A Sunday place holder featuring parrots ... and other bird-like wonders ...

 

That image is a sign that the pond has wound down for the weekend, gone AWOL and given up herpetology studies while lurking deep in the Victorian wilderness ...

Sweet loons, what a pity the pond isn't on Instagram ...

However, the pond can still keep doing its ritual ceremonial tribute to the country on which the pond is scribbling, with these parrots having a great time in a bird bath high above the park across from Spring street ...

The look is very Melbourne ...

There's no point in pretending that the pond is up to speed this Sunday ... 

Uncle Leon's current deeds, the ones that are driving his brand into the toilet, are but an idle dream ... where the pond had landed, you won't see chargers or EVs, or that many Swasticars ...

The pond would however like to record one triumph ... the pond has persuaded its partner to give up its WaPo subscription.

The pond's partner had been wavering for some time but last week broke the will, what with democracy dying in a billionaire's self-interest.

The pond had sent along a link to a Parker Molloy story Will Jeff Bezos Stick with Will Lewis Amid WaPo's Credibility Crisis?, The Washington Post is at risk of losing the public's trust. (Sorry, you need to be signed up for her emails or go to her site):

...today's announcement takes things to an entirely new level of billionaire meddling.
"We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others," Bezos wrote in a message to staff that was subsequently shared publicly. He added, "I'm confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion."
Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people on Earth, is using one of America's most storied newspapers as his personal ideological megaphone.
The audacity of claiming that free market ideas are "underserved" in American media is staggering. Has Bezos somehow missed the existence of The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Bloomberg, Fox Business, CNBC, and countless other outlets that have spent decades championing free-market capitalism? The New York Times noted the obvious parallel between Bezos's new direction and the informal tagline of The Wall Street Journal's conservative opinion pages: "Free markets, free people."
Then there's the question of what exactly Bezos means by "personal liberties." Will the Post be publishing forceful defenses of reproductive freedom? Thoughtful op-eds about the importance of transgender rights? Pieces supporting the right to protest inhumane working conditions at Amazon? Somehow I doubt it. When billionaires talk about "personal liberties," they're usually thinking about their personal liberty to avoid taxation and regulation, their personal liberty to not be held accountable for the things they say and do.
Post CEO Will Lewis, in his own message to staff, claimed this shift is "not about siding with any political party" but rather "being crystal clear about what we stand for as a newspaper." That's some impressive spin, but it's transparently false. This is absolutely a political statement—and a rightward shift that has been underway since Lewis took over last year.
What's particularly galling is Bezos's justification for narrowing the opinion section's focus. "There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader's doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views," he wrote. "Today, the internet does that job."
This sounds eerily similar to what New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said in 2017 when eliminating the role of public editor: "Today, our followers on social media and our readers across the Internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be."
In both cases, powerful media owners are essentially saying, "We don't need to hold ourselves accountable or present diverse viewpoints within our pages because... the internet exists!" It's a convenient abdication of responsibility that uses technological change as cover for eliminating oversight and narrowing perspective.
The message could not be clearer: editorial independence is dead at the Washington Post. Opinion editor David Shipley, recognizing this fact, has already resigned rather than oversee this ideological narrowing. According to Bezos's own note, he told Shipley that "if the answer wasn't 'hell yes,' then it had to be 'no.'" That's not how you treat respected journalists.
This is the fundamental problem with billionaire-owned media. Bezos can talk all he wants about the Post's journalistic independence, but when push comes to shove, he's demonstrated repeatedly that it's his paper and he'll do what he wants with it. First by blocking the Harris endorsement, and now by explicitly dictating the paper's editorial stance.
Democracy dies in darkness? No, it dies when billionaires decide they want their media
properties to serve their personal ideological agendas rather than the public interest.
What we're witnessing is the complete abandonment of the principle articulated in 1935 by Eugene Meyer, the Post's publisher from 1933 to 1946, that "the newspaper's duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners." These principles have been discarded by the paper’s current owner.
The sad irony is that the Post's new editorial direction comes just as we're entering Trump's second term — exactly when we need independent journalism most. In 2017, the Post adopted "Democracy Dies in Darkness" as its slogan to signal its commitment to holding Trump accountable. Now, as he returns to power, Bezos is narrowing the paper's vision to focus on the economic ideology that primarily benefits people like... Jeff Bezos.
This matters far beyond one newspaper. It's a reminder of what happens when vital democratic institutions fall into the hands of the ultra-wealthy. They inevitably bend those institutions toward their interests and ideologies, no matter how much they initially promise editorial independence.
So much for democracy. So much for darkness. So much for journalism.

So much, it turns out, for subscriptions. 

The pond had backed it up with a link to The Bulwark's Jonathan V. Last, promoting his own rag as an alternative, in The Washington Post and Autocracy's Asymmetric Advantage.

Done and dusted.

It was always a fit of enthusiasm, optimism, and delusional hope over harsher realities. 

So many better ways to waste money, while shedding a tear for the poor buggers forced into the wilderness already, or the poor buggers chained to the wheel and fearing what might follow if they chanced their arm and left the tent ...

The pond always likes to drop in on Rex Huppke ...

He's always fun, as in A measles outbreak rages in Texas while RFK Jr. hamstrings vaccines ...

He's not subtle ...

Kennedy is welcome to treat viral outbreaks by sticking a pickle in his ear or whatever he does, but for the rest of us, it would be nice if our health czar wasn’t a raging lunatic.

But he always looks on the bright side of the new regime ... interalia ...

Rather than sweat a measles outbreak, RFK Jr. is busy hampering vaccines
You need to wear a tinfoil hat to believe any of that bunk. And tinfoil hats might soon be our only defense against infectious diseases, as Kennedy — when he’s not busy saying “Meh” to the Texas measles outbreak — has been using his time and power to cancel vital federal vaccine advisory committee meetings aimed at developing next season’s flu vaccine.
One was scheduled for this week and the other for next month.
A protester demonstrates as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., U.S. President Donald Trump's nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, testifies during his Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Jan. 29, 2025, in Washington, DC. In addition to meeting with the Senate Finance Committee, Kennedy will meet with the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee tomorrow.
The Washington Post reported that committee members were notified via email and no reason was provided: “The email warned members against forwarding the email. It suggested members decline to answer questions from media.”
The Post also noted: “Kennedy has pledged ‘radical transparency’ into the scientific process. But the cancellation of the meeting eliminates an opportunity for the public to hear from federal agencies and the companies about the merits of proposed flu vaccine formulas, decreasing visibility into the process at a time when the safety of vaccines has been attacked as not having enough data.”
Don't worry, Americans, your health is in the hands of a complete quack
Also this week, Kennedy paused production of a COVID-19 vaccine pill. He had previously called the COVID vaccine, which has saved untold lives globally, “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”
Kennedy is welcome to treat viral outbreaks by sticking a pickle in his ear or whatever he does, but for the rest of us, it would be nice if our health czar wasn’t a raging lunatic. 
Between the Texas measles outbreak and bird flu and the measles cases that just popped up in Kentucky and New Jersey, Americans have some legitimate health stuff to worry about. Too bad our health is in the hands of a guy I wouldn’t trust to apply a Band-Aid properly.

Here, have a health care cartoon or two ...

And there are plenty of other distractions to hand, peddling easy to swallow medicine.

The pond was, for example, vastly entertained and for free, by Marilou Johanek's Ohio’s J.D. Vance rebuked by the Pope, denounced by NATO allies, ridiculed for bizarre rant (see the archive also)

It was a home town offering for the Ohio Capital Journal and it was a ripper, with Johanek holding nothing back ...

J.D. Vance has really done Ohio proud these last few weeks, hasn’t he? The lapdog vice-president, with evidently a lot of time on his hands, has managed to be firmly rebuked by Pope Francis, denounced by outraged NATO allies and widely ridiculed for his bizarre ‘masculinity’ rant at a weekend MAGAfest just a month into his tenure. Way to create a buzz/acute embarrassment back home!
What is wrong with J.D.? Have the wheels come all the way off? Why does the 40-year-old awkwardly playing VP keep stepping in it stateside and abroad? Is the “childless cat ladies” charmer acting out unresolved rage from a bad place? Working through some deep-seated anger? Seriously, Vance manifests juvenile cringe, not sober sway, as he settles into his nondescript role as an appendage in the Trump-Musk administration. Even Trump won’t name him as a slam dunk heir apparent. Not good.
For a supposed Ivy League intellectual, Vance sure spouts stupidity on the regular: Honestly, you’ve got to be really off base on Catholic theology for the Vatican to correct your twisted take on love with descending priorities as justification for mass deportations. In Vance’s godawful reading of the Christian order of love concept; (to mesh with his political ideology) family, community, and country come first and everyone outside that concentric circle later or not so much. Which puts migrant families outermost from Vance’s construct on brotherly love for me but not thee from outside our borders. 
Francis rejected the VP’s sophomoric theoretical defense of cruel immigration crackdowns as flatly wrong. He urged the misguided millennial to meditate on the parable of the Good Samaritan, “on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” But “American citizens first” nativist Vance has no interest in building a “fraternity open to all,” just an all-white patriarchy focused on baby-making. To that point, he started a holy war (barely a week after inauguration) against charitable organizations across the country that feed, clothe and house refugees and immigrants (i.e., Catholic Charities and Catholic relief groups) by implying they perform their labor of love for federal money — not humanitarian concerns. 
“Devout Catholic” convert Vance went all glib and combative on compassion and care for the “least of these” because they included Brown and Black mothers and fathers and children fleeing horrendous homelands for hope. But upholding the dignity of every human being (native-born or not) as a core tenet of Christianity clashes with the core MAGA mission to degrade, shackle and ship terrified families back to the foreign hellscapes they fled. Vance threw nasty and mean into the mix to look tough on dehumanized “illegals” and scorn mercy. He is a dutiful, if not decent, Trump toady. 
But the swift rebuttals to Vance’s hollow broadsides from the Church and the pope himself only reinforced the veep’s smallness as a smug sycophant slinging ugly. Whatever reputation Vance may have enjoyed in the past as a thoughtful individual with at least a modicum of integrity is long gone. With a brief stint as a venture capitalist, an even briefer stint as Ohio senator and now VP, Vance is heady with power and hubris over his meteoric rise from bending the knee to a man he once derided as “America’s Hitler.” Then Vance went to the Munich Security Conference recently, not to collaborate with NATO allies on mutual security interests and Ukraine, but to turn on them. 
Vance, the shameless election denier in service to an authoritarian regime lawlessly dismantling a democratic republic, had the towering audacity and historical blindness to lecture his European audience on democracy, downplay threats from Russia and China, and publicly court a far-right German party (AfD) that many Germans consider the heirs of Nazi ideas and that sanitizes the Holocaust. His blistering dress-down of European leaders, rightly dismayed over rising extremism and history repeating itself, coupled with his pronounced affection for far-right politicians a week before a crucial German election (U.S. election interference?) was obscene.
The last thing the world needs now is a U.S. vice-president trashing eighty years of foreign policy with America’s closest and most enduring friends. But that’s what a dangerously reckless Vance did on the world stage to compete with Elon Musk and boost his nascent brand as an uber-nihilist bent on destroying plurality for purity and seeding a new world order. It’s wing-nuttery on a disturbingly dark scale. But Vance, for all his performative bravado — whether it’s lashing out at European allies for not welcoming extremism, or engaging in petty posting on X, or weirdly obsessing about “the essence of masculinity” and a “broken culture” that tells you “You’re a bad person because you’re a man” — is a phony.
He morphed from Never-Trumper to groveling suck-up for unimagined power, but he can’t quite pull it off as a poser with a makeover beard spewing stupid and offensive and strange. Vance has been doing us proud by attacking friends, embracing enemies, insulting humanitarians, drawing papal ire, and pontificating laughably on what makes a man a man. 
Seriously, what is wrong with J.D.?  

Credit where credit is due ...

Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist

What a relief to have JD celebrated. 

He's been a pale figure in the shade of giants of narcissistic attention-seeking ...

The pond supposes that it should insert one reptile from the lizard Oz to keep up a pretence of doing herpetological studies while on a break.

This outing, an epic in snidery. came from the lizard Oz's resident Zionist, a certain Yoni Bashan.

It was truly appalling and loathsome, and littered with defensiveness ......

Is pointing out Rae Cooper’s Labor links sexism – or scrutiny? Moral outrage crash-landed into our inboxes here at The Australian on Thursday in the form of a searing response to a column item we ran earlier this week.

It took a while to get to the punchline in what was a typical piece of lizard Oz trolling, gloating, vindictive and petulant ...

Moral outrage crash-landed into our inboxes here at The Australian on Thursday over a column item we ran earlier this week, a devilish morsel we thought was pretty funny and incisive. Turns out it was severely sexist – or so went the charge in a searing Letter to the Editor we received.
“The outdated and sexist column item, ‘Labor minister’s partner snags funding victory,’ undermines the significant contributions of Professor Rae Cooper AO, FASSA, to workplace gender equality and employment relations policy.”
Penned by University of Sydney Professor Leisa Sargent and former Mirvac CEO Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz, the letter fumed at our analysis of a $5m grant that was announced on Tuesday and bestowed upon Cooper and her workplace gender equality centre, housed at the University of Sydney.
Snark is the name of the game around here, so of course we pointed to the bleeding obvious at the time of the announcement – that Cooper is a pro-union, pro-Labor academic with impeccable ties across government reaching right into the office of Assistant Minister for Trade Tim Ayres. He’s her husband.
“While it is true that she is the partner of a Labor assistant minister – a fact transparently stated in the grant submission – the implication of favouritism unfairly diminishes the achievements of a highly distinguished academic and researcher,” wrote Sargent and Lloyd-Hurwitz. 
Cooper is undoubtedly a Labor favourite. Here’s a tiny example: her pro-government opinions are quick to be found inside an “independent” review released last month examining the Albanese government’s contentious IR reforms. Cooper is cited eight times across the document and three of her publications are listed in the bibliography. She’s an eminent scholar so perhaps that’s to be expected. But was it necessary for the report’s authors to call her “Professor Rae” on page 106?
That kind of familiarity could be a typo, or maybe it’s a result of Cooper co-writing at least two books with one of the review’s authors, Emeritus Professor Mark Bray. So yes, all very independent.
But back to the letter …
Sargent is the Dean of USyd’s Business School. Lloyd-Hurwitz chairs the advisory board for the Australian Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusion at Work, which Cooper runs. The centre’s grand opening was held at USyd in August and was attended by three federal Labor ministers, among them Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, who praised Cooper as a shaper of government policy and then announced $5m in funding for the centre this week.
We thought this was all sounding a bit cosy, and so did our readers. But in the minds of Sargent and Lloyd-Hurwitz, any magnification of these curiosities isn’t at all indicative of a robust and free press doing its job scrutinising taxpayer expenditure – it’s just more sexist garbage from a couple of pub-room boars.

“As an internationally respected scholar, Professor Cooper has built a reputation as a trusted adviser to governments of all political persuasions at both state and federal levels, as well as to industry and business,” Sargent and Lloyd-Hurwitz wrote.
Well, yes, that’s one way of putting it. 
Cooper is clearly an academic of exceptional accomplishment – a point we made in the original item. But it’s facile to pretend she hasn’t been a beneficiary of substantial Labor government patronage at the state and federal level, and not least of all from Anthony Albanese.
Last year, the Albanese government appointed Cooper to the ministerial advisory board serving Jobs and Skills Australia. She was separately appointed to a Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce just months after Labor was elected in 2022.
Cooper and the PM actually go way back. Their friendly bants are still recoverable from deep behind the seat cushions of the ancient ­internet.
“I suspect @ayrestim will be pleased – @Raecooper1 not as much,” Albo tweeted in 2015 when he was shadow transport minister. At the time he was quoting a deleted post, so we don’t know to what he was referring, but he added a little beer jug emoji to the message.
“Yes,” Cooper replied. “I am way too ladylike to drink beer.” What? Beer too masculine now? And here we were, sexist pigs, thinking beer was the most gender-equal beverage of them all.
Trawl back further and you’ll find the Gillard government appointed Cooper chair of Hearing Australia in 2011. The Rudd government named her to its productivity agenda panel for the 2020 Summit (appalling boondoggle that turned out to be). Kristina Keneally’s Labor government in NSW made Cooper deputy chair of an advisory council on women, then appointed her to the board of the NSW TAFE Commission. And Bob Carr selected Cooper in 2005 for the board of the Rural Assistance Authority.
We wouldn’t be so foolish to suggest Cooper’s husband had a bearing on the $5m grant decision. Of course he didn’t. She’s clearly more powerful and connected. Still, Sargent and Lloyd-Hurwitz didn’t waste an opportunity to staggeringly miss the point.
“Professor Cooper’s leadership and decades of collaboration with colleagues across institutions secured this grant – not her marital status. Her work has shaped public policy and industry practice in many meaningful ways.
“To imply otherwise is unfair, sexist, and dismissive of her substantial achievements.”

And likewise to sweep aside Cooper’s blaring affiliations to the Labor Party and the union movement is droolingly stupid, as is calling these observations sexist, which is actually worse than stupid; it’s boring – as boring as Mehreen Faruqi looking for racism in a bowl of white rice. And it’s humourless, which is a capital offence to us. Be anything, but don’t be humourless.

And that's the punchline. 

That's what passes for humour in the lizard Oz ...

...it’s boring – as boring as Mehreen Faruqi looking for racism in a bowl of white rice

That's worse than stupid ... it's humourless and deeply pathetic, not to mention a casually racist slur dressed up as a wannabe joke ... 

Who is this Yoni? Are we dealing with ancient Hindu symbols of the yoni and the lingam kind?

Nope ...

However you cut it, he has a mean and nasty look, as Shakspere put it, not so much brain as ear-wax, a reptile boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle on the pond's corrupted blood ...

He's also deep in the grip of projection ...

But that’s what you get from Lloyd-Hurwitz, president of Chief Executive Women, the greatest self-love club in the history of self-love clubs. But what did Maslow say? When your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. 

All of that defensive rant was scribbled with a goodly deal of self-love, for the lizard Oz, home of the hive mind, and self-love clubs. And when Yoshi gets going, all he can do is mangle the usual crap about hammers and nails ...

No wonder he never features in the pond, except as a holiday placeholder ...

And so in keeping with the holiday mood, a few cartoons just to wash the smell of Yoni away ...

 And there's also this one, which nothing much to do with any of the above, but tickled the pond's atheist heart ...