Many reading assignments for diligent herpetology students, but the pond is still searching for intestinal fortitude ...

 

The pond is still ginger about its return to the ranks of reptile observers, and found it hard to pay attention to the jihads that pass as "news" at the top of the weekend digital edition:

Spend precious time doing the "Ned" Everest climb, with the beefy boofhead and Ted "nuke the country" O'Brien as his companions?

EXCLUSIVE
‘Dud’ deal: Taylor rebuffs Labor over EU trade deal
‘Dud’ EU trade deal: Libs rebuff ALP but offer olive branch
Australia’s third-largest trade partner deal is in jeopardy after the Opposition Leader called the EU free trade agreement a ‘dud’, but the Coalition has offered an olive branch.
By Paul Kelly

Even worse, "Ned" doubled down ...and that required a full 15 mins of "bot" listening to wade through

The Coalition veto on Labor’s free-trade agreement with EU
There should be no mood in this country for the childish, anti-European prejudices of JD Vance.
By Paul Kelly

Hardier souls can don their Everest Millets and head off to the internet archive for their fix. 

Maybe the pond will summon the strength for the climb on the morrow, or maybe the likes of the Ughmann will offer a distraction ...

The pond also struggled to pay attention to a recalcitrant toad from the deep north, suddenly aware of the implications of all the inane bigotry doing the Murdochian rounds...

After years of fear-mongering and bashing furriners, with Dame Groan offering weekly rants about how we'd all be rooned by the invading hordes, suddenly the reptiles have come to this?

EXCLUSIVE
‘Diabolical’: Crisafulli urges rethink on blanket migration cuts
Queensland Premier David Crisafulli breaks ranks to slam Canberra’s ‘crazy’ migration debate
The conservative Queensland Premier, whose political survival depends on regional seats, has declared blanket migration cuts would be ‘devastating’ to the economy.
By Marcus de Blonk Smith

The temptation to plonk on de Blonk was easily resisted and once again the archive relieved the pond of the burden...

And as for that boiling Rice, raging at the trans clouds? Fergeddit ...

EXCLUSIVE
Pro-trans lobby’s campus capture revealed
Degree of capture: how transgender lobby grades universities
Newly obtained FOI documents reveal how trans lobby group ACON has shaped university courses, targeted dissenting academics and ensured career advancement for ‘allies’.
By Stephen Rice

So much reptile fuss and lathering about an already persecuted minority ...conscripted to serve as this millennium's Salem witches...

If the pond might pause to do an Our Henry, what about the strange case of Tiresias?

...On Mount Cyllene in the Peloponnese,Tiresias came upon a pair of copulating snakes and hit them with his stick, upon which he was transformed into a woman. Afterwards, as told by Phlegon, god of prophecy Apollo informed Tiresias: if she spots copulating snakes and similarly harms them, she will return to her previous form. After seven years as a woman, Tiresias found mating snakes; depending on the myth, she either made sure to leave the snakes alone this time, or, according to Hyginus and Phlegon, trampled them. In both outcomes, Tiresias was released from the sentence and changed back to a man.
According to Eustathius, Tiresias was originally a woman who promised Apollo her favours in exchange for musical lessons, only to reject him afterwards. She was turned by Apollo into a man, then again a woman under unclear circumstances, then a man by the offended Hera, then into a woman by Zeus. She became a man once again after an encounter with the Muses, until finally Aphrodite turned him into a woman again and then into a mouse.

Make of that what you will, but by golly, sex changes were pretty easy in ancient times ...(not to mention the joys of being a rodenta furry).

And the pond has absolutely no idea who would be interested in this sort of gushing by Louise ...

How men and women fell out of love – and created a culture war
Single life is leading to a political radicalisation of the sexes. Is marriage the antidote?
By Louise Perry
Columnist

Sorry Louise reading the lizard Oz is the guaranteed path to political radicalisation. Better life as a hermit in a cave than that ...

Even worse, Geoff was chambering his usual rounds, and carrying on familiar jihads ...

EXCLUSIVE
Grayndler’s had a gutful: PM’s own voters rebel
New polling shows Anthony Albanese’s primary vote has collapsed by almost 14 per cent in his own Grayndler seat, with a left-wing independent now posing a credible challenge.
By Geoff Chambers

No seats safe for the major parties
No sitting federal MP from a major party should feel safe in their seat.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

What a tiresome, tedious, repetitive reptile hack he is ...but after that careful winnowing and wilful handing out of reading assignments, not much was left, and the remnants had the smell of stinking offal ...

Yes, the bromancer went there, and the pond was reminded again of that infallible Pope cartoon ...

Is there a connection between bromancer stupidity and inanity ... and the French riots?

Possibly not - who knows? - and that's the art of the bromancer. 

Raise nonsensical connections, phrase it as question - always be asking questions - then leap into the rhetorical void...

This is a man who routinely deploys intemperate language in pursuit of his ideological obsessions, labelling dissidents as "nuts", and "insane", and so on and so forth ...

How did the pond end up so quickly back in the Australian Daily Zionist News, with another column intent on ignoring the ethnic cleansing currently going down in the West Bank, Gaza and southern Lebanon?

How stupid does the bromancer manage to sound? Take this line at the start of the next gobbet ...

The word Zionist means anyone who supports the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East; in other words, anyone who supports the existence of Israel. 

You could just as easily argue that in later times, "Zionism" has become synonymous with a particularly virulent form of theocratic rule, and exclusionary government, with ethnic cleansing tendencies and a wanton enthusiasm for the revival of a form of apartheid...

Alternatively, the pond prefers the notion that the term came from a form of wild cats...

...yet another possibility is that Zion is derived from that same “on” suffix, but that the beginning of the name comes from a name of an animal, which once lived there, and which the Bible calls (in the plural) tsi’im. We don’t know what this animal is but some speculate these were wild cats. It seems that we will never know for sure. (Haaretz)

Too light a tone for an ongoing genocide? 

Why not just further simple mindedness?

What a relief that portion of the rant returned to the perfidious French, as if rioting hasn't been a way of life since the eighteenth century ...

The pond passed over the bromancer's sudden turning on mad King Donald, as if the Murdochians had done nothing, via Faux Noise, to spread the poison, as if Dame Slap had never donned a MAGA cap and gone out into the streets of New York at night to celebrate the new era of poison and bile ...

At this point in any reptile rant, there has to be a bunny, and as usual it was the greenies.

Come on down greenies, feel the bromancer bile, taste the insults, hearken unto the verbal violence ...

The pond isn't much interested in the bromancer's student days, aligned with the mad monk and his mentor BA Santamaria's devotion to Franco, and the pond has its own problems with the Greens, what with their recent disavowal of Ukraine ...

But to rabbit on about them in this kind of feral,violence, savage, insulting way?

It's really a form of deflection. 

The damage being green has done to the planet is minuscule up agains the depredations of mad King Donald and his minions, urged on by News Corp in its various manifestations - from random murders in the street to rampant looting of the state purse.

And when it comes to Ukraine, has any greenie done the damage of fascist leaning, white nationalist devotee Uncle Leon?

As a side note, the pond found this suggestion by Paul Krugman irresistible ... It’s Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk, Americans did not give him the right to make national security policy

Of course it will never happen, but what a nice idea ...

What greenie has done damage to the international order in the way that Elon and mad King Donald have done?

Pace Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic ... What the U.S. Is Really Doing in Venezuela

Suppressing democracy and extracting resources at the expense of its people

...The political and business relationship now being forged between America and Venezuela is completely different. It’s not a relationship of two equals, obviously. But nor is it exactly an occupation. Some have compared it to the Anglo-Persian oil deal of the early 20th century, or the 1905 treaty that gave the U.S. government control over the customs service of the Dominican Republic, but neither of those analogies is quite apt. Searching for a model or a reference point, I asked Hausmann how he would describe it. “A coalition of two kleptocracies,” he said.

And again ...

...At the end of the day I spent floating through the postapocalyptic landscape of Lake Maracaibo, I met Juan Pablo Guanipa, one of the best-known opposition leaders in Venezuela. Guanipa, who lives in Maracaibo, was released in February after eight months in prison. He was detained on the street the next day, placed under house arrest, and then released again. He is still followed by the Venezuelan security service wherever he goes. Sitting in a room filled with books, we talked about the oil deal, the poor economy, the rising frustrations of Venezuelans.

I asked him whether he found the new union between Americans and Chavistas peculiar. Of course he did, he told me. Most perplexing to him, it seemed, was the absence of Yankee pragmatism, the most basic thing Venezuelans expected of Americans. At the very least, American capitalists should know about the rule of law. “I never thought we would reach a moment when we would have to convince the United States of the obvious—that Venezuela needs a legitimate government, that we need elections, and that we need change.”

And what about the violence done to the English language by Witkoff?

Vladimir Putin, the Humanitarian

Please update your dictionaries accordingly.

By Alexandra Petri

“You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian. You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again.”

— Steve Witkoff, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, addressing Russian President Vladimir Putin

Mark Wednesday, October 21, 2026, as “the day words lost all meaning.” My dictionary just ran outside and threw itself off a bridge. Noah Webster arose from his grave and lurched around, howling and tearing at his hair. Samuel Johnson is bellowing something awful; I can hear it across the Atlantic Ocean. George Orwell is sighing; he has been here before.

I have to imagine that Putin is a little insulted at being so gravely misunderstood. With this single word, humanitarian, our envoy has revealed a stunning ignorance of the Russian president’s life’s work. This is like going to Picasso and praising him as a “representational painter,” or calling the Sahara “the wettest place in the world,” or describing Witkoff’s statement as “unembarrassing.”

I see, perhaps, where the misunderstanding began. Putin referred to Trump as a “humanitarian,” and Witkoff thought to himself: Ah! This word clearly has a different meaning than I have been led to believe! I will have to reconstruct its definition from context clues. Maybe it’s someone with P in his name. Maybe it’s someone who doesn’t think that the United States should be in NATO. Maybe it’s someone who would look really good on horseback. Maybe no words mean anything! Maybe they are just phonemes to be thrown at a wall, at random, in the manner of that great representational painter Jackson Pollock.

One of the conditions of freedom is that words have an understood meaning. If Putin is a humanitarian, then Dolly Parton was an axe murderer. Who else gets to be filed under humanitarian if Putin makes the cut? Stalin? The iceberg that sunk the Titanic? Calling Putin a humanitarian is like calling Hannibal Lecter a humanitarian, although there is more of a case to be made for Hannibal because he does, at least, subsist on people...

Priorities bromancer, priorities! 

Why this ranting at greenies, when there's a world of shame emanating from tax-avoiding News Corp?

Talk about the need to pay a price for all the ugly extremism that Faux Noise has unleashed on the world ...at the minimum, a little tax from a foreign corporation looting the country ...

No doubt the likes of Hannity and Ingraham are rolling around on the floor, convulsed by laughter.

Is there any further irony to be found?

Well the Polonial prattle this weekend began with a header implying a rebuke to the bromancer ...

Let’s not politicise this attack until we know all the facts

The traumatic injuries suffered by Helen Haines prompts fresh scrutiny of political violence in Australia.

By Gerard Henderson

News24 Columnist

The pond's enthusiasm for the notion of not politicising the matter was tempered by the alternative reptile header for the piece:

Alleged attack on MP Helen Haines highlights rising extremism risks across Australia

It's an "alleged attack"?!

The pond didn't have the strength, and will save Polonius, News24 columnist, somehow lost in the hive mind of the lizard Oz, for the morrow ...

Even so, the point stands. 

Confronted by Ted Kacznski back in the day, the pond has no doubt that the bromancer would have rushed in to print to denounce his Unabomber ways as a greenie lust for violence designed to bring about the end of the state of Israel, as a mentally ill man with extreme political motivations, and none of them to do with the bromancer's favourite causes (and what about the violence of enduring a performance by Rusty? Say no more.)

And so to catch up on a surfeit of 'toons ...

The real problem? Delusional religion.

You can see it in the stupidity of the fundamentalist tyke thinking of the bromancer ...shouting at the clouds about extremism, in a way that could only be called irrational, and extremist ...