In which, after celebrating bigot of the week awards with an esteemed correspondent, the reptiles and the government decide to gas the country

 

The gift that keeps on giving, courtesy Colbert ...

Such a national treasure, such a monument, such a memorial designed to stand the test of time ... and what a bum and what a magazine for the biffing of the bum ...

Of course the pond doesn't expect any stormy weather in the lizard Oz this day, nor any mention of the continuing genocide in Gaza, but there did seem a faint chance that the stars might align, and that the reptiles might seize the chance to celebrate the bigots of the day, what with Islamic ideology intruding on parish pump politics ...

An esteemed correspondent had, as usual, gazumped the pond and drawn attention to the matter with a link to The Conversation, A Sydney council has banned books with same-sex parents from its libraries. But since when did councils ban books?

As the pond's esteemed correspondent noted, a good question, and so the pond anxiously scanned the top of the lizard Oz digital edition this day for the answer ...

Jack the Insider in the top far right position bashing Victoria, terrifying the pond with the notion that when the pond lands in Melbourne in June, only blackened, vast ruins will remain ...

Nope, that wasn't the answer.

Petulant Peta missed out on the coveted far right position and was rabbiting on about Islamics, but she also didn't have the answer.

Instead she wasted her chance, and spent her time moaning about people daring to talk about the Gaza genocide and the way that Islamics now ran Britain (apparently they have ruined London in much the same way the Melbourne is now a post-apocalyptic wilderness ready for the next Netflix sci fi show, not being satisfied with being a great place to portray the arse end of the world in On the Beach).

The pond wondered by petulant Peta had missed the obvious ... even the infallible Pope had joined in the game, managing to get the new Who on the case ... (What stayed on second, and Why didn't make it to third)...

Why did petulant Peta and the reptiles miss out? 

Then the pond realised ... the bigots were doing the right thing in the eyes of the lizard Oz, as can be seen in The Graudian write-up.  

And so on, and it was obvious ... between bashing the Islamic Labor party rat in the ranks and bashing the gays, stick with bashing the gays, stick with the bigots. The enemy of thine enemy is thine book-banning, woke-hating, gay-loathing friend.

So how could the reptiles attack the sweet, honourable, Labor party rat in the ranks who'd helped tip the scales the right way  ...

The motion passed 6-5 with the backing of Labor councillor Mohamad Hussein, who broke ranks with his party to vote in favour of the ban in a move condemned by NSW Labor minister Rose Jackson.

Hussein said he stood by his decision which was made in line with his religious beliefs and “not targeted at anyone or groups”.

“I will not be comprising those beliefs,” he said.

Other local residents have come out in swinging opposition, including award-winning poet Omar Sakr.

But that only put Hussein in a hot contest for bigot of the week with Christou, the bigot that set it all in motion ...

It turns out this mob has form, per a yarn in Crikey back in 2023 ... (possible paywall)

Wilcox seemed to take it personally ...

As for the rest, the pond really had very little interest in what the reptiles had to offer below the fold ...

There was Jennings of fifth form railing at China, and Rodger celebrating Bibi, and Tom issuing warnings, and the WSJ taking a firm stand, and another repeat of the petulant Peta sighting - the pond read her so others needn't bother - and the pond realised it would be rather reading Politico's Evangelicals Hate Stormy Daniels But Love Trump. 

Here’s Why, Trump may have sinned, but evangelicals still admire his masculinity and power.

In the piece, associate editor Dylon Jones talked with Samuel L. Perry, a sociologist of religion (who knew there was such a thing), and these insights came up ...

Jones: How do you see evangelical theology and views of masculinity and sexuality impacting support for Trump?
Perry: In the Old Testament, you have these examples of flawed but wild and effective warriors for the Lord’s work, who also happen to be womanizers. Of course, you’ve got David, who is somebody who’s celebrated as the leader of Israel, who has his affair with Bathsheba. You’ve got Solomon, who has 1,000 concubines. But then you also have this character of Samson. I actually think Samson is the best metaphor for Trump.
Samson is just a full-time ass kicker. He’s this rampaging wild man who is like the John Wick of killing Philistines. That’s his favorite thing to do. His other favorite thing to do is to visit prostitutes, and his downfall ends up being this prostitute, Delilah. But that is often glossed over within the evangelical space — he’s still talked about as a hero, because God used him to fight the enemies of his people, and to do it fearlessly and even happily. So there was plenty of precedent in evangelical readings of the Old Testament to celebrate flawed but effective leaders who fail sexually. Maybe they aren’t representative of the best sexual morals, but God used them, and we still celebrate them as heroes.
Samson is another example, though, of something else. Samson is also thought of as this uber-masculine hero: He’s big, and he’s strong, and the representations of Samson are of this hyper-masculine guy. And part of that is his huge and enormous sexual appetites. The guy was the embodiment of physical superiority, and that includes his sexual superiority as well.
Jones: So Samson’s sexual appetites are sinful, but they’re also part of what makes him a strong man. Is sexual temptation seen as a fundamental part of the male evangelical experience?
Perry: In my research, I found that evangelicals tend to see sexual temptation as just a normal part of being a Christian man — that God gave men tremendous sexual appetites because he wanted them to be leaders and initiators and people who take charge. And this isn’t just about sexuality; this is about every area of life. This is what’s called complementarianism, that the ultimate male goal is to lead — in terms of politics, is to lead, in terms of moral authority, is to lead, and also in terms of sexual initiation. And that comes with a risk of those appetites being too strong, and somebody being overcome by their own sexual temptation — like a Samson.
So in Trump, you’ve got this guy who, yes, he has failed sexually. He has a history of being a womanizer. The Stormy Daniels thing is something that reflects poorly on him. And yet, it also reflects positively on his masculinity. Because this guy, he’s a man’s man. This guy is an initiator, he goes after what he wants. He’s going after women, and he now has a supermodel wife who looks like the embodiment of a kind of “trophy wife.” So Trump is representative of a kind of masculinity that is so masculine that his sexual appetites cannot be contained. That’s almost a good sign. In other words, he’s not Mike Pence — a kind of asexual, Ned Flanders kind of Christian that is effete and ineffective. No, Trump is power personified. He is a warrior. And with that comes all of the temptations of being a warrior.

It was exactly the excuse the pond needed to wander down memory lane to a movie which had a powerful impact on the pond, as only Victor, Hedy and the mighty George Sanders could ...

Oh you licentious, lustful beasts, you pagan sex addicts, play that geetar woman and let us read the Bible ...

How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince's daughter! the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.

Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.

Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.

Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.

Thine head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of thine head like purple; the king is held in the galleries.

How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!

This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes.

I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof: now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, and the smell of thy nose like apples;

And the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak.

Ye ancient hot cats and lusty dogs, this is a case for Cumberland council, that bloody vile font of pornography is in want of a good banning ...fishpools!

Is the pond ever going to get serious this day? Well the pond was relieved to see that Jeremy scored a slot ...

Well played petrol head dinosaur, forget the Beeb, you'll always have a home with the reptiles ... and recently the lizard Oz editorialist was also on the case ...

Indeed, indeed, the lizard Oz, truth teller to the nation. Nuke the country to save the planet.

In turn that led the pond to a sighting of the lesser member of the Kelly gang. Not enough people take Joe seriously, but Joe is a serious member of the gang, with great news ...

Why are the reptiles suddenly obsessed with net zero? The pond keeps getting reminders from the reptiles that climate science alarmism is just a cult, a tawdry religion, and yet here we are ...

CCS, the wonder drug? The pond dutifully trotted off to the Climate Council to read ...

Key points:

• Carbon capture and storage (otherwise known as CCS) is a licence to ramp up emissions.
• CCS will never be a ‘zero-emissions’ solution.
• CCS is eye-wateringly expensive. 
• Chevron’s Gorgon Gas Plant in WA, which is the biggest attempt at a CCS project in the world, is a big, expensive failure.

If you made it past the key points, you might have got to this ...

Carbon capture and storage is a licence to ramp up emissions. Around the world, CCS projects are being built to allow for continued oil and gas production – A use that still makes up almost three quarters of world CCS projects, not reduce emissions. In Australia, the coal and gas industry is pushing for CCS so it has a license to keep its polluting projects going, not because it wants to cut emissions.

After decades of CCS research and billions of dollars invested around the world, including here in Australia, there is little to show for it. In fact, when CCS is attached to coal and gas power stations it is likely to be at least six times more expensive than electricity generated from wind power backed by battery storage. Every CCS project that has been undertaken so far has resulted in significant delays and massive cost blowouts. Even when they get a project up and running, CCS trial sites like Chevron’s Gorgon gas plant continue to belch out huge amounts of pollution.

Worldwide, CCS trials on coal-fired power stations have been monumental failures. The few that have got off the ground have grossly exceeded budget and schedule, massively underdelivered on carbon promised to be captured, and are now mostly shuttered. No company is prepared to underwrite a CCS project for the life of storage, leaving that risk to taxpayers.

It is far better and cheaper to avoid carbon emissions in the first place, rather than try to capture them after they’ve been released. Rather than wasting money on something that’s expensive and ineffective, Australia should be investing in the things we know can cut emissions quickly and bring down power prices – like renewables backed by storage. 

Time to celebrate with a cartoon ...

Then it was on with the final gobbet of hope, and instead of nuking the country to save the planet, it seems we'll be gassing it ...

The pond realises this was a short weight day, and so offers this as a tribute to a woman who just keeps on giving ... Kristi Noem Bailed on Fox News Because of Snow. So They Nuked Her (paywall).

...Gutfeld pulled no punches when delivering the news of Noem’s cancellation to his viewers, skewering her with a brutal series of dog-related barbs about her latest book, No Going Back, in which she reveals that she executed a 14-month-old puppy that she “hated.”

At the top of his show, Gutfeld snarked that Noem’s staff “blamed bad weather” for her bailing, turning to “locals for reaction,” which was a video of dogs barking and swimming in a pool.

“Who knows why she canceled? When we asked how her week was going, she replied ‘ruff.’ Maybe it wasn't bad weather, I heard it was raining cats and dogs,” Gutfeld quipped. “I tried to convince Noem to stay and do our show. I even told her my dog Gus had all his shots. She said not yet he hasn’t.”

After a few more cracks, Gutfeld suggested Noem would have ultimately benefited from appearing on his show.

“You know, you could’ve done the show. Could have done the show,” he said. “We are nice people. Everybody here teases everybody else. We have a good time. You probably would come off looking a lot better than you do now because we would have had fun, but instead, you chose to run. Boo!”

Towards the end of the broadcast, Gutfeld turned to Fox News vet Dana Perino, a well-known dog lover, to portray Noem in a skit once again roasting the governor’s calamitous book and her cringeworthy efforts to defend herself.

“So, Dana, aka Gov. Noem, did you write the book yourself?” Gutfeld wondered.

“You know, that’s a great question for someone who wrote the book, and I don’t think I will dignify your question with a response,” Perino retorted. “There are so many other important issues in the world, like animal cruelty.”

Perino continued to mock Noem’s evasive responses to journalists’ questions about the book’s claims, especially when Gutfeld asked if the governor had actually read her own memoir.

“Thank you for reading my book. I said some words that were written about me, and they were in a certain order of—they call them sentences, and so I read those aloud,” she quipped. “I don’t know if that means I read the book, though.”

Keeping the dog jokes flowing, Perino also claimed that she had recently gotten another puppy named “Ghost Writer” but that she had “killed him this morning.”

“I also regret not canceling on you on Saturday, so I didn’t waste your time reading a book that I was not going to come on and do the interview about,” Perino said, still pantomiming Noem.

“Amen,” Gutfeld replied.

Well it passes for humour on Faux Noise.

So to James Parker's tribute in The Atlantic, Some Late-Breaking Adjustments to My New Autobiography, Which is entirely true, by the way. (possible paywall)

“I’m not going to talk about my specific meetings with world leaders. I’m just not going to do that. This anecdote shouldn’t have been in the book and as soon as it was brought to my attention, I made sure that that was adjusted.”

— South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, in response to questions about a meeting she claimed to have had with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un

It has been brought to my attention that my memoir The Truth: My Life, How It Really Happened, and What It Means for America—for which I conducted more than 500 hours of interviews with myself—contains an anecdote in which the late Samuel Beckett mails me his Nobel Prize for Literature medal and insists, in a long and heartfelt letter, that I deserve it more than he does. This anecdote has been adjusted.

It has been brought to my attention that my memoir Just the Facts: Everything I Ever Did and the Order I Did It In—for which I embedded with myself on a series of dangerous solo military missions—contains an anecdote in which, after a boozy lunch with King Charles III, I invent the iPod. This anecdote has been adjusted.

It has been brought to my attention that my memoir You Better Believe It: All My Realest Adventures—for which I accompanied myself on many trips to palaces, embassies, medieval mountain hideaways, global HQs, elite conferences, celebrity meditation retreats, and secret underwater laboratories—contains an anecdote in which I win Season 14 of Survivor but turn down a subsequent offer (from Jeff Probst himself) to host the show. This anecdote has been adjusted.

It has been brought to my attention that my memoir The Honesty Gospel—for which I observed myself over seven sessions of ketamine therapy, supervised by myself—contains an anecdote in which I am visited by the archangel Gabriel. No adjustment has been made to this anecdote.

It has been brought to my attention that my memoir No BS: Straight Talk From the Mouth of Reality—for which I spent several months on the set of a documentary about me, directed by me, and starring (as me) both Steve Martin and Eva Longoria—contains an anecdote in which I ask the late J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Listen, Bob, are you sure you want to split the atom?” This anecdote has been adjusted.

Just so you know ...

James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

In turn that reminded the pond of an ancient offering by Mike Skerrett in McSweeney's, I travelled to a diner in Trump country to write another article on whether the Persident's supporters still want to, quote "Smash My Libtard Face In" ...

First a current cartoon to establish the mood of the day ...

Now take that step back in time ...

It has been, to put it lightly, a bad few years for journalism. Public trust was shattered after the surprising results of the 2016 election, leading to a lot of self-reflection on the part of journalists. How did we mess up so badly? Was it the fact that we harped on a non-story, pushed entirely by a bad-faith Republican media machine? No, we decided; it was the fact that we weren’t in touch with Trump voters. What do they really mean when they say, “Journalists are the enemy of the people?” It’s truly a mystery. Luckily, I drove from my coastal elite bubble to a diner in America’s heartland to hear things straight from the Trump’s supporters’ mouths.

After all, the only way to stop people from wanting to bash your face in for writing something they disagree with is to sit down across a platter of some bacon and eggs and just talk.

The concerns of Trump’s supporters are valid, and they deserve to be heard. All opinions, after all, are equally valid—whether that opinion is “I have a journalism degree and spend my entire day trying to get the facts” or “I pipe The Daily Caller directly into my prefrontal cortex and that’s just as good as facts, you [pick a slur, any slur].”

I came to this diner, The No Safe Space Café, to get a taste of the Real America. This America exists outside the liberal echo chambers, somewhere with real diversity of thought: The opinions of straight, white, Christian men.

“George Soros commands an army of transgender Jewish robots, who have infiltrated our society and aim to make all our kids gluten-free,” says Paul, 54, a white, middle-class, salt-of-the-earth, blue-collar financial analyst and property developer making $329,000 a year.

I say that surely, he means this metaphorically. Surely, he’s expressing some sort of discontentment with the fact that the middle of the country feels left behind as the industry and agriculture sectors have—

“No, no.” Paul shakes his head. “The control center George Soros uses for these robots is in Berkeley, California. Someday we’re going to find it, and then you will all get what’s coming to you. And by ‘all get what’s coming to you,’ I mean violence.”

I thank him for agreeing to sit down and talk with me.

“Enjoy the ability to trash-talk our president while you still can, scum,” he says, shaking my hand.

Disagreements are what make us American. You believe journalists should be thrown in jail for saying things you don’t like? Totally fine, but I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree there. Even though I’m a smart and sensible person, for some reason I believe that Trump supporters are going to say something new and insightful in the next 8,000-word profile, or at the very least they’ll see themselves represented in print and stop wanting to take a baseball bat to our faces. Fingers crossed this will be the article that accomplishes all that!

I continue through the diner, discussing the issues with Trump supporters as they thoughtfully throw sugar packets, straws, and crumpled-up napkins at me. As they prepare to pummel me with their fists, I type out a genius lede to the article:

In a time when division and political change is racking the country, one group stands firmly behind Trump—the people who like him.

I get back into my car, proud of myself about how fair I’m being, blood oozing from my ears. I pull up my GPS. It’s time to go ice skating with the subject of my next profile—a white supremacist who, like, actually kinda loves ice skating? Isn’t that quirky and fun?

Yes, America. It’s all so, so quirky and fun.

Well it's been a light day for herpetology students, with bigots on parade providing a distraction, and the gassing of the country such a positive solution, and Kristi and the orange Jesus still giving ... and giving ... and giving, and so there's just room for a final celebration, thanks to the immortal Rowe ...