In which the pond offers a truly weird Quad rant as a late Friday arvo surprise ...

 

It's not as if the pond lacks Murdochian things to scribble about ...Elon Musk confidant James Murdoch becomes the latest Tesla insider to sell, cashing in $13 million amid the historic single-day plunge.

Or cartoons to match ...

With human intelligence on the ketamine-fuelled Nazi-salute slide, what about AI?

AI search engines give incorrect answers at an alarming 60% rate, study says, CJR study shows AI search services misinform users and ignore publisher exclusion requests.

Oh dear, talk about a Nazi surprise ...

All the same, the pond felt a twinge of regret about this morning's choices.

The pond is acutely aware that some of its correspondents actually dip into Quad ranters to get a bracing rant.

Was it wrong to deprive them in the morning of a prime ranting treat?

The pond decided a late arvo bonus was in order and if Quad rant devotees find it, so be it, the pond has responded to the market place like any good capitalist.

The heading should give stray readers a hint of the hysteria, the apocalyptic Armageddon that has been a fundamentalist tendency for millennia, and that surfaces throughout the piece like a worm in the rose...

The West is sleep walking towards a demographic crisis, The biggest story of our time is that the entirety of the Western world is sliding off the cliff – and most citizens of the West are not even aware of it, and have no desire to be made aware of it.

And what provoked the hysteria? 

Apparently, if you believe the accompanying reptile snap selection, a very small portion of people with gender dysphoria, and supporters willing to allow them a place in the sun, and a role to play in the world ...Pro-Trans Rights rally in Sydney with a march from Town Hall and through the city streets. Picture: David Swift

The pond numbers amongst its trans acquaintances a very successful astronomer, a nicely heeled (in every sense) US lawyer, a CEO of a major company and a top shelf state government bureaucrat.

The trouble of course is that hysterical Quad ranters don't get out much, they just get more and more weird...

Listen to the sounds of a demented hysteric in end of world snowflake overdrive ...

The biggest story of our time is that the entirety of the Western world is sliding off the cliff – and most citizens of the West are not even aware of it, and have no desire to be made aware of it.
In that respect, I envy them. It is comforting to paddle one’s canoe and insist that the ever louder roaring sound from up ahead is the crowd at a Taylor Swift gig and not Niagara Falls. To be sure, permanence is the illusion of every age, but only in our time do we choose consciously not to believe our lyin’ eyes.
Nevertheless, the West is now weak by every measure. First, and most obviously, it is demographically dying. Second, it is economically moribund. Third, it is militarily feckless. Fourth, it is culturally suicidal … A couple of decades back, I would have kept the list going for another half-dozen sobering bullet-points, but let’s just cut to the chase: We’re nuts, and we’re raising our kids to be even nuttier.
That last bit doesn’t always work, of course: on the Continent, young voters are some of the most enthusiastic supporters of Germany’s AfD, France’s National Rally and other “far right”, “Neo-Fascist” parties.

At last a point of agreement, he's definitively nuts, though the pond has some hope for the children (though perhaps not the ones in what was once east Germany, where the conditioning persists).

There's always been a good business in this sort of end of world nuttiness, Ancient Mariners lost at sea, reading from The Book of Revelation (Apocalypse if you will) and hunting for white whales (never grey ones) or albatrosses for neck decoration.

As if to compound the nuttiness, the reptiles flung in an AV distraction, The recent German elections have seen a significant surge in support for the centre-right parties and the Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), a far-right party. Speaking to Sky News host Peta Credlin, Author Ayanna Hirsi Ali shares insights into the possible reasons behind the shift, pointing to immigration as a key issue. “Germans have been voting for the closing of their borders. They don't want any more immigrants. And I think what they want really is to assimilate the immigrants who are already there,” she told Sky News host Peta Credlin. “So what you see is a disconnect between the German elite on the one hand and the German citizens who are voting for the closing of borders and less immigration. And that's what's making the AfD party bigger and bigger through every election.”

Weird. That disconnect. Deeply weird. You know, getting into bed with petulant Peta and pretending you're at one, best Sky Noise buddies.

The result's a migrant explaining how she's the problem, without any sign of understanding that she's saying she's the problem, while really thinking she's the problem, it's the others that are the problem. Which is how you get to vote for your own deportation by King Donald. 

There's something richly, uniquely weird about that kind of self-loathing, that self-hatred, though plain old loathing and hatred can be just as weird... pathological even...

But in America and the anglophone satellites that insist on mimicking its worst pathologies the youth vote marches on to ever wokier* pastures.

*Sorry, the pond must interrupt at this point. The pond has contractual obligations when "woke" and its variants are mentioned...

Back to the weirdness, fuckheaded if you will, with the great replacement theory rampant ...

In the rest of the world – and the rest of the world is where one now goes for demographic energy, industrial production and geopolitical clarity – no one wants what we’re selling. They don’t want it because it leads to societal death – literally.
Sometime in the course of the second half of the 21st century (demographers dispute whether it will be 2055 or can be postponed to, say, 2080), ethnic Swedes will become a minority in Sweden. How did that happen? All those millions of colonial subjects from the vast Swedish empire on every continent making their way to the metropole?
Not so long ago, we would have taken as read that the first requirement of any such thing as Sweden is that it be brimming with Swedes. Now we are all America – “proposition nations”: anyone can be Swedish as long as he embraces Swedish “values”. “Abba-hu akbar!” as my compatriot, Laura Rosen Cohen, likes to say. In practice, the inverse seems more likely: we will embrace their values. In a telling bit of symbolism, the most famous Swede on the planet, Greta Thunberg, the angry environmentalist turned angrier Hamas groupie, is already wearing a keffiyeh.

Talk about a confusion and a cofounding lumping together of weird ideas. 

No, you don't have to be a fundamentalist Islamic to deplore what's happened in Gaza, no, you don't need to embrace barking mad Islamic fundamentalist values, any more than you need to embrace barking mad Xian fundamentalists or Zionist fundamentalists, and yes, you can be big enough to deal with both climate science and the ethnic cleansing going down in Gaza, and even don a symbol showing a little empathy for those being cleansed ...

Such a bigot, and with bonus climate science denialism... but no, you don't have to live in stark terror at the sighting of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Why do they always show her shouting? Why not a smiley shot?

That's better. 

This grumpy vulgar youff hating loon somehow manages to sound like a native American, an indigenous Australian or perhaps a Greenlander, without realising that's what he's saying ...

It’s odd to become a minority in your own hitherto ethnically homogeneous nation within three generations. And it’s even odder to do so without the subject being raised as part of mainstream public discourse. After all, if you projected the average European or North American on an HG Wells time machine from the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s into the typical Western metropolis of our own age, the first thing he would notice is that almost everyone under, say, 50 appears to be from somewhere else.
Absent conquest, or contagion on a scale way beyond even Imperial College’s Covid modelling, this is a difficult phenomenon to account for. In London, for example, by 2021 the “white British” population was down below 37 per cent – which the Office of National Statistics attributed blandly to “the increasingly multicultural society we live in”. Which is, of course, a good thing.

Really? The whole of Europe and plucky little England has been a melting pot long before the recent pot melting. Only the plucky Scots managed something of a Hadrian's wall; for the rest, the Europeans were all over each other, so that your average DNA looks like a stew.

Then it was back to the trans thingie. Is there a Freudian in the house?

The tedious badinage of political punditry has yet to catch up with quite how valueless our “values” are. In the days before the US election, I was bombarded by a bazillion emails shrieking that Kamala was a commie. We’re way beyond that. Say what you will about Marx and Lenin, Mao and Stalin, but they knew what a woman was – unlike the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, at least one judge on America’s Supreme Court, and a phalanx of Australian public health officials responding in parliament to a question from Senator Alex Antic.

How weird is all it? Well the reptiles inserted an AV explanation ...

The latest conservative commentator to be “cancelled” this week was the legendary Mark Steyn after he left GB News, according to Sky News host Cory Bernardi. “Steyn was effectively driven out because he was asked to indemnify the broadcaster from any legal claims arising from his commentary, particularly that which was questioning the safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccines,” Mr Bernardi said. “I perfectly understand why GB News don't want to spend their precious resources on frivolous group think complaints by hateful lefties and woke* whingers, but this is actually surrendering to the mob. “The way the world is going, we will not have a free media left, just regurgitators of official lines and government propaganda.”

(* The pond considered its contractual obligations fulfilled, but under dire pressure was forced to honour its commitment)

Yes, he's resentful, reactionary, rankled and ranting, and he's one of Corey's mob, so deeply weird even GB News was nervous. 

Fancy that, as if they didn't know vaccines were useless and masks deeply fascist and Ivermectin the only solution.

That reminded the pond of an RFK Jr story in Popular Information, As measles cases soar, RFK Jr. declares war on science

On Tuesday, in an interview on Fox News, Kennedy, who has called getting vaccinated a “personal” decision, stoked fear about the safety of the MMR vaccine. Kennedy stated that there were “adverse events from the vaccine,” claiming that it “cause[s] deaths every year” and “causes all the illnesses that measles itself cause[s].” According to the CDC, however, the MMR vaccine “is much safer than getting measles, mumps, or rubella.” The vaccine has also saved millions of lives. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that immunization efforts “averted more than 60 million deaths between 2000 and 2023.”
In the Fox News interview, Kennedy downplayed the risks of the disease, claiming that “it used to be… everybody got measles. And measles gave you lifetime protection against measles infection.” Kennedy argued there were benefits of getting infected, stating that previously infected women used to provide children with immunity through breast milk. Kennedy has also said that it is “very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person,” suggesting that deaths from the disease are linked to poor health and diet. This is not true. The disease kills between one to three out of every thousand people infected in the United States.
Kennedy has used the measles outbreak to promote alternative remedies that have not been proven effective against the disease. Kennedy announced that the HHS would conduct clinical trials of alternative treatments for measles, including a steroid, an antibiotic, and cod liver oil, due to its high levels of vitamin A. Kennedy said that he had heard that these treatments caused “miraculous and instantaneous recovery.”
According to experts, these remedies are not recommended for treating measles and are not an effective substitute for the vaccine. While health experts do recommend vitamin A for people who already have measles, it is “most useful… in patients who have a specific deficiency," and the “studies mainly draw on evidence from low-income countries where that deficiency is common,” CNN reported. Under “1 percent of the population” in the U.S. has a vitamin A deficiency. Moreover, cod liver oil “makes it difficult to administer precise amounts,” and it can be dangerous to take excess amounts of vitamin A. A doctor in Gaines County, Texas, which has the most cases of measles in the state, told the New York Times that Kennedy promoting these treatments was “100 percent going to make it harder” to minimize the outbreak.

Maybe he's a RFK Jr kinda guy. 

Even weirder was the notion that he was "legendary" on matters of Covid, except perhaps in his own lunchtime.

It kept getting weirder and weirder... so much festering hate, fear and loathing, it was a bit like getting stuck into Mein Kampf for a relaxing read ...

A society can tolerate a few peripheral agreed-upon evasions, but it cannot last for long in a constant around-the-clock blizzard of lies. Hence the paradox of our times: “the West” now gets more west the further east you go. The “leader of the free world” and the British dominions that begin by mocking America’s latest fad and end by taking it to the next level are the furthest gone.
In Western Europe, the likes of Emmanuel Macron can occasionally be roused to fits of butchness, as when France’s dinky metrosexual announced he would not be renaming a single street or removing a single statue because “they are all part of our history” – which puts him well to the right of, oh, Mitch McConnell. But, for anything approaching a serious, sustained understanding of the peoples who built the modern age and what a post-Western world will look like, one has to cross Mitteleuropa to the ex-Soviet satellites beyond.
In the western end of the West, by contrast with the East, there appear to be prominent persons who genuinely subscribe to the Official Lies – which one would not have thought possible for any creature more sentient than an earthworm.
Thus, in Canada, Jewish liberals who enthusiastically welcomed, for decades, mass Muslim immigration now profess bewilderment at the open Jew-hate on the streets of Montreal and Toronto every weekend: they wonder what happened to “my city”, as though this strange sudden antipathy to Jews had just swept in out of the blue like a tsunami, and was not the entirely obvious consequence of public policy.

See how easy it is to trash Jews who dare to be tolerant, perhaps even show a bit of empathy? See how easy it is to rant?

...what sort of pabulum was it that the German Press served up for the consumption

of its readers in pre-War days? Was it not the worst virulent poison imaginable? Was

not pacifism in its worst form inoculated into our people at a time when others were

preparing slowly but surely to pounce upon Germany? Did not this self-same Press of

ours in peace time already instil into the public mind a doubt as to the sovereign rights

of the State itself, thereby already handicapping the State in choosing its means of

defence? Was it not the German Press that under stood how to make all the nonsensical

talk about 'Western democracy' palatable to our people, until an exuberant public was

eventually prepared to entrust its future to the League of Nations? Was not this Press

instrumental in bringing in a state of moral degradation among our people? Were not

morals and public decency made to look ridiculous and classed as out-of-date and

banal, until finally our people also became modernized? By means of persistent attacks,

did not the Press keep on undermining the authority of the State, until one blow

sufficed to bring this institution tottering to the ground? Did not the Press oppose with

all its might every movement to give the State that which belongs to the State, and by

means of constant criticism, injure the reputation of the army, sabotage general

conscription and demand refusal of military credits, etc.--until the success of this

campaign was assured?

The function of the so-called liberal Press was to dig the grave for the German people

and REICH. No mention need be made of the lying Marxist Press. To them the

spreading of falsehood is as much a vital necessity as the mouse is to a cat. Their sole

task is to break the national backbone of the people, thus preparing the nation to

become the slaves of international finance and its masters, the Jews.

And what measures did the State take to counteract this wholesale poisoning of the

public mind? None, absolutely nothing at all. By this policy it was hoped to win the

favour of this pest--by means of flattery, by a recognition of the 'value' of the Press, its

'importance', its 'educative mission' and similar nonsense. The Jews acknowledged all

this with a knowing smile and returned thanks.

The reason for this ignominious failure on the part of the State lay not so much in its

refusal to realize the danger as in the out-and-out cowardly way of meeting the

situation by the adoption of faulty and ineffective measures. No one had the courage to

employ any energetic and radical methods. Everyone temporised in some way or other;

and instead of striking at its heart, the viper was only further irritated. The result was

that not only did everything remain as it was, but the power of this institution which

should have been combated grew greater from year to year.

Tolerance and he are three. 

Speaking of religion - as a card-carrying atheist the pond has dissed on all of them on one time or another - please allow the pond another detour.

There's a reason the pond visits ProPublica regularly. 

Did correspondents see the one by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski, Speaker Mike Johnson Is Living in a D.C. House That Is the Center of a Pastor’s Secretive Influence Campaign

In 2021, Steve Berger, an evangelical pastor who has attacked the separation of church and state as “a delusional lie” and called multinational institutions “demonic,” set off on an ambitious project. His stated goal: minister to members of Congress so that what “they learn is then translated into policy.” His base of operations would be a six-bedroom, $3.7 million townhouse blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
Recently, the pastor scored a remarkable coup for a political influence project that has until now managed to avoid public scrutiny. He got a new roommate.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has been staying at the home since around the beginning of this year, according to interviews and videos obtained by ProPublica.
In sermons and on social media, Berger has mentioned some of the topics he’s discussed with Johnson and other members of Congress. Last year, Berger, a passionate supporter of the Israeli right-wing, said he’d had “a great conversation” with the speaker about Israel.
Recently, Johnson has described his conversations with Trump to the pastor, according to Berger. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Berger said in a sermon that he’d advised “some congressmen” to see the conflict through the lens of Ezekiel 38 and 39, parts of the Bible some see as prophesying a great war before the Second Coming. He did not specify what that meant from a policy perspective.
An energetic 60-year-old with a white goatee and penchant for preaching in sneakers and jeans, Berger has strong views on a wide range of issues, including economic policy and public health. He is vehemently opposed to the World Health Organization, which Trump moved to withdraw the U.S. from last month, and recently predicted that COVID-19 vaccines will result in “young people dropping dead all over the place.” He attacked the World Economic Forum at length in a recent sermon, accusing it of “taking advantage” of COVID-19 “to implement their satanic plot.”
Berger is also against same-sex marriage, saying “it opens the door to all manner of sexual depravity and wickedness” — though he has said he has “friends who are practicing homosexuals, people I care about.” He opposes homosexuality and “heterosexual sin” in equal measures, he’s said, referring to acts like watching pornography and sex between unmarried adults.

Weird, deeply weird. Did correspondents see the sequel? Secretive D.C. Influence Project Appears to Be Running a Group House for Right-Wing Lawmakers

In sermons, Berger has devoted long stretches to attacking the separation of church and state, as well as COVID-19 vaccines. The pastor used violent language to describe his disdain for “LGBTQ+ Pride” parades and “drag queen story hour” during an interview for a podcast in 2022, according to unpublished footage obtained by ProPublica.
“If I was left to myself, I’d take a baseball bat and beat the hell out of every single one of them. And not feel bad about it,” Berger said. “I have to go, ‘You know what? That’s probably not the will of God, is it?’ And obviously it’s not.”
Berger has said his goal is to “disciple” members of Congress so what “they learn is then translated into policy.” He has claimed to have personally spurred legislation, saying a senator privately credited him with inspiring a bill.

Ah, that baseball bat, it's so Xian ... and so useful in so many places ...

But the pond digresses. Back to the Quad ranter ...

The pond half-expected a rant about the age gap and bloody cougars, following the snap of Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron.

But there was a different form of bitterness and bile to hand ...

In the German town of Solingen, 11 patrons of a “Festival of Diversity” (yes, that was its name) got stabbed, three of them fatally. Did they at least have the frisson of being stabbed by someone “diverse”? Well, no, not really: he was drearily predictable – a 26-year- old Syrian “migrant” yelling “Allahu Akbar!” Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.
While we’re vaguely sad about the deceased, albeit in a despicably pro forma way (candles, teddy bears, one more chorus of Imagine), the priority of officialdom and its court eunuchs in the media is to ensure that the casualties do not include our vibrant diversity.
So The Guardian quickly amended its headline about three dead “at diversity festival” to three dead at a “festival”. For Theo Underwood, speaking on Sky News in Europe, the “real worry” about 11 of your fellow citizens bleeding all over the pavement is “how it could be used by those on the far right”.
I wish that were true. As has become traditional, the dead had insult added to fatal injury by the usual limpid, passive placards advertising the fatuous bromides of a people anaesthetised Eloi-style even to their own slaughter: “Wir wollten doch nur Feiern, dann kam der Tod.” Which means: “We just wanted to celebrate, then came death.”

That's the best thought crime he can muster?

Well if we're dealing in trivia, and speaking of headlines, please allow the pond another distraction ...

This was the rip that the Beast paraded ...

That's it, "trounced", but how did the Times head that story?

In Trump’s Shadow, Greenland Votes for a New Government, President Trump has expressed a desire to “get” Greenland, but the victorious party is in no rush to change the status quo. (Archive link)

That's not the angle, you prime klutzes, that's not the angle at all. 

You were busy both siderising yet again ...

...Kuno Fencker of Naleraq, who is Greenland’s most pro-Trump politician, got far more votes than he did in the last election, in 2021. Mr. Fencker, an advocate for independence as soon as possible, attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration and took a tour of the West Wing, and his push for stronger ties with the United States drew fierce criticism from his rivals, some of whom labeled him a traitor. In a recent podcast, Mr. Fencker argued that Mr. Trump had been “misunderstood.”

... while the real angle was an apple pie in the moosh of King Donald, for some obscure reason you decided to bury that angle right at the bottom of the yarn...

Worse, (a) by your own account he's not Greenland’s most pro-Trump politician, and (b) by your own account, what happened to Greenland’s most pro-Trump politician?

In the election campaign’s final televised debate on Monday, five of the six party leaders said they did not trust Mr. Trump. Only Karl Ingemann of the Qulleq party, which is small and has little influence, said he did. (Mr. Ingemann failed to win a seat.)

What a pathetic, inept rag it is

Speaking of pathetic, for some reason, hapless Keir got caught up in the Quad ranting by way of a snap...Keir Starmer

Why is it that those who sound psychotic always trot out the mass psychosis angle...

Yeah, funny how that works. It’s almost as if to celebrate so ostentatiously your fetishisation of “diversity” – a delusion, indeed a kind of mass psychosis – is to invite societal demise.
Half the public, give or take, seem to get that democratic governance in the Western world has degenerated into a racket. Every once in a while, the populist spasms in minor Continental countries erupt at the heart of the West, as they did in 2016 with Brexit and Donald Trump. But both were subverted, very easily, by the Permanent State, at pains to emphasise as always that no serious course correction can be permitted.
Now Trump has a second shot. Can he do what needs to be done? In the time that remains – to him and to our civilisational inheritance? We changed too much too fast – welfare, immigration, protracted adolescence, the bepenised woman – and, as real change overwhelms us, we will still wonder why everything’s changed. The forces around us are real, and increasingly we are not.
Mark Steyn is the best-selling author of America Alone and After America. This article was first published in Quadrant.

Really reptiles? You've sunk so low you've had to regurgitate the rantings of a Quad man, a rant which first saw light of day back on February 26th?

Was it all because Canada hasn't yet been invaded? 

Is that the second shot Steyn is blathering about? Does he want to become a subject of King Donald and kiss the ring?

At last a chance to seize the moose and the maple syrup and make them dinkum Yanks?

‘Nobody Is Safe’: Canada Sends World a Warning Against Trump, The country’s minister of foreign affairs shared a blunt message ahead of a G7 meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week. (archive link)

Presumably the "legendary" Steyn is happy to become a US citizen, pick up a Tesla and enjoy the smell of Musk in the morning...

Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly had one stark warning to share Wednesday: “If the U.S. can do this to us, their closest friend, then nobody is safe.”
During a press conference addressing President Donald Trump’s recent tariff retaliation against the country, Joly reiterated that Canada is “holding strong” and described the president’s actions as a “day-to-day fight.”
“We have done nothing to justify Trump’s attacks on our country, on our economy and our identity,” Joly said. “Canada is your best friend, best neighbor, and best ally.”
“The only constant in this unjustifiable trade war seems to be President Trump’s talks of annexing our country through economic coercion,” she continued. “He called our border a fictional line and repeated his disrespectful 51st state rhetoric. Well, Canadians have made it very clear that we will not back down, and we will not give in to this coercion.”
The foreign affairs minister went on to reflect on the long-established history and relationship between America and Canada, which she described as “the envy of the world,” and called for the American public to contact their elected representatives to send “a message to the White House” and put an end to the tariff sparring match.
Joly is slated to meet Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week at a G7 meeting in Quebec. When asked by reporters Wednesday if U.S.-Canada relations would be on the meeting’s agenda, Rubio replied, “We’re going to be focused in G7 on all of those things. That’s what the meeting is about.”
“It is not a meeting about how we’re going to take over Canada,” he continued.

Welcome liddle Marco...

The president imposed a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum imports from Canada this week, and so far seems to be going full speed ahead toward his reciprocal tariff deadline on April 2 which will see a 25 percent tariff on another handful of goods from the country.
He also has regularly touted his aspirations toward making Canada the 51st state. In a Truth Social post Tuesday, Trump wrote: “The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State. This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear.”
“The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear, and we will have the safest and most beautiful Nation anywhere in the World,” the president continued. “Your brilliant anthem, ‘O Canada,’ will continue to play, but now representing a GREAT and POWERFUL STATE within the greatest Nation that the World has ever seen!”

Or is it because the 401k's of his devotees, his bread and butter mug punters, are now in the tank?