When the YouTube pirates threw up a relatively modern outing in the Jurassic Park franchise, the pond did its best to get into it. After all, you can never argue with the free part of freedumb.
The dinosaurs initially bunged on a do and took down a chopper and swallowed a couple of humans in good style, but then things quickly turned silly, with a woman leading the charge to save the dinosaurs by shipping them to a tranquil island where they might enjoy their freedumb.
The pond didn't have the slightest interest in saving the dinosaurs, in much the same way that the pond is well over the mango Mussolini, the enfeebled Joe, and - it has to be said - the likes of aged Henry blathering on about the past like the dinosaur he is ...
The pond had hoped to break free of the US situation, perhaps reference Graham Readfearn's Renewables caught in misinformation crossfire from Australia’s nuclear cheerleaders, but the reptiles simply wouldn't allow it. Maybe another day, when the Riddster returns, or nuking the country to save the planet is the theme of the day ... (with the pond likely to be tempted when Dame Groan returns to slip in the bit about her groaning).
On the upside, our Henry returned to ancient pastures for his foliage and his verbiage.
This was a full-on Thucydides day ... a day in which the august dinosaur became a caricature of a parody of a satirical version of himself ...
For once the pond regretted that it wasn't able to dive off into the accompanying videos, even if they also featured dinosaurs ...
A disappointing gobbet, and curiously the only place that those direct quotes seem to turn up is in our Henry's piece, suggesting the old devil is offering his own translation of the ancient Greek.
Relax, Thucydides is named again, together with some actual Greek...
Then it was back to our Henry for a final gobbet ...
Is the old dotard, the ancient dinosaur, so other-worldly he's completely unaware of that perfect model of malice and amorality, Justice Thomas?
Here, have an immortal Rowe to celebrate making it to the end ...
Meanwhile, cackling Claire was also out and about this day, and worse, also harping on about the USA ...
Another fudger delivering an epic fudge, this time in the form of "whatever one thinks of Trump, and whatever one thinks about the threat to democracy he poses ..."
When writing about a cult, is it too hard to note that it's a cult?
The choice of snaps for a cackling Claire's thesis as it unfolded was equally revealing ...
Where was the snap of the orange Jesus? Surely he deserved a place, what with him being an actual current politician? Yet the reptiles stuck in a snap of Pelosi, who retired from the Speakership way back in 2022 and was then named Speaker Emerita ... sure, she's still hanging around, keeping her seat warm, but the mango Mussolini is the clear and present danger and would be piqued at not being featured ...
Never mind, on we trudge ...
Actually being young or being different doesn't get you out of more familiar binds. The pond was reminded of Tanya Selvaratnam's piece in the Beast Is Usha Vance Chugging MAGA Kool-Aid Like Her Husband J.D.? (paywall).
In part:
The daughter of middle-class Indian immigrants, a trial lawyer, and until 2014, a registered Democrat: Will Usha Chulikuri Vance be a moderating force on her husband J.D. Vance, the new Republican candidate for vice-president?
Vance can’t be that extreme, after all—look at the diverse and highly educated woman he married. (He wore a bindi and a South Asian outfit for their 2014 wedding ceremony, which was officiated by a Hindu priest; during a speech Usha made Wednesday night at the Republican National Convention, she noted that the “meat and potatoes kind of guy” had adapted to her vegetarian diet and learned to cook Indian food for her mother.)
Dear sweet long absent lord, way too much information but carry on ...
...We are assuming that Vance himself is the one so craven with ambition he has bent to Trump’s will. But what if his spouse, say, urged him to rethink his former concerns that Trump could become “America’s Hitler” and instead suck up to his party’s standard-bearer? As the potential second lady, she has fallen into lockstep with well-resourced threats to immigrant communities, LGBTQ communities and all women.
Still, while political commentators and the American public might speculate about Usha Vance’s character, it’s not so much who she is as what she (potentially) enables that we should be paying attention to. Yes, we should be afraid.
The plans by the architects of Project 2025 and others are likely infinitely more harmful to many freedoms and government institutions we take for granted. We have already been witnessing the demise of some—take, for example, the appointment during Trump’s first administration of three Supreme Court justices (one of whom, Brett Kavanaugh, Usha clerked for) whose votes helped bring to pass the fall of Roe v. Wade and more recently a decision on presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.
How could Usha Vance abide by these outcomes? “It’s safe to say that neither J.D. nor I expected to find ourselves in this position. But it’s hard to imagine a more powerful example of the American dream,” she said in her RNC speech, having claimed that her husband has always sought “to keep people safe, to create opportunities to build a better life, and to solve problems with an open mind.” She failed to acknowledge the dissonance, apparent to many, between these words and what her husband actually stands for from a policy perspective.
But it would be a waste of time to understand the motivations and thought process of any enabler. Not all patriarchs are men, just as not all feminists are women. Just because she’s a minority doesn’t mean that she will stand up for the rights of minorities. Just because she’s on the board of the Cincinnati Orchestra doesn’t mean she’ll question her husband’s sharp criticism of classical music.
Before we let women soften men in the public eye, we should consider the role they might be playing behind the scenes. Samuel Alito’s wife Martha-Ann and Clarence Thomas’ wife Ginni have proven to be cut from the same or harsher cloth as their husbands; Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s wife Erin was part of the legal team that argued for Roe’s reversal at the Supreme Court. Even Dr. Jill Biden’s influence has been widely cited in recent weeks as a key factor in whether (or not) President Biden stays in the race.
When Ivanka Trump was asked in a 2017 interview on CBS’ This Morning program whether she had been complicit in her father’s misdeeds, she deflected the question. She seemed not to understand the meaning of the word.
Usha Vance has chosen silence for now, but when the question inevitably comes her way, will she be able to feign such ignorance?
Indeed, indeed, being blessed by relatively vulgar youff, or the possible ameliorating effects of being an Ivy League-educated professional woman doesn't mean you can't go all in on bigotry (the pond won't break Godwin's Law despite severe temptations).
After all, you can still end up a cackling Claire, missing the trunk for the leaves...
No, that's not how it works. You can't just average down ages and that makes things okey dokey - see Usha Vance above.
A young bigot imitating an old ossified bigot still leaves you with two bigots.
And as for planning the GOP's future, is cackling Claire completely clueless about how rabid Vance has become? Never mind the ratbag repressive policies dressed up as freedumb, just consider him as a lover of coups, obligingly anxious to keep an ossified authoritarian in power by pandering to insurrectionists ...
What perhaps poses one of the greatest dangers to this country is that Vance, like Trump, has already proven that he is committed to aggressively hacking away at the fraying social fabric that binds this nation together. Most alarmingly, Vance has said that if he had been vice-president on 6 January 2021, he would have done what Trump wanted and blocked electors from states that voted for Biden. Vance has raised money for insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the elected government of the United States and who sought to block the certification of an election in which all 50 governors – Republican and Democratic alike – certified results that showed Biden won the presidency. (Steve Phillips, Graudian)
Okay, okay, the pond gets it, cackling Claire doesn't mind a coup if it's done by relatively young vulgar youffs, and if it helps, she's perfectly willing to look the other way...
Won't hurt his momentum? Certainly not, at least not with coup-loving white fundamentalist Xian nationalist cultists inclined to wear bandages on their ears, sadly not in homage to Vincent van Gogh ...
Here, have a cartoon for having made it to the end ...
Speaking of dinosaurs, there was one other who appeared in the lizard Oz this day.
Usually the pond wouldn't go past its allotted two reptiles on any given day, but this was an exceptional and exceptionally bigoted ancient dinosaur ... so what the heck ...
It is, of course, Lord Downer doing a Nigel Farage. He was always contemptible as a politician, and he's just as contemptible as a scribbler for the lizard Oz.
The snaps are indicative of those women he wants to put down, and those he wants to elevate, and in the middle that master of bigotry and fear, the lying rodent ... two snaps of the rodent in the one story, that says everything you need to know ...
The pond might offer Lord Downer, but that doesn't mean the pond has to waste time discussing his pathetically obvious attempt to kick the Islamophobic can in classic Farage style ... you know ...
There's Nigel taking care of Nigel, now watch how that ancient dinosaur Lord Downer can do the same trick ...
Rulsz will save Lord Downer from Islamophobia and bigotry?
Fat chance, but at least he mentioned Gaza, so the pond could drop in to see how the genocide is going, and it's going exceptionally well, per Al Jazeera's live coverage titled Israel accused of 'weaponising water' in Gaza with supplies down 94 percent ...
Inter alia ...
You wouldn't want an ancient dinosaur to care about any of that ... dinosaurs just love to generate fear and hate and other ancient grubby, bestial emotions ...
And so again, thanks to the reptiles being miffed at the way that the Nine rags have set the pace, other matters have to be relegated in the pond to a couple of closing cartoons, featuring the infallible Pope and Wilcox ...
"...SCOTUS jealously guarding the separation of powers". But it does, it very jealously guards the separating of all powers into itself. As "supreme" courts are wont to do.
ReplyDeleteBut so very good to see the Holely one fully reunited with his main love, Thucydides. True love always wins out.
Dearest Claire: "...America has become a gerontocracy - a system governed by the elderly...". And yet, once upon a time it was considered good that the "elderly" - because of all that deeply matured knowledge and experience that leads to much wisdom - was indeed the soundest way to go.
ReplyDeleteIs that now all past and done with ? We're going to have to be ruled by the likes of JD Vance ? Please say it isn't so.
Ah yes, A. Downer and those things that batter. Good one, Andy.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, Andy tells us that: "Tens of thousands of migrants have been pouring into Europe and America without approval...". And yet, those "tens of thousands" are but a small percentage - maybe as little as 1.5% or less - of the 117 million refugees we are told exist in the world.
But never mind, Australia takes its share - provided they arrive with tourist visas on aeroplanes rather than in small boats - despite the issue of "...migrants who fail to integrate into society". How frightfully terrible that is.
Yet I recall the larrikins and the social dropouts who inhabited the down market city pubs back in the 1950s and 1960s and then the later Vietnam objectors and apartheid protesters* and so on who most definitely didn't "integrate into society" either. I particularly remember a group that used to collect in an old pub in Russell St Melbourne that I had a few drinks with a few times - but group moniker and pub name both lost in my 'gerontology' (anyone ?).
It seems to me that we have never needed to import our unintegrated folk, we've always been capable of breeding our own.
* South African apartheid that was - little if any protest about Australia's less publicised apartheid.
Ooops, 'Alex' Downer - the gerontocracy is really out in force today.
DeleteA faint memory finally worked its way through: they were called 'The Push' which was mainly a fairly famous Sydney group but there was a somewhat smaller 'outpost' in Melbourne:
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Push
Still can't remember the name of the pub though - probably because I always only referred to it as "the Russell Street pub".
Oh my: "show me the noney !"
ReplyDeleteWhat happens when you pay Year 7 students to do better on NAPLAN? We found out
https://theconversation.com/what-happens-when-you-pay-year-7-students-to-do-better-on-naplan-we-found-out-234281
What can one make of people who claim to be trained 'teachers' but who apparently don't understand that motivation is everything.
I have been travelling, and my schedule did not allow time to make comment early in the day. I should also concede to the E-clair’s generalisation that, as I am in the demographic that simply does not understand artificial intelligence, and am unlikely to be able to open electronic messages and attachments, it is therefore unlikely that I have anything of interest to write.
ReplyDeleteI could say I look forward to the E-clair’s simple exposition on artificial intelligence, but, well, the short-term memory probably is shot, so I may have to write myself a note and hold it on the ‘fridge door with the souvenir magnet from Washington, to tell me to look out for E-clair’s explanation.
My disintegrating memory was stimulated by the Henry’s ‘Americans need to remember that in politics the chasms that yawn beneath us are deeper than the peaks that beckon us are high/‘. Yes, the style follows the opening crawl (such, I believe, is the term in the trade) that used to roll up the Cinemascope screen to start Hollywood’s versions of the history of two millennia ago, from around the Mediterranean. The style that was so well carried over in the very first ‘Star Wars’, and had about as much relationship to actual history of current humanity.
Is it worth pointing out to the Henry that there is ample evidence of many great civilizations having come and gone; some still being discovered? As it happened, the Greek language was fairly well-adapted to delivering narrative, where the records of others more often preserved tax codes or similar administrative memoirs. Just because one language delivered narrative, does not mean that one story describes the failure of all other civilizations, to be uniquely applicable to our circumstances now.
Our Henry even tells us, for this day, that the semantics and ontology of Greek (and both those words are derived from early Greek - it all gets cyclical) was degraded - invective and hyperbole triumphed, so some of this story is to do with what happened to the language in which it has been delivered to us.
Might I suggest that, in an adaptation of the introduction to ‘Anna Karenina', every unhappy civilization failed in its own way, and there was no inevitability about some scribe, sitting on a hill, chronicling events. Even where that kind of thing did happen - how do we know that Thucydides was not the Tucker Carlson of his day?
Maybe you should go travelling more often, Chad; you certainly wax very lyrical when you return. 😄
DeleteThough when you say that all civilisations fail in their own way, there really is only one way: human beings do stupid things, often aided and abetted by acts of 'nature' (eg like the plague of Justinian (bubonic) back in about 540 CE which ruined the Roman revival).
And looking at the USA now, there's plenty of stupid things being done. But wasn't there always ? Courtesy of an Anony, you may find value in this article (I did):
https://theconversation.com/why-consciousness-may-have-evolved-to-benefit-society-rather-than-individuals-232459
"These [key intuitive] beliefs are found in all human cultures. They are important as they serve as foundational beliefs for most liberal democracies and criminal justice systems. They are resistant to counter evidence. That’s because they are powerfully endorsed by social and cultural concepts such as free will, human rights, democracy, justice and moral responsibility."
Yes, indeed, and what a Thucydides punch line, with the heresy still ringing in the pond's ears like a Tuckyo at the convention...
Delete