In which the Caterist goes there, and Major Mitchell goes to war with China by Xmas ...

 

As an aside, what sort of deeply clueless loon, promoted on the Peter principle, would offer to meet a dead Christian fundamentalist in Valhalla?

Beyond the valley of the clueless...defaming both ancient Vikings, who didn't know much about Christ, and Christians, who don't fancy being Viking warriors with a belief in Odin.

And then another thought occurred to the pond. Why all the grief about dying? It's a fast ticket to eternal bliss, and death by misadventure avoids the Catch 22 that keeps many living out lives of tedious despair - what with suicide a guaranteed ticket to eternal hellfire. 

What a cunning catch.

If it wasn't for that catch, there'd be many true believers that might decide to go full next level, full Heaven's Gate ...and the quicker the better, with a ticket to eternal bliss. Except maybe, perhaps, might as well get as mileage now, because you never know what might really be waiting...

Meanwhile, the  Murdochians revealed their full fascist ... as Fox and Friends explained what to do with the homeless (Huff Post)...

“You can’t give ’em a choice,” Jones went on. “Either you take the resources that we’re going to give you, or you decide that you gotta be locked up in jail. That’s the way it has to be now.”
That’s when Kilmeade floated a more extreme idea.
“Or uh, involuntary lethal injection. Or something,” he said. “Just kill ’em.”
The other two hosts barely react to his remark before continuing their discussion.

(See also Reddit and The Independent. Of course the deeply fascist Kilmeade later tried to walk it back, but when you shoot from the hip, your first shot is the most revealing of who you really are.)

Well of course you'd just kill 'em - it goes without saying that the easiest way to settle the gay and TG and feminist and gypsy and migrant and rootless cosmopolitan problem is to give 'em a lethal injection.

Not to mention the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine.

Never mind, enough with the heavy philosophy, the pond has to observe its Monday duties, as onerous as a monastic lifestyle...

Here the pond wants to note yet again the eerie way that the alleged "news" is echoed over on the far right ...

So the lead "news" features devastated reptiles...

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: Coalition records its worst ever primary vote
The Coalition’s primary vote has plummeted to an all-time low of 27 per cent after Sussan Ley’s dramatic sacking of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price sparked fresh party turmoil.

As well as reporting, Geoff chambered another round ...

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Libs trapped in a web of despair, tangled in chaos
After two disastrous election defeats that virtually wiped the Liberals from capital city electoral maps, radical ideas are being floated privately on finding a way back to power.

Over on the extreme far right, top of the world ma?

Yep, simpleton Simon was top of the world ma for parroting ...

Libs’ internal war plays into Albanese’s weak hand
The irony of the Coalition’s catharsis is that the Albanese government’s zeal for reform and economic solutions will slide when it isn’t being challenged by its opponents to deliver

Is this the day the lettuce took the lead?

The other story that got the reptiles going saw Ben packing it in ...

INTEGRATED FORCES
Australia to modernise PNG military under landmark treaty
Australia will spend billions of dollars on new equipment for Papua New Guinea’s military under a landmark treaty that will introduce new mutual defence arrangements.
By Ben Packham

The pond only notes Ben packing it about the "hugely significant" treaty because over on the extreme far right came ...

Steady, reliable friendship is best service to PNG
From colonial rule to rugby league bonds, Australia’s relationship with PNG has evolved dramatically over 50 years – but we must do more.

By Ian Kemish

The archived header explained a little more ...

Why Papua New Guineans enjoy a level of familiarity with Australia no other partner can match

How lucky they are to enjoy our company ...

The pond also noted this yarn ...

ABC star’s contrite admission after ‘embarrassing’ misinformation post about Charlie Kirk’s accused killer
Veteran ABC journalist Barrie Cassidy has admitted to spreading false claims about US conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer, saying he is ‘incredibly embarrassed’ by the mistake.

... but really only because the quarry-whispering-extraordinaire Caterist went there ...

The header: Charlie Kirk’s murder and its celebration tied up in web of hate, Social media posts sharing delight at Charlie Kirk’s assassination have revealed not just their willingness to endorse evil, but a wider dangerous level of moral confusion, even among our MPs.

The caption: Charlie Kirk … ‘His influence will live on in the countless men and women whose lives his mission has filled with a deeper purpose,’ says Nick Cater. Picture: Jeff Kowalsky / AFP

It's a full five minutes of worshipful hagiography, but it's worth ploughing through because at the very end it reveals the Caterist to be as bigoted and hate-mongering as Kirk was...

If you’re convinced the FBI is watching you through your toaster you are probably insane. If everybody in your town thinks so, you’re not.
Sadly, Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer cannot be dismissed as a deviant psychotic loner, living in a fantasy world of his own. The 22-year-old suspect arrested last Friday in the US was part of a sizeable online community that shared his belief that Kirk was so dangerous he needed to be silenced with a gun.
The countless social media posts applauding Kirk’s assassination crossed a line beyond bad taste. Their authors weren’t just sick, they were complicit in an evil act. They, too, had broken the moral law that human life is sacred. Their gleeful endorsement normalises an abhorrent act and grants permission to anyone thinking of doing the same.

Strange, the Caterist avoided going the "leftist" route; instead he was part of a "sizeable online community" ...

The reptiles offered a snap... Tyler Robinson, 22, the suspect in the shooting death of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Picture: Utah Governor's Office / AFP

The pond suspects that it'll be a long time before the reptiles get around to exploring the deep weirdness of that online culture, what with it being 4Chan and points beyond ...

(For those wondering about OwO. The pond only knows because it took the advice of a couple of millennials more in touch with Gen Z - pay particular attention to the Jezebel yarn about witches).

Then came a dark irony, what with bullets not being the answer when we all now know that a lethal injection is the answer (or perhaps just a dose of Zyklon B in a specially prepared Murdochian chamber. Think the office toilet?)...

This is a frightening moment for a nation that has settled civil disagreements peacefully since 1865. Social media has illuminated the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt described the complicity of ordinary Germans in Adolf Hitler’s crimes. Now we know there are nurses, teachers, military personnel and journalists who think it’s OK to settle an argument with a bullet.
That is why Kirk’s assassination will never be last week’s story, much as we may wish it was.
American college campuses have been primed for violence by the influence of cancel culture. A 2024 survey found 63 per cent of students thought it was acceptable to shout down a speaker to deny them a platform, while more than a quarter (27 per cent) thought it was right to use violence to stop a campus speech. Roughly one in five (21 per cent) strong Republicans endorsed violence compared with one in three (31 per cent) of strong Democrats. Of those who identified as “a-gender”, 71 per cent endorsed political violence.
We cannot say it couldn’t happen here, although we have reason once again to thank John Howard for gun restrictions. The same morally complicit supporters appeared on social media in Australia within minutes of the shooting.
They saw the death of a young father as a chance for mockery, humour and cheap political gibes.

Inevitably Zali got dragged into it ... Zali Steggall at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

But Zali wasn't the only one.

Inevitably pundits asked Grok, thereby upsetting Uncle Leon, busy shouting about leftists in the UK as he went about the business of ruining the UK, having done his best to ruin the United States ...

Shame on you shameless Grok.

That came from a Reddit source ...

And so on, and back with the Caterist, offering grand conspiracies...

Others, while not endorsing this shooting in particular, were not prepared to condemn political violence per se. MP Zali Steggall “liked” a post by Cheek Media co-founder Hannah Ferguson arguing political violence was sometimes necessary and then “unliked” it when it started to make headlines. A dangerous level of moral confusion appears to be lurking, even among our elected representatives.
Last week’s attack has more in common with 9/11 than we might care to imagine. Both al-Qa’ida and the radical left see US power as inherently malignant, the root cause of global injustice, instability and personal threat. Each has an all-encompassing ideological framework that interprets events through the lens of US domination. Both cultivate grand conspiracy narratives. Radical Islamists believe a Zionist-Crusader alliance is controlling global events. The radical left speaks of shadowy corporate, military and neoliberal forces conspiring to sustain oppression.
Each portrays US power as an existential danger to ordinary people’s lives. For radical Islamists, it is Muslims in the Middle East. For the radical left, it is minorities, the poor and the environment. Both reject compromise.
Seen in this light, the alliance between the radical left and the Palestinian freedom movement isn’t so surprising after all. When pro-Palestinian activists in the West play down or even applaud the Hamas atrocities in southern Israel, they make the same moral leap as those who shared their delight at Kirk’s shooting. Murder is no longer murder but an act of service to a higher good.

The reptiles flung in King Donald, boldly healing the nation with an astonishing display of empathy and a desire to get cracking on his ballroom, but not helping the reptiles with their spelling ... President Donald Trump addresses the nation after the assanation of Charlie Kirk. (sic, please send complaints direct to the lizard Oz).

Then the Caterist went the radical left routine ...

It is not the first time the American left has resorted to political violence. Suspect Tyler Robinson’s formative years in an all-American home mirrors the story of Merry Levov, in Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral. Merry is an intelligent, idealistic but slightly awkward loner whose father, Seymour “Swede” Levov epitomises the post-war American dream. His life is shattered when Merry plants a bomb to protest against the Vietnam war, killing a local doctor. The plot is closely modelled on the Weather Underground, a left-wing student organisation active in the late 1960s and early 70s that bombed symbolic targets such as the Pentagon, the Capitol and police headquarters.
The difference with today’s radical left is scale. There were never more than a few hundred in the Weather Underground’s core, which allowed the FBI to bring it under control.
Social media has changed everything. Grooming potential converts is no longer the patient task it once was. All the radicals need to do is release the meme and let the algorithm go to work.
Social media is the perfect recruiting ground for radical causes. Solitary and resentful young people with underdeveloped prefrontal cortices tend to be over-represented. Conversations become performances staged for an invisible audience and friendships are reimagined as assets in a personal publicity campaign. The self that emerges is not the one tempered by human interaction but a distorted mirror image validated by the number of likes and followers.
The same YouTube model that created a generation of content creators has been adapted for content destruction; the permanent silencing of disagreeable voices.

Next came Cassidy's shame ... Barrie Cassidy’s deleted tweet about Charlie Kirk killer Tyler Robinson. Picture: X

But what of Grok? (S)he was still peddling mischief on X...

What's Uncle Leon to do with you, shameless Grokster?

Never trust AI, especially Uncle Leon's version, but then never trust the flood waters in quarries whisperer either...

Like computer games and online pornography, the only check against wider social harm is an individual’s moral boundaries. Cognitive compartmentalisation, the ability to hold two conflicting codes of behaviour at once, applying each only in its proper context, typically does not fully mature until a person reaches their mid-20s.
The words inscribed on the assassin’s bullets derive from social media and online gaming. “Hey fascist, catch this” is part of the banter in Helldivers, a game set in a parody of a dystopian universe in which the meaning of words is inverted along Orwellian lines.
Authoritarianism is inverted as “managed democracy” in which citizens vote within rigidly controlled structures, and dissent is crushed. “Freedom” means enforcing conformity with approved values. Peace is achieved through total annihilation of alien enemies. “Heroes” are people die for the cause, regardless of whether their actions make sense or succeed.
Who knows what depraved, socially sanctioned mission Kirk’s killer imagined he was carrying out. Suffice to conclude that it has taken the death of a great man to wake us up to the potency of the forces lurking within.
The war against terror was frequently characterised as asymmetric. The frontline was hard to define, and even if it could be drawn you couldn’t be certain which side the next threat would come from.
As for the frontline in the war against socialised radicalism, where do we begin to start?
At the press conference to announce Robinson’s arrest, Cox revealed he had been praying that the killer might come from another country. “I thought it would make it easier on us if we could just say, ‘Hey, we don’t do that here’,” he said. “Sadly, that prayer was not answered the way I had hoped for … it was one of us.”

At this point the reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction, The widow of American political activist Charlie Kirk has spoken for the first time since his assassination. Erika Kirk has addressed Charlie Kirk’s killer directly, vowing to keep her husband’s work alive. “You have no idea what you just have unleashed across this entire country. In this world, you have no idea,” she said. “You have no idea the fire you have ignited within this wife, the cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.”

Then came a final burst of Caterism ...

It is only now with Kirk’s death that we can fully appreciate his precocious wisdom, enriched by a Christian faith anchored to eternal truths. As with Billy Graham, his influence will live on in the countless men and women whose lives his mission has filled with a deeper purpose.
If Western civilisation is to be pulled back from the edge of this precipice it won’t be through violence but by rescuing young people from the effects of the dangerous nonsense taught at school and university that has made them primed for radicalisation, the work to which Kirk dedicated his short adult life.
In search for a redemptive note at the end of a sombre news conferences, Cox paraphrased Kirk: “Turn off your phone, read scripture, spend time with friends, and remember internet fury is not real life. It’s going to be OK.”

Say what? 

Billy Graham ...filled with a deeper purpose?

Pass the pond a chuck bucket as it read that tosh one more time to make certain the Caterist was indeed as contemptible as the pond had already imagined he was..we can fully appreciate his precocious wisdom, enriched by a Christian faith anchored to eternal truths. As with Billy Graham, his influence will live on in the countless men and women whose lives his mission has filled with a deeper purpose.

Precocious wisdom?

Waiter, another chuck bucket. That extra mint caused an explosion.

Of course these days when the jihadists are out and about saying Kirk was a bigoted hate merchant who regularly targeted minorities with his hate is now verboten, and anyone diverging is soon brought into line by the hate police ...

And yet ... Kilmeade... standing ready with a Kirkian final solution ...

Even mentioning the way that Kirk enabled a school shooter gun culture with Nazi tendencies is verboten ...

And yet ... even Faux Noise...

A Fox News host drew fire from inside the network for suggesting that conservatives may be going too far in their efforts to immortalize far-right activist Charlie Kirk after he was brutally murdered earlier this week.
“Charlie Kirk was not a saint,” network mainstay Howard Kurtz said during a Sunday panel on his show, Media Buzz. “He said two years ago, it’s worth [it] to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so we can have the Second Amendment,” he went on, adding that “his murder makes this feel like a very dangerous time.”
Kirk, who was shot and killed at a Utah campus event on Wednesday, did indeed make those remarks at a Turning Point USA conference in April 2023, describing gun deaths as “a prudent deal” and “rational” if they allowed Americans “to protect our other God-given rights.”
Such remarks are characteristic of the reliably provocative rhetoric that the late far-right Christian activist used to build his name across a wide range of social issues. On his eponymous podcast and at campus events across the country, Kirk previously spoke of how “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people,” how “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America,” and how “we need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor.”(Beast)

And so on, and the irony turning on itself, and as always the pond turned to the immortal Rowe for help, if not from Mr Toad, then certainly from Pepe ...

And so to the bonus, with cackling comrade cockie Chris Mitchell in from the golf links to share his thoughts ...

The header: News media’s quiet support for Xi’s China, Much of the left-wing media in Australia quietly prefers Xi to Trump and favours Anthony Albanese’s appeasement of China to Scott Morrison’s more direct approach with the Asian superpower.

The caption for the snap: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Tianjin claim to have an unbreakable friendship. Picture: AP

The pond had wanted an excuse to note this X post ...

... but Major Mitchell will have to do ...

Journalists in Australia missed a negative about participants in China’s September 3 celebration of the 80th anniversary of its World War II victory over Japan.
Dictators standing with China’s Xi Jinping – Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian – all face economic problems, as does Xi.
While left-wing journalists love pointing to the economic harm Donald Trump’s tariffs are doing to the US economy, few point out the non-market authoritarian world is struggling.
This column on November 3 last year, predicting a Trump win in the US presidential election, quoted a Wall Street Journal survey of 50 leading economists suggesting the downside of Trump’s agenda would prove to be tariffs, which would boost inflation when passed on to US consumers.
Not only is Trump frittering away the US Federal Reserve’s victory over inflation, he is frittering away almost a century of close military and diplomatic relationships.
Much of the left-wing domestic media in Australia quietly prefers Xi to Trump, and favours Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s appeasing of China over former Coalition PM Scott Morrison calling out of China over the origins of Covid.

Naturally there was a snap of the villain ... Anthony Albanese recently spent almost a week in China shoring up ties between the two nations. Picture: Gaye Gerard

The Major carried on ...

Peter Hartcher, international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, is a rare exception among journalists of the left prepared to call out China’s bullying. And while Trump is a bully too, his behaviour is born of childish narcissism while Xi relies on brute force, such as in the South China Sea.
The axis of evil leaders with Xi are described in most media as a systemic threat to the US and to capitalism. Yet their own economic indicators suggest they could do with more free market vigour.
China remains mired in a property crisis reminiscent of the bubble that smashed Japan’s miracle economy in 1989. And now China confronts more misallocation of scarce resources as various companies and regional leaders vie for market share in EV production and AI.
Xi last month publicly called for an end to EV discounting. Popular models from China EV leader BYD – a success here too – are being sold new for as little as $11,000 domestically.
Ford and General Motors slowed EV production in the US a year ago when it became clear the industry was racing ahead of US consumer demand. Who knew markets work, hey?
While oil sales to India have helped Russia weather US and European sanctions imposed over its invasion of Ukraine, its domestic economy has slowed this year as Russians pay dearly for Putin’s deluded imperial ambitions.
Remember the Russian economy is barely bigger than Australia’s: GDP of $US2.2 trillion in a country of 150 million compared with our $US1.8 trillion and 27 million people.
North Korea remains a hermit kingdom, though one with nuclear weapons. Iran has been damaged by extensive Israeli air strikes and the US bombing of its nuclear facilities. Even before that, it languished with total GDP of $US430bn in a country of 91 million, smaller than Israel’s economy at $US540bn with only nine million people.
So why consider economics when assessing alliance issues thrown up by Trump’s eccentricities and Xi’s ambition to again become the greatest power on Earth, as China believes it was before the Industrial Revolution?

Why indeed?

Oh Major, Major, not a single mention of the genocide, and you a devotee of it, and so no excuse for the pond to segue to a Haaretz story.

Damn it, the pond will do it anyway...

Now carry on Majoring...

China’s ascendancy is not a forgone conclusion. Where people such as former Labor PM Paul Keating used to claim before Covid that China’s economy was already bigger than that of the US, it is now clear US GDP exceeds China’s by more than $US10 trillion: $US30.5 trillion to $US19.3 trillion. Add in the GDP of the EU ($US20 trillion), the UK ($US3.8 trillion) and Japan ($US4.2 trillion) and the traditional US partners plus America dwarf the Chinese economy three to one.
While Trump’s MAGA voters want him to focus on making America great, it’s hard not to look at the latest jobs data in the US and conclude the President’s tariff punishment of the US’s allies is failing.
More focus on his friends, and trying to lure the most populous nation on Earth, India, into the free world’s orbit – as Trump’s predecessors and Australia have been trying to do – might just help Americans more than Trump thinks. That was the point of the Quad meeting with the US, Japan, India and Australia.

The reptiles didn't offer many visual distractions to the Major, and this was the last of them ...US President Donald Trump has alienated India with 50 per cent tariffs, leading to closer ties between Delhi and Beijing. Picture: Getty Images

What a grand role model ...

Inevitably the Major brought in the bromancer...

As this newspaper’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan suggested on September 6, US businesses looking to relocate away from China could do a lot worse than head to a democratic country with a highly educated middle class.
Yet Trump punished India with 50 per cent tariffs, compared with China’s 30 per cent and Russia’s exemption. This was largely because Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi refused to participate in Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize circus, saying Trump had not ended India’s short war with Pakistan because the two sides had negotiated their own truce.
Trump now won’t go to the next Quad meeting that was to be held in India later this year. Modi responded to that diplomatic slight by attending the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation summit meeting with Xi, Putin and more than 20 other leaders in Tianjin from August 31 to September 1. It was a win for Xi, on a plate served by Trump.
In Australian media terms, such alliance issues are treated very differently depending on the source. In the left-wing Guardian, ABC and Nine mastheads, Albanese has brought maturity to the relationship with China and has settled diplomatic ties with our South Pacific neighbours.
These sources argued Morrison had alienated our biggest market over Covid and our Pacific neighbours over global warming.
In the populist right-wing media, Albanese is a failure because he has not had a meeting with Trump, he is kowtowing to China and the Pacific Islands are having a lend of us because China is the main global source of CO2 emissions.
In reality, as a middle power that depends on China buying our exports, Australia cannot force Xi Jinping’s hand on any issue.

The pond has already noted that trend in nattering "Ned".

It's the trend in the reptiles in the hive mind of the lizard Oz to refer to "populist right-wing media", as if it was "other", a thing apart, different somehow from the reptiles ...

As if these singular reptiles could disconnect from the hive mind, as if they themselves weren't flag-waving populist ratbags of a cratering Caterist kind ...

Never mind, "Ned" also joined the Major parade ...

If we were punished for seeking an open inquiry into the origins of Covid then we were lucky the loss of exports of wine, barley and lobsters was more than offset by higher prices for our coal and iron ore.
Similarly, we can’t force Trump to meet our PM or sell us Virginia-class submarines, but we can publicly make the case that we have been good allies of the US in two world wars, and in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan. We also have lots of the rare earths China is holding over Trump’s head in tariff negotiations.
We are right not to let China in under our guard in the Pacific. But we also need to tell our island neighbours some hard truths. We need to remind Vanuatu, which is bowing to China over a planned treaty arrangement with Australia, that we were first in with aid after the devastating 2015 cyclone.
A 2017 Auckland University study proves most Pacific island nations are not sinking and sea levels are rising because of emissions from China, not because of Australia’s 1 per cent of global CO2.
Paul Kelly here on September 6 suggested Australia in the end will have to choose between its defence alliance with the US and its trade partnership with China.
Remember, this is Trump’s final term. Chances are his successor will revert to traditional US engagement with allies.
Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr, host of next year’s Pacific Forum, was right last Wednesday to say the Pacific was, in effect, “already at war with China”.

And so the pond has completed its monastic duties for the day, once again with plenty of heat and absolutely no light ...but with a splendid irony on display...

You know, the one where Pacific islands aren't sinking, but sea levels are rising because of China, and nobody else ... 

Srange King Donald's minions have yet to take down the NASA page headed NASA Analysis Shows Irreversible Sea Level Rise for Pacific Islands.

Climate change is rapidly reshaping a region of the world that’s home to millions of people.

In the next 30 years, Pacific Island nations such as Tuvalu, Kiribati, and Fiji will experience at least 6 inches (15 centimeters) of sea level rise, according to an analysis by NASA’s sea level change science team. This amount of rise will occur regardless of whether greenhouse gas emissions change in the coming years.

The sea level change team undertook the analysis of this region at the request of several Pacific Island nations, including Tuvalu and Kiribati, and in close coordination with the U.S. Department of State.

In addition to the overall analysis, the agency’s sea level team produced high-resolution maps showing which areas of different Pacific Island nations will be vulnerable to high-tide flooding — otherwise known as nuisance flooding or sunny day flooding — by the 2050s. Released on Sept. 23, the maps outline flooding potential in a range of emissions scenarios, from best-case to business-as-usual to worst-case.

Just remember a rising doesn't mean a sinking.

Only in the Major's world of epic, some might say galah stupidity, but actually galahs are quite intelligent birds. 

Not so this Major Mitchell ...