In which the Prof soils his nest, Mein Gott solves everything, and an unmentionable is dragged in as 'toon spacer ...

 

America and guns and a wannabe assassin who thinks Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley are the answer; the BBC and child porn and a soft rap over the knuckles; and Sir Keir sits down with the far right in Italy to do over immigrants. 

Oh it was great in the glory days when the colonisers spread out across the world to colonise the colonised - grand days for Abyssinia - but now the colonised are heading to the homes of the colonisers, and quelle catastrophe.

Meanwhile, the genocide keeps on, and JD admits to creating stories about cats and dogs to keep the media interested, though that yarn was swept away by the wannabe assassin and the blame game as to who provoked the violence with their rhetoric, while poor old Springfield had to cancel its CultureFest for safety reasons.

Oh and Vlad the sociopath kept busy wth sociopathic duties, while the Taliban were doing their despicable thing... (WaPo paywall)

Tucked away behind closed doors, the world's very own reality show version of Succession has begun to play out in a Nevada court, which is why the lizards of Oz devoted their energy to the Wright family feud ...

Oh gormless, gutless reptiles, when not contemplating guns in America, this is the story that's captivating the world ... it isn't the feuding Wright family, it's the feuding Murdochians...

No need to go there - the reptiles will never go there.

The pond might drop in at the end of the series as the plot and storyline leaks begin, but it was pleased to see that Faux Noise agreed with the wannabe assassin and thought that Vivek was the solution ...

Given all these weighty matters, it might seem like a bit of parochial self-indulgence to join the Prof in bashing Melbourne, but it's been a national sport for decades ....

Everybody agrees that Melbourne is a dank hell hole full of rabid leftists who prowl the streets waiting to infect innocent northerners - the pond's father was terrified the first time that he visited the pond in Fitzroy, only to find relief in a local pub from whence a crazed gunman once emanated ...

The obvious question is why the Prof stays there? Why hasn't he fled to Queensland, Brisbane at least, or better yet, the deep far north, where he could swelter in his own juices?

Sheesh, the Prof must actually like the joint, he gives out a Fitzroy address ...

Now there were assorted snaps showing off the hell hole's most notable denizens - can the reptiles ever get enough of demonising comrade Dan, now long gone?

Snaps out of the way, it was time for the Prof to go full froth at his home town ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, the Prof talking fondly of the Cain government. The pond seems to recall that in his day Cain was the Comrade Dan of the moment, and that as a dangerous Marxist of the most rabid kind, he bankrupted the state ...

Never mind, the point about this shouting at Melburnian clouds is to make the Prof feel good and to distract the pond from bigger matters... you see, it's all doom and gloom and despair ...

Flee, Prof, flee, sell up at once, forget your antiquated desire to cling on to the red brick prestige - for what it's worth - of La Trobe University. Your rightful place is studying the natives of XXXX land in their natural sociological habitat. Let this be your swan song to the renegade south ...

When Humphries died, he had arguably become a completely unfunny bigot. His ever present inclination to show contempt for his audiences had pretty much spread into showing contempt for pretty much everything and everybody not to the far right of Genghis Khan. Chalk one up to Victoria's cultural antennae. 

It's a fair bet it's also working for the Prof, diligently soiling the nest, and then trying for a gigantic billy goat butt ... of the "This survey is provisional and impressionistic" kind ...

To be fair to the Prof this attempt at redemption is about as funny and as accurate as a late Bazza skit ... but thankfully the attempted billy goat is the last of it ...

Of course the Prof only put that bit about RMIT in to troll the pond. 

The pond's favourite apartment block is at the end of Smith street in Collingwood (near 3CR for anyone interested), and more concrete was used in its construction than was used by Hitler's mob to build their Atlantic Wall ... if Adolf's gang had used the same amount, likely there'd have been no D-day. It makes Sydney's Masonic centre's brutalism look woefully underdone.

As for Melbourne being like a football team, only a doofus Melburnian in the grip of a stupid religion would have used that sort of metaphor ... shouldn't the Prof have been shouting "go the Brisbane Bears" or the Carrara Koalas if you will.  Oh Fitzroy, Fitzroy, look at what they did to you ...

The pond could hardly bear to go on, because the Prof's eruption concealed tragic news. At time of writing, there was no Tuesday groaning ...

The pond relies on Tuesdays to provide news that we've all been rooned, are being rooned, or certainly will be rooned by next week.

Luckily Mein Gott had been out and about the day before and he would suffice in lieu of Dame Groan.. 

Mein Gott, it's a disaster, it's a crisis, it's reptile bread and butter, but before getting on with it, Mein Gott started off his story with a quote from Uncle Leon and the pond couldn't resist mentioning Uncle Leon's latest triumph ...

Elon Musk, the billionaire king of bad takes, came up with a new one to cement his reign on Sunday night.

Responding to a second potential assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life, the X owner questioned why no one was trying to kill the Democratic president and vice president.

“And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” he posted, adding a thinking-face emoji.

A near-instantaneous firestorm of criticism predictably followed, with several people telling him to “delete your account” and others tagging the U.S. Secret Service’s X account.

“This is literally incitement,” the grassroots action group DemsMight wrote, while others pointed out that the post was grounds for the revocation of Musk’s government contracts, including a pair of NASA contracts worth roughly $4 billion that his company SpaceX won in 2021.

Others took the opportunity to clown on Musk. “Another example of why your children hate you,” the actor Billy Baldwin observed.

The New York Times reporter Dave Itzkoff remarked dryly, “and they say this site has advertising problems.”

And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala 🤔 

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 16, 2024

There was a follow up, there always is with Uncle Leon, with this version in Forbes ...

On Sunday night, Musk reshared a post asking why people want to kill Donald Trump and wrote: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” followed by the thinking face emoji.

The post immediately faced blowback from X users, but the billionaire—who has endorsed Trump—appeared to double down, responding with a hundred points emoji to a reply saying: “Trump threatens the machine. Biden/Kamala are the machine.”

Responding to another user who asked him to reconsider the post, saying “We need to unite,” Musk wrote: “No one has even tried to do so is the point I’m making and no one will.”

A few hours later, Musk responded to a follower asking him to reword his post because people were “misinterpreting your obvious intent” by saying: “Fair enough…I don’t want to do what they have done, even in jest.”

After taking down the post, Musk appeared to suggest it was a joke, saying: “One lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X.”

Talk about exceptional skill in inciting violence.

Now on with sage Mein Gott quoting sage Uncle Leon ...

Splendid stuff, who needs a Groaning when you've got Mein Gott? Now there were a couple of pesky interrupting snaps ...

... but the pond prefers Mein Gott's rants to flow unimpeded by visual distractions ...

Mein Gott why isn't this man treasurer? As for talk of that Leprechaun sandwich, strange he didn't mention that recent tragedy ...Spare a thought for poor Ireland – forced to collect €13bn from Apple against its will. Oh the suffering ...

...So what should the Irish state do with the €13bn windfall? There were plenty of suggestions on social media of how to spend it, from the serious (build a high-speed rail network) to gallows humour (immediately buy 16m iPhones and apologise to Apple). Decades of fantasy economics and paper growth have produced a pessimist malaise, where even when faced with a massive sum of money, people don’t really believe it can or will be used in the right way. Nobody really has a concrete plan for how to transition away from this model, so ingrained is it into every facet of Irish governance. Successive governments are free to haughtily present themselves as sage high priests of “seriousness”, a trait much more highly valued in Irish politics than vision, competence or intelligence.

The Apple case, and our corporate tax structure, is one of the only areas in which Irish governments have openly defied EU institutions. Those two prime directives, of loyalty to the EU and loyalty to US corporations, are finally coming into open conflict. Perhaps while everyone is distracted we could conceivably build a house. Maybe even two.

Luckily Mein Gott is on hand to solve it all, though we must await further instructions from the Oracle ...

Stay tuned, the pond will do its best to report on Mein Gott's next column, which contains vital, urgent insights, but relax, they needn't be embraced immediately, they're merely transformational and so require careful study ... perhaps a committee to assemble a report for delivery in a decade?

And so finally and with deep reluctance to the bromancer. The pond refused to dignify the bromancer with screen caps, stills, etc. The header and hook will explain why ...

Harris’s lies fuel toxic mix of hate and chaos in US election

Democrats routinely tell the most appalling, extremist lies about Trump. Trump is a brash, crude, often offensive and even chaotic politician. But he’s not the author of American fascism

Yes, it's more Trumpian apologetics from a master of the sane-explaining arts.

Meanwhile, in another country, where a toxic mix of hate and chaos fuelled by depraved lies has gone down ...

Reading the sane-washing apologetics of the both siderist bromancer fuelled anxiety in the pond that someone might read him and decide to reach for their Glock, or more likely in America, their AR-15, because who doesn't need a military assault weapon handy?

So the bro's offering has been reduced to small print ...

Two lone gunmen, and the Iranian government, have all made efforts to assassinate Donald Trump in the past couple of months. That’s surely the single most astonishing fact of this very strange election campaign.

It is not to defend the general Trump approach to politics to say this level of deadly hostility to Trump is evil, somewhat insane and almost certainly not unrelated to the wild lies told about Trump by his Democrat opponents, including Kamala Harris.

There is of course no simple cause and effect. A politician in a democracy who mounts even extremely robust criticism of an opponent is not morally responsible for the actions of an extremist who attempts violence. The person morally responsible for violence is the person who carries out violence.

But Democrats, including Harris, routinely tell the most appalling, extremist lies about Trump. This is doubly weird because there’s more than ample in Trump’s actual words and actions that thoroughly deserve criticism. Mostly, Trump is a brash, crude, often offensive and even chaotic politician. He’s not the author of American fascism, the new Hitler, the leader of anti-democratic storm troopers. The dishonest extremism of much of the criticism of Trump contributes at least as much, perhaps more, to the toxic nature of American political and cultural debate as does Trump himself.

With just seven weeks out from US presidential election day, the Secret Service has come under scrutiny following a second assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump in just over two months. Trump was playing golf in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday local time when a gunman was spotted by Secret Service as little as 300m away from the former president. Sky News host Chris Kenny questioned why Trump hasn’t yet received maximum security from the Secret Service following a previous assassination attempt on him. “This staggers me. He's a former president. He's running as a candidate again. They shot his ear off just two months ago, shouldn't they be giving him the maximum security possible,” Mr Kenny said.

Trump’s most serious transgression, his behaviour during the January 6 riots, is partly mitigated by the fact he told his supporters to demonstrate “peacefully”. Trump’s behaviour was nonetheless grossly offensive; it doesn’t make him Hitler.

Harris’s personal attacks on Trump contain fantastic and extreme lies. Because Trump himself often says such hateful and untrue things about other people, unless you’re a Trump partisan, which I certainly am not, you’re not much inclined to defend him on personal issues...

Oh come on bro, week after week, you waste endless words defending the latest doings of your orange Jesus. You closet Trumpers are the worst, why not just do a Dame Slap and proudly don a MAGA cap and slip out into Surry Hills to celebrate ...

As for the rest ...

Yes, the only reason the pond went with the bro is that it needed space and a vague connection to the current local 'toons ...

...But Democrats claim to be operating on a higher moral plane than Trump. Therefore they should make some effort to link their criticisms to reality and in particular not to make demagogic and extreme accusations about Trump that they know are untrue.

Consider just a couple of examples. In the debate, Harris claimed that Trump had said that if the presidential election went against him, there would be a “bloodbath”. Any normal person hearing this would assume Harris was telling the truth and that Trump had threatened bloodshed and killings if he lost the election. In fact Trump said there would be a bloodbath in the auto industry if the Democratic candidate were elected president, partly because of electric vehicle mandates.

So Harris is not only telling a barefaced lie about Trump, she is telling the kind of lie that elevates Trump from the ranks of a bombastic and complicated politician to a kind of Adolf Hitler-like threat to American democracy itself.

Indeed, the Democratic National Convention heard that Trump was the greatest threat to US democracy in its history.

Harris also claimed in the debate that Trump had described neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville as “very fine people”. In fact, Trump explicitly condemned the neo-Nazis but said that on both sides of the demonstrations – related to controversy over statues of Civil War era leaders in the south – there were very fine people.

Again, in this claim Harris has dishonestly alleged that Trump supports neo-Nazis. Trump does many dishonourable things that rightly deserve criticism. He has not, however, as Harris claims, supported neo-Nazis, or called for mass killings if he should lose the election. So these wild and untrue allegations about Trump contribute to a fever pitch of hostility, anger and public derangement.

This kind of response characterised the Democrats all through the Trump presidency. Remember the Russia collusion hoax, which held that the Trump campaign had illegally colluded with Russia, and that Moscow played a role in Trump winning the 2016 election. Our own ABC devoted vast taxpayer-funded resources to propagating this utterly mythical hoax. And it never subsequently properly acknowledged that its journalism in that case was mistaken....

It's funny really. There was the pond watching Margarita Simonyan of RT - the Goebbels of our time - boasting of the stunning successes RT has had interfering in elections ... and there's the bro, once again playing, with inordinate skill, one of Putin's useful idiots...

Here, the pond is only in it for the 'toons ...

What else to say about the bro? Well a good starting point would be that you can't get any understanding of deranged people from a deranged loon, so don't expect any sense in the final gobbet, just the usual both siderism followed by the usual celebration of the orange Jesus...

...Sadly, these days there are deranged people on the left, deranged people on the right, and people with what you might describe as free-floating derangement waiting to fix on one cause or another. If you constantly present them with false facts, which purport to show not that Trump is a grubby and unreliable politician, but that he is an American Hitler in waiting, this can easily fertilise into the idea that it would be better if he were just taken out altogether.

By the way, it’s astonishing how little fuss has been made of the plot by the Iranian government to kill Trump. That the Iranians apparently want Trump gone is perhaps Trump’s best character reference.

Try this thought experiment. Just imagine that a Russian government plot to assassinate Harris had been discovered. This involved US intelligence about the plot and the arrest of an agent of a foreign country said to be working for the Russians. (Obviously, nothing like this has happened, but it’s a hypothetical equivalent to Iranian efforts against Trump). Imagine then that two serious assassination attempts had been made against Harris. This is a hideous thing to imagine in any way, but it’s useful to elucidate the underlying politics.

If all that had happened, the American cultural, media and political establishment would be in full nuclear core meltdown over the arrival of fascism in America. Furious photos of Trump as the author of American despair would figure on the front page of every liberal newspaper. Hand-wringing essays of national despair would proliferate. Probably some court somewhere would find a pretext to indict Trump yet again.

The point of all this is that if Democrats want to be regarded as morally superior to Trump they should start behaving that way. Their calls for national unity are plainly hypocritical and hollow when they lie about their opponent in such extremist ways.

Trump’s erratic, changeable and unreliable rhetoric make it difficult to judge how he would govern. But there is the first Trump term. It’s perfectly legitimate for voters, and indeed allies, to look to actual experience. Economically and in foreign policy, there’s a strong case that Trump’s term was better than Joe Biden’s has been.

The media is failing US politics as well. The US budget deficit this year will be $US2 trillion. Interest payments are already bigger than the defence budget. Yet none of the debate moderators thought this subject worth raising.

In many ways Trump is unattractive, but his courage in the face of all the threats against him is highly laudable. So is his desire to keep mixing with the public, keep doing big rallies. The Biden administration should not force Trump indoors for his own safety, which would diminish US democracy. It should instead give him the same level of Secret Service protection as the President himself enjoys. For all his failings, Trump’s personal courage is a significant asset for US democracy.

If the mango Mussolini is a significant asset for US democracy, then the long absent lord help that democracy, and while at it, help hapless Springfield, but then the pond only went there with the supine bro as spacing for the 'toons ...

As usual, it's in the detail, what with the dogs and the cats ...

... and whatever you might expect, don't expect the bromancer to scribble about America and its gun problem. 

Why he's a card-carrying member of the GOP, in spirit if not in reality, and there's only one solution to that matter - take no notice of the abundance of assault weapons, offer thoughts and prayers, and blame the other side. The bromancer has few skills, but he knows how to do that in spades ...