In which the pond has some news but only that tired old bigot, Henry of the bucket, for devout herpetology students...

 

The best line the pond heard out of the recent affair was that the orange Jesus was tired of being called weird and wanted to be called racist ...

None of any or all of that penetrated the thick hide of the reptiles at the lizard Oz this morning ... it was gold, gold, gold, with the prisoner swap and the assassination down the page ...

Wilcox had the best take on the assassination ...

Meanwhile, the pond is pleased at the diligent progress being made in Murdochian studies ...

Andrew Dodd was abroad in The Conversation with Rupert Murdoch’s succession plan reveals a lot about his empire – and most of it is not pretty. Inter alia:

...even Murdoch knows his money won’t be much use to him after his death. Instead, this is about ensuring the legacy that now most matters to him.
He has spent seven decades building a reactionary force across three continents and he likes the effects it continues to create. Yes, it isn’t what it once was and sometimes the issues get away from him, but at least the debates are happening, and the so-called elites and the establishment continue to be rattled.
He watches his acolytes in action, such as Fox presenters Sean Hannity and Greg Gutfeld and columnists Miranda Devine and Bolt, and he likes what he sees. He likes that they sow division. He likes that they mock people who are progressive and bolster those who are cruel. He doesn’t agree with all their conspiracy theories, but he kind of likes that they’re out there creating hegemony, undermining harmony.
He likes it all and he doesn’t want it to end. Not now. Not even when he’s dead.

Over in Crikey, Christopher Warren maintained his enthusiasm with Watch Hong Kong (not Reno) to understand what News Corp is really up to (paywall), News Corp's Wall Street Journal has sacked a reporter who was elected head of the Hong Kong Journalists Association. In doing so, the company has shown once and for all just which side it's on.

Inter alia:

...In the chronicles of the Murdoch dynasty, Hong Kong plays much the same role as it does in British imperial history: once the strategic spearpoint to open up China to drive expansion for a new century; now, a largely greyed-out embarrassing moment of overreach.
For the Murdochs, that spear was Star Television, distributed across east and south Asia (although not China itself) bought for about US$1 billion in 1996. The spear carrier was youngest princeling James, who marked his own 28th birthday in 2000 as Hong Kong-based head of the satellite broadcaster. 
His main job was to persuade Beijing that they could trust the family to go along to get along (a task made harder by Rupert’s incautious 1993 assertion that satellite television was an “unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere”.)
In a 2001 speech, by contrast, James shrugged off the threat of authoritarianism, saying Hong Kong democracy activists should “accept the reality of life under a strong-willed ‘absolutist’ government”. 
That’s the lesson from Hong Kong: you can change the father for the son, or the brother for the other, but you can’t change the fundamentals of the business of right-wing media.

There was news on the climate wars/nuking the country front, with Graham Readfearn recently offering his regular report in the Graudian, Dutton praises Canada to sell nuclear plan. But does Ontario really have cheaper power?

A good question. Inter alia, part of the answer:

...Winfield says Ontario’s decision to sideline renewables and back nuclear will see the province relying more on gas, which he says will push up greenhouse gas emissions.

“The fundamental underlying problem, along with all of the other downsides with nuclear – waste management, major upstream impacts in terms of uranium mining and milling, security, catastrophic accident and weapons proliferation risks that just don’t exist in relation to other energy technologies – is that it hasn’t benefited from the kinds of learning curves you have seen with renewables and storage, where costs have fallen and performance improved,” he says.

“Rather, nuclear costs just keep rising.”

Meanwhile, on another planet ...

There was more, and a very pretty graph which would have pleased ABC news finance reporters ...

Meanwhile, Garry Linnell in The Canberra Times' Echnida newsletter was on an Arctic expedition and got deeply depressed ...

...Unable to visit Ittoqqortoormiit, we turned north. That's when a fellow passenger - an academic and influential government adviser on climate change - updated me on new developments in the global warming field.

I felt the buoyant optimism that accompanies exciting new experiences vanish. June had become the 15th consecutive month of global sea temperatures reaching record highs. The oceans have been our protective sponges for decades, soaking up a quarter of the worst excesses of global warming. But scientists, who admit the complexities of these chaotic systems are beyond them, now fear we are approaching a point of no return, with our fourth global coral bleaching event in the past decade under way.

Even more disturbing was a paper he showed me by a group of risk assessment experts. They highlighted the lack of research undertaken into the many variables that could drive climate change to catastrophic levels. They gave several examples, including simulations showing how the loss of stratocumulus cloud decks might, in a worst-case scenario, trigger a further eight-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100 - a scenario that would melt the Antarctic and drown the entire planet. We are already facing massive disruption with a now certain minimum increase of two degrees.

The real point of their paper was that we don't even know what we don't know. It's too complex. The time scale too great. The variables too many. Combined with that deeply ingrained human trait of avoiding bad news - shooting the messenger should be an Olympic sport - we are simply not prepared to surrender our complacency. It's a safe bet few who started this column have made it this far. Who needs another old fart giving a bleak appraisal about the future when the Paris medal tally warms the soul?

And as the Paris medal tally warms the reptiles at the lizard Oz, the pond can hear the few who've made it this far asking where the heck are the reptiles, so that devout herpetology students can continue with their studies?

Well the pond has only got that tired old bigot, Henry, the mender of buckets, on hand this day, and by now everybody should know his schtick ...

What's the real point? The tired old bigot is intent on proving that proddies and tykes eventually managed to get along, but those bloody Islamics ...

The piece was dressed up with tedious period snaps dragged out of the archive because that's all the remnants of the lizard Oz graphics department can afford. There was Mannix in a frock and Billy with Fisk and Sir Henry ... all here reduced to a more appropriate size ...

 

The hole in bucket man, stuck in the past as always, had no time for news from America ... of the kind celebrated by Ernest Owens in the Beast in The Real Reason Trump Attacks Harris’ Racial Identity: It’s a Distraction:

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction,” the late great Toni Morrison once said. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”
For Donald Trump’s entire political career, he’s used racism as a tool to distract the public from matters more significant. In 2012, he resorted to birtherism while questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship to disrespect the nation’s first Black president. When launching his presidential campaign in 2015, he called Mexicans rapists to incite fear on immigration issues. He spent his presidency attacking other marginalized groups on their identity to rally up the most xenophobic and racist base of his supporters.
This week, Trump was welcomed to a convention panel hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists to publicly insult the Black women journalists interviewing him—and his Black and Indian female presidential opponent, Kamala Harris.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump responded when asked by ABC News Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott if it was appropriate to call Harris a “DEI hire,” which many Republicans have been recently referring to her presidential candidacy as.
“She was Indian all the way, and all of a sudden she made a turn, and she became a Black person.”
It goes without saying, but this is a big fat Trump lie: Throughout her public life, Harris has long identified as being both Black and South Asian. Born in Oakland, California, to an Indian mother and Jamaican father, Harris graduated from Howard University, a historically black college and university (HBCU) and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated, a historically Black sorority.
But this has been documented for years. And in a room of predominantly Black journalists who have covered Harris—it’s obvious they know this already as well.
So why did Trump resort to attacks on Harris’s racial identity? It’s simple: Distraction.
On a platform where Black journalists tried to get him to address issues pertinent to their respective community, he instead pivoted to attacking a Black woman who wasn’t even in the room. While currently dodging an opportunity to actually debate Harris in person, he took advantage of a Black journalism convention platform to test out a nasty campaign attack on her. Rather than most of the media address Trump’s lack of a serious agenda to engage Black voters, holding him accountable on his racist past with this community, we’re instead seeing them wrestle with Harris’s racial identity instead.
Mission accomplished!

Luckovich had returned from his summer break, but had only caught up with the deeply weird:

Meanwhile, our Henry rambled on with his history lesson, though Thucydides was nowhere in sight...

Relax, all will be well, it's the bloody Islamics that are the problem now.

Might the ongoing genocide in Gaza have something to do with it? 

After all, the pond has become dangerously radicalised ...

Per Al Jazeera ...

• Gaza’s civil defence says at least 15 killed in Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians.
• Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah says war with Israel has entered “new phase” after killings of commander Fuad Shukr and Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh.
• Israeli military claims to have killed Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif in its air raid on Gaza’s Khan Younis on July 13.
• Funeral for Haniyeh and his bodyguard held in Tehran, with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei leading the prayers.
• At least 39,480 people, including 16,314 children, have been killed and 91,128 wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 and more than 200 were taken captive.

Other questions arise ... 

Per Alon Pinkas in Haaretz, Is Israel Deliberately Provoking an Escalation That Might Drag the U.S. Into the Conflict?, (paywall) This week's targeted killings in Beirut and Tehran raise three fundamental questions, including the biggest one: Who has a vested interest in an expanded regional war?

...the assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran after the inauguration of the new Iranian president, widely attributed to Israel, is an entirely different story. This is not about justice, retribution or settling accounts. This is about flirting with major escalation.
This leads to two possible explanations: That Israel did not perform a serious risk-assessment analysis and was motivated instead by instant gratification, with disregard to the ramifications. Or, conversely, that Israel is deliberately provoking escalation in the hope that a conflagration with Iran will drag the United States into the conflict, further distancing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from the debacle of October 7 – a calamity that to this day he has not been held accountable for.
The intensity and speed of unfolding events in the Middle East over the past 10 months is such that while I'm writing on the likelihood and potential of escalation, by the time you read this we may be fully immersed in such a spiraling and sprawling escalatory whirlpool.
This week's assassinations raise three fundamental questions.
First, why didn't Israel employ this months ago instead of launching a full-scale invasion of Gaza and dumping 2,000-pound (907-kilogram) bombs and decimating neighborhoods, before a hostage deal was negotiated. If Israel can perform a precise, impeccable, intelligence-driven operation 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) away, why bomb Gaza for 10 full months?
Second, what did it achieve in terms of changing the equation and dynamics, given that Israel has no plan or political framework for Gaza whatsoever?
Third, was escalation considered an inevitability, and is Israel prepared for it or could benefit from it?

Good questions, awkward answer:

..This is where it gets interesting. Who has no interest in such an escalation? The United States, whose makeshift Middle East policy will now have to be revisited, and Iran, which clearly prefers attrition and low intensity.
Who does have a vested interest in an expanded war? Mr. Netanyahu. Which is why the conventional wisdom in Washington over the last 36 hours is that Israel carried out the Haniyeh assassination deliberately in Iran and intentionally on that day.
How all this plays out is purely speculative at this point. One thing is clear, though: the idea to assassinate Haniyeh, however justified, has "escalation" written all over it.

As for the hole in the bucket man, the pond lived through the proddie v. tyke wars, by accident of birth allegedly on the tyke side until atheism thankfully intervened, but still hates Oliver Cromwell and what he did to the Irish.

As a result, the pond is deeply bored by our Henry's recitation and even more by the ultimate point of the proceedings ... those bloody Islamics! ... especially as splendid visions waft into view ...

And just like that bigot, our Henry has been practising the art of distraction, and so to the real business ... those bloody Islamics, ruining everything ...

He really should be a bit fairer. Genocide is an important strain in the Western intellectual tradition. 

Go genocide (but sssh, let the old fart fail to mention it) ... why god Herself set the pace way back when with a flood that wiped all life off the planet, bar a few who managed to make it to the boat...

And with that the pond finally arrived at the last mercifully short gobbet ...

Ah yes, the moral economy ...

... why didn't Israel employ this months ago instead of launching a full-scale invasion of Gaza and dumping 2,000-pound (907-kilogram) bombs and decimating neighborhoods, before a hostage deal was negotiated. If Israel can perform a precise, impeccable, intelligence-driven operation 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) away, why bomb Gaza for 10 full months?

The moral economy does a stock take:

At least 39,480 people, including 16,314 children, have been killed and 91,128 wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 and more than 200 were taken captive.

Weird sort of economy, morally or morally bankrupt ...

And speaking of the economy, the infallible Pope was on hand to round out proceedings by noting the suffering of stubborn dragons ... a bit like suffering old dotards ineptly flailing at buckets of sticky historical stodge ...