In which the pond has quite a busy Thursday, though the Lynch mob and Mein Gott do bring down the tone ...

 

The gift that keeps on giving ... and it was only when the pond could add The Daily Show to its list of sightings that it realised it was keeping the company of the mother of all Streisand effects...

Thursday is usually a quiet time on the pond, as the lizard Oz routinely features petulant Peta, and by this time the pond is well over the genocide lovers at News Corp.

This day petulant Peta, in the most shameful way, managed to use the genocide to conclude thusly ...

This is where there is a real opportunity for Peter Dutton. Forget the commentators who think slick delivery and clever lines are what will win over voters. Right now, given the worries people face and their fears about the future, an opponent with moral clarity and trustworthiness is the biggest contrast with Albanese, and the greatest risk to Labor. Howard was mocked for being dependable; Dutton wants to wear that as a badge of honour.

Yep, celebrating genocide is the way to victory, and a badge of honour ...

Keeping the pond's nausea under careful control, this seemed a good time to honour the keen Keane, an expert herpetologist, who recently let fly at Crikey with this ... (paywall)

A couple of points - there was indeed a petition, grotesque and amazing, which the pond won't link to for fear it might fall into the hands of children...

That last line leads to the most obvious parallel ...

As the keen Keane notes the hypocrisy is rampant - anyone outside Liverpool would be aware of the inclination of the Chairman Emeritus to use tits to boost coffers...

But then the Chairman Emeritus is himself a randy old goat, who has recently converted back to supporting the pussy groper and coup lover so that contraception might become the latest target for an increasingly Taliban party and court system ...

Somewhere along the way as the pond slogged through Stephen Breyer's Choosing Pragmatism Over Textualism in the NYRB (paywall), the pond came across this ...

The first problem with Dobbs’s application of originalism to abortion is what lawyers sometimes call the problem of “dead hand control.” When the Framers wrote the Constitution in 1787 and when the Reconstruction Amendments were enacted soon after the Civil War, not all “people” could vote for ratification. Enslaved people were not considered citizens. Women were not understood to be full members of the political community. Yet it seems that originalism would have us limit the kinds of liberty interests that the Fourteenth Amendment recognizes to those contemplated by men at a time when women were not considered to have a legal identity separate from their husbands. How can an interpretive methodology with so limited a view of which people are entitled to constitutional protection function in our modern society?

And that's how you can have an organisation, to wit News Corp, supporting a party that thinks that a ten year old should be forced to carry a rapist's child to term, and ditto victims of incest, and so on ... 

And that's how you can end up comprehensively alienated from the alleged justice system ...

Law is not hard science. It is a codified set of beliefs comprising the rules that all members of society must live by. They agree to abide by those rules, and that agreement cannot be taken for granted. Adopting rigid jurisprudential methods that are divorced from people’s real lives and understandings, I fear, may undermine rather than strengthen that social contract. It risks distancing law from society, creating a system of internal logic that is useful to no one, unresponsive to contemporary life, and unable to safeguard our values and shared commitments. It threatens to weaken our commitment to the rule of law itself.

And that's how the pond can only stand so much hypocritical gas bagging and humbugging, though some might observe that finding 21k+ deluded fools is a good sign in a country of 25 million.

The keen Keane wrapped up this way ...

...Of course, the age verification issue doesn’t stop with Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Australia’s internet censorship body, the eSafety Commission — now wholly discredited after losing its attempt to dictate to the entire planet what people should be allowed to see online — wants to impose age verification on all “adult sites”.
Given it’s less than a decade since News Corp publications in the UK were printing photos of topless models in family newspapers, the definition of an “adult site” could be pretty flexible. Given nearly as many Australians use online pornography as use social media — over 80% of men and over half of women — does News Corp also want Australians to be handing pictures of their passports, driver’s licences and credit cards to PornHub? As the likes of the latter have argued, the only likely consequence of imposing such silly and easily circumvented restrictions would be to drive some users to more sinister sites that have no interest in complying with any Australian law.
Not that any of that matters to News Corp. This is about moral posturing and demonising a competitor. But the stench of hypocrisy emanating from the company is more than usually odious.

Odious! Now there's the right word. Every day the pond feels like it goes for a swim in a sewer ...

Luckily First Dog had joined in the fun ...

There's more, but at this point the pond thought it should at least pretend to be interested in its herpetology studies ...

Oh FFS, not the Lynch mob in the far right, highly esteemed, much desired "top of the barking mad lizard Oz digital world ma" slot ...

There was good news, with Rish! having finally snapped, so there'd be plenty of fun away from the genocide ... but herpetologists who headed off to read about Rish! would have been delighted to stumble across another yarn to the right of news of Rish!, News Corp’s Rebekah Brooks joins Lachlan Murdoch in Sydney ahead of major Australian newspaper restructure

Yes, the woman who was the canker at the core of criminal activities in the UK is coming down under ...

...Staff are bracing for significant cuts as the media giant moves to slash tens of millions of dollars in costs to counter the decline of print and a slow advertising market.

Cuts were also deemed necessary after Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, said it would not be renewing three-year content deals struck with News Corp under Australia’s news media bargaining code.

Meta said it would stop paying all Australian publishers for news, and planned to shut down its news tab in Australia and the US.

Facebook, along with Google, signed dozens of deals with publishers in 2021 worth an estimated $200m to avoid being “designated” under the Australian government’s news media bargaining code, which would have forced the digital platforms to negotiate with news publishers for the use of news content on the platforms.

Sources said consulting firm PwC was hired by News Corp earlier this year to help make changes to the management structure and to streamline operations.

The Australian’s editorial resources have been cut drastically in recent years and redundancies have continued this year, but the tabloids are said to be most affected by the cuts as the company moves towards more centralised reporting.

The newspapers already share some reporting from a centralised news wire which supplies all the mastheads with the same copy.

With so many executives in town, staff at Holt Street were told to keep their desks tidy, sources said.

The restructure follows a difficult period last year, which saw News Corp cut 1,250 roles after a plunge in profits of almost a third. Thomson broke the news of job losses after presenting the company’s second-quarter results in New York last year.

Mastheads the Australian, the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun had a 5% headcount reduction after a decline in earnings for Murdoch’s international newspaper stable of US$59m.

In Australia the company cut one in 20 staff at its local operations after the company posted a 47% decline in earnings in its news media division and lower quarterly revenue overall.

News Corp Australia would be split into three divisions: the free news.com.au site in one, the paywalled tabloids in a metro division and The Australian and magazines Vogue Australia, GQ Australia and Wish in a third so-called prestige division, the Australian Financial Review reported last month.

Miller will deliver a speech at the National Press Club on 6 June, which is expected to address Meta and the tech giants and is titled Australia and global tech: time for a reset.

And that perversely brings the pond back to the real reason for that caring for kiddies campaign, and the rest of First Dog celebrating the naked hypocrisy ...

Maybe ... or maybe Bekky will have kicked them to the curb ...

But what of Rish!? 

No need to worry, the cracking Crace is on hand with Cringing in the rain: soggy Rish! kickstarts his farewell tour ... oh and there was a good Hydeing in Rev Vennells wept but couldn't remember much about sending innocent subpostmasters to jail. All so long ago ...

By golly, things are happening this Thursday, just not in the poverty-stricken lizard Oz ...

The pond knew its duty ... of all the genocide lovers to hand, the pond had to study the Lynch mob, reflecting as he does the glory and wonder of the University of Melbourne ... with a twee reference to glamping, when any fuel knos that it should be galumphing, what with him being clumsy, ponderous and vexatiously noisy  ...

Netanyahu is an oasis of Western progressivism?

Talk to the hand or perhaps the people at Haaretz ... at the top of the page this day, they had two images grimly alternating, with the header This Is What Israel's 'Limited Operation' in Rafah Looks Like...

 

Yep, there's Western progressivism at its finest ... but before proceeding to the next gobbet, the pond would like to contemplate some wording that has always troubled the pond.

The pond found some help from Yolanda Moses ...

How widely accepted is the use of the term “people of color” in everyday language? In an NPR blog post titled “The Journey From ‘Colored’ to ‘Minorities’ to ‘People of Color,’” author Kee Malesky discusses the evolution of these terms and observes that “people of color” has gone mainstream. This term may have originated in political circles or social justice arenas, but it has spread to academia and is being accepted in academic writing and in speech.

But it is important to recognize that while “people of color” reaffirms non-whiteness, many people don’t like the term because they feel “it lumps all of us together.” Those who are white or Caucasian (“Caucasian” is itself a problematic word—which I discuss in another column post) are still the standard by which all others are labeled, at least for now.

At this cultural moment in the U.S., we still live in a racialized social and cultural hierarchy, and our language continues to reflect our ongoing attempts to grapple with that reality.

There was a helpful link to Kee Malesky's The Journey From 'Colored' To 'Minorities' To 'People Of Color' ... but none of it helped the pond work out whether referencing "governments of colour" was incredibly racist, or just passing racism ... not to mention the old argument as to whether white is a colour, because white light comprises all hues on the visible light spectrum ...

You know, if there's a mango Mussolini in charge, is that a government of colour, or is that a government of bronzer?

At this point the pond should note that the poverty stricken reptiles could rustle up a couple of visual distractions by recycling the dog botherer etc. 

It was just as well because the Lynch mob is one of the most tiresome of reptile contributors ...

This from an organisation designed to elevate a pussy groper to top position in the land ... this from an organisation dedicated to the notion of a ten year old girl carrying her rapist's baby to term ... this from an organisation that steadfastly ignores war crimes on one side while deploring war crimes on the other ... this from an organisation that celebrates genocide ... this from an organisation which purports to care about children, when it's really using children as a shield for its failing business model ...

The pond suddenly felt a deep welling of sympathy for Wilcox ...

And with that it was time for the last gobbet ...

Meanwhile, the genocide goes on, thanks no doubt to western progressivism, a cause apparently for muted optimism or perhaps profound contempt for the Lynch mob and the organisations that shelter him  ...yes, you, University of Melbourne, with the pond so dangerously radicalised it might set up a tent on the front lawn ...

And again ...

...Just recently, the Israeli government voted to shut down Al Jazeera – which has correspondents inside Gaza – from operating in Israel. On Tuesday, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi confiscated equipment and shut down a broadcast set up on the Gaza border by the Associated, and quickly backtracked the decision after receiving backlash.
The IDF's ground incursion into Rafah began on May 6, when the army ordered residents in parts of the area to quickly evacuate. Israeli forces entered through the Kerem Shalom crossing area and moved northward along the Philadelphi corridor and parallel to the Egyptian border.
The forces reached and seized control of the Rafah crossing, and continued further north. According to a report by Reuters on Wednesday, IDF forces reached the center of Rafah.
Haaretz examined the satellite images, which show near-total destruction in wide areas, and major damage caused to concentrations of urban buildings. The images reveal about an 18-square-kilometer area where the destruction is prominently visible.
Between May 8 and May 20, about a thousand buildings in the Rafah governorate were either damaged or destroyed, according to U.S. researchers Jamon Van Den Hoek of the University of Oregon and Cory Scher of CUNY, who have been tracking the damage to buildings by analyzing satellite data.
According to their analysis, from the start of the war through this week, 38.5 percent of the buildings in Rafah have been damaged or destroyed.
The Rafah ground incursion has significant implications for the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, since the Rafah crossing is a central area where the UN and many aid organizations have been operating over the past months, and is also an important entry point for humanitarian aid.
Since the start of the incursion, the Rafah crossing has been closed, and aid organizations are warning that an extended closure could have catastrophic consequences for Gaza's population.
Since February, the Netanyahu government has insisted that a Rafah incursion is crucial for dismantling the remaining Hamas battalions and tunnels that cross into Egypt, as part of its stated goal of destroying Hamas' civil and military control of the enclave.
The international community, the UN, and aid organizations strongly oppose this move, warning that it would cost the lives of many innocent Palestinians.
According to UN estimates, between May 6 and May 18, more than 800,000 people have fled Rafah. Many have already been uprooted several times during the war, setting out with hardly any belongings, and many of them still injured.
These displaced Gazans headed north to Khan Yunis and Dir al-Balah, where tent cities were recently erected. The UN says that some are also trying to find shelter on farmland, on roads and in buildings that were damaged in the war.
In the first months of the war, the army ordered Gazans to evacuate southward and said that anyone who remained in the evacuation zone was risking their lives.
A majority of the Gaza population, an estimated 1.4 million people, crowded into the Rafah governorate, which prior to the war was home to about 300,000 people. Huge tent cities were erected there and the population has been living in difficult humanitarian conditions.
According to UN monitoring, from early February until the start of the ground invasion, the IDF bombed areas in Rafah dozens of times. The UN reported that hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the bombings, which the IDF said were targeted against Hamas.
Parallel to the beginning of the ground incursion into Rafah, satellite images showed the tent cities there have rapidly emptied.

That western progressivism, progressive beyond belief ...

Never mind, time for some relief, and when confronted by mindless destruction, the pond always turns to Mein Gott ... 

Sure he's a holdover from yesterday, but that's because he turns up at odd times, outside the pond's hours.

As for chewing on grass in Gaza, forget it. Mein Gott is all about real disasters, constant, ongoing, never ending disasters ... so much suffering ...

As usual, the reptiles interrupted with snaps of the smirking villains, and the hallowed one, the saviour, the redeemer, the messiah ...

... and to be fair, when Mein Gott gets going, he prefers to get hysterical about super rather than suffering landlords ...

It's Mein Gott listicle time, in handy dot point form, so you can reel off the endless disasters and the suffering, way worse than anything going down in Gaza ...

Et tu Captain Spud? Don't worry, he's the redeemer, the saviour, and the hour is nigh, and redemption is at hand, though there's a few more dot points of anxiety and terror before we get there ...

From petulant Peta to Mein Gott, and talk of miracles and pious morality, and redemption at hand as that rough Queensland plod slouches towards Bethlehem or Canberra, take your pick ...

And soon enough we'll be nuking the country to save the planet, with the infallible Pope on hand to celebrate the feat ... (though the pond should note that the reptiles have been eerily quiet of late about the nuking, but is sure that any day now the order of the universe will be restored, and things made right with a thunk, a whoonk, a doonk and a klunk) ...

It's all in the details and he really is the caricature that keeps on giving ...