Why was the pond surprised, with the reptiles at the lizard Oz running with the (alleged) gender Olympic wars at the top of the digital edition, and news of Harris's VP pick a long way down the page?
The pond has just come off a John Oliver jag (paywall), which also included watching The Daily Show's (YouTube) bit about the dead bear in the park and the Algerian boxer ...
Rather than getting tangled in links to PPV matters, the pond will settle for noting a Les Carpenter story in WaPo, (paywall) illustrating the company that this sort of sensationalism keeps...
PARIS — Inside a gilded party hall here Monday, three leaders of the International Boxing Association stood on a dais, hoping to start a news conference in which they said they would reveal the evidence that led them to disqualify two female boxers last year, ultimately throwing the Paris Olympic tournament into chaos.
The IBA disqualified the fighters, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu Ting, from last year’s world championships in New Delhi, but they are fighting in these Olympics — and winning. Both advanced to the semifinals of their weight classes. Khelif will fight Tuesday and Lin Wednesday at Roland Garros.
The IBA’s leader, Russian sports businessman Umar Kremlev, has repeatedly alleged without proof that a test revealed the women had XY chromosomes, suggesting they had a testosterone advantage over other fighters. Those allegations sparked anti-transgender social media posts from former president Donald Trump, author J.K. Rowling, billionaire businessman Elon Musk and others and upended the Games, leading to what Olympic officials have called “hate speech” and “abuse” against the boxers.
The International Olympic Committee, which cut ties with the IBA last year over Kremlev’s connections to Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as IBA scandals and financial questions, has rejected the tests as “arbitrary” and illegitimate. Last weekend, Christian Klaue, the IOC’s head of communications, said the IBA is running a Russian-backed “disinformation campaign against the Olympic movement.”
So on Monday the IBA pushed back, promising “detailed explanations” for its ruling. Chris Roberts, its secretary general; Ioannis Filippatos, a member of its board of directors whose biography also says he is a gynecologist and obstetrician; and Gabriele Martelli, its world coaches chairman, planned to attend.
The start time came and went. The news conference’s moderator said it would start a half-hour late. The room, filled with journalists, grew warm. The men on the dais fidgeted. Despite the IBA having lost its status as boxing’s Olympic governing body, Filippatos wore a French Olympic T-shirt under a sports coat. African jazz music played over the speakers as workers fiddled with the electronics. At the open bar in the back, someone served wine.
“Guys!” a German reporter shouted. “You’re wasting our time!”
Finally, an hour late, aides walked into the room with translation devices. Kremlev planned to join remotely, and he would speak only Russian.
Roberts spoke first, saying he couldn’t show any test results because the Algerian and Taiwanese Olympic committees had sent letters demanding the alleged results stay private. None of the men on the dais provided evidence. They just talked. Or at least tried.
Roberts tried to provide a timeline for how the tests came about, but there was feedback from his microphone and there were screeching noises from the speakers. Filippatos attempted to speak, but before he could, Kremlev’s face appeared on a nearly 15-foot screen behind the dais, looming over his associates.
Kremlev spoke about how he was standing up for women’s sports while IOC President Thomas Bach was trying to destroy them. He ranted about the Games’ Opening Ceremonies and how a scene resembling Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” portrayed by drag queens had “humiliated him.” Finally, his voice rising until he was almost shouting, he said he was “going to open prosecution” of Bach without providing details of how this would be done.
When Kremlev finished, Filippatos started to talk about how, as a man who has delivered many babies, he is qualified to decide who is a woman. He said the IOC needs to let people such as him determine athletes’ genders.
“Are you going to show us evidence, or is it time for us to leave the room now?” a reporter interrupted.
They didn’t.
More questions came but few answers. How much was Kremlev paying them? How much of the IBA’s funding still comes from the Russian energy company Gazprom, which had for a time been the IBA’s lone sponsor? Kremlev’s face again filled the enormous screen.
Then the room’s speakers exploded. Or so it sounded. A translation device onstage had gotten too close to a microphone, and a boom filled the room. Everyone recoiled.
The news conference stretched past an hour, with the men on the dais saying that they don’t test all boxers for testosterone irregularities and had only chosen four at the 2022 championships, including Khelif and Lin, and then only Khelif and Lin in 2023. They did not say the results of the 2022 tests or why those athletes were selected, other than vague references to complaints from opposing countries.
The speakers exploded again. People moaned. Kremlev reappeared and attacked Bach and the Olympics. He spoke vaguely of “high testosterone.”
The news conference dragged past 1½ hours. Reporters shouted questions. People yelled in frustration. Once, as Filippatos talked, a woman yelled, “Shut up!” Some reporters started to pack up and leave. And still Kremlev talked.
Suddenly there was a noise in the back of the room. One of Khelif’s Olympic boxing teammates, a 50 kg (110 pounds) fighter named Roumaysa Boualam, had come into the party hall. She wore an Algerian team jacket and a necklace with Olympic rings, and she carried an Algerian flag.
Many of the reporters abandoned their seats to surround her. Kremlev kept talking.
“Unfortunately, that’s all the time we have for today,” the moderator said.
“People need to listen to us,” Kremlev said.
But no one was. Boualam stood up and held her Algerian flag high over her head.
“One, two, three, viva l’Algérie!” she shouted.
Then she started to walk out. Another woman from the Algerian team delegation walked with her.
“One, two, three, viva Imane,” they chanted, referring to Khelif.
On the screen, Kremlev’s head was still talking. But the Algerian women were leaving the room, and the reporters followed. They walked past the open bar and the complimentary snacks, down the stairs and out into the sunny Paris afternoon.
The IBA disqualified the fighters, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu Ting, from last year’s world championships in New Delhi, but they are fighting in these Olympics — and winning. Both advanced to the semifinals of their weight classes. Khelif will fight Tuesday and Lin Wednesday at Roland Garros.
The IBA’s leader, Russian sports businessman Umar Kremlev, has repeatedly alleged without proof that a test revealed the women had XY chromosomes, suggesting they had a testosterone advantage over other fighters. Those allegations sparked anti-transgender social media posts from former president Donald Trump, author J.K. Rowling, billionaire businessman Elon Musk and others and upended the Games, leading to what Olympic officials have called “hate speech” and “abuse” against the boxers.
The International Olympic Committee, which cut ties with the IBA last year over Kremlev’s connections to Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as IBA scandals and financial questions, has rejected the tests as “arbitrary” and illegitimate. Last weekend, Christian Klaue, the IOC’s head of communications, said the IBA is running a Russian-backed “disinformation campaign against the Olympic movement.”
So on Monday the IBA pushed back, promising “detailed explanations” for its ruling. Chris Roberts, its secretary general; Ioannis Filippatos, a member of its board of directors whose biography also says he is a gynecologist and obstetrician; and Gabriele Martelli, its world coaches chairman, planned to attend.
The start time came and went. The news conference’s moderator said it would start a half-hour late. The room, filled with journalists, grew warm. The men on the dais fidgeted. Despite the IBA having lost its status as boxing’s Olympic governing body, Filippatos wore a French Olympic T-shirt under a sports coat. African jazz music played over the speakers as workers fiddled with the electronics. At the open bar in the back, someone served wine.
“Guys!” a German reporter shouted. “You’re wasting our time!”
Finally, an hour late, aides walked into the room with translation devices. Kremlev planned to join remotely, and he would speak only Russian.
Roberts spoke first, saying he couldn’t show any test results because the Algerian and Taiwanese Olympic committees had sent letters demanding the alleged results stay private. None of the men on the dais provided evidence. They just talked. Or at least tried.
Roberts tried to provide a timeline for how the tests came about, but there was feedback from his microphone and there were screeching noises from the speakers. Filippatos attempted to speak, but before he could, Kremlev’s face appeared on a nearly 15-foot screen behind the dais, looming over his associates.
Kremlev spoke about how he was standing up for women’s sports while IOC President Thomas Bach was trying to destroy them. He ranted about the Games’ Opening Ceremonies and how a scene resembling Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” portrayed by drag queens had “humiliated him.” Finally, his voice rising until he was almost shouting, he said he was “going to open prosecution” of Bach without providing details of how this would be done.
When Kremlev finished, Filippatos started to talk about how, as a man who has delivered many babies, he is qualified to decide who is a woman. He said the IOC needs to let people such as him determine athletes’ genders.
“Are you going to show us evidence, or is it time for us to leave the room now?” a reporter interrupted.
They didn’t.
More questions came but few answers. How much was Kremlev paying them? How much of the IBA’s funding still comes from the Russian energy company Gazprom, which had for a time been the IBA’s lone sponsor? Kremlev’s face again filled the enormous screen.
Then the room’s speakers exploded. Or so it sounded. A translation device onstage had gotten too close to a microphone, and a boom filled the room. Everyone recoiled.
The news conference stretched past an hour, with the men on the dais saying that they don’t test all boxers for testosterone irregularities and had only chosen four at the 2022 championships, including Khelif and Lin, and then only Khelif and Lin in 2023. They did not say the results of the 2022 tests or why those athletes were selected, other than vague references to complaints from opposing countries.
The speakers exploded again. People moaned. Kremlev reappeared and attacked Bach and the Olympics. He spoke vaguely of “high testosterone.”
The news conference dragged past 1½ hours. Reporters shouted questions. People yelled in frustration. Once, as Filippatos talked, a woman yelled, “Shut up!” Some reporters started to pack up and leave. And still Kremlev talked.
Suddenly there was a noise in the back of the room. One of Khelif’s Olympic boxing teammates, a 50 kg (110 pounds) fighter named Roumaysa Boualam, had come into the party hall. She wore an Algerian team jacket and a necklace with Olympic rings, and she carried an Algerian flag.
Many of the reporters abandoned their seats to surround her. Kremlev kept talking.
“Unfortunately, that’s all the time we have for today,” the moderator said.
“People need to listen to us,” Kremlev said.
But no one was. Boualam stood up and held her Algerian flag high over her head.
“One, two, three, viva l’Algérie!” she shouted.
Then she started to walk out. Another woman from the Algerian team delegation walked with her.
“One, two, three, viva Imane,” they chanted, referring to Khelif.
On the screen, Kremlev’s head was still talking. But the Algerian women were leaving the room, and the reporters followed. They walked past the open bar and the complimentary snacks, down the stairs and out into the sunny Paris afternoon.
The pond needed that - going on the John Oliver jag had dangerously radicalised an already radical approach to the world, and this day's lizard Oz outings didn't help, with the bromancer just the start of the pond's troubles ...
Israel a democracy?
Well, there's a problem at the get go. Oliver spent some time establishing that in the West Bank Israel was perfecting a form of apartheid, to the considerable irritation of the Jerusalem Post ... in part ...
Meanwhile, back with the bro, there were a couple of illustrations and a short gobbet ...
It was going to be one of those days where the pond was forced to give up talk of climate science and the end of the world, and revert again to John Oliver, this time as reported in the New Arab... and the way an alleged "democracy" was not just doing apartheid, but also conducting a genocide ...
Meanwhile, on another bank on a different planet to Planet Janet ...
But all Dame Slap cares about is the right for everyone to do an Uncle Elon ... showing his affinity with the old South Africa ...
The pond is perversely pleased that Dame Slap is comfortable with genocide and apartheid and the odd bit of torture ...
And so to the last Dame Slap gobbet, because despite having installed the finest set of trigger warnings available, the pond still gets triggered by the reptiles and sent into a rage ...
Perhaps a trip to Gaza or the West Bank, without Israeli guides limiting the vision, might be a way to challenge Dame Slap's reprehensible thinking.
Enough already ... and there's simply no time to note that elsewhere Vlad the sociopath's war goes on ...
At this point, the pond was forced into a bout of both siderism, because the pond has no time for the mad fundamentalist mullahs of Iran, nor any time for Hamas, but what need to say that when the bromancer is frothing and foaming at the mouth?
The pond thought about moral vacuity and the deep weirdness of that notion appearing in the lizard Oz, and then thought it might calm down with a dose of minor Milner, the rat in the rank Cameron from the deep north, blathering on about renewables and wind farms and reconciliation and the Aboriginal Voice, but lingering bitterness about the appalling role the reptiles played in that made the pond turn to Dame Slap.
What a mistake, what a way to add to the pond's dangerous radicalisation.
Each time the pond sights a Dame Slap piece, her sneering condescension and the miasma of moral vacuity that surrounds her seems to get worse ...
Answering that question is hard? It's not so hard if you see some of the news coming out of Gaza ... per Al Jazeera ...
Meanwhile, the reptiles flooded Dame Slap's piece with bland snaps and a video clip, all down sized by the pond ...
If the reptiles had wanted some illustrations, there were plenty to hand of a different kind...
And so on and endlessly on, but the pond digresses and must return to the sneering Dame Slap...
Meanwhile, on another bank on a different planet to Planet Janet ...
But all Dame Slap cares about is the right for everyone to do an Uncle Elon ... showing his affinity with the old South Africa ...
There's nothing like family feuds ...
Sorry, back to Dame Slap and never mind Uncle Elon and Andrew Tate, apparently it's all about 18C...
Back to the blithe Dame Slap, still sneering away...
Meanwhile, on another planet, there's plenty of sowing and reaping going down ...
It might be wrong to blame what's happening in Gaza and the West Bank on the nearest Jewish person you encounter, but it's just as inexcusable to fail to note what's currently happening, and instead use it all as a way of turning events into an attack on 18C...
Perhaps a trip to Gaza or the West Bank, without Israeli guides limiting the vision, might be a way to challenge Dame Slap's reprehensible thinking.
Or maybe not ... over in Germany ...
That's rich ...that's the icing on the free speech cake, all the more so because the phrase is a favourite of the barking mad fundamentalists that make up Netanyahu's cabinet, with the war now continuing so that Benji can stay out of the clink ... per Al Jazeera ...
Israel’s use of ‘from the river to the sea’
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, which describes itself as conservative and nationalist, has been a staunch promoter of the concept of “Eretz Israel”, or the Bible-given right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.
According to the Jewish Virtual Library, the party’s original party manifesto in 1977 stated that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”. It also argued that the establishment of a Palestinian state “jeopardises the security of the Jewish population” and “endangers the existence of the state of Israel”.
Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, has been among the promoters of international recognition of the Jewish historic claim to lands from the river to the sea.
The expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem by successive Israeli governments is seen as an attempt by Israel to control the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, denying Palestinians’ aspiration for an independent state.
Well yes ... Who are Israeli settlers, and why do they live on Palestinian lands?, As many as 700,000 Israeli settlers are living illegally in the occupied West Bank as settler violence surges.
And so the pond must again apologise for its dangerous radicalisation, but that's what happens when forced to endure reptile gruel on a daily basis ...
Sadly the result is that news of the world must be crammed in at the very bottom, but at least the news comes from the infallible Pope and the immortal Rowe ...
Is the pond above recycling a fake meme for a cheap laugh?/
As if ... the pond has been slumped on the couch, enjoying the telly as well as the feel of the couch ... so deeply weird...
Mars mars Musk's megalomanical marketing making a mockery of his mastery!
ReplyDeleteMusk and co are severly wealthy, yet lining up this lot against yourself is stupidity, arrogance against the First Amendment. ""Mr Musk tweeted: "We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words. Now, it is war.". He always gets what he wants.
For once the biggest "Fake Christian, Bigot And 'Serial Adulterer'" and worlds centibillion-ocrite, is trying really hard to shoot his own feet off by trying to force the worlds largest advertisers to advertise. (Never imagined writing that!).
Because these companies don't want ads for Adolf to appear next to a Mars bar, wind farm or hospital. Seems reasonable to me
Mars spent a mere USD$1.5bn on ads last year, and is able to muster 3x the price of X-toilet capital anytime it wants... "Mars also set up a $100 million fund the same year called Companion Fund," and
"Unilever's brand investment worldwide increased to roughly 8.5 billion dollars in 2023"
"Mars family. $117B"
"The siblings Jacqueline and John Mars each own an estimated one-third stake and are worth $37 billion each." And the other 3 each have "according to Forbes, with a net worth of US$11 billion each"
Mars Inc "with US$45 billion in annual sales in 2022;[7] that year Forbes ranked the company as the fourth-largest privately held company in the United States."
CVS Health "EPS of $2.21. Total revenues increased to $264.0 billion, up 10.6% compared to prior year."
Orster, wind power supremo... "Net profit amounted to DKK 15.0 billion [USD2.2bn], and return on capital employed (ROCE) came in at 17 %",
Musk "accuses the food giants Unilever and Mars, private healthcare company CVS Health, and renewable energy firm Orsted - along with a trade association called the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) - of depriving it of "billions of dollars" in advertising revenue.
"The lawsuit relates to the period in 2022 just after Mr Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, when advertising revenue dived.
"Some companies had been wary of advertising on the platform amid concerns that its new owner was not serious enough about removing harmful online content.
"X chief executive Linda Yaccarino said "people are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is constricted. No small group of people should monopolise what gets monetised".
"Mr Musk tweeted: "We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words. Now, it is war."
"Professor Rebecca Haw Allensworth, of Vanderbilt University, said the boycott "was really trying to make a statement about X's policies and about their brands".
"That's protected by the First Amendment," she said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn47798gxx4o
His bakers dozen brats need to be taken away to a safe place.
Because of his [DP] "sneering condescension and the miasma of moral vacuity that surrounds" him.
And His Wars.
"...protected by the First Amendment," she said. But nothing, absolutely nothing, is protected from the totally imaginative literalistic interpretations by the SCOTUS. As usual, it's decided by who has the most money and can fly the "Justices" off to anywhere they want to go.
Delete"...a way to challenge Dame Slap's reprehensible thinking." Oh, I don't think so because reality will never penetrate the Slap defence - it hasn't at any time in her 58 years of existence so far. But it would be interesting to know what "...distress - or discomfort, as this woman called it..." is ever a "reason to refuse service." Like if an apparent customer was actually threatening her with a machete would that be a reason to refuse service ?
ReplyDeleteThe thing with our reptiles is that they only ever see things from their ill-informed and un-thought through viewpoint, even if, as it frequently does, it means that they adopt self-contradictory positions. But in minds so completely compartmentalised as the Slappy's, self-contradictory ideas and/or beliefs never come into contact with each other and so are never even noticed, much less ever resolved.
However, the Slap does have her heroes, like Haidt and Lukianoff, who would have us all "see the world more accurately" just like they all do. And if we did, we'd come to know, just like Slappy, that all evil begins with 18C.