From Rowan Dean to the war on Christmas to the Ministry of Love to crowd size freak-out to genocide ...

 

The pond took its first look at the lizard Oz and was totally unnerved.

Petulant Peta, Jack the Insider and Killer Creighton reporting from the USA? It was more than the pond could take, the pond simply couldn't do it. 

Thursdays were always bleak, but this day seemed even bleaker, so the pond put the tepid pile of garbage to one side.

But what to do to keep the comments section open without changing the settings?

Luckily the pond was pleased, as proud as dinkum punch really, to see Sky News (Au, not the divested Pom mob) score an honourable mention in (the remarkably cheerful) Sam Stein's piece for The Bulwark, Breaking: Sources Say the Story You’re Reading Isn’t Real.

The pond's own acquaintance with Sky News (Au) is extremely limited. 

The pond doesn't mind garbage but paying for it is a bridge too far. After all, if you still have the likes of Rowan Dean on your books, then in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed climate science denialist moron is going to be the king.

Back to Stein and that dishonourable mention, infinitely pleasing, and a loon called Bad Hombre who specialises in false reporting, including a recent yarn about the Harris-Walz campaign paying for entertainers to turn up to her rallies.

...The post was fiction. The account that “broke” the story was “Bad Hombre,” one of the cycle’s more nefarious posters on X. With a following of 115,000, Bad Hombre has gained influence and visibility on the right for being a prolific source of tweets that use journalistic language and framing to create the impression of real reporting even though the posts amount to nothing more than MAGA fanfic. It’s literally fake news.
Much of Bad Hombre’s content is based on stories and bits of information from other publications. But occasionally, a post will give the impression that Bad Hombre has insider access to people in Harris’s close orbit (or in the Washington Post newsroom) and is just gleefully spilling the tea. 
Days before his Lizzo post, the account—the bio for which reads “Political commentary. Catholic. Populist.”—issued the following post: 
Major drama within the Kamala Harris campaign this morning. A source reveals that Harris screamed at and angrily berated her campaign manager Julie Chavez for over 30 minutes on the phone this morning. . . . Chavez was in tears during the phone call as Kamala shred her to pieces, called her an idiot, inept, horrible at your f-ing job, and told her that her stupid advice is going to be the reason she loses.
Actual Harris campaign sources, not surprisingly, were totally perplexed. 
It’s impossible to know the extent of Bad Hombre’s reach. But according to the barebones metrics X makes publicly visible on posts, the made-up Chavez story alone got seven million views. 
Occasionally, Bad Hombre will post a bit of “news” based on actual public information. But these morsels of reported fact are presented in a way that fundamentally distorts the story. On October 22, Gwen Walz canceled a reproductive rights talk in Maine without offering an explanation. Bad Hombre picked up on the news, posting that the vice presidential nominee’s wife had canceled the event “angrily” because “Kamala spoke to Tim Walz to tell him his wife’s overbearing attitude was hurting her with male voters.” That post got 1.8 million views. 
One of his more infamous posts—falsely accusing a Harris-supporting Republican couple in Pennsylvania of being paid actors and left-wing film producers—prompted Sky News Australia to do an entire segment on it as if it were true. (“This was great investigative journalism by the journalist that went and found that out,” one Sky News contributor says.) The couple said their life was turned into chaos, although they’ve since embraced their role as Harris surrogates.

Yeay, minor bush league Sky News finally made it to the Faux Noise big time.

At this point Stein posted a link to X featuring said Sky News (Au) distribution of lies, which should have come with an "unsafe, about to enter Uncle Leon cesspool" warning, but where you can still see the clip (unlike the screen cap below).

If you liked you could go straight to Dinesh recycling Sky News (Au) recycling garbage. This also contained the link, which is just as well because the pond understands that Sky News (Au) took the original down:

Ye ancient world of cat and dog eaters, preferably with ketchup and pepper, how lucky to live in a world where Dinesh D'Souza pays attention to your work and means something other than barking mad insanity howling at many moons.

Of course Sky News (AU) is just a wannabe aspirational drop kick bunch of losers who'd like to imagine themselves as Faux Noise down under, but credit where credit is due. 

Faux Noise has had decades at refining its knives, as noted by Gretchen Carlson in a tweet:

Ye ancient cats and dogs, served with mustard and mayonnaise, the pond can remember the days that Gretchen made a living on Faux Noise getting outraged about Festivus:

Oh they were the good days, when the war on Xmas was always worth a laugh.

In an interview last week on the American Family Radio program “AFA Today,” Fox News host Gretchen Carlson repeated her strong stance against Festivus, a fake holiday featured on “Seinfeld,” by arguing that the “sacrilegious” holiday “denigrates Christianity.”
Carlson told host Kevin McCullough that a Festivus pole display in the Washington state capitol next to a Christmas tree was “outrageous,” adding: “I don’t want to have to drive around, eventually, years gone by with my kids looking at all the Nativity scenes during Christmas time and say, ‘Oh look kids, there’s the baby Jesus, way behind the Festivus pole, you can barely see him.’”
Carlson previously explained that she does not want to see a Festivus pole because “I’m all for free speech and free rights, just not on December 25th.”That was it for the Stein/Sky News (Au) connection, but while at The Bulwark, the pond did enjoy an Orwellian reference by William Kristol (ye ancient cats and hounds, the pond can remember the days when Kristol presented as a fatuous fop).

Once the war on Xmas is recalled, Megyn Kelly immediately springs to mind, as stupid now as she was back in the day. 

There was Jon Stewart, still turning up on a Monday for The Daily Show, way back in 2015:

There must be more juice in the war on Xmas, and after tonight, it'll be less than two months to go. Time for the outrage machine to get cranking.

That was it for the Stein/Sky News (AU) connection, but while at The Bulwark, the pond did enjoy an Orwellian reference by William Kristol.

Ye ancient cats grilled medium rare and hounds served in their juices, the pond can remember the days when Kristol presented as a fatuous fop:

Cf. Why is Bill Kristol always wrong?

Say what you will but the mango Mussolini has managed to bring together a weird assortment of extremely strange bedfellows, including the pond, Bill Kristol and Arnold Schwarzenegger, immortalised by Clive James as a brown condom full of walnuts ...

But back to that Kristol quote:

...Yesterday morning, Donald Trump spoke at Mar-a-Lago. He had nothing much to say, but apparently wanted to get in the news cycle before Kamala Harris spoke at the Ellipse last night. In any case, Trump made no apologies for Sunday’s remarkable hatefest in Madison Square Garden.
Quite the contrary, he offered this about that occasion:
The love in that room, it was breathtaking. There’s never been an event that beautiful. It was a love fest. It was love for our country.
You might not have thought that what you saw Sunday at the Garden was beautiful. In fact it might have looked ugly. You might not have thought that what you saw was love. It might have looked more like hate.
But Trump says it was love. Who are we to argue? To do so might make us enemies from within. And Trump and his gang will wreak vengeance and exact retribution, if they win, on those who are enemies from within. But not to worry. They’ll wreak vengeance and exact retribution under the banner of love.
There’s a precedent for this. The interior ministry in George Orwell’s Oceania, the building with no windows but with its interior lights always on, the heart of state power and repression, the place where submission to Big Brother is ultimately enforced. That is the Ministry of Love.

The pond will have to remember that when dealing with the odes to hate that emanate from the lizard Oz. The reptiles are merely doing the work of the Ministry of Love. To quote a few lines:

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatusof government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

...The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.

...One did not know what happened inside the Ministry of Love, but it waspossible to guess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your  nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude  and persistent questioning. Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

...He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in the Ministry of Love, but there was no way of making certain. He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain. Concealed lamps flooded it with cold light, and there was a low, steady humming sound which he supposed had something to do with the air supply. A bench, or shelf, just wide enough to sit on ran round the wall, broken only by the door and, at the end opposite the door, a lavatory pan with no wooden seat. There were four telescreens, one in each wall.

Speaking of the MM and his ministering to Love, predictably he totally lost it over comparative crowd sizes. 

Who knows how he'd feel, what he'd XXXX, how he'd react, if someone asked him to compare his cock's size to that of Arnold Palmer's:

Lordy, lordy, if he does squeak a win, the USA can look forward to at least four years of psychosis on parade. Who knows what it will look like four years hence, if senility and dementia maintain their relentless march.

Finally, to strike a sombre note, the pond would like to put a face on the ethnic cleansing and genocide that's currently being perpetrated in Gaza.

Come on down Yulia Malinovsky, featured at CNN: Israeli MP behind bill to expel key UN agency accuses US of interfering with process.

She was one of many, but she was a barking mad fundamentalist leader of the pack.

Is there a meta-irony to be found? Well yes, because Malinovsky was born in Ukraine, where Vlad the Sociopath is busy waging his own form of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

So it goes ... and so the pond turns to the 'toons for a little relief and a celebration of a day that has spread through Newtown like cockroaches, rats, or a virus.

And here's one for Uncle Leon, bizarre billionaire, Elon Musk Wants Big Families. He Bought a Secret Compound for His. (sorry, NY Times paywall):