A little unseemly gloat ...

 

The lizard Oz finally acknowledged there'd been a trial of the century (so far) and had to clear the front digital page for the news, and the pond felt the need to note it for the reptile record ... while indulging in a little gloat ...

Killer was there, and questions were asked, and for a nanosecond those noting that the centrepiece was by "the Editorial Board" might have thought that the lizard Oz editorialist had finally spoken.

No need. Such is the strength of the hive mind that the WSJ could speak for the lizard Oz, and the pond felt so generous it allowed the illustrations to stand ...

Henry Fonda? What about Gregory Peck? Oh that's right, he hectored his lawyers into monstrous nonsense, telling porkies about him not porking a porn star when he had at the time boasted to his fellow golfers that it made him drive 20 yards further ... and so they became the very essence of a SLOAT.

What fun, and everybody was out and about with illustrations as part of the celebrations ...

Back with the crybabies at the WSJ ...speaking because the locals weren't up to the job, and never were, because they tried to avoid the trial of the century (thus far) whenever they could ...

Actually, the problem was that  the mango Mussolini was a grifter, a penny pincher, a tightwad, a scrooge, a cheapskate, a piker, a churl, a skinflint, a moneygrubber and a cheese-parer, a stiff who likes to stiff, and he could have avoided all of it easily if he'd wanted to ...

The best read on this came in Jose Pagliery's  How Trump’s Cheapness Over Stormy and Cohen Came to Cost So Much ... (paywall)

...Although the case originated in Trump’s alleged hotel rendezvous with Daniels during a Lake Tahoe golf tournament in July 2006—which he still denies—Trump’s first relevant act of greed can be traced back to an episode in January 2014, when Trump was laying the groundwork for his presidential run.

Trump had his consigliere, Michael Cohen, hire a tech firm called Red Finch to rig a CNBC poll about the nation’s top business leaders—only to stiff the vendor, refusing to pay its $50,000 bill when Trump was disappointed with the results. A year later, Cohen pulled $20,000 from his own bank account and handed the firm a paper bag filled with cash. He would admit pocketing the other $30,000 when Trump eventually repaid him but nonetheless, Trump had started to run a tab on his own lawyer. It would come back to haunt him

Fast forward to summer 2016, when former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal had Beverly Hills lawyer Keith Davidson start shopping her story about an affair with Trump, which he also denies.

It started with a June 7, 2016 text Davidson sent to National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard saying, “I have a blockbuster trump story.” By the end of the month, Howard had met McDougal and determined her story was worthy of a catch-and-kill operation. His boss, American Media Inc. CEO David Pecker, approved a $150,000 deal that would give McDougal a fake writing gig at the supermarket tabloid. And Trump, the leading Republican presidential candidate, had taken a call from Pecker that he patched through the speaker on his desk at Trump Tower, allowing Cohen to recall his boss promising, “No problem. I will take care of it.”

But he didn’t. Pecker grew increasingly impatient as it dawned on him there was no way he’d get away with such a suspicious corporate expense on the company books. As Cohen would testify, the shared anxiety reached a breaking point that compelled Cohen to secretly record a conversation with Trump about the overdue bill—a tape Cohen supposedly planned to share with Pecker to ease his concerns.

By the time Davidson reached out to Howard for a second payday, this time to silence adult film star Stormy Daniels, the tabloid would not carry Trump’s water. Instead, Howard passed Davidson to Cohen.

Faced with what sounded like a bald-faced extortion racket in the closing weeks of a struggling campaign, Trump played games once again. He tasked Cohen with taking care of the problem but together they came up with a plan to drag it out, past the election if they could. With a month to go, Cohen struck a deal to pay Daniels $130,000 but came up with all kinds of excuses for not wiring the money. The career shyster feigned being too busy, disappeared for a time, blamed a Jewish holiday, and repeatedly claimed he’d lost bank account details.

When Daniels’ lawyer threatened to call the deal off, Trump was nowhere to be found—forcing Cohen to draw the money from his home equity line of credit and set up a shell corporation.

The lies kept stacking up. But they hadn’t yet reached the point of criminality.

The tale reached its second act after the 2016 election. As president-elect, Trump was jubilant. The business tycoon who leveraged his fame to launch a TV reality show and fuel a meteoric rise in national politics had become a parody of the American Dream. But he had a dirty little secret, and his loyal bagman was owed a pretty chunk of change.

It’s all the more confounding, then, that one of Trump’s final acts as head of the Trump Organization was to stiff Cohen of his annual bonus.

Every year, near Christmas, the boss would flee Manhattan for his Florida estate. As he did so, his employees opened envelopes to discover their reward for remaining loyal. When Cohen got his, he did a double take. His usual $102,000 had been cut by two-thirds. He stormed into Allen Weisselberg’s office, giving the chief financial officer a piece of his mind.

“I was truly insulted. Personally hurt. Didn't understand it. Made no sense,” Cohen recalled on the witness stand, angry still, all these years later.

The guy who’d scour news articles to make sure the boss wouldn’t get maligned, the guy who’d phone reporters and threaten to sue and make their lives a living hell, the guy who stuck his neck out time and again to defend the honor of a fundamentally dishonorable man, was starting to realize this was a fool’s game. But not quite yet.

“Allen said, ‘Take it easy. We’re gonna do right by you. We’re gonna make sure you’re taken care of. Relax. We'll make this right.’”

But instead of immediately reimbursing Cohen the $130,000, Trump and Weisselberg approved a drip-drip approach – paying Cohen much more, $420,000, but stretching payments across 2017, under the guise of legal work and with Cohen described as “personal attorney to the president of the United States.”

In the end, the payments produced 11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries—34 documents in all, ultimately the subject of 34 charges and determined by a jury of New Yorkers to be false business filings as defined by Penal Law §175.10.

Had it been a single fake invoice, Trump would have faced three felony counts—if the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had bothered to take up the case.

Instead, Trump has shelled out tens of millions of dollars, paying lawyers Todd Blanche, Susan Necheles, and Emil Bove to defend him in a one-year case and a historic seven-week trial, redirecting political donations that could have supported his 2024 campaign but were instead burned in a futile effort to stop him becoming the first American president turned convicted criminal.

“I believe in spending what you have to,” Trump – or his ghost – wrote in his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal. “But I also believe in not spending more than you should. I never threw money around.”

If only he'd listened to a real Scrooge ...

If he hadn't stiffed his Pecker, if he hadn't Cruellad his Cohen ... but in the end he had to throw other people's money around like it was going out of style, and so he made it round, and it came back to bite him ...

D'uh ... it's simple, dudes, don't overthink it. He's always been a hustler, a con artist, a confidence man, a snake oil seller, a fraudster, a quack, a charlatan, a mountebank, a cheat, a swindler, a phoney, a sham, and a flim flammer ... don't trust the pond, just ask a few of the students who paid a fortune to attend Trump University ...

Sadly the fantasy elements live on in that New Yorker front page and in the Luckovich of the day ...

Sadly ... because this isn't the sort of white collar crime that would see the mango Mussolini do time in the slammer ... though we can at least all look forward to the United States electing a convicted felon to be their president ...

It couldn't get richer than that ... and remembering Adolf's time in the clink, it would uphold a proud tradition for coup lovers.

As David Remnick noted in The New Yorker coverage, Trump Is Guilty, but Voters Will Be the Final Judge (paywall).

...Following the devastating judgment against Trump in Manhattan Criminal Court, voters will now decide to what extent they care. The question is whether any who remain undecided—particularly in the most critical precincts of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona—will be convinced that a felony conviction disqualifies Trump from a second term as Commander-in-Chief, or whether this most recent badge of dishonor is, in the end, of no greater concern than his well-documented history as a bigot, a fabulist, and an authoritarian intent on pursuing a second term inflamed by a spirit of vengeance.

The vast majority of the electorate is, to one degree or another, quite aware of his many characteristics. He has been around a long time. He is aggressively transparent, supremely frank about his furies and his prejudices. He appears to be devoid of shame. Rather than betray regret about a hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actress with whom he allegedly enjoyed a brief interlude, or even issue denials under oath, Trump, in his many press conferences outside the courtroom at 100 Centre Street, exploited the trial as a means of illustrating the ongoing narrative of his persecution at the hands of the Biden Administration and the Deep State. His victimhood, he has told his supporters, is your victimhood. I am you. My retribution will be your retribution. As the trial wore on, he managed to monetize this tall tale. His fund-raising increased, particularly among smaller donors. Such is his talent for self-pity and demagoguery. His continuing legal jeopardy, according to Politico, “may be the most effective tool he has going.”

The picture is no different among Trump’s former Republican rivals. Early critics, such as Senators Marco Rubio, of Florida, and J. D. Vance, of Ohio, are now puppy-eager supporters vying for the Vice-Presidency or a Cabinet position; more persistent naysayers, such as Governor Chris Sununu, of New Hampshire, have also fallen into line. Trump’s last real opponent in the Republican primary, his former envoy to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, spent months attacking his character (“Every single thing Donald Trump has said or put on TV has been a lie”) and his mental stability (“He is unhinged. He is more diminished than he was”). She blamed him for the Party’s losses in 2018, 2020, and 2022, and declared that she, at least, was brave enough to say so: “Of course, many of the same politicians who now publicly embrace Trump privately dread him. They know what a disaster he’s been and will continue to be for our party. They’re just too afraid to say it out loud. Well, I’m not afraid to say the hard truths out loud.” And yet, as the trial entered its last days, Haley, predictably, crumbled, saying out loud that she would cast her vote for Trump and, implicitly, her integrity to the four winds. In return, Trump tossed Haley a crumb, suggesting vaguely that she might yet gain a place on his team “in some form.”

Some of the titans of Wall Street are showing similar degrees of moral flexibility. Stephen Schwarzman, a billionaire financier who abandoned Trump not because of the insurrection, in 2021, but after the G.O.P.’s poor showing in the 2022 midterm elections, has now returned meekly to the fold. His reasons, he said obscurely, include a variety of policy concerns and “the dramatic rise of antisemitism.” (Trump, who has a long history of antisemitic statements, said earlier this year that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”) The hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin has similarly overcome his doubts. He once called Trump a “three-time loser”; now he is back on board.

Like so many authoritarians of the past—and, more recently, like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Jair Bolsonaro—Trump deploys a blood-and-soil rhetoric in which his supporters and the existing order are under dire threat. The United States is a “failing nation” hurtling toward catastrophe. The government and the media may say (accurately) that inflation has trended downward and that the unemployment rate is below four per cent, but Trump darkly forecasts a nightmare world of Chinese dominance and a “1929-type Depression.” Moreover, if Joe Biden is reëlected, the country will continue to become “a Third World hellhole ruled by censors, perverts, criminals, and thugs.” The 2024 election is “the final battle,” and only he can redeem us from a “Mad Max” dystopia—or, as he put it at a conference in Maryland last March, a “lawless, open-borders, crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare.”

Or as Eric Lach joked at the end of his coverage of the actual verdict for TNY, When the Verdict Came In, Donald Trump’s Eyes Were Wide Open (paywall)

...In the hallway outside the courtroom, Trump found his voice again. “I’m a very innocent man,” he said, calling the verdict a “disgrace.” America, he said, has “gone to hell.” “We’re a nation in decline, serious decline,” he went on. “Millions and millions of people pouring into our country right now from prisons and from mental institutions, terrorists. And they’re taking over our country.” Criminals taking over the country? Sounds bad.

Meanwhile, that editorial board was still shedding tears ... and living in hope that a convicted criminal might yet take over the country ... sounds good ...

Yes, you read it there, the WSJ is happy to have a cad in the White House. 

If the pond's Roget serves it right, that's a bounder, a rascal, a rogue, a reprobate, a good for nothing, a charlatan, an SOB, a rat, a louse, a hound, a skunk, a heel, a snake in the grass, a bad egg, a rat fink rotter, a wastrel, a dastardly knave ...

Oh brave land of the bold and the free.

But the pond must insist on one point of order in relation to that last line.

You cackling geese, it was the mango Mussolini and Faux Noise and the like, coup lovers all of them, laura norder lovers who love breaking the law, treason haters who love a bit of treason when it's done by the right sort of authoritarian wanting to horde state secrets (and maybe trade in them, who knows, a deviant, caddish Scrooge would) that opened a new destabilising era in American politics, and even now no one can say how it will end ... except that if the mango Mussolini gets back in, then the world will see what an angry, vengeful charlatan with dementia looks like as a President ...

Meanwhile, those with a memory will recall that the pond labelled certain Supreme Court judges as being pussy whipped, a concept and a term designed to cause offence unless you happen to be in the SM crowd, but it turns out that Luckovich agreed with the pond. 

They do wear frocks and the women do wear the pants ...

Why the poor hen-pecked, hard done by, deballsed learned judges, take pity on them ... and don't forget the spittle ...

In which our Henry celebrates anarchy, but not before there's a little Vlad the sociopath and a serve of Mein Gott ...

At last, a convicted felon will become Prez ...

Sorry, that's news for another day, and the pond must carry on as if nothing has happened ... much like the reptiles in their bubble-wrapped hive mind world ...

Christopher Warren has been writing some more soft core lizard Oz porn for Crikey, this time featuring a two way with the cardigan wearers, The Laura Tingle fallout shows how the ABC kowtows to News Corp, News Corp's outrage machinery clunked into gear following Laura Tingle's 'racist' Australia comments. The ABC should know better than to kowtow. (paywall)

The pond felt an unholy tingle ...

It’s been a big week at News Corp’s outrage factory, with one of Australia’s significant cultural thought leaders having been called to order for colouring outside the lines of what the US company decrees as the acceptable limits on the hot issues of race, migration and refugees.

The actual words of Laura Tingle at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on the weekend were too hot to report straight, too dangerous to confront with reason. Instead, each called for a cranking up of resentment and indignation through News Corp’s old friends: diversion, misrepresentation and amplification. 

In The Australian, outrage was quickly diverted to “partisan rot” at the ABC, misrepresented as an “attack on Australia” and active campaigning against Peter Dutton, amplified through the opposition frontbench commentary.

To the surprise of no-one, ABC management stumbled, then fell to the occasion. Fresh off last year’s staff revolt over the public broadcaster’s failure to defend Indigenous journalists during the Voice campaign, ABC leadership rewarded News Corp with a mealy-mouthed sniff that Tingle’s “conversational” comments “would not have met the ABC’s editorial standards”.

News Corp’s pile-on was more than just another skirmish in the Murdochs’ long-running war on the ABC. Policing the tone about migration — and migrants — with an “it’s not racism” deniability is central to the strategy for winning next year’s election.  

They’re reaching for the well-worn register of the dog whistle, eager to keep on the not-THAT-racist side of the debate while arguing that (as per Tingle’s truncation of Dutton’s comments) “everything that’s going wrong in this country is because of migrants”...

And so on and sure enough the Graudian reported ...

The goose in chief actually used these words: 

...Anderson said Tingle’s comments had hurt the ABC and the journalist herself, partly because they had been unfairly reported by some media.

“I will say that some media organisations have really taken this and run with it. There is also social media trolling happening for our people as well.”

Anderson said the corporation disagreed with Hanson-Young’s suggestion he should “blacklist” all News Corp journalists from ABC platforms because of the company’s hostile attitude towards the ABC.

“It is important for the ABC to cover a perspective of views that are held in this country,” he said.

Out of that word salad, the reptiles immediately knew the right one to deploy, albeit using scare quotes ...

What a pathetic kowtowing goose, supplying the words and the ammunition, and all the pond had to offer was a cartoon ...

No wonder the pond gave up on the ABC long ago ...

And so on to the rest of the reptile rag, digital edition, this day ...

Nothing really appealed in that lot - the pond is particularly disappointed at the way that riff raff have been allowed to occupy the far right, top of the digital world, ma highly desired slot ... and the bunch below the fold were just as disappointing...

The pnod finds it hard to imagine anyone could be as dull as our Henry, but the meretricious Merritt manages it effortlessly, though the pond was pleased to see that all that righteous nonsense the Murdochians deploy in the United States about their fatuous bill of rights doesn't cut the meretricious mustard ...

And what's this Salt blathering on about "fortunately, we have migrants". The pond will dob him into Dame Groan to give him a decent peppering ...

Sure, there was our Henry, but the pond always likes an appetiser before moving to the main course. How about this one?

That saintly vision sold it to the pond. A sociopath as a heavenly saint in the clouds? What's not to like?

It was sad that it was behind the Beast paywall, because Panicked Russia Is Now Telling Reluctant Soldiers They Will Be Resurrected was a ripper ...and the pond felt not a shred of guilt straying away from the lizard Oz hive mind for just a moment, knowing that our Henry would turn up in due course ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ill-fated decision to invade Ukraine is so unconscionable that his propagandists—including Russian Orthodox church that is tightly controlled by the government—are having to resort to increasingly outlandish methods to recruit more volunteers and comfort brokenhearted families of soldiers who perished in Ukraine.

From the beginning, Putin’s loyal mouthpieces like state TV host Vladimir Solovyov asserted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a “holy war,” predicting it would lead to a “global jihad” against the West. Deputy of the State Duma Vyacheslav Nikonov claimed that Russia is “the embodiment of the forces of good” and stated, “This is truly a holy war we're waging and we must win.” Major General Apti Alaudinov, the commander of Chechen forces, who is himself a Muslim, claimed that Russia’s war against Ukraine will lead to the second coming of Christ, describing Moscow’s troops as “the forerunners of Jesus forces.”

Apparently, these assurances are not sufficient to ensure a steady stream of volunteers, much less to calm down the families of fallen soldiers. This month, Archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church Artemiy Vladimirov decided to up the ante and claimed that soldiers fighting on Russia’s side in Ukraine get resurrected after they get killed.

Ukraine’s Armed Forces estimate that the Russian military has suffered 451,730 casualties in the course of war, which includes deaths and injuries. Estimates by the U.S. and British intelligence conclude that Russian casualties exceed 300,000. This further exacerbates Russia’s growing demographic catastrophe and highlights the difficulties faced by the Kremlin in ensuring they have enough men willing to continue this devastating war.

Host of TV channel “Soyuz” Sergey Platonov told Vladimirov that he often speaks to soldiers serving in Ukraine and has been trying to convince them that there is no such thing as death. Describing one of his recent conversations with a Russian soldier, the host proudly said, “Maybe I’m boasting but I was successfully able to explain that death does not exist. He was encouraged by that!”

Vladimirov played along and replied, “In war, there are no unbelievers! When you are facing physical death, every fiber of your soul comes alive. Right now, there are many wonderful testimonies of Christ’s victory over death. My wife sends me many military testimonies and video clips. Before Lent, I watched a video about one Chinese man who participated in the special military operation. A bullet hit him in the stomach, destroying all of his insides. He died from this and then was resurrected.”

Vladimirov continued to spin the tale, claiming, “Saint Luke of Crimea appeared to him and completely healed him, his insides were fully restored. He was baptized along with his relatives, all of them are photographed together, dressed in white clothes, baptized into our Orthodox Church.”

The Archpriest added that this is not the only miraculous testimony that “Christ is visiting the soldiers who laid down their lives for their brethren, he is visiting them as his brothers, as blessed martyrs.”

Platonov said that Vladimirov’s tale of an alleged physical resurrection is an example of what should be a constant topic of conversation. He surmised, “All of us talk on the Internet, these stories should be constantly told. Death does not exist.”

Vladimirov wholeheartedly agreed, reminiscing about the Archpriest Dimitry Smirnov, describing him as one of the first clergymen who united the Russian Orthodox Church with the Defense Ministry. The thesis that “death does not exist” has already been incorporated into multiple state TV programs and even holiday specials, but is now being endowed with new outlandish specifics.

Vladimirov is no stranger to spreading idiosyncratic fibs. In 2019, he claimed to have communicated with Charles Darwin from beyond the grave and alleged that the scientist repented for his theory of evolution and renounced his own hypothesis about the origin of species.

You simply don't get that sort of high resurrection comedy in the lizard Oz, instead you get talk of the wonders of Xianity, or perhaps Mein Gott doing a riff on EVs ...

The reptiles try to keep Mein Gott out of the pond's eye by running him at odd times - just like Killer Creighton musing on the New York trial, which involved some kind of recognition that the trial was happening, and so Killer had to be disappeared quickly. (Why, it might turn ugly and then you'd have the reptiles supporting a convicted felon for Prez).

Dammit, the pond is not easily dissuaded from serving up a dose of Mein Gott and his latest tale of disaster, because talk about channeling Charles Darwin is nothing up against Mein Gott channeling the apocalypse, in all its myriad and manifest forms ...

Mein Gott, it turns out the global EV mess is wot brung Rish! down. Who knew, apart from Mein Gott?

To be fair, EVs featured significantly in a recent Rowson on Rish!

(Relax, apparently that boat was an EV).

The reptiles supplied different videos and snaps for Mein Gott ...

... and then it was on with the catastrophe that had brought Rish! down ...

Ah, it was the pandering to 'leets wot done it ... only Mein Gott can channel "ordinary peeple" ... but it would seem there's a simple solution. 

Let India stay clogged in sweat while we revert to the 1950s and the good old days of petrol ...

Oh sheesh, a switch back to petrol will cause more chaos ... ordinary peeple is doomed ... with a Colbert "Meanwhile" to wrap up this sorry tale of woe ...

If only all these clever dicks always wanting to innovate and driven by the delusion that climate science is a threat would settle down and let us all get back to a decent Morris Minor ...or perhaps an Austin A30, or if you really wanted to keep your mechanic happy, a Vauxhall or a Jaguar XJ-6.

And so to the serve of our Henry, in ripper nineteenth century form this day ...

Our Henry's real beef is with people daring to call out an unfolding genocide, but as usual the deviant dodderer seeks refuge in the past as a form of attack on the present ...

Indeed, indeed, why try to tame war, why try to prevent genocides? Why indulge in the Nuremberg trials? Surely the correct response was to hand all the Nazi leaders a ticket to South America, and living expenses for a year, with a kindly note that they'd played a jolly good game, but they'd lost.

Let the beast loose, indulge in the bestial. Why all the hanging and the rest of the carry on? Why all this talk of self-regulation when you can freely wank in the patented our Henry way?

The reason became apparent in the next reptile snap ... the barbarian perpetrator of a genocide in response to a barbarian slaughter might be under the gun ...

Our Henry wasn't going to stand for any of that ...

Hang on, hang on, mixed message reptile time out.

Didn't Killer Creighton only yesterday scribble Things even may be looking up: the world is coming to look more like it did in that relatively peaceful 19th century, when no one nation held overwhelming global power.

He did, he did, and the pond thinks esteemed correspondents might have noted, what with the American Civil War still tops, with an average of 425 deaths per day, up against a 100 a day in the first world war and 200 fatalities a day in the second world war ...

Oh okay, that's just the sort of faux statistic the google bot will throw up when asked, and c. 600k dead helps explain why the nineteenth century was relatively peaceful ...

Meanwhile, our Henry was still working out ways to save the current Israeli government and its war criminal leader from assorted charges ...

Oh sheesh, the hole in the bucket man is going to do a listicle, and yet truly up to this point, his main thrust in support of anarchy, lawlessness, and barbarism was going splendidly well ...

Next time you feel like murdering your partner, please don't be held back by sweeping judicial mechanisms. 

The disconnect between those biblical injunctions and actual practice have always been in a chasm, and if you don't like the rulez, simply tear them up and do what you will.

As Aleister Crowley famously once said, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the our Henry law ..."

Perhaps not exactly those words, but put it another way...

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you.

And now it's time for the listicle, and then you can head off to do a little shop lifting, and complain SovCit style about stringent rules and sweeping judicial mechanisms.

Who needs a driver's license? Who needs to drive on one side of the road, what meaningless rules are these? Why all these stringent judicial mechanisms and useless pettifogging regulations?

Yes, lessons have been drawn, just as the curtains were once drawn with a pencil on the Good show.

As Nikki Haley famously scribbled and as the genocide loving Henry concurred ...

Finish them! Kill 'em all, the long, the short, and the tall. Let there be blood. Heck, pound an Xian to death with a bowling pin if that's your fancy.

Remember, our Henry has never met a genocide he couldn't love ... his god is old testament,  where bunging on a flood to wipe out life on earth was just a routine cleansing genocide. She really knew how to do barbaric slaughter, and gave not a whit nor a jot for the rules She'd scribbled in a listicle fit into a ten point form. Useless regulatory nonsense full of mindless legalisms. She should have known better, She should have sought Henry's advice.

And so to the cartoons of the day, and the pond had to hold them back to the end because they all concerned the latest racist migrant lizard Oz fixation.

The pond has a humble attitude to the problem ... if you've sheltered and nurtured someone from say the age of one or two, and they turn criminal - not that there's anything wrong with that, they've been made that way by insufferable legalism and sweeping judicial mechanisms - then you broke it, and you should fix it, or at least live with it, rather than deport it and dump your handiwork on other countries...

Cue a flurry of cartoons to wrap up proceedings...

In which the pond does its best to surround the onion muncher and Killer with items of interest ...

 

Wow. 52.9°C, or 126.1°F if you will ... the pond woke to the news with a start as the Beeb blared out the figures.

The pond knew at once that it would be front and centre at the lizard Oz, further proof that climate science was a hoax, and that renewables were a complete waste of time ...

Hang on, hang on, no mention of world records?! 

Was it all a fever dream? Had the pond been led astray yet again by the cardigan wearers at the Beeb? The pond consulted The Times of India ...

It had actually happened, and once again the bubble-wrapped hive mind had triumphed by resolutely staying inside the bubble ... and instead of records the reptiles featured at the top of the page simplistic Simon - here every conflict of interest imaginable - and more blather about Tingle ...

It's probably wrong of the pond to draw attention to a story in another place ...

Gad sir, enough of that, the reptiles are devoted to their racism ...

And the pond rarely features First Dog, but sometimes it has to be done ...even if it takes up a lot of space ...because News Corpse features, as only it can ...

Impeccable logic, and with the top of the hive mind covered, the pond turned to the commentary section below the fold ...

Oh sheesh, the onion muncher's back ... and there's Killer ...and the pond knew what had to be done ...

At once the pond had to abandon dreams of the UK election and the splendid comedy on offer ...

That big splash has been downsized already but the Hydeing is still there, and there's a cracking Crace too ...

The pond also had to abandon its plans for a Gina joke, what with the Graudian's Comedian drops plan for a billboard of Gina Rinehart portrait in Times Square ... but there was an upside, Picture that: Visitors flock to gallery after Rinehart portrait row ... (L'Age paywall)

And all the pond had left from all this talk in the AFR ...(likely paywall) ...

...Mr Dutton declined to be drawn following a report in the Nine Newspapers that he would soon announce seven nuclear power sites across mainland Australia.
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan told Mr Dutton to look elsewhere.
“I take the opportunity to make it absolutely clear that nuclear energy will never be part of the mix here under a Victorian Labor government,” she said.
“I want to send this message to the communities of Anglesea and the La Trobe Valley – me and my government will stand with those communities against a federal Coalition who want to bring toxic, risky, expensive nuclear power plants into their backyard.”
State Liberal leader John Pesutto was lukewarm.
“We have no plans to introduce nuclear power into Victoria,” he said.
WA Premier Roger Cook said his government would “absolutely” oppose a federal Coalition government moving to build a nuclear power station at Collie, in the state’s south.
“No one in Collie wants to see a nuclear power station constructed in their community. Don’t forget that a nuclear power station is the most expensive form of power and won’t be able to be realised for 20 to 40 years,” Mr Cook said.

... was a bloody useless souvenir, not the SMR the pond had ordered for the back yard ...

The pond would settle for a nuke snow dome for the bedside table if it can't have that SMR ...

Okay, okay, time to get serious, or at least as serious as the onion muncher, climate denialist in chief, allows ...

The usual bro twaddle, but for once the pond can agree on one thing.

This summer is going to be an exceptionally difficult fighting season for Ukraine, which is going to face an existential crisis ... and it hasn't been helped in its fight against Vlad the sociopath by the behaviour of the orange Jesus, the GOP and certain European folk ... including but not limited to ...

The pond wasn't to be distracted by a few video clips inserted into the onion muncher's piece ...

The pond was waiting for a vicious, full throated assault on Orban and his lickspittle fellow travellers fellow travelling with Vlad the sociopath...

Sadly the onion muncher has the attention span of a gnat, and so wandered off into other pastures ...

There was still time in the onion muncher's long march through infinite stupidity for him to berate assorted loons, including Peter Pellegrini ... and others ...

Nah, that'd be too hard for a mindless gnat ... how about some useless blather about the Anglosphere instead ...

Still stuck in 1947?

Actually the 1950s is probably more the go, you can take a lad out of the DLP but you can't take the DLP out of the lad, but then came the punchline ... and devoted followers of the onion muncher will know what's coming ...

Budapest?! That's the capital of Hungary if the pond remembers it's geography lessons ... yet another reminder of just how mindlessly stupid the onion muncher is ... there he is kowtowing to the tribe that's actively kowtowing to Vlad the impaler, while blathering about rediscovering our better selves. 

Making himself a useless tool for the Danube Institute ... but then he's always been a useless fool, and he's  been that way for some considerable time ...

And so to a serve of Killer thinking as the bonus ...

Huzzah, there's nothing like a really cheap serve of third rate Machiavelli from a member of the Murdochian 'leet (yes, 'leets will be mentioned in the usual 'leet way) ... 

Deeply cynical and full of illustrations to disguise the paucity of the mind ...

Stripped of the snaps, Killer was reduced to mindless short gobbets best joined together ...

Confronted with this level of cynicism, the pond decided to do what it's been doing and turn to Haaretz for a little relief ...

This offering by Yoana Gonen was titled ...Israel Is Blind to Rafah's Inferno, but Its Own Ruin Is Entwined With Gaza's, (paywall), and the pond only noticed because it was featured in Haaretz's daily newsletter ...

The sights from the explosion of the displaced persons camp in Rafah this week were horrifying, even for a war that is providing more and more unbearable pictures. Beheaded toddlers, scorched bodies and a huge fire that destroyed the rickety tents in which civilians were sheltering, in an area that Israel had declared "safe."

"This is one of the most horrifying things I've seen in all the weeks I've been working in Gaza," a British doctor told the New York Times, and a foreign journalist described it as "a real vision of hell."

And meanwhile in Israel, in another vision of hell, there are some who enjoy seeing dismembered children and charred civilians. For example, the frenetic troll Yinon Magal, who shared a photo of the burning tents alongside the caption "The main bonfire this year in Rafah"; the security chief of the settlement of Kfar Adumim, Avihai Shorshan, who is known for harassing his Palestinian neighbors, expressed his enjoyment at the disaster with the words "Lag Ba'omer, Rafah version," and my former colleague in the opinion section of Haaretz, Naveh Dromi, who shared Shorshan's post and added: "Happy Holiday."

In the State of Israel, the sheol (dark underworld) that is being built for us by insane, hard-hearted people like Magal, Shorshan and Dromi, happy holidays are days when dozens of innocents are killed and all the jokes are made about other people's dead babies.

But as in Dante's Inferno, even the hell to which Israeli society has sunk consists of different circles. Surrounding the heart of darkness, where people dance on the blood, resides a circle of self-declared or implicit deniers. From there comes the yelling and growling of all those who, at the sight of the bodies and the fire, could immediately say that these are fake propaganda videos, that it wasn't a bombing by the Israel Air Force but "the launching of a failed rocket" (as invented by Channel 14 reporter Hallel Bitton-Rosen), that the numbers of dead are inflated, and why were Hamas terrorists in the displaced persons compound anyway?

The tweet was featured ...

...and then Gonen returned to hell ...

In this circle, there are no monsters who are happy about dead children, only chatterboxes and fabulists who find sophisticated ways of erasing the suffering of others. As it is said: It didn't happen, and if it did happen, so what?

In an adjacent circle, the verbal jugglers are jumping about: members of the government and the army who operate the euphemism mechanism that whitewashes the killing of civilians. "The attack was carried out in accordance with international law, using precise ammunition," the Israel Defense Forces quickly reassured us. That doesn't make dozens of people any less dead, but it may convince The Hague to refrain from issuing injunctions.

Alongside them, sitting on upholstered chairs, are all the submissive journalists, who refrain from reporting on Israel's actions in Gaza. According to them, the horror that took place in Rafah really is a somewhat unpleasant matter, but not because of the children who lost their limbs, but because it harms public diplomacy efforts and photographs badly on the TV screens of the goyim.

And all these are surrounded by the largest circle of sheol, the place where the blind, deaf and simply bored sit. Here the silent majority proclaims its innocence, the people who don't celebrate soot-covered civilians and don't deny the terrifying sights – but are completely indifferent.

In 2002, after the assassination of Salah Shehadeh, commander of the military wing of Hamas in Gaza (who was far more senior that the duo who were assassinated this week in Gaza), the country was in an uproar and dozens of pilots declared that they would refuse to bomb concentrations of civilian population, because along with him 15 children and adult civilians were killed.

Today, about 45 incinerated refugees fill the role of "collateral damage" – and the country is silent before the sight of Rafah's red sky. Toddlers go up in flames, and the Israeli public celebrates, erases, chatters or yawns – that's what our hell looks like. When you embark on a campaign of vengeance, as the saying goes, dig two graves; Israel has such a strong desire for revenge that it is slowly sinking in a dark abyss, hand in hand with the ruins of Gaza.

If there were any justice, instead of cheap cynicism and third rate Machiavelli, Killer himself would endure a little hell, but instead he inflicts hell on his readers with that promised 'leet blather about 'leets ...

SCOTUS? Was this the right time to mention SCOTUS? What with the fixes and the flag waving being in ...

Sheesh, so much SCOTUS fun the pond almost forgot the Wilcox ...

That's an easy question to answer. The pond's tragic mistake was giving space to Killer ... doing Carl von Clausewitz lite with 'leet jokes... but on the upside, there's just one gobbet to go ... full of the usual Murdochian projection, as you'd expect of a card-carrying member of that tribe ...

Allegedly killing and starving? The pond can say, without benefit of an "allegedly", that Killer is a clown of the first water ... and as for that last line about the nineteenth century being relatively peaceful, tell that to all the victims of empires straddling the world ...

The pond did like this one from 1886, beyond the valley of a Killer karicature...

And what about this one from 1910 showing a world ready for world war ...

And speaking of empire, nary a thought in the hive mind for those up north. 

That's best left to a closing cartoon from the infallible Pope ...