In which the pond resumes usual herpetology studies, with a groaning and a "Ned" Everest to climb, but occasionally seeks relief ...

 

An esteemed correspondent drew the pond's attention to a story in the Graudian about the making of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, proudly featured in the pond's banner gathering of loons, and while there's a fair argument that the original is the best, Philip Kaufman did a good job with the re-make, including a couple of nods to the original team. 

He also joked in that story:  I saw a cartoon of Trump in Donald Sutherland’s pose from the end of the film, pointing and screaming. That Maga world is the one I currently feel most endangered by.

No need for a 'toon. The pod people are out and about, and adopting the pose ...

The mango Jesus is no Donald Sutherland, and needs to spend less time cheating at golf and a little more time on his method, but it's not a bad pastiche ....

While doing droll material, a concerned citizen sent the pond a link to this extension ...

Of course the pond can't use it, the best the pond can do is refuse to provide links to reptile publications. 

If the pond did use it, it would put an end to the pond's long-held desire to graduate cum laude with a PhR degree (or is that PhHS?) ... and it's typical of vulgar youff (or perhaps aged tech heads) to think everything can be solved with an app or an extension, when what you need is discipline, or maybe one of Percy Grainger's floggers ...

Such pleasant distractions, so pleasant that the pond felt a strong desire to stay revolting, but a sense of duty returned the pond to its herpetology studies.

There's no need to sulk because of Dame Groan deprivation syndrome or a bromancer overload, and today the reptiles tried to make up for their bad behaviour with even more deplorable behaviour.

The pond notes that the bro is perched in the far right "top of the world ma" position, while down below the reptile obsession with the Lehrmann matter continues apace ...

That reminded the pond of the keen Keane's rant in Crikey. Culture, media and male violence: It starts at the top, with Seven and News Corp (paywall), If you're looking for a cultural component to male violence, look no further than Seven and News Corp and their recent treatment of women.

The bit about Seven is extracurricular, but the lecture on the lizard Oz involved the matter routinely noted by the pond ...

...War crimes. Rape. Drunken tirades and lewd comments. You want to see male violence and aggression in the media? Switch over to Seven.

Which prompts the question: how the hell does Chris Dore and anyone employed by Kerry Stokes have any right to lecture anyone about male violence?

All workplaces, no matter which industry, whether it’s the media, politics, finance or anything else, have male staff who behave badly toward women, from inappropriate comments to sexual harassment through to crimes such as sexual assault and even homicide. It is how those workplaces deal with those men, and protect their staff, that is key. Most large corporations now have far less tolerance of such behaviour, and even consensual relationships between CEOs and more junior staff have become the basis for dismissal at large firms. It is a change that Australian politics lags far behind on. It is also a change that large media companies plainly struggle with. At least News Corp, after years of promoting Dore, eventually let him go. Seven, however, remains mired in a very dark age.

At The Australian, there’s also been no lack of enthusiasm for lecturing the prime minister about how to respond to male violence. But does The Australian come to the issue with clean hands? Hardly. The Australian has been the lead newspaper outlet in trying to destroy Brittany Higgins and backing Lehrmann, including by suggesting Higgins should be investigated for acting corruptly even after the Federal Court found she had been raped, and using material such as private text messages wrongfully shared by Lehrmann. And Higgins is hardly the first victim of News Corp’s relentless campaigning. The company’s treatment of Grace Tame has been particularly vile.

The Australian’s campaign against Higgins is aimed at making an example of her for any woman who might embarrass the Liberal Party by revealing sexual assault or harassment by Liberal politicians. Like Seven, News Corp engages in campaigns in the service of covering up male violence and predation. That anyone at The Australian even thinks for a moment that outlet has any right to lecture anyone about male violence is extraordinary.

You want to talk about culture and male violence? It starts with two of our biggest media companies.

Speaking of behaving badly towards women, what was missing from the top of the page? Why, the 'grab 'em by the pussy' man.

Where you might find lurid details centre stage in the Graudian in bold, live red...

... you had to ferret down the page for Killer's anodyne report, with only one comical moment noted...

Below the fold, relief was in sight for pond traditionalists determined to get their daily serve of "we'll all be rooned" ...

What a relief. No need to indulge in the usual black bashing with Dame Slap ... a serve of Dame Groan would butter the pond's parsnips ...

What's that you say, the pond has been watching faux nineteenth century re-enactments of period recipes on YouTube? 

Maybe, the pond refuses to confirm or deny, it's really just trying to make the old biddie comfortable as she returns to deliver an epic groan, all the more poignant because the reptiles insisted on juxtaposing the groaner with Jimbo (not to be confused with Jimbo of the deep north), and dammit, he turned up to haunt her again in the only snap the reptiles provided for the groaning ...

That easy Jimbo facility with glib words simply can't be allowed, and Dame Groan is just the old biddie to take him down ,with a few pointed thrusts from her brolly or her keyboard ...the uppity whippersnapper must be put in his place, and Dame Groan gets down to making key points at both the beginning and end of the gobbet ...

So many points, so little time, and dammit what an outrage that surplus is, and once in a rage, Dame Groan can never let up about the use of butter on parsnips ...

Ah, the old renewables rag, yet again, and some might wonder why the pond doesn't spend time reading stories noted by esteemed correspondents, such as Great Barrier Reef’s worst bleaching leaves giant coral graveyard: ‘It looks as if it has been carpet bombed’.

It's true there are fun cartoons that might be deployed ...

... but that require the Riddser of the IPA, and all the pond has a deep groan, and occasional sigh, and talk of unbuttered parsnips, which the pond thought came from Tamworth circa 1950s, but actually is a most learned reference: The earliest known printed version of this proverb is in a 1639 English/Latin textbook, which reads: “Faire words butter noe parsnips, verba non alunt familiam” (words no family support).  (here)

And so the final buttered gobbet or is that the treacle of empty platitudes ...

The old biddie's wordsmithing is truly reaching an exalted metaphorical state, up there with the kite-flying done by Mr Dick in David Copperfield ...

Mr. Dick and I soon became the best of friends, and very often, when his day's work was done, went out together to fly the great kite. Every day of his life he had a long sitting at the Memorial, which never made the least progress, however hard he laboured, for King Charles the First always strayed into it, sooner or later, and then it was thrown aside, and another one begun. The patience and hope with which he bore these perpetual disappointments, the mild perception he had that there was something wrong about King Charles the First, the feeble efforts he made to keep him out, and the certainty with which he came in, and tumbled the Memorial out of all shape, made a deep impression on me. What Mr. Dick supposed would come of the Memorial, if it were completed; where he thought it was to go, or what he thought it was to do; he knew no more than anybody else, I believe. Nor was it at all necessary that he should trouble himself with such questions, for if anything were certain under the sun, it was certain that the Memorial never would be finished. It was quite an affecting sight, I used to think, to see him with the kite when it was up a great height in the air. What he had told me, in his room, about his belief in its disseminating the statements pasted on it, which were nothing but old leaves of abortive Memorials, might have been a fancy with him sometimes; but not when he was out, looking up at the kite in the sky, and feeling it pull and tug at his hand. He never looked so serene as he did then. I used to fancy, as I sat by him of an evening, on a green slope, and saw him watch the kite high in the quiet air, that it lifted his mind out of its confusion, and bore it (such was my boyish thought) into the skies. As he wound the string in and it came lower and lower down out of the beautiful light, until it fluttered to the ground, and lay there like a dead thing, he seemed to wake gradually out of a dream; and I remember to have seen him take it up, and look about him in a lost way, as if they had both come down together, so that I pitied him with all my heart.

Are Mr Dick and Dame Groan one and the same? Who knows, because it's on with a serve of nattering "Ned" ...

The last time that "Ned" featured on these pages an anonymous correspondent provided a summary which pretty much summarised every "Ned" Everest climb the pond has gone on ...

A quintessential Ned column. So much huff, so much puff, but in the end….. Inflation may go up further, or it may not. Interest rates may drop - or they might rise - or they might stay the same. This may happen - or perhaps not happen - sometime. In other words, Ned has NFI what the future may hold but that doesn’t stop him pontificating, and it certainly doesn’t stop him from assuming false gravitas by quoting umpteen other talking heads. 

What else to say? It's not possible to be pithier ...

As for the future and climate science and the reef and all that, hold the pond's beer and have a few snaps ...

Two reptiles moaning "we'll all be rooned" can be a bit wearing, especially given "Ned's" pompous, portentous tendency to blather about the challenge of the age, and alarums. and such like ...

Worse, there's nothing bonza here ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, Bazza jokes? Hold the pond's beer ...

Meanwhile, something went badly wrong in the reptile compile. It looks like they stretched a thumb, and blew it up as if in that Antonioni film ...

The pond has no idea why the prof was given a blur job, but it did provide a distraction.

Of course if the pond had really wanted a distraction, it would have followed up that story about Hunter and Faux Noise ...

It's behind the paywall ...but the headline really said it all ...

Besides quietly taking down The Trial of Hunter Biden from its streamer, the network also deleted a promotional video promising Fox News viewers an “inside look” at the “mock trial,” which was presided over by former reality-TV star Judge Joe Brown.

The scrubbing of the series, which debuted in October 2022, directly complies with the demand from Biden’s legal team—powerhouse celebrity law firm Geragos & Geragos—to delete the content immediately.

A Fox News spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Daily Beast that the special had been removed from the service following the complaint. “This program was produced in and has been available since 2022. We are reviewing the concerns that have just been raised and—out of an abundance of caution in the interim—have taken it down,” the statement read....

...On Tuesday morning, search engine links to The Trial of Hunter Biden either led to a page reading “this episode is not available right now” or a general landing page providing Fox Nation customers with other viewing options. Additional searches on the streaming service also fail to pull up the series.

A promotional video on Fox News’ digital website about Brown’s appearance on Fox & Friends has also been removed and replaced with a 404 page saying, “Something has gone wrong.”

Always pause and take a refreshing drink while doing the "Ned" Everest climb ... with the pompous old blowhard as usual resorting to a conga line of others for "Ned" to quote ...

As already noted, what more can be said, except that this is the the last gobbet, and the pond hasn't found the slightest reason to cut to the infallible Pope of the day ...

Well you can't expect the likes of "Ned" to care about any of that, so let's just do it ... do the last gobbet live if you can ...

Why does "Ned" bother with a rhetorical question? Why is he so pathetic that he can't even end with a rousing "having read Dame Groan, I, Captain Neddie Seagoon, have determined Labor isn't up to the job."

Such an inveterate hand wringer and wearer of sackcloth and ashes. Such a vacilator. Such a wimp and an empty vessel, much given to the tinkling of brass in the void ... and don't ask the pond what else what he does with his hands, it's obvious enough in his columns, even if these days he can only manage it in his mind, in a Rousseau way ...

At this point the pond can hear shrieks of "enough already", with tortured souls carrying the "Ned" albatross around their neds suddenly remembering what a traditional pond outing is like. 

Just run an immortal Rowe, they cry to the heavens rapidly falling on the earth, and end the torture ...

But how could the pond leave the field without honouring the bromancer?

Not big Dave! Apparently he's got the genes, and you know how they go when they get the genes, which is nothing like the white nationalist Xian fundamentalist tyke genes that course through the bromancer ...

Blink and you'll miss the bromancer reporting on Blinken says Israel still must do more to boost humanitarian aid to Gaza ...

Of course the bro would like to use the Hamas barbarians as a reason to back the Netanyahu barbarians, but really, it takes exceptional skill (a) not to have foreseen and taken steps to prevent the massacre; and (b) to have followed up with barbaric behaviour so wretched that campuses are now reverting to singing Buffalo Springfield lyrics ...

There's something happening here

But what it is ain't exactly clear

There's a man with a gun over there

A-telling me I got to beware

I think it's time we stop

Children, what's that sound?

Everybody look what's going down

There's battle lines being drawn

And nobody's right if everybody's wrong

Young people speaking their minds

Are gettin' so much resistance from behind

Children, what's that sound? It's the bromancer braying in his usual way ...

Et tu orange Jesus, drawing a conclusion that seems to have eluded the bromancer ...

Even more titillating was Kenneth Roth's piece in the Graudian, What will happen if the ICC charges Netanyahu with war crimes?

The Israeli government believes that the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague is about to file war crimes charges against Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials. We can’t know for sure – the ICC has kept its plans close to the vest – but the Israeli prime minister has good reason to worry, and the defenses he has offered so far are unlikely to help him.

The ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan’s most likely target is Netanyahu’s starvation strategy for Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Because the Israeli government has refused to let ICC staff enter Gaza, it will take time for Khan to complete the detailed investigation required to demonstrate other possible Israeli war crimes, such as indiscriminately bombing civilian areas and firing on military targets with foreseeably disproportionate civilian consequences. But the facts surrounding Israel’s obstruction of humanitarian aid are readily available.

During his two recent visits to the region, Khan stressed that, as international humanitarian law requires, Palestinian civilians in Gaza “must have access to basic food, water and desperately needed medical supplies, without further delay, and at pace and at scale”. He warned the Israeli government: “If you do not do so, do not complain when my Office is required to act.” The standard he cited is endorsed by virtually every government in the world including Israel, Britain, the United States, and, as a United Nations observer state, Palestine.

For much of the war Israel has allowed just enough food into Gaza to avoid widespread death, but not enough to prevent pervasive hunger and, in some parts of Gaza according to the USAid administrator, Samantha Power, “famine”. Oxfam calculated that hundreds of thousands of people in northern Gaza were receiving on average only 245 calories a day, about one-tenth of normal requirements. At least 28 children younger than 12 were reported to have died of malnutrition as of 17 April.

Israeli authorities have been blaming anyone but themselves for this deprivation, but the evidence points primarily to Netanyahu’s government. Israel understandably wants to stop the smuggling of arms to Hamas, but its understaffed, convoluted procedures for inspecting aid trucks can take three weeks, with trucks often rejected for carrying a single innocuous item that Israel deemed of military value, forcing them to start the process all over again.

Items rejected include anesthetics, cardiac catheters, chemical water quality testing kits, crutches, maternity kits, oxygen cylinders, surgical tools, ultrasound equipment, wheelchairs and X-ray machines. When the UN secretary general, António Guterres, visited the Egyptian side of the Gaza border in March, he saw “long lines of blocked relief trucks waiting to be let into Gaza”. Israel has allowed much-publicized airdrops and sea delivery of food, but they provide only a tiny fraction of what land transport could deliver.

It is thus not surprising that Khan reportedly will initially charge Netanyahu, as well as the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, for having “deliberately starved Palestinians in Gaza”. Just as Khan initially charged Vladmir Putin and his children’s rights commissioner with abducting Ukrainian children, and only later began to address Russia’s factually more complicated bombing campaign starting with attacks on electrical infrastructure, so is Khan likely to start with the straightforward charges in Gaza before moving on to more complex ones.

Khan will undoubtedly also charge senior Hamas officials in the military chain of command, as he should. The killing and abduction of Israeli civilians on 7 October are clear war crimes. But a basic premise of international humanitarian law is that war crimes by one side never justify war crimes by the other. The duty to comply is absolute, not reciprocal...

Well yes, and there's more at the link, and the behaviour of one set of war criminals doesn't provide an excuse for the collective punishment and famine as a weapon of war deployed by another set of war criminals, except in the bromancer's febrile mind ...

Completely clueless, but isn't that the reptile way ... and students on campuses around the world, if you think a Wilcox cartoon might provide enlightenment in such a dull war crime-loving brain, don't bet on it ...