In which the pond distracts from its original Sunday meditation distractions with more distracting distractions ...

 

The pond was bemused to read in Crikey (sorry paywall) ...

New ABCs: At an all-staff meeting on Tuesday afternoon, ABC staff are getting a hint at what it’ll be like under the leadership of Hugh Marks, who took over from former managing director David Anderson. Marks brings a great deal of private sector experience, having last been CEO of Nine and leading it through its $4 billion merger with Fairfax in 2018. 
As part of the address, Crikey understands that the ABC is launching its new “key values” (whatever that means), as seen below in an apparent slide from a PowerPoint presentation. 

Whatever that means?

Foolish Crikey.

The pond has sure and certain knowledge what that first one, that noble "aim high" means...

Yes, it's the pond's alma mater, the good old Tamworth Public School, named in the days when they weren't afraid of the word "public", where "aim high" meant attending assembly and chanting in unison like a flock of pink and grey galahs ,'I love my country, I salute the flag, I honour the queen and I promise to obey her laws'.

Later to be followed by warm banana-flavoured, puke-inducing milk left out too long in the Tamworth sun.

The ABC didn't go the milk, they went the water, with Crikey explaining ...

We’ve even been sent an image of some supposed new emojis for staff to use in Microsoft Teams, and there are rumours that water bottles will be handed out as prizes for employees who embody the values.
Staff have been gifted new emojis to run amok with.
One wonders what the reception will be like for this latest show of corporate managerialism at the national broadcaster. —DS

Sheesh, they call them emojis?

Well DS (Daanyal Saeed?) here at the pond the reception was a retreat back on to nostalgia road and infantilism.

The pond digresses, because this is the last outing in an epic journey to make visible all the content in the pond's Sunday meditation that the Google bot insisted be concealed behind an age identification wall, an abomination to a pond devoted to the notion of privacy. 

If you insist, you can give your details to Qantas, and be assured of a good time...

So long ago...it feels like the Mesozoic Era, back when reptiles flourished...

The pond digresses because, in order to stand visiting the reptiles these days, the pond likes to do digressions.

It's the only way to stay sane.

Confronted by reptile inanity, why not take a moment to share the sort of obscenity that's ruining the planet?

Bill Gates is too ashamed to admit his folly? Is that why the Zuck keeps his fortress secret? Be out and proud like the bald one in Venice.

Never mind, when confronted by "Ned" and Polonius and Snappy Tom for its Sunday meditation, the pond immediately reached for distractions.

There were three the pond hasn't already covered in its recovery efforts, and they're now reflecting their age.

The first was the fun in The Bulwark's It's Starting to Smell Like Trump's Watergate?

That's now five days stale ...

...So we have Trump’s Justice Department all-in on executing Trump’s coverup. And unlike in the case of Watergate, we have no special counsel investigating and combating the coverup; we have no Senate Select Committee holding hearings to try to get at the facts; we have, as of yet, no conscientious individuals like John Dean who turned against the coverup after having been part of it.
This coverup could succeed.
But perhaps not. The fact that the Epstein-Maxwell crimes were so horrible will surely make the coverup more difficult to sustain. Trump was very close to Epstein and Maxwell during the years they were committing those crimes. I suspect more information will come out about their relationship.
So does JD Vance. Last night he complained, in response to the latest Wall Street Journal piece about the Epstein birthday book, “We all know what’s going to happen. They’re going to dribble little details out for days or weeks in an effort to assassinate the president’s character.”
Feel free to chortle, dear reader, about the notion that Trump has an upstanding character that is now being disparaged. But consider what the vice president is acknowledging: That more is to come. More “little details” like Trump’s incriminating birthday note. More little revelations of hushed Oval Office meetings. More little cracks in the Trump stonewall. More and more until, perhaps, it all comes crashing down.

Currently on view is the irresistible headline His Name Is Jesus. He's a Carpenter. ICE arrested him.

That helps in an appreciation of this Luckovich ...

The Epstein saga continued to bubble along, with Please, Mr. President, Keep Talking Epstein ...

Inter alia with Bill Kristol ...

...Trump was asked about his comment the day before in which he said he had cut ties with Epstein not, as he had previously maintained, because of a real estate dispute, but because Epstein “stole people who worked for me.”
Reporter: You’re saying Epstein poached two of your staffers?
Trump: . . . Yeah, he took people and because he took people, I said don’t do it anymore—they work for me. Beyond that, he took some others and once he did that, that was the end of him.
So Trump knew that Epstein “took” multiple “people” from Mar-a-Lago.
A reporter asked the logical next question: “Were some of the workers taken from you, were some of them young women?”
Trump began by answering, “Well I don’t want to say.” Perhaps Trump had an instinct he was getting into deeper waters. But he couldn’t resist continuing to talk. “Everyone knows the people who were taken.” So, he went on, “the answer is yes, they were.” And Trump provided a little more detail as he continued talking: “People were taken out of the spa . . .’”
Of course, it’s well known that when Ghislaine Maxwell approached Virginia Giuffre at Mar-a-Lago in 2000, the then 16-year old Giuffre was working at the spa. So a reporter asked: “Was one of the stolen people Virginia Giuffre?”
Trump kept on talking. “I think so. I think that was one of the people. He stole her.”
So: Trump knew that Epstein (and Maxwell) had “taken” or “stolen” Virginia Giuffre and “some others” from Mar-a-Lago. And, of course, Trump knew about Epstein’s proclivities for younger women at the time. Two years after Giuffre was “stolen” from him, he infamously told New York magazine that Epstein liked “beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Or as he reportedly wrote in his now-famous 50th birthday note to Epstein a year after that, in 2003, “Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?”

The pond enjoys the way they always include a cheap shot ...

... but the pond does wish sometimes they'd go the full loon, and expose the source material ...

Speaking of loons, a special shout out to Will Sommer for Dan Bongino, an Emotional Wreck, Throws QAnon a Bone, Plus: Nick Fuentes and Tim Pool rethinking their looks.

Forget Dan, it was the bit about the Groypers turning on Fuentes in Looksmaxxing Controversy that shook the pond to its carefully curated sagging flesh and failing bones ...

The second original distraction was the already referenced in these pages Susan B. Glasser outing in The New Yorker: Trump Redefines the Washington Scandal, In a Presidency where everything is an outrage, what does it say that MAGA’s revolt over the Jeffrey Epstein files is the one crisis that really might hurt him? (*archive link)

Trump’s strategy to win back his base unintentionally reveals what he thinks of them—throw them lies, new made-up lies to supplant the old made-up lies, and package them with as much visceral hatred and crude racism as possible. The purest distillation of this was an A.I.-generated video of former President Barack Obama being handcuffed in the Oval Office, which Trump promoted on his social-media account over the weekend.
This revolting clip seems to represent what Trump imagines to be the ultimate MAGA fever dream—a ritual humiliation and debasement of America’s first Black President. Accompanying the video has been an elaborate new conspiracy theory, rolled out by Trump and various advisers in subsequent days, that involves Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the former leaders of the U.S. intelligence community, and the Presidential elections of 2016, 2020, and 2024. Its main premise is that Russia did NOT intervene in 2016 on Trump’s behalf, and the intelligence finding that it did was part of an attempted “coup” against Trump that is allegedly still ongoing.
In Trump’s first term, when he said awful stuff like this, even many of his Republican allies publicly distanced themselves from it. There was squirming. There were embarrassed silences. Not now. If there were any G.O.P. members of Congress who denounced the disgusting video of Obama, I missed it. Not a single one, as far as I am aware, could be found to issue even a Susan Collins-esque statement of “concern.” Including Susan Collins. Instead, senators such as Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn on Thursday demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into the allegations, apparently having forgotten that there already was a special prosecutor—John Durham—who spent more than three years doing so and failed to come up with anything remotely like the Obama-and-everybody-else grand unification Russiagate theory that Trump is now promoting. Cornyn, it should be noted, was also a member of the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee who signed on to its bipartisan report concluding unequivocally that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.
The point is that they’re still more than willing to go along with Trump’s lies so long as they don’t conflict with one of their other crazy stories. That goes for MAGA senators and for the MAGA base—and it explains why we’re in such a mess. Sorry, Jeffrey Epstein truthers; this is the biggest scandal of them all.

Indeed ...(and there was a cartoon to go with that)

But The New Yorker has moved on, and given the interest expressed by pond correspondents, likely the pond would have offered as a distraction Adam Gopnik's How Tom Lehrer Escaped the Transience of Satire, The late songwriter’s targets are mostly forgotten—so why do new generations keep discovering him? (*archive link)

A sample ...

And so on, and what a fine distraction.

The third original Sunday meditation distraction? 

That was introduced this way ...

And while at The New Yorker, the pond couldn't help but savour Tyler Foggatt's “South Park” Skewers a Satire-Proof President ( that's an archive link), The new season première goes after Trump as never before—and solves a problem that’s plagued comedians since his first term in office.

The pond is no fan of the show and has never watched it, but still ...(and here the pond is now liberal with *'s for fear of disturbing the easily offended Google bot):

The episode opens with Cartman turning on a radio station, where he’s met with the sound of static. “Mom, something’s wrong with my favorite show,” he complains. “National Public Radio, where all the liberals b*tch and whine about stuff.” His mother informs him that Trump has cancelled NPR. Cartman is devastated: “That was, like, the funniest sh*t ever.”
Later, Cartman confides in his friend Butters, who’s more of a snowflake type. “Woke is dead,” Cartman says, sadly. “You can just say ‘ret**ded’ now, nobody cares. Everyone hates the J*ws. Everyone’s fine with using g*y slurs.”
“That’s not good,” Butters replies.
“No, it’s terrible!” Cartman says. “ ’Cause now I don’t know . . . what I’m supposed to do.”
At first, it didn’t seem like “South Park” had an answer to this question; Cartman, unconvinced by Butters’s assurances that “woke” is “still out there, somewhere,” forces him into a s**cide pact. The two of them sit inside a car, parked in a garage, with the engine running. The scene is foreboding—until it’s revealed that the car is electric.
The townspeople, meanwhile, negotiate a settlement with the President, who agrees to a sum of $3.5 million. (“We’ll just have to cut some funding for our schools and hospitals and roads and that should be that,” one woman says.) But there’s one condition: as part of the settlement, the town also has to engage in “pro-Trump messaging”—an apparent reference to recent reports that Trump has demanded the same from CBS. What follows is genuine shock comedy, and a treatment of Trump that feels original. The town’s first P.S.A. is an A.I.-generated video of Trump—a live-action one, not a cartoon—trudging through a desert. He proceeds to take off his clothes, though he leaves his dress shoes and sock garters on. “When things heat up, who will deliver us from temptation?” a voice-over says. “No matter how hot it gets, he’s not afraid to fight for America.” Trump lies down in the sand, and his microp*nis, which has googly eyes and a mouth, slowly becomes erect, before announcing, “I’m Donald J. Trump, and I endorse this message.” The P.S.A. is labelled one of fifty, leaving open the possibility that, in the course of the forty-nine “South Park” episodes still to come, we’ll get forty-nine more.
Is this too much? Probably. Yet there’s an age-old tradition of political vulgarity, of which Trump himself is a practitioner—it’s the crux of his appeal. And, although the White House put out a statement condemning the “South Park” episode, it also seemed to acknowledge that Parker and Stone have a place in this tradition, too. “The Left’s hypocrisy truly has no end,” a spokesperson said. “For years they have come after ‘South Park’ for what they labeled as ‘offense’ content, but suddenly they are praising the show.” Though it’s hard to say that an A.I. d*ck joke is deserving of “praise,” it is refreshing to see what happens when satirists are willing to play on the President’s terms, deepfakes and all. One of the most striking aspects of Colbert’s firing is that his comedy, whether you like it or not, wasn’t all that offensive; “The Late Show” is standard liberal fare. But, by getting rid of that problem, Paramount has created a new one. They’re paying Parker and Stone more than a billion dollars to put out the same message as Colbert—a lot less politely.

(* did any of these words trigger the Google bot? Was this the cause of the pond's Sunday problem? Who knows, but the pond felt a certain chill descending. Better to be safe than sorry)

The pond then segued into Snappy Tom's column.

Of course all these stories are now aged and out of date.

The South Park saga later took another turn ...

‘South Park’ Delays Follow-Up to Explosive Naked Trump Episode
TO BE CONTINUED...
Comedy Central will air an encore of the season premiere that featured Trump naked. (*archive link)

The teaser promises a new episode next Wednesday, August 6, that has no intention of letting up on Trump. One scene shows Trump flirting with Satan at a black tie dinner, smirking and rubbing the character’s thigh until he says, exasperatedly, “Stop.” Like the premiere, the second episode will also mock Trump’s fiercest supporters. The teaser seemingly reveals Cartman playing a version of MAGA podcaster Charlie Kirk.
Still, the strangely-timed break seems unusual. While Trump has threatened other shows will be “next” to be canceled for criticizing him after Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, the White House’s statement last week settled for a series of insults and stopped short of threatening revenge. That omission from the White House’s response was out of step with Trump’s pattern, considering how brutally the episode mocked the president.
Parker and Stone actually toned it down, as they’d wanted an even more graphic version of Trump’s naked character. They compromised by putting eyes on Trump’s penis to get around the network’s request that they blur it. And while weekly TV shows take a week off all the time, a hiatus following a one-episode season premiere—especially one as explosive as last week’s—is highly unusual.
That said, Parker and Stone showed absolutely no remorse for their brutal Trump takedown even before the teaser for the next episode dropped on Tuesday. “We’re terribly sorry,” Parker sarcastically told a crowd at a San Diego Comic Con panel last Thursday after Trump’s White House fired back at them.

How the Beast loves the story, with fresh updates (*archive link)...

And so on and waay too much detail. 

Best put that in a screen cap, all that talk of micro appendages ...

The completely humourless self-centred narcissist and grifter has gone full fascist when it comes to comedy ...

Memories of him festering and simmering while Obama roasted him linger in the mind.

Trump’s Ominous Prediction in Searing Stephen Colbert Rant
‘WHO WILL GO FIRST?’
Trump took aim at more than one late-night host on Truth Social. (*archive link)

It's all grist to the new mill, the decline and fall of the American cultural empire...

Without a shred of decorum or decency, the rantings, foamings and frothings of a manchild monarch, given to whims, servile lackeys and very expensive luxury planes.

King Donald's narcissistic obsession with ratings is nothing new.

As a distraction from the original distraction, see the ancient Vanity Fair story Donald Trump’s All-Consuming Obsession with TV Ratings: A History, It started with The Apprentice, which Trump claimed was the No. 1 show on TV for years after it stopped cracking the top 20. (*archive link)

...So why are ratings still such a big deal to Trump? As Jacob Brogan observed in Slate during the campaign, Trump is more of a numbers guy than a words guy—and ratings are just one more metric against which he can measure himself and others. “He’s always talking numbers, one way or another,” Brogan wrote. “During one recent campaign stop, he counted up every reference that Hillary Clinton made to him in her Democratic National Convention address—22 in all. He also routinely talks polling data—mostly when the numbers are in his favor, but sometimes even when they’re not. But no single metric matters more to him than television ratings—so much so that even polls are secondary for him. ”
In the case of The Apprentice, this could explain why Trump—the king of self aggrandizement—seems unwilling to accept any narrative in which he doesn’t come out on top. Winning the presidency wasn’t enough for him—he must have won it by a landslide, even if he actually didn’t. Trump can’t just hold an inauguration—that inauguration must be the biggest one in history, one that’s rendered stores across Washington bereft of formalwear and hotels full to the brim. It seems that in Trump’s eyes, as long as he is on a show, it is No. 1—and he must be the reason why.
The irony in all this? Nielsen ratings, like polls, are subject to flaws of their own. They only gather data from traditional cable subscribers—so as streaming platforms proliferate and more and more viewers cut the cord, Nielsen ratings numbers grow more and more obsolete and out of touch with a certain growing subgroup of the American population.
However hypocritical or illogical Trump’s fixation on ratings is, it’s something opponents might want to keep in mind throughout his presidency—just as reporters must find ways to cover his false statements without inadvertently corroborating them for readers who don’t read past the headline. Citizens looking to hit Trump where it hurts may want to start by not watching his inauguration in the first place, since tuning in will only contribute to viewership numbers Trump will likely use as an objective sign of America’s infatuation with him. True, the inauguration ratings won’t discern who was watching and who was hate-watching—but neither will Trump.

And yet who can look away from the train wreck?

So many train wrecks, so many white rabbits and so little time...

And there you have it, an entire post without the reptiles starring.

Will the bot allow it? Only the bot knows, but that's it, that's all she wrote for this bot time and this bot channel ... with the pond having put up all of its Sunday meditation, and a lot for by way of distractions in the process, with the first class loser always present and incorrect ...