In which the pond tries to keep things light, you know, invade China with the help of Jennings of the fifth form ...

 

After yesterday's dangerously radicalised meltdown, the pond felt the need to lighten the mood...

The Streisand effect lives on in Chippendale! Sorry folks, it's been and gone, but there'll always be another Streisand moment for Gina ...

As for news of the new Walz, the pond scanned the reptiles' digital edition in vain. 

He'd been ghosted, with nary a single mention ...

Instead it was the usual gold, gold, gold for Australia ...

After hunting about like a Tamworth chook in search of grain treasure, the pond did find one mention, a disapproving clucking of the tongues from the lizard Oz editorialist ...

How they hate the weird ... a sampling of Katy Waldman in The New Yorker, "Weird" is a rebuke to Republican Dominance Politics (paywall).

Waldman ended this way ...

..There’s even a hint of caregiving in the left’s language. Weird is the sort of word a parent might use to wave away a child’s anxiety—“A monster in the closet would be pretty weird, huh?” It’s a way of acknowledging a fear without assigning it too much power. And it’s a form of containment. There’s a sense of quarantining this baffling political weirdness away from the rest of the country, not in anything so crazy as a physical structure—no need for that—but simply in a word, a gust of air, some sound attached. The wager of “weird” is that Americans of all stripes have been longing for de-escalation, a cooling hand on their brow, and that they’ll welcome a chance to distance themselves from the perceived fringe. Biden’s Presidency may have offered a measure of stability and sanity to those reeling from the unreality of the Trump years, but his reëlection campaign did not. The country seemed to be sleepwalking toward November as Trump’s rhetoric darkened and the Democratic establishment dismissed clear evidence of their candidate’s decline. As in a nightmare, we all had rigor mortis and couldn’t open our mouths to protest when we were told that these two men represented the best our political system had to offer. Harris, when she moved to the top of the ticket, jolted many people back to life. The fear and confusion aren’t gone, but her candidacy diminishes those feelings, makes them seem silly and insignificant. By running Harris, Democrats are signalling that they refuse to dwell in denial; and, therefore, that they refuse to fight MAGA on its own fantastical turf. If she wins, the country has a shot at waking up from an extremely weird dream. 

Well yes, life with the reptiles is perennially an extremely weird dream.

Even the Nine rags managed a little more than the lizard Oz editorialist's grumpiness, proposing that perhaps doing a new waltz wasn't that radical, with this from Kayley Lyons, a senior lecturer in the Centre for Digital Transformation of Health at the University of Melbourne, US vice presidential pick Tim Walz was once my high school teacher (soft paywall):

...Walz and I lived in Mankato, a plain, suburban town of 50,000 people surrounded by corn fields. Our district is home to one of the best hospitals in the world, the Mayo Clinic, and the Jolly Green Giant canned vegetable company. The next city over produces the world’s supply of Spam.
Until our district voted for Donald Trump by 10 points in 2022, I had never been sure if my home town was conservative or progressive; it was the kind of place where it was considered rude to talk about politics or religion with strangers.
Mr Walz, as we knew him, was everyone’s favourite teacher. He was a “cool teacher”, but not young or trendy enough to be the coolest teacher. He was professional, but also a human.
As a 15-year-old girl in 2004, I walked into his classroom among 30 other students, sceptical about how geography, history and social studies would help me. But he encouraged us to listen and ask questions.
One of his favourite tasks was to have us read the same news story from three different newspapers each week. He would ask us things like, “What is the historical context of this story? How does each newspaper frame this story differently, and why do you think that is?”
Instead of talking at us, his classes were always a reflective conversation. His engaging style persuaded me to become a better citizen, and even now, as a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, his teaching still challenges me to think and learn in everything I do.

Now that's truly weird.

In the spirit of keeping it light, a few 'toons please ...

This was petulant Peta day at the lizard Oz, but as soon as pond hears talk of "values", it reaches for its Glock. 

Whenever someone like petulant Peta starts to rabbit on about values, the pond refuses to bite. The pond refuses to relitigate Gaza today, enough already. 

Viktor Orbán, fawned on by the onion muncher, doesn't represent the pond's values. Nigel Farage, channelling Andrew Tate, offers no discernibly useful values to the pond. The pond shares no values with the mango Mussolini, or for that matter, his enabler, the Emeritus Chairman.

Talk about values ... this is what you're likely to encounter in a stroll down the lane at the side of Newtown's public school ...

Maestro, an ECU of that window please ...

Now there's a host of Newtown values ...

In the same spirit, here's keeping the feud between Nigel and James O'Brien, and the bulldog riots light ...

And keeping the oily Musky smell in the proper context, how about an infallible Pope?

Perfect. The pond had never thought of that stinky Musk smell as Pepé Le Pew, but now the odour of that ordure will never leave the pond's nostrils.

It's always lighter in the details ...

The pond shares no values with the likes of fear-mongering bigots of the petulant Peta kind, with her inclination to verbal riots and Islamophobia, and with her channeling her inner boofhead Andrew Tate  ...

That Islamophobic snake in the grass popped out at the end of her piece, and that was about as much as the pond could manage...

...As long as newcomers have largely adopted our values, here in Australia we’ve tended to pride ourselves on being the “world’s most successful multicultural society” and have been comfortable with big changes in our ethnic composition as our immigration intake changes from about 50 per cent British (before 1970) to well under 10 per cent now.

While the US and Britain have about 15 per cent of their population foreign-born, we now have almost 30 per cent. After the British-born, the largest immigrant groups are from India and China, communities that are generally keen to succeed and integrate.

The same can’t be said, though, for some Middle Eastern migrants whom even the government’s recent Towards Fairness multicultural report conceded “offer a particularly striking example of how a growing sub-population experiences disadvantage”.

The appointment of Tony Burke as Home Affairs Minister, with responsibility for immigration and much domestic security too, could be a potential turning point; and how he balances community safety versus the desire of foreign criminals to stay in Australia a sign of which way things are likely to go under the Albanese government.

Burke’s electorate is 55 per cent overseas born and 25 per cent Muslim. Already pressure from Burke and other cabinet ministers in seats with large Muslim populations has produced a more pro-Palestine Labor foreign policy. Labor insiders are telling me the Burke appointment was a deliberate prime ministerial strategy to shore up Labor seats with high Muslim voting blocs.

With Burke under pressure to admit more Gazans and reportedly planning to turn their temporary visas into permanent residency, get ready for an immigration program designed to change our country, not strengthen it; and with little ability to security check many of the new arrivals.

Yep, same old stuff, same old trading on bigotry and fear of the Middle East as a way of attention-seeking:

Speaking of swarthy Middle Easterners generating fear and loathing, the pond's reading today, in relation to Xian values, comes from Luke 10:25-37, KJV:

...And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?

And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,

And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.

Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?

And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

You know, keeping it light ...

The reptiles did attempt one EXCLUSIVE:

Keeping it light, all that did was remind the pond of a recent profile in The New Yorker of RFK Jr.

It was by Clare Malone and in the usual NY way, it ran on and on ... What Does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Actually Want?, (paywall) The third-party Presidential candidate has a troubled past, a shambolic campaign, and some surprisingly good poll numbers.

The pond will leave the drug and sex addiction and the LSD freak out to Malone; it's enough to note that at around a 5% polling number, Kennedy has potential to skew the Presidential race the way that Ralph Nader helped George W. Bush into office, and into that Iraq war ...

The bear story copped a re-telling:

One day, in the fall of 2014, Kennedy was driving to a falconry outing in upstate New York when he passed a furry brown mound on the side of the road. He pulled over and discovered that it was the carcass of a black-bear cub. Kennedy was tickled by the find. He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends. In a picture from that day, Kennedy is putting his fingers inside the bear’s bloody mouth, a comical grimace across his face. (When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”)

After the outing, Kennedy, who was then sixty and recently married to Hines, got an idea. He drove to Manhattan and, as darkness fell, entered Central Park with the bear and a bicycle. A person with knowledge of the event said that Kennedy thought it would be funny to make it look as if the animal had been killed by an errant cyclist. The next day, the bear was discovered by two women walking their dogs, setting off an investigation by the N.Y.P.D. “This is a highly unusual situation,” a spokeswoman for the Central Park Conservancy told the Times. “It’s awful.” In a follow-up piece for the Times, which was coincidentally written by Tatiana Schlossberg, one of J.F.K.’s granddaughters, a retired Bronx homicide commander commented, “People are crazy.”

Keeping it light ...

Crazy is as crazy does, and there's a huge amount of crazy in Malone's telling ...

...That year, Kennedy moved with Hines to Los Angeles, where he soon became acquainted with Eric Gladen, a vaccine skeptic who, in 2007, founded a group called World Mercury Project. According to an Associated Press investigation, the group—which was later renamed Children’s Health Defense—reported $13,114 in revenue on its 2014 tax filings. But, in 2015, after Kennedy joined the group’s board, revenue shot up to $467,443. At an event in Sacramento to promote a film by Gladen, “Trace Amounts,” Kennedy told a crowd that, when children receive vaccines, “that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”

In May, 2019, as a measles outbreak rippled across the country, Kennedy’s older brother, Joseph, his older sister, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, and Townsend’s daughter Maeve published an op-ed in Politico about Kennedy’s anti-vaccination efforts. “He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines,” they wrote. That summer, Kennedy and the actress Jessica Biel spearheaded a high-profile campaign against mandatory vaccination in California schools. By the end of the year, the journal Vaccine found that, during a two-month period, two groups accounted for more than half of the ads spreading misinformation on Facebook about vaccines. One was Children’s Health Defense, which, in 2021, paid Kennedy an annual salary of five hundred thousand dollars.

And then it was out to lunch with Covid, vaccine denialism, and autism, more than enough to warm the Kockles of Killer Kreighton's heart ...

With the arrival of COVID, Kennedy’s reach exploded. He churned out books: “The Real Anthony Fauci,” “Vax-UnVax: Let the Science Speak,” and “A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and Covid.” In the summer of 2021, as COVID vaccines were rolling out, Children’s Health Defense promoted its film “Medical Racism: The New Apartheid,” which was seemingly aimed at Black Americans. During the early weeks of Kennedy’s Presidential campaign, the New York Post published a video in which Kennedy said that COVID was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Researchers in China, Russia, and the U.S., he went on, are developing “ethnic bioweapons” to “target people by race.” (Kennedy said that his remarks were taken out of context.)

Kennedy has long been drawn to questionable science. But some of his former close friends have grown alarmed at the changes they’ve seen in him more recently. Last summer, Kennedy posted a video of himself shirtless, doing pushups, a sunburn blooming across his well-defined back and torso. The implication was that his then rivals, Trump, at seventy-seven, and Biden, at eighty, were comparatively old and enfeebled. On a podcast last year, Kennedy said that he was taking testosterone-replacement therapy under the guidance of a doctor. One of the side effects of that treatment is increased muscle mass. But the longtime friend told me, “It’s almost like he’s been body-snatched. I look at pictures of him, and he’s unrecognizable. His sense of humor is all but gone. There’s this anger.”

To skip back a bit in Malone's telling to get to that autism angle ...

In 2005, Kennedy approached his friend Jann Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone, with an idea for a story about what he said were links between vaccines and autism. Kennedy was well liked at the magazine; two years earlier, he had written an article on the environmental movement. “He’s an incredibly charismatic presence,” Will Dana, the former managing editor of the magazine, said. “One time, he gave this speech in the Rolling Stone conference room about environmentalism, and I swear to God he practically had everyone in tears.” Still, Dana went on, he could display a certain sense of entitlement. “He came in one day carrying a bucket with a little injured baby bird,” Dana said. “So then we have our meeting, and we do our thing, and suddenly he’s, like, ‘I gotta go. Um, can you get one of your interns to take the bird to the vet?’ ” (When asked to comment, Kennedy said, “This is a lie.”)

Kennedy’s previous work for the magazine was sometimes problematic. “He would turn in these manuscripts, and it’s barely exaggerating to say, like, eighty to ninety per cent of the facts would be incorrect, even the simple ones,” Dana said. “It’s because he’s not a journalist. He’s a lawyer. He’s more about making arguments than about trying to communicate the truth.” The former friend remembered attending a dinner party with Kennedy and finding his case against vaccines persuasive and nimble, even though the former friend knew that the facts were wrong. “People think he’s an idiot—he’s not an idiot,” the person said. But the vaccine story for Rolling Stone was riddled with errors. Eric Bates, an editor at the magazine, tried to slow-roll the piece, but Wenner pushed it through. (Wenner said that, if he had known that the piece was “flawed that deeply,” he wouldn’t have published it.)

The article, titled “Deadly Immunity”—which stated that “the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real”—required a number of major corrections. Kennedy falsely reported the amount of ethylmercury that infants receive in their vaccinations and misrepresented the transcript of a meeting of doctors in order to support his thesis that they were conspiring with the pharmaceutical industry to push unsafe vaccines. The magazine staff agonized over the fallout, but Kennedy seemed unfazed. “Bobby never had a moment of doubt,” a former staffer told me. “He was already convinced in the overarching argument, so the loss of any one piece or all of the pieces of data didn’t put a dent in that.”

Kennedy told me that, in the aftermath, he stepped away from the vaccine issue. “I did the Rolling Stone article, and I felt like I’d done my part,” he said. “Things kind of calmed down.” A year later, he published a piece for the magazine suggesting that George W. Bush stole the 2004 election. In Kennedy’s telling, he was dragged back into the vaccine debate in 2011, when Salon—which had co-published “Deadly Immunity”—retracted and removed the story from its Web site. “By then, I was watching the science on this issue, on neurological harms from certain vaccines,” Kennedy told me.

In 2014, he published “Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak,” an expansion on his refuted claims in Rolling Stone that vaccines contain dangerous amounts of ethylmercury. He told the Washington Post that friends and colleagues had urged him not to pursue the project. But, when we spoke in Atlanta, he seemed to suggest that his honor had been besmirched, forcing him to respond. “At that point,” he said, “it was like a declaration of war from pharma.”

All that's certainly lightened the mood ...

The pond supposes it should include at least one reptile, just for form's sake, and it's been a while since the pond paid any attention to Jennings of the fifth form ...

There will be a joke at the very end ... but first the intro...

The pond has heard all this a zillion times and these days thinks of it as bromancer-lite ...

In the usual way there was a snap and a video to leaven the text ...

 

The pond promised a light moment, but first the next gobbet must be done and dusted ...

Pearl Harbour? What about Darwin?

Then it was on to the punchline ...

Yep, there was the light moment.

"... note that no heavy landing craft design is selected yet."

A heavy landing craft design will be vital for the lizard Oz's invasion of mainland China, scheduled for around 2030 ... if not by next Xmas...

Some think that Hong Kong might be the easiest way in, but there are good arguments for Shanghai, Shenzhen or Guangzhou. The pond has patented invasion plans available for hire and study as soon as heavy landing craft become available ...

As for those wondering why the pond never bothers with the links, they always seem designed to keep you in the hive mind, and once you've booked into the lizard Oz, you can never leave. 

That link which was ostensibly about having landing craft design, took the pond to this ...

Yes, we can rely on the sociopathic narcissist and his hillbilly chum and by golly we'll take it up to dictator Xi and have the invasion complete by lunch time on New Year's Day ... provided the mango Mussolini has gotten over his love affair ...

Pure, undiluted love, like that of an alleged billionaire for a porn star. Can it get any lighter?

And so to close by doing a last waltz with the immortal Rowe ...

As always it's even lighter in the delicious details ... the pond has always yearned for blue eyes and a decent eye liner ...