In which the pond reverts to the usual school week, with Caterism taking up the first period ...

 

The gift that keeps on giving ... it seems every Graudian story must now feature an obligatory study of the Streisand effect ... and what can the pond do but act as a humble minnow echo chamber ...

With that out of the way, yes, the pond did read Arwa Mahdawi's take down of Jerry Seinfeld in Jerry Seinfeld’s lurch to the right now includes mourning ‘dominant masculinity’.

The put down in relation to Palestinian children and child girlfriends was exemplary, as was the quoting of Rachel Fink in Haaretz ... but the funniest thing was Seinfeld's attempt at a troll in the name of "comedy" ...

...this week, Seinfeld decided to get nostalgic about “real men” on the conservative agitator Bari Weiss’s podcast. “I miss a dominant masculinity,” Seinfeld said. “Yeah, I get the toxic thing … But still, I like a real man.”

His eponymous TV sitcom was of course about a rarefied New York comic as close to dominant masculinity as George Costanza. Despite his character's ostensible pursuit of female companionship, relationships he could never stick, the character exuded an ambiguous metrosexual air, not least because of his addiction to breakfast cereals and a fastidious obsession with tidiness. It was like a stereotypical portrait of a man who didn't dare to come out ...(assuming of course that "real men" are seriously cut cereal addicts who can never be gay).

What is it with comedians? John Cleese went the same way and became a grumpy old man, and weed-affected Bill Maher thinks contrarianism is deep, when all it does is make him is a glorified Joe Rogan ...

Being filthy rich isn't enough? Always got to be whining or delusional?

The pond has no time for George Clooney or most of his movies (except the Coen brothers and especially Burn After Reading), and his ads for coffee capsules are profoundly offensive (and besides he's revoltingly handsome and scores good looking women), but at least he also takes time out to beard Vlad the Sociopath ...

Enough already with echo chamber duties, even if talking about derelict comedians and highly paid actors is more amusing than talking about today's bunch of reptiles ...

The pond baulked at the fence, the pond simply couldn't do Dame Slap doing another activist judges. 

The pond had had the worst of Dame Slap in a special edition yesterday, and that was more than enough. 

The pond was well over a Tingling with the reptiles too, with Kudelka having the last word ...

As for the reptiles running a Packer slam job on Petey boy, what was the world coming to? He's a dud? Who'd have guessed? Certainly not the pond or the lizard Oz ...

The pond also couldn't come at a story on the randy old goat, or the revival of Josh ...

Randy old goat story in the lizard Oz, partnered with the revival of Josh

It will be fun to see Josh's leadership ambitions take on the Queensland plod from the deep north, but that's a pleasure for further down the track ... for the moment a cartoon will suffice, thanks to the immortal Rowe ...

Down below it was the usual bunch of grifters and self-promoters ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, Lord Downer's still a thing, still out and about, speaking of old balls s'il vous plait, and Dillon wins the dill gong of the day for mentioning "virtue signalling" ... because if you wanted any sign of intellectual laziness, that deployment is truly stupid at best, and really, really stupid at worst ...

As for that lizard Oz editorial outing, some might recall that back on 3rd - 4th June 1989, the Chinese Communist party arranged the Tiananmen Square massacre ... and are still sending Hong Kong people off to the clink, but it turns out, in an ill-omened way, that the lizard Oz is having a different sort of memory fest ...

That holds true? In the usual lizard Oz way, that's a blatant lie ...

...At The Australian, Deamer was given a free hand to run the paper day-by-day, especially after it moved to Sydney in 1967. He became editor in March 1969. He had a good eye for layout and he knew how to create a paper that had a logistical consistency, edition after edition. He had liberal views (Murdoch would later call him a socialist) but he insisted they should not intrude on the news coverage.
In the staid world of 1960s newspapers, Deamer’s editorship was innovative, even radical.
The Australian covered business seriously, and gave close attention to international news.
The editorial line was liberal and outspoken, especially on such issues as Aboriginal land rights, apartheid and the Vietnam War, with opposition becoming more strident after the My Lai massacre of unarmed civilians, which affected Deamer deeply.
The paper embraced the emerging women’s movement and gave strong coverage to universities and student protests. Its columnists were opinionated – and they included women.
“I was given the most extraordinary freedom,” says Phillip Adams. “There were no limits,” says Julie Rigg. “The only brief was to write for intelligent women.”
Deamer gathered a team of fine writers, including Betty Riddell, Maria Prerauer, Robert Drewe, Peter Smark, Sam Lipksi and Ian Moffitt to give the paper a distinctive quality.
He also hired young people – including Jane Perlez, Paul Kelly, John Newfong (the first Aboriginal staff writer on a major daily), Janet Hawley and Daniela Torsh. Hiring graduates was unpopular with News Limited management but Deamer trusted his young reporters.
Deamer could be alternately charming or pugnacious – verbally and physically; references to legendary editor Harry Gordon as his sparring partner are not merely metaphorical.
He was a man of his own time but he was also in touch with the emerging mood of the nation.
Readers responded. When The Australian moved from Canberra to Sydney, circulation was an estimated 46,000; when it submitted its first official audit five years later, sales were 136,031. Deamer, with the advantage of better distribution, had given the paper strong momentum. He was, however, increasingly at odds with Murdoch.
Marty Dougherty, then a senior sub-editor, says Murdoch once walked into an editorial conference and asked: “Aren’t there any white people to write about?”
The relationship was strained in August 1970 when Murdoch ordered Deamer to sack satirists Phillip Adams and Ray Taylor and restrict cartoonist Bruce Petty. Deamer was shattered but he got Adams reinstated.
The final confrontation came in June 1971, when the Springboks, South Africa’s rugby team and a symbol of apartheid, began an Australian tour. Unions imposed a travel ban but prime minister Billy McMahon offered the team the use of RAAF planes. On June 25, The Australian criticised McMahon in a front-page editorial. It was headed, “Cynical use of RAAF by McMahon” and said he was “not fit to lead the government of this country.”
The placement and content were bold and provocative. Murdoch was furious. He flew from London to Sydney to confront Deamer. “You’re not producing the sort of paper I want,” he said. (More here)

Those were the days, but these days, they produce the sort of paper he wants, and the gifts to the readership are an endless stream of hacks and lies to the aged readership, mugs handing over shekels to the randy old goat's company... the likes of Lord Downer on repeat and that dill Dillon and so on ...

Isn't it enough that each week the reptiles bless its readership with the thoughts of the Caterist, always a fruitful study for diligent herpetology students doing the hard yards ...

At this point the reptiles began a regular set of interruptions with a plethora of videos and illustrations ...

With those out of the way, the pond could get on with its studies ...

It might surprise some but the pond is on board with the Caterist, but there's conclusive evidence that command economies don't work ...

You see that final line ... Closed Non-Competitive ... and since the pond last dropped in to check, the grift has gone up to a healthy 300k+

Naturally the Caterist is appalled at this kind of non-competitive leechery and bludging on the tax payer ...

Indeed, indeed, and yet for a few humble dollars, mere government crumbs, harmless bagatelles, somehow the Department of Finance manages to support the intellectual geniuses of the lizard Oz so that the readership can feast on this lecture about private markets from a man acting as a senior fellow for a Centre with its snout deep in the government trough, pigs to the taxpayer dollar feast ...

Governments,  as we should never forget, have an inexhaustible amount of non-competitive dollars to drop on humbugs...

At that point, the pond would be inclined to call it a day, but the pond does love a cat fight, and the sight of cackling Claire taking on the Angelic one was irresistible, especially as the Angelic one had been a set text for diligent students ...

It was an iStock sort of story and the remnants of the shattered lizard Oz graphics department paid handsomely for a few more iStock illustrations, together with a video clip ...

Then came the startling news ... the Angelic one had entirely missed the point ...

Indeed, indeed, and speaking of gender dysphoria, the pond was reminded of a Michael Waters' story in The New Yorker, A Forgotten Athlete, a Nazi Official, and the Origins of Sex Testing at the Olympics (paywall)

Inter alia ...

..Koubek was not the first person to publicly transition gender, but he was one of the most high-profile. That fall, the long-serving editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Morris Fishbein, wrote a widely distributed op-ed positioning Koubek as part of a long history. “No doubt in various places in the United States today there are little girls growing up who will eventually turn out to be predominantly male and who will need the type of diagnosis and surgery that has been mentioned,” he wrote. “What they need most at this time is proper understanding by their parents, by their doctors and by the community in general.” The popular science magazine Sexology reported on Koubek, and letters poured in from people who might today call themselves trans or intersex. One letter writer, who was perceived by the world as a man, asked, “Could I live the balance of my life as a woman, as I have desired to be all my life? It seems to me that it would repay me for the years of suffering I have already put in.”

Wilhelm Knoll had a different response. He was the head of the International Federation of Sports Medicine, an influential group of sports doctors which advised the I.O.C. and the International Amateur Athletic Federation (I.A.A.F.), the organization that governed the international rules of track and field. He was also a member of the Nazi Party who gave lectures at the University of Hamburg dressed in a Brown Shirt uniform, with a swastika pinned to his shirt. His allegiance to Nazism and his views about competition went hand in hand: Knoll wrote of his desire to remove “unsuitable elements” from sports, a term that seemed to refer not only to Jewish people but also to racial and gender minorities. Knoll read the early news accounts of Koubek’s impending transition, and he was disgusted that the press largely championed the Czech athlete.

Knoll published an op-ed in the popular magazine Sport, in January, 1936, accusing Koubek of “deliberately fooling” sports officials about his biological sex. He called on the I.A.A.F. to ban Koubek from the forthcoming Berlin Olympics and to strip him of his world records. By competing in women’s sports, he wrote, Koubek “unfairly makes use of superior physique, as a man, against frail women.” Knoll believed that the only way to prevent this at the Olympics was to introduce physical examinations of all women competitors. (Koubek had already said that he no longer wanted to participate in women’s sports; Knoll ignored this.) His position as a sports doctor gave weight to his statements; several American newspapers republished excerpts from his op-ed, which was also circulated by the Nazi newspaper Der Führer.

Of course it was the increasing availability of Volkswagens and smart phones in Germany in the 1930s that caused all the fuss and were the source of Koubek's delusions ... and it was wise of the German government to do something about it with concentration camps ...

The pond, of course, approves of any government action that might prohibit young, sensitive minds from being able to access Quillette ... and so is completely onside ...

Of course it's much too simplistic to blame all social ills on social media, which is why social media is responsible for just about everything you can think to mention ...

Back in the day, before television was the cause of it all, which was a close run thing with comics being the cause of it all, and before those days were the days when the radio was the cause of it all, though perhaps the cinemah was the cause of it all, though likely the decadent stage was likely the real cause of it all ...

...By this point, Koubek had sailed to New York, wearing a gray suit and a blue felt hat and clutching a years-old passport that still listed his sex as female. Czech officials had hastily scrawled across it, “The bearer is now officially a man.” His lawyer had not succeeded in getting the marker changed, but the effort was under way. When Koubek arrived in New York, he greeted a throng of reporters with a handshake that one described as “unmistakably masculine,” and he told the journalists, “I always felt like a man, so I do not feel at all strange now.” He was there to make his Broadway début, in a cabaret show called “Folies d’Amour,” at the invitation of a producer. It sounded like show business might be his future: Koubek claimed that he was in talks to star in a Hollywood movie based on his life.

“Folies d’Amour” premièred two weeks later, at the French Casino, an enormous Art Deco venue. Hundreds of people paid two dollars and fifty cents, around fifty-five dollars today, eager to “give up money for a view of a guy who used to be a gal,” according to the Daily News. Koubek opened the second act, after an intermission. When the curtains were pulled aside, they revealed the athlete dressed in what would become his signature outfit: tennis shoes, white shorts, and a white sleeveless top that showed off his biceps. His blond hair was slicked back, and he looked into the crowd with bright-blue eyes. Onstage, Koubek sprinted on a treadmill, tracked by a kind of stopwatch. The concept was that Koubek “runs against time.”

In late October, Koubek boarded another steamship, the Lafayette, bound for France, where he performed in the famous Folies-Bergère music hall, in Paris, alongside Josephine Baker, cycling through track-and-field exercises onstage. He and Baker shared top billing; French newspapers carried a photo of Koubek kissing Baker’s outstretched hand. Then, after about a week, he went home to Prague, where he was more famous than ever. Early the next year, he sent a note of thanks to the French Casino for hosting him and expressed his love for New York City: “In all my 24 years—man and girl—I’ve never seen anything like it.”

But this moment in the sun was brief. The far right was gaining political traction in Czechoslovakia, and queerness was one of its many enemies. In February, 1938, Koubek managed to obtain a driver’s license that identified him as a man, which may well have saved his life a year later, when Nazi troops began occupying Czechoslovakia. In 1940, Koubek married a woman, Uršulou Škrobačovou. They lived together in Prague, where Koubek worked for the automobile manufacturer Škoda. As the Nazis sent queer and trans people to death camps, Koubek managed to pass—on the surface, he was the picture of white, gentile heterosexuality. It was best, perhaps, if no one thought too much about, or even remembered, the full story.

Dammit, there's a lot more, it came from Waters' book, but the pond should finish up with a reminder of how all social ills can be pinned on social media ... simple-mindedness being a cackling Claire speciality ...

As for Faux Noise and what they've done to the United States, or what News Corp would like to do to Australia and is busy doing it ...

Shush, cackling Claire had an astonishing reveal ...

The Angelic one is a libertarian? And there was the pond thinking she was just a barking mad fundamentalist tyke, doing what tykes have always done since the grand days of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum ...

So little the pond knew, and now it turns out that cackling Claire is also into the Prohibitorum thingie ... though the chances of the government regulating News Corp publications is between zero and zilch, what with their desire to provide grants as accelerants ...

And so to wrap things up with a 'toon ... which does resonate with Jared's outing this day ...

How lucky the pond had saved up an infallible Pope for Jared's kissing of the reassuring ring ...