In which the Caterist fawns and simpers, Lord Downer votes, and the Major denies ...

All heil the Streisand effect ...

Gina keeps shooting and scoring ... (it was on YouTube too).

On with the day's business ...

When the pond wakes up late and it's still feeling very nippy, the pond only has to look to Melbourne or Canberra for consolation. Things could be worse.

When the pond reads another study of the Murdochians, there's a meeting of minds that's deeply consoling. 

The pond wouldn't know Julianne Schultz from a bar of soap, as the saying in Tamworth and possibly elsewhere used to go, but there was immediate synchronicity reading Most media barons hide their ambitions behind the language of journalistic impartiality. Not the Murdochs, with the coda As The Australian turns 60, the Murdoch dynasty celebrates another year of reshaping Australia in its vision...

After the intro came ...

...in Australia the third generation of the homegrown Murdoch dynasty declared victory. “I believe that if it wasn’t for The Australian today, if the policy debate in Australia today was being driven by the ABC, then we would be a totally different country.”
If only, the more than half million who signed the petition backing a royal commission into the operations of News Corporation may have muttered to themselves.
It was a big call by Lachlan Murdoch. It highlighted that his shrinking newspapers and the broadcast interests that might be about to be rebranded and relocated to the company’s Australian headquarters use journalism as a means to an end. He implied the mission was to shape hearts and minds in an undeclared war with the public broadcaster that remains, by a significant margin, Australians’ most trusted source of news and information.
In the pantheon of statements by press barons (canvassed by Eric Beecher in his forthcoming book, The Men Who Killed the News) it was also somewhat unusual. It made more sense when news broke that Rupert Murdoch was prepared to drive a wedge between his very rich children, by reshaping the family trust to ensure News Corp’s aggressive politics are not diluted after his death.
His son’s statement a couple of week earlier belled the cat. Most media barons have generally preferred to hide behind the slippery language of journalistic impartiality, as the “feedback mechanism of democratic system management”, rather than admit to being a player trying to change their society by shaping debates.
The grubby little secret of using their media power to advance their own fortunes, could once be tolerated if they played within the rules of fairness, impartiality, and truth. But those principles are now on life support.
In Australia, as in many countries, media regulation has become a shadow its former self. Insulating profits have evaporated, leaving a whiff of desperation and nervous politicians. The new online players unapologetically put company before country – they don’t care what information flows from their platforms, so long as they capture attention and make a buck.
But seeking to change Australian society is in the Murdoch dynasty’s DNA, as Walter Marsh vividly documents in Young Rupert. Perversely the man who once considered himself an outsider is now a dominant member of the establishment. The man who once wanted to shake up the society, now watches his outlets block long overdue change, mock innovation, foster fear and pick on the weak.

And so on ...

No need to quote all of it, it's there at the link, and Schultz also provided a link to a story in the AFR about the reptiles losing their Sky News name, Fox News Australia? Sky News Australia may be forced to rebrand.

The reptiles are unlikely to take up the pond's suggestion for a new name and a brand new branding... a third rate pastiche of Faux Noise down under, watching it can make you chunder ...

Speaking of nausea and chunder, the pond scanned the digital edition this day and thought for a minute that the Caterist was too busy fawning and simpering and bending the knee and paying obeisance in Hungary to make an appearance...

 

There were other pleasures - an appearance by Lord Downer and that wily cockatoo, the Major Mitchell - but it turned out that the reptiles were merely hiding the Caterist ... and he was doing his pandering and fawning and simpering in his column ...

When the pond got to the end of the piece, there seemed to be something missing, something that had turned up in other Caterist outings, something which explained everything ...

Nick Cater is a senior fellow at Menzies Research Centre and a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute.

There's nothing a hustler, and a grifter, won't do to keep the wolf from the door and so regurgitating the thoughts of an authoritarian is entirely in keeping with the Caterist way...

At this point. the pond should note the usual visual distractions, including a big snap of the diet Mountain Dew man ...

Then it was on with the fawning and the simpering, because any dog kept around the house must earn its keep, and the flood waters in quarries whisperer does a fair average imitation of a dog barking on command... a kind of 'leet pet ...

If it wasn't so nauseating, it would be richly comic - even Ben Shapiro is thinking the mango Mussolini should be having buyers remorse, a sign of just how out of touch the Caterist is, sheltering deep inside Orban's darkest recesses ...

Even the WSJ thought he was a deeply weird man ...

J.D. Vance’s Basket of Deplorables

Trump’s running mate is on the defensive over his views about the childless. By  The Editorial Board

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Trump’s choice of 39-year-old J.D. Vance as his running mate was supposed to present the GOP ticket as modern and looking to the future. Instead the campaign has found itself playing defense against Mr. Vance’s censorious views about women who don’t have children.

As it always does, the press has been digging up the VP choice’s comments over the years for political scrutiny, and the Ohio Senator turns out to be a target-rich environment. As a Senate candidate in 2021 he told Tucker Carlson, then a Fox News host, that the U.S. is being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

That sounds like he was referring to Vice President Kamala Harris, who has two stepchildren but none of her own. The comment is the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts. But it doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.

The remark has gone viral on social media and is being portrayed as an example of chauvinist views. They’re mocking it on TMZ, a sure sign that this is Mr. Vance’s first big cultural impression, and not a good one.

Mr. Vance went on “The Megyn Kelly Show” on Friday to repair the damage, calling the cat-lady line a “sarcastic comment” that didn’t mean to denigrate single or childless women. But he wasn’t at all apologetic.

“I know the media wants to attack me and wants me to back down on this, Megyn, but the simple point that I made is that having children, becoming a father, becoming a mother, I really do think it changes your perspective in a pretty profound way,” Mr. Vance said.

He’s right about that, but then why didn’t he say it in 2021? One possibility is that at some level Mr. Vance really doesn’t respect people who make different life choices. Politicians often reveal their true beliefs when talking to supporters, as Hillary Clinton did when she sneered at the “basket of deplorables” who supported Mr. Trump in 2016.

Mr. Vance has also put some policy substance behind his cultural views by saying in the past that the childless should pay higher taxes than other Americans. “If you are making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you’ve got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you are making the same amount of money and you don’t have any kids. It’s that simple,” he told the Charlie Kirk Show podcast in 2021. The podcast with Mr. Vance has vanished from the show’s website but has been quoted widely in the press.

It’s bad policy to use the tax code for social policy because it creates complications that add distortions. Pro-natalist tax policies haven’t worked where they’ve been tried.

It’s also bad politics. Conservatives used to believe in a neutral tax code that didn’t play favorites, but Mr. Vance is suggesting the code should be used as a political and cultural weapon against people who don’t share his values. “Raise taxes on the childless” isn’t a winning campaign slogan.

An old political saw is that the best VP choice is one who gets applause upon announcement and then is never heard from again. You can tell that doesn’t apply to Mr. Vance since Mr. Trump is being asked if he still believes he made the right choice. He says he does, but the Trump campaign can’t be happy about having to defend Mr. Vance instead of focusing on Kamala Harris’s many extreme views.

If Mr. Vance doesn’t want to apologize, perhaps he could start showing up on stage with his wife, Usha. Her speech at the GOP convention was understated and warm, and she is clearly accomplished professionally. She might help persuade swing voters that Mr. Vance respects women more than his comments have made it seem.

It's not often the pond quotes the WSJ, and don't get the pond talking about the suffering of Usha, also here, but if the pond is prepared to give the Caterist praising an authoritarian a run, clearly the pond will sink to whatever the lowest  level is to hand ... 

Meanwhile, back to the sock puppet doing his thing for his new master ...

Well yes, and the Caterist is here to prove the truth of it ... and what a contemptible, craven sell-out he is ...

It's possible to imagine the Caterist back in the 1930s scribbling for Der Stürmer "Why is Adolf so infuriatingly popular?" (followed the next week by "Why do they try to belittle Benito?")

That advertisement brought to you by a senior fellow at Menzies Research Centre and a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute.

And so to Lord Downer, wth his lordship doing a cunning tease. 

Who would his lordship vote for if he happened to be a US citizen? Don't wait with baited breath for the answer (please, some snail killer for his lordship) ...

Ah a listicle, and as well as a list of demands, there were any number of snaps, all bigly, as a way of hiding the lack of substance ...

It didn't take much reading between the lines to see where his lordship was heading ...

At this point, the pond lost interest, and was reminded of a story in WaPo. 

It was by Ashley Parker and purported to be a serious analysis, under the header A Trump shark’s tale: Whether to be eaten or electrocuted (paywall), with the pitch The Republican nominee keeps telling a nonsensical story involving a battery-powered boat, a shark and electrocution.

Over the past 10 months, former president Donald Trump has periodically unspooled a nonsensical tale involving a sinking electric boat, a potential electrocution and a ferocious shark attack.

Trump’s recounting of the saga goes roughly like this: In September, a South Carolina boat manufacturer warned him about the scourge of electric boats — arguing that the battery is so large that it leaves little room for passengers and, worse, the battery is so heavy that the boat might not even float.

It was then that Trump claims he posed the “very smart” question the manufacturer said he had never before been asked: If the boat sinks under the weight of its own battery, couldn’t the boaters be electrocuted? And worse, if they jumped off the boat to avoid electrocution, might they then be devoured by a shark?

“You know what I’m going to take? Electrocution,” Trump said when he unveiled the story for the first time at a rally in October in Ottumwa, Iowa. “I will take electrocution every single time.”

The riff has all the hallmarks of a classic Trumpian yarn — full of fabrication, riddled with illogic, defying the laws of physics and, by turns, rambling and hyperbolic, humorous and head-scratching.

It is a whale of a tale, and listeners could be forgiven for thinking they’re going to need a bigger boat to handle all of the exaggerations and flights of fancy.

Electric vehicle and electric boat experts say that, like any boat or ship, the battery of a properly built electric boat is unlikely to cause it to sink and that even if the vessel did take on water for some reason, safety standards make it unlikely that anyone would be at risk for electrocution.

“We have cargo ships that carry thousands of tons of cargo, so based on Archimedes’ principle — you just have to displace as much water as the weight of the battery pack,” said Jason Siegel, a research scientist in the University of Michigan’s mechanical engineering department who also is the education director for the university’s Electric Vehicle Center.

As for the threat of electrocution, Siegel added that EV lithium-based batteries “are inherently more dangerous than a 12-volt lead acid battery you’d typically find on a boat — but because they are more dangerous, they have more safety precautions designed on the package so there’s virtually no way you can come in contact with the battery.”

Siegel explained that the risk of electrocution with high-voltage systems normally occurs when “you become part of an electrical circuit between the positive and negative terminals of a battery.” So it’s possible, he said, that if “you just happened to lay across the battery pack, maybe you’d be in trouble.” But an individual would have to come in contact with both terminals of the battery — and these battery systems “are designed in a way that you don’t have access to the electrical connections of the battery pack.”

In a text message, the Trump campaign declined to answer whether Trump truly believes his claims about electric boats and, if not, why he is continuing to repeat falsehoods about them.

“The Washington Post is a pathetic institution no longer worth the paper it’s printed on and they should be embarrassed for wasting time writing a story about boats sinking when our country is sinking from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s failed leadership,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt wrote.

Yet the former president has persisted in repeating the unlikely narrative.

Trump rolled out the story yet again at a rally this past weekend in Grand Rapids, Mich. — his first public appearance with his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), following the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last week.

“The press kills me all the time,” Trump said, before forging ahead with this favored hypothetical scenario. “If there’s a shark about 10 yards away, do I get electrocuted or do I go with the shark … because I will take electrocution all day long.”

It was hardly the first time Trump had recounted the tale.

“I said, ‘How bad would it be if you went all electric?’” Trump said in November at an event in Houston, segueing from concerns about the Army wanting to build electric tanks straight into his boat riff, and again referring to his alleged conversation at the South Carolina boat manufacturer. “He said, ‘Well, the one thing is it’s very heavy, so we don’t think the boat can float.’”

“So they’re off to a bad start,” Trump said, to laughter.

The former president continued: “I said, ‘What would happen if you’re out at sea and your boat sinks and you have a whole big electric deal under you — would you get electrocuted?’ He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’”

Finally, Trump reached his denouement — the Hobson’s choice between electrocution and a shark attack, perhaps more at home at a slumber party game of “Would You Rather?” than in the words of a major-party presidential candidate.

“So if that boat goes down and you have a shark that’s 10 yards away, so you have a choice of a shark or being electrocuted — I will take electrocution every single day. Do we agree?” Trump concluded. The former president’s tale of “The Old Man and the Shark” also offers a submersible journey into the deep recesses of Trump’s psyche, where institutions — like marine safety standards — can’t be trusted and abiding fears — like sharks — loom large.

Trump has long disdained sharks, regularly expressing his unease toward the ocean predators. On July 4, 2013, before he was a presidential candidate, Trump tweeted, “Sorry folks, I’m just not a fan of sharks — and don’t worry, they will be around long after we are gone.” Just minutes later, he returned to the topic again with another missive, writing, “Sharks are last on my list — other than perhaps the losers and haters of the World!”

As president, he again reaffirmed his dislike of the finned underwater carnivores, telling a confused Pennsylvania crowd: “It’s true — I’m not a big fan of sharks either,” before worrying aloud he might have alienated the shark demographic: “I don’t know, how many votes am I going to lose?”

Another claim of Trump’s shark obsession came from adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who said in a 2018 interview with In Touch Weekly that when she met him at a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2006, she found Trump watching the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, describing him as both “terrified of” and “obsessed with” sharks. Trump this year was found guilty of 34 counts of business fraud for covering up a hush money payment to Daniels shortly before the 2016 election to hide his relationship with her.

“He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die,’” Daniels told the magazine.

Trump’s recent shark’s tale began in late 2023, following a September visit to Sportsman Boats, a boat manufacturer in Summerville, S.C., where Trump claims he first heard the concerns about electric boats. Sportsman Boats did not return several calls requesting comment.

Less than a week later, on the first day of October, Trump recounted the story in Ottumwa, Iowa, for the first time, repeating it twice more that month as he campaigned across the state, and again in Texas in November. Each retelling remained remarkably consistent: The concerns from the boat manufacturer, the former president’s question about the threat of electrocution and then the surprise twist of a shark just “10 yards” away.

He revived the yarn in June in Las Vegas. But this time, the riff seemed to come out of nowhere and was even more circuitous than usual.

At one point, he paused to opine on shark attacks generally — “By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, you notice that?” he asked — before digressing into an aside about sharks that “bit off the young lady’s leg” because they “misunderstood who she was.” (Trump seemed to be referring to a trio of shark attacks two days prior at western Florida beaches that injured three swimmers, including two teenage girls.)

According to the Florida Museum of Natural History’s International Shark Attack File, there were 69 unprovoked shark bites on humans and 22 provoked bites in 2023, the last year for which the file has released data. But Gavin Naylor, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the University of Florida, said 2024 “is absolutely spot-on for an average year” and that shark attacks have consistently been declining over the years.

Nonetheless, it was after this Las Vegas retelling that Trump’s shark diatribe went viral. “Trump Jumps the Shark,” blared several headlines. “Cognitive Decline? Trump Short-Circuits During Bonkers Rant,” wrote the New Republic, adding, “The former president glitched during a tirade about sharks and batteries.”

The absurdity of Trump’s hypothetical is only heightened by his incorrect facts and assumptions.

Craig Scholten, vice president of technical for the American Boat and Yacht Council, which writes safety standards for the marine industry, said the weight of a battery for an electric boat is handled similarly to a traditional fuel tank.

“A battery bank on an electric boat is not different than a gasoline or diesel fuel system, and the weight of the fuel is determined in the boat weight and then there’s a safety margin that is put in place,” Scholten said, explaining why an electric boat will remain buoyant and float.

Elaine Buckberg, who served as chief economist of General Motors and oversaw the company’s long-term forecasting for vehicles — including the EV market — said that when GM did an analysis on a hypothetical electric pontoon boat, none of Trump’s concerns came up.

“At no time in any of those discussions did I hear any concerns about safety,” said Buckberg, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. “I heard nothing about it could sink from the battery weight. I heard nothing about risk of electrocution.”

After his Las Vegas event, even Trump seemed to realize that his story was being mocked, and he defended it later in June at a gathering of conservatives in Washington, D.C.

“You heard my story on the boat with the shark, right? I got killed on that. They thought I was rambling — I’m not rambling,” he said, before launching anew into the watery depths of his riff.

This time, Trump became especially animated as he imagined “a shark about 10 yards over there” — gesturing with his left hand at the invisible predator — and, conjuring images of “Dr. Strangelove,” again asked, to laughter, “Would I immediately have to abandon or could I ride the electric down?”

“It’s actually not crazy,” he concluded. “It’s sort of a smart story, right?”

And for all the tale’s twists and turns, at least one thing remains remarkably clear: Trump would definitely prefer electrocution to a shark encounter.

Others, however, weren’t so sure.

“I mean, I’d be staying on the boat as long as I could,” Siegel said, when pressed on Trump’s fictitious scenario.

Then, he mused further: “Depends on how big the shark is,” he said. “I’ve seen some pretty scary-looking bull sharks, and some pretty benign-looking sand sharks.”

Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.

Deeply weird, though it's hard to work out which is weirder, the orange Jesus spinning his shaggy shark story, or WaPo wasting so much time on it, or the pond being delighted by the whole deeply weird shaggy thing ...

That took up too much space, so best get the rest of Lord Downer out of the way ...

Of course as an entitled peer of the realm, Lord Downer has never had any time for riff raff needing a hand - he's happy to give them work tipping their hat and saying thanks with an "ever so grateful guv'nor", and so to the inevitable conclusion ...

As prize a prat as he ever was, completely clueless, and naturally Lord Downer is a sucker for a shaggy shark story, but more's the pity, there's only a small chance a shark will take him ...

And so at last to that wily bird, Major Mitchell, returning to his denialist roots.

These days, the fashionable new term for denialism is "scepticism". The Major is just asking questions in a deeply sceptical way, with Twiggy the way in ...

It's the usual redressed serving of standard reptile fodder, reheated in the Major's kitchen where rehashing is a way of life ...

At this point the reptiles interrupted the Major with the one snap they thought his piece was worth ...

The pond was more inclined to offer a 'toon celebrating the Caterist, Lord Downer and the Major ...

We all know where the Major is heading... the purple prose of nuclear advocacy, though it will take a time to get there ...

And so at last after the ploy that nuclear power is tried, tested and reliable (and as chup as chups) to nuking the country to save the planet, and the pond invites correspondents to wrap their minds around this deployment of negatives by the Major ...

In the energy transition, conservative-leaning journalists who favour nuclear power have been unable to accept the Coalition’s plan to build nuclear reactors will do nothing to reduce CO2 emissions until 2040.

Therefore, unless a Coalition government were to scrap its emissions reduction targets, it would not markedly slow the rollout of wind and solar technology which, for all its problems, will reduce emissions.

The pond has no idea what the Major meant with this gibberish ... and yet there it was, proudly leading off the last gobbet ...

It's worth remembering that way back in 2014 in Crikey Clive Hamilton noted the Major as the first in a dirty dozen doing down climate science.

There were a host of links in the piece, many now lost, and this ...

Where to start with The Australian’s editor-in-chief? ...(Many links followed)

Just as his reporters repeatedly misrepresent the science of climate change and blacken the names of eminent scientists, so Mitchell’s opinion editors are always willing to turn over their pages to whatever disinformation is being peddled by the likes of Ian Plimer, Bob Carter and Bjorn Lomborg, plus blowhards like Maurice Newman and George Pell. Even the loopy Lord Christopher Monckton gets space.

Otherwise-good journalists at The Australian allow themselves to be sucked into Mitchell’s vortex of paranoia about all things green. At the heart of his relentless campaign of anti-science and debunking of measures to reduce Australia’s carbon emissions is a visceral hatred of environmentalism, especially the Australian Greens, whom he wants to “destroy”.

In 2009 the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, the oil and gas lobby group, awarded Mitchell the JN Pierce Award for Media Excellence “for leading the newspaper’s coverage of climate change policy”, which proves that the greenhouse mafia does have a sense of humour. As a sign of his endurance, Mitchell’s is the only name to appear in all three Dirty Dozens

One link that did survive is in The Conversation... Event horizon: the black hole in The Australian’s climate change coverage.

Thanks in no small part to that black hole known as the Major this has been going on since before 2011 ...

If you were really perverse, you could track down some of the links on the Wayback Machine, with Lloydie of the Amazon in his prime, doing the Major's work ...

Ah Moorice, Steve Fielding... and Lloydie still to save the Amazon ... grand times ... 

Of course the paywall and broken lizard Oz links protect the Major's memory, but they were all doing it, with the Major's reptiles always keen to reprint any denialist news they could find ...

Enough already ... 

The pond has tarried too long, but there's just time to note that the genocide continues apace, with ominous signs of the slaughter expanding, and so to end with a cheerful 'toon ...