remind correspondents that there is an alternative reality outside the reptile hive mind ...

The pond almost forgot Norway ...

Meanwhile, the dog botherer was still ranting away...

Speaking of geopolitical forces at play ...

Or perhaps mass starvation would do the trick ...

The pond admits it's a lazy way to tackle the dog botherer, but the pond has heard this sort of ranting and shrieking and carry-on many times before, and the only upside is that this day it means that climate science doesn't score the usual dog botherer denialism ... and better still, there's just one gobbet to go ...

Not to worry. The Taliban have already won, and are currently using the GOP to do their bidding ... and the Murdoch empire is doing nothing, except making it worse ...

Sorry the pond just had to take a break, because there's even more coming from "Ned", with his usual Everest of natter ...

Yep, it's more of the same, and the pond understands why many will leave the room. Mamma said there'd be days like this, compounded by the ridiculous number of snaps offered by the reptiles in a bid to break the monotony of the Everest climb...

If you're doing the climb, best do it the hard yards way, plodding along, one foot after the other, one gobbet after the other, head to the ground, fighting off lack of oxygen in the reptile hive, just to get to the top of the Everest of natter ...

Dutton is running on values?

There's a reason the pond doesn't pay the slightest attention to the pompous, portentous, tedious old bore's latest exercise in mind-numbing tedium and verbosity ...

But as we're speaking of values, how about a little murder?

There was an interactive graphic to go with that yarn, but the pond only does screen caps ...

Then it was back to the alleged "values" man ...

Meanwhile, on another planet ...

The pond could keep on doing this cut and pasting endlessly, such is the infamy of what's been going down, but in the end, exhaustion will win, and the desire to just finish the climb will take over ...

Meanwhile,  on that other planet ...

Truth to tell, there's never been a better genocide for the reptiles. How they love their collective displacement, their collective punishment, their mass famine, their very own genocide to celebrate, with bonus colonisation, old school British empire style ...

One last burst of criminal activity ...

And a short follow-up from "Ned" ...

Oh heck, why not another reminder of criminal activity ...

And that meant that there were just two "Ned" gobbets to go ...

It's extraordinary the extent to which current war crimes and the genocide in Gaza have almost been erased from "Ned's" column, but enough with the cut and paste already, time for the final surge to the summit ...

Meanwhile, mass starvation goes on as a strategy. 

Benji might be good at it, he might think it's smart, but is it anything more than a survival tactic for a man who would otherwise face quality time in clink for corruption?

Don't expect an answer from the dog botherer and "Ned", and the pond must apologise for the monomania this day, but once the reptiles latch on to an issue, the hive mind determines that there can only be one kind of buzzing emanating from the hive...

Roll on Monday, when anything might happen, and the pond might suddenly develop an interest in golf ...