In which Lloydie of the Amazon does minimalist slacker mumblecore, while Mein Gott goes full chemtrails ...

 

Irony isn't quite dead yet. The Taliban recently announced they were going to ban MMA style sports because they were too violent. No news on when the Taliban is going to ban the Taliban because of extreme violence and cruelty directed at women.

Meanwhile, a joyless Ms Lindsey recently announced there was no joy ..."...this whole joy love fest doesn’t exist in the real world.” That's possibly true for a sycophantic suck whose master said there was no need to listen to his advice, let alone follow it. Back to the plantation Ms Lindsey ...

Meanwhile, the genocide has ramped up in the West Bank, on the basis that the government of Israel should run everything from the Jordan river to the sea (why is it always Palestinian militants and terrorists, why never talk of Zionist militants and terrorists?)

Meanwhile, Woollies has decided that the way to maximise profits is to turn customers into wage slaves, (not really wages, they'll be replacing check out workers by working for free).

The idea is to roam around the aisles like a shelf checker,  toting up the day's shopping and scanning the details into a pad sitting on a trolley. Hell will freeze over before the pond joins in, and with Coles thinking of following, it looks like IGA and Aldi might be competitive, unless they join in that Orwellian dream.

Meanwhile, it should be clear by now that the pond is particularly jaundiced by this day's reptile offerings...

Oh dear really, David Pearl? The spectre of Gough and the grim road back? 

Surely the federal government has contrived fresh ways to irritate minorities ...

SloMo couldn't have organised it better.

As for petulant Peta having a giggle about Giggle, the pond simply couldn't go there, nor, given the current genocide, could the pond give a fig about Jack the Insider rabbiting on about anti-semitism... there's a genocide going down in the gulag, and drawing attention to it isn't grandstanding or anti-semitism.

The sight of Lloydie of the Amazon at the bottom of the far right gave the pond brief hope, but that was quickly shattered ...

Really? A two minute read, and just a snap of some transmission lines of the sort the reptiles also trotted out for Col's beating of the energy drum at the top of the digital edition ...

Where's the sinister solar panels? Where are the threatening, whale-killing wind turbines? Where's  the sinister menace? At the very least there should have been a snap of a nuclear plant nuking the country to save the planet...

Instead, Lloydie was over before he'd got going ...

The pond appreciates that correspondents have advised that Lloydie is doing mighty, hugely important work for Sky but is this the best he can do? Must he leave off a question mark in that last line "What could possibly go wrong"?

What could possibly go wrong? The English language for starters ...

It was pretty much the same when Lloydie last made an appearance, way back on 18th July and also a two minute read, allegedly, though the pond finds a minute more than enough ...

That's the best the brave warrior can do to save the Amazon? Forget it Jake, and so the pond turned to Mein Gott for a little nutritional filler ...

He may be right?

He's a barking mad loon who, in his crazed lust for power, has thrown in his lot with an authoritarian coup lover and a VP with an obsession about childless women ...

For a fundamentalist Catholic, he really does have a weird attitude to nuns and priests and brothers.. it's not so common these days, but you can still find some warping the minds of kids.

Every time JD speaks he manages to sound clueless ...JD Vance Feels ‘Terrible’ for Donut Clerk Who Dissed Him, The vice presidential candidate randomly speculated that the clerk was probably having a “panic attack” during his awkward encounter with her.

Deeply weird.

Sorry, the pond didn't mean to take that detour, not when there's other deep weirdness to hand, what with Mein Gott feeling the RFK Jr light ...

Now don't get the pond wrong, back in the day the pond used to play in the asparagus patch, which was liberally sprinkled with DDT ...

On the other hand, as the Beeb keeps reminding the pond (will they never change that bloody promo featuring Winnie rabbiting on about the iron curtain?) that back on 12th April 1955, the Salk vaccine was pronounced safe and effective and the pond was saved from a life wearing callipers, as were many others faced with an Alan Marshall situation.

How quickly we forget, how easily misled by frauds and false messiahs ...

As evidence of RFK Jr's barking mad ways, the pond was reminded of a Philip Bump column in WaPo which started out this way (paywall) ...

For Donald Trump, the benefit of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s endorsement was obvious. The election has shifted dramatically in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris but remains close; picking up even a few percentage points of support from former Kennedy voters could make the difference.

For Harris, the benefit of not receiving Kennedy’s endorsement was similarly obvious. Kennedy is … strange. Even before announcing his long-shot bid for the presidency, he was known (or, if you prefer, notorious) for his anti-vaccine activism and baseless claims about health and food. If Harris were to accept Kennedy’s endorsement, she would, in effect, be accepting responsibility for that background — and anything else that unexpectedly turned up like a bear cub in Central Park.

Kennedy endorsed Trump on Friday. On Monday, there was already an example of precisely what Trump had gotten with his purchase.

No, not the Kennedy-cut-the-head-off-a-whale story, though that was (a gross) part of the political conversation. (It was battling for attention with the right’s discovery that Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, occasionally pets dogs that aren’t his own.) Instead, it was a reply Kennedy posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

“We are going to stop this crime,” Kennedy pledged to user “Concerned Citizen.” The crime? “Chemtrails,” the conspiracy theory that the lines planes trace in the sky are not water vapor (which they are) but at least occasionally dangerous chemicals being released for some nebulously explained population-control effort.

“Chemtrails” are an old-school conspiracy theory, growing up in the same neighborhood as tinfoil hats and Bigfoot. It’s something that’s been debunked countless times. And here is the newest member of Team Trump assuring an anonymous social media poster that “we” — presumably meaning him and Trump or him and the Trump administration — will prevent this thing that isn’t happening from happening.

Two hours after Kennedy assured Concerned Citizen that Trump would address chemtrails, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson posted a lengthy interview with Kennedy in which the former candidate described the role he had been promised with Trump’s team.

“We’re working on policy issues together. I’ve been asked to go on to the transition team, to help pick the people who will be running the government, and I’m looking forward to that,” Kennedy told Carlson. So if you’re an expert on chemtrail prosecution, get your résumé ready.

In a Sunday interview on Fox News, Kennedy said that there had been no commitment that he would serve in a Trump administration. (He did tell Carlson that he'd happily accept a role running the CIA, though he admitted it was unlikely he'd be confirmed by the Senate.) But he was promised the opportunity to help shape what that administration would look like.

Everybody loved the chemtrails angle, perhaps even more than chainsawing the whale head or dropping the dead bear in the park. 

Nandika Chatterjee also had a go at in Salon ... Trump team won't condemn RFK Jr. "chemtrails" conspiracy, says campaign "proud" to have him on board, The Trump campaign isn't denying Robert Kennedy Jr.'s suggestion that the ex-president would take on 

"We are going to stop this crime," Kennedy posted Monday on X, responding to a 60-second video in which a purported "Chemtrail Pilot Whistleblower" says chemicals are being sprayed and "killing off unwanted or leaching aspects of America and the world."

Two hours after his post, former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson shared an interview in which Kennedy described his new role as part of Trump’s team. 

“We’re working on policy issues together. I’ve been asked to go on to the transition team, to help pick the people who will be running the government, and I’m looking forward to that,” Kennedy told Carlson.

As the Washington Post noted, there is no guarantee that Trump’s micro-managerial tactics will afford Kennedy any real autonomy should the former president win the election. But it is also possible that the embrace of Kennedy, and refusal to condemn his more outlandish claims, from chemtrails to anti-vaccination pseudoscience, is intended as a signal to other conspiracy theorists that Trump is on board with their agenda.

Yep, he's a doozy alright, which is why Mein Gott's faith in him is remarkably touching ...

As for that talk of autism, it's worth remembering that Salon was in on the ground floor in that game ...

Kennedy’s long history of vaccine skepticism was reported on in a 2005 article originally published by Salon, in which he argued that a link between compounds in vaccines and autism existed. The article was retracted after evidence suggesting critical errors and potential fraud in the cited studies emerged.

Never mind, it was really just a bit of fluff serving as space filler between the usual infallible Pope and immortal Rowe ...

And that left just one gobbet of Mein Gott to go ...

Might as well finish off that Bump in the night ...

...It’s very possible that Trump would renege on any agreement with Kennedy should Trump win. The former president has not earned a reputation as someone who sticks to his personal commitments. But it is also possible that Trump would be happy to have Kennedy advise his transition team or serve in his administration because Trump has similarly not earned a reputation as someone committed to staffing government with the best and most capable officials. You don’t have to take our word for that. Trump himself has often criticized staffers he once hailed, the shift following their departures from his team and, frequently, their willingness to criticize Trump.
It bears repeating that Trump came to the White House in 2017 from a decades-long career as the absolute authority in a private company, a place where people served at his whim and where fealty provided a path toward higher status. Before leaving office in 2021, Trump introduced a plan to overhaul the federal bureaucracy, letting him fire more civil servants and replace them with people he himself had identified. The effort would build a more Trump Organization-like government. It would create a lot of positions to fill with loyalists, people selected because they demonstrated a commitment to Trump and who then get to do what they want with their power.
This is precisely the reason that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is important. Not simply because it articulates an extreme-right view of how presidential power can be deployed but because it was written by people close to Trump who would undoubtedly be tapped for roles in a second Trump administration. Nestled into government agencies, often without needing confirmation, they could implement their agendas — just as Kennedy, left to his own devices, could figure out whom to hire to tackle this chemtrail thing once and for all.
We can’t discount the possibility that Trump is using Kennedy or that, should Trump win in November, Kennedy’s input on hiring would be largely ignored. (And why not? What cost would Trump pay for doing so?) But we also can’t discount the possibility that a Trump victory would lead to a Kennedy-recommended head of the Food and Drug Administration tasked with removing “chemicals” from food (does that include dihydrogen oxide?) or a Federal Aviation Administration director whose mandate includes banning dihydrogen oxide emissions from airplanes.
We can’t discount the possibility, broadly, that a second Trump administration would mean a lot of people with similarly fringe ideas empowered to act on those ideas by a president largely indifferent to the machinations of government. In fact, we should probably expect it.

And we should probably expect deeply weird reptiles at the lizard Oz will go all in, though on the upside, at last there'll be no need to fear chemtrails. 

Instead we should fear dragons, beasts that the immortal Rowe clearly loves to draw in all sorts of poses... (should have saved it for a Groaning).