Oh boy. It seems that the United States faces a choice between a constantly lying, deeply narcissist, authoritarian coup lover and cult leader in his dotage, and a bumbling inert man in his dotage.
To be fair, expecting the worst, the pond avoided the live action and only caught up with the Jon Stewart debrief, wherein he decided he needed to call a real estate agent in New Zealand.
After the movie of the evening, the pond also dropped in on the Morning Joe crew, in a general state of shell-shocked depression, apart from a little loyal Mika delusionalism.
The movie, ironically, was titled Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, an exceedingly long arthouse Romanian outing still showing the after effects of life under dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu (his palace scored a mention) - shortly, it seems, to be the American experience.
The pond has railed before about the American tendency to gerontocracy and theocracy, which puts the United States in the same turf as the likes of Iran, which has "supreme" leader Ali Khamenei aged 85 years, or the rights of women oppressing Taliban, though the barking mad fundamentalist Hibatullah Akhundzada is only believed to be in his seventies, not much being known about the dude apart from his singular ability to make women suffer.
Luckily the immortal Rowe and Luckovich were on hand to summarise the debate ...
Instead of all the gaps on view during the week suddenly the far right column is full to overflowing ...
That meant the pond could avoid the debate and feature a select sample, but before beginning, the pond would like to note a story in Crikey that's important for herpetology students, The Daily Telegraph plummets in latest news website rankings, News Corp's signature Sydney tabloid has tumbled down the monthly news website rankings amid research that shows readers don't trust it.
The piece by Daanyal Saeedjun announced some good news:
The May 2024 rankings were released by pollsters Ipsos this week, and show The Daily Telegraph dropped in audience share by 5.7%, the biggest drop of any website in the top 20 for that month.
The rankings, published monthly, are keenly awaited by newsrooms and are a point of pride for those atop the list.
The Daily Telegraph has consistently trailed its Victorian counterpart the Herald Sun in the rankings over the past six months. The tabloid didn’t crack the top 20 in January this year but shot up the rankings to 12th in February on the back of almost 1 million more readers, only to fall back down to 20th in March.
It’s not the only notable movement in the rankings. For the past 17 consecutive months, the top spot has been held by News Corp’s digital flagship, news.com.au, with ABC News consistently ranking second. The gap between news.com.au and the ABC has sat between 6-7% in recent months, but closed to 4.2% in March and just 0.6% in April. This month, that gap has narrowed to just 0.2% of audience reach — a mere 46,000 readers.
The dominance of news.com.au coincided with the tenure of recently departed editor-in-chief Lisa Muxworthy, who Crikey revealed was made redundant as part of the company’s recent major corporate restructuring.
It comes after a month of disappointing public metrics for News Corp, with the annual digital news report published this month by the University of Canberra finding The Daily Telegraph was the least trusted of the 14 Australian news brands covered, with only 42% of respondents trusting the newspaper compared to 65% who trusted public broadcaster SBS. The Telegraph also ranked lowest among all the News Corp brands rated in the survey.
Of the five News Corp brands included in the survey, four made up the lowest four ranked brands, with The Australian the lone exception. With a trust rating of 50%, the national broadsheet ranked equal with Guardian Australia and above The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
There was a graph too, with some compelling, if dubious, figures, down there with the trust rating for the lizard Oz ...
Meanwhile, the Weekly Beast provided news of MTG and Tucker down under, thereby relieving the pond of the odious task, so instead the pond could turn to the odious Ughmann, doing his by now standard climate science denialism column for the weekend edition ...
Naturally, inevitably, it began with that stock snap of terrifying, ghostly whale killing windmills posed against a dead gum, a snap much loved by the lizard Oz ... and being the Ughmann, and so replete with science, the yarn began with a quote from the bible ... oh yes, it's theocracy day at the pond ...
It almost goes without saying that - as the Ughmann's billy goat butt lands - the source for his science is Gina's mob at the IPA ...
Or the truth will be written in catastrophic climate change.
Never mind, you can always live with Jesus and the Ughmann in the sweet bye and bye ...
And that mention brings the pond to another theme, which happily allows the pond to mention that the Scientology cult has recently been papering the cars in the neighbourhood with this ...
The other side featured a meaningless IQ chart and details of said test, and that mention of Oxford Capacity Analysis revived a distant pond memory, with the wiki for it starting ...
The test is an important part of Scientology recruitment and is used worldwide by the Church of Scientology to attract new members. However, it is not a scientifically recognized test and has been criticized by numerous psychology organizations, who point out that it is not a genuine personality test and that Scientology recruiters use it in a highly manipulative and unethical fashion.
The pond frequently walks past the local Athena School, which seems to have been downplaying its Scientology connections and boasting instead about its Montessori elements, but pause for a moment, and you'll discover the cult is still in control ...
In order to develop such virtues, we teach from the booklet “How to Make Good Choices”, which is based on the first nonreligious moral code called 'The Way to Happiness'. The Way to Happiness was written by L. Ron Hubbard as an individual work and not part of any religious doctrine. Precept 12, “Safeguard the Environment”, prompts our students to value such community activities as Clean Up Australia Day. Discipline in the first instance is approached by reviewing Precept 19 “Try not to do things to others that you would not like them to do to you” and Precept 20, “Try to treat others as you would want them to treat you”. You are welcome to contact us to receive a complimentary copy of “How to Make Good Choices”.
Nah, not really, they really should be offering a complimentary woman if they want to appeal to angry Sydney Anglicans, but it seems it's theocratic cult day at the pond and that brings the pond to the dog botherer, embarking on a right old round of bigotry - presumably on the basis that the presence of the Ughmann has relieved hm of his climate science denialism duties ...
Perhaps the dog botherer should head to the States, where theocracy is just around the corner ...
And so to wrap up, and Stewart's summary had already clocked up 5 million plus views by this morning under the header Jon Stewart's Debate Analysis: Trump's Blatant Lies and Biden's Senior Moments, but for those not among the 5 million plus, here it is, on the basis that laughing is always better than crying.
In the Land of rising authoritarian theocracy... "All this of course is due to the current deeply corrupt SCOTUS and the perception that it's a body of barking mad fundamentalists with a strong taste for tax-free tips, gratuities if you will ..."
ReplyDeleteTips are now passè. SCOTUS conservatives... "who now, in Kagan’s words, have “the power to make all manner of scientific and technical judgments.”
"... she lamented. “In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden — involving the meaning of regulatory law. As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.”
"In reprimanding the majority for discarding longstanding precedent, Kagan also wrote that the court has done so only all too frequently in recent years, saying it was “impossible to pretend that today’s decision is a one-off, in either its treatment of agencies or its treatment of precedent.”
“[J]ust my own defenses of stare decisis — my own dissents to this Court’s reversals of settled law — by now fill a small volume,” Kagan said.
“Once again, with respect, I dissent.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/justice-kagan-issues-blistering-dissent-on-conservative-supreme-court-hubris_n_667ec9aae4b0d079dd457330
How have newscorpse reported the "my own dissents to this Court’s reversals of settled law — by now fill a small volume,” Kagan said."?
Chad, thanks for your reminder latish on Friday about 'efficiency dividends', that Howard/Costello pile of destructive nonsense had slipped my mind. Yes, that's a neat way to destroy a public service, by making it very profitable for senior servants to use their experience to do the destruction themselves.
ReplyDeleteTruly a great PM, John Winston.
Ughmann might do well to watch an old Clarke and Dawe
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELaBzj7cn14
Summed up nicely by “we don’t have an electricity system, we have an electricity market”. Broadband is the same house, different room.
Errr Ughmann: "'The truth,' Pilate replies ... Pilot has Christ, aka The Truth...". Pilate/Pilot ? Indeed, what is the truth ?
DeleteWell: "Confronted with uncomfortable truths, many prefer their own version of reality." Have I ever mentioned the reptile propensity for 'attribution and projection' of their own grievous failings onto innocent others ? Yes well, just one more of many, many examples.
So anyway, from the Energy Institute: "Record global energy consumption, with coal and oil pushing fossil fuels and their emissions to record levels...". Yep, just can't stop boasting about their runaway successes, those wingnuts, can they.
Ok, so: World Population:
2023: 8,045,311,447 2022: 7,975,105, 156 - an increase of 70.2 million in a single year !
Just for comparison, the world population has increased by over 794 million since 2013. Not hard to break consumption records when you have 'growth' like that.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/
But then, the reptiles' "reality" doesn't include such truths as population growth. Though Ughmann does go on to provide a fine set of facts about why we should never have tolerated the Hawke-Keating/Howard-Costello libertarian stupidity of "privatising" a monopoly public service to allow sundry players to extract their fortunes from the "free market".
(Which then had to be paid for by "efficiency dividends" - thanks Chad.)
"... the odious Ughmann, doing his by now standard climate science denialism column for the weekend edition ..." Will he replace both Lloydie and Bjoragain, d'you reckon ?
ReplyDeleteApart from the contradiction of claiming a strength is a weakness, it's apparent from the first paragraph that Chris Kenny wants to rid Western liberal democracies of openness, plurality and tolerance.
ReplyDeleteKenny, quotes from the British Policy Exchange, a conservative think tank, which distinguishes between Muslims and Islamists as one might distinguish between the average Christian churchgoer and the hierarchy of the churches who covered up child sexual abuse or the average Christian believer and the likes of Sheridan, Shanahan and Ulhmann who try to impose their religious beliefs on everyone else via activist columns in the Murdoch media.
Then Kenny scribbles: "Most Muslims are not Islamists" and " we need to be able to call it out without demonising all Muslims," whereupon he goes on to align the Muslim Students Association with Islamism simply because they are getting some money and he thinks that the Labor Government having some consideration for the largely Muslim seats in southwestern Sydney is somehow kowtowing to Islamism, implying that the people living in these seats who are Muslim are Islamists. He also thinks that Albanese giving " special treatment to a Muslim view" because Fatima Payman was not ousted from the ALP (Kenny says a lie when he claims she was not sanctioned - she has been banned from caucus for the remainder of this term) as though considering the views of a Muslim - and avoiding further inflaming divisions - Albanese is advancing Islamism, as defined by the UK Policy Exchange. Yes, believe Kenny. Albanese, the ALP, Fatima Payman, the Muslim Students Association and the Muslims of southwestern Sydney are trying to impose a theocracy on the rest of us!
"Islamists work assiduously to delegitimise democracy, secularism and pluralism, and work towards the long term goal of imposing their fundamentalist ideology."
DeleteI wonder what the lifespan of a species such as homo sapiens sapiens is - will the species survive for a million years ? (only about 800,000 to go) and if so, will there be any "fundamentalist ideologies" still in existence then ? Will we still be playing cricketand various codes of football ?