Thursday, December 25, 2025

Season's greetings ...seasonal sweetenings ...

 

Xmas day, and the reptiles seem to be asleep at the wheel, with holdovers and hangovers all the go...



The pond doesn't expect things to get better later in the day.

The pond hadn't intended to stick around this long into the celebrations, but took a grim interest in how long the current jihad would last, and it's beaten the lettuce by a long way ...

It's had its results already ...

Retribution fears as Australian Muslims see surge in Islamophobic hate since Bondi terror attack




Well played reptiles ...

Surely the trick is not to blame individual Jewish people for the criminal actions of the current government of Israel, nor all Muslims for ratbags inspired by fundamentalist craziness (especially given the actions of one Muslim during the terror attack), nor for that matter lumber the entire US population with blame for providing endless entertainment watching the end times unfold, thanks to mad King "Battleship" Donald.

Stripped of some Bondi elements, the bromancer did attempt this trick ...

Christmas 2025: Amid cloud of senseless slaughter, a time of hope

...All religious traditions seek to answer the same basic questions: Who are we? Why are we here? What meaning does our life have? What does it mean that we relate to other human beings? And what becomes of us?
The truth is that human beings can survive almost anything, if they believe their lives have meaning. If they don’t believe this, there is very little worthwhile that they can achieve at all.
Christmas is the Christian story of the birth of Jesus. It is the moment when eternity announces itself as a human being. It elevates the very conception of human nature by God becoming man.
Far beyond Christianity, Christmas is a feast day that celebrates hope. It’s the happiest feast in the Christian calendar and it’s become a worldwide symbol of joy and good fellowship, for Christians and non-Christians alike. Sometimes I’ve celebrated Christmas in Muslim countries and while this isn’t universal in the Muslim world, there’s been a lusty singing of Christmas carols and decorations and celebration.
The story of Christmas, centred on the birth of a child, is necessarily a story of hope. It celebrates innocence.
In all of human experience there is nothing so innocent as a newly born baby.
In the scheme of the Christian symbol, it also celebrates the paradox of God’s power, power in helplessness, strength in vulnerability, hope in the smallest and humblest.
A new baby promises renewal of the community, splendour in the life ahead, though that life will doubtless have its share of suffering and pain. When Mary first took the child Jesus to the temple, she was told he would suffer and that as his mother, “a sword shall pierce your soul too”.
Yet at the moment we receive the new infant, all future difficulty is put aside, and the overwhelming reaction is just joy and wonder at the miracle of birth.

See how he tried the trick, though it's insulting and demeaning in that special condescending bromancer way - why, they're almost Xian, what with their lusty singing of Xmas carols and decorations and celebration.

The pond would have been more impressed if he'd done some lusty chanting of Muslim prayers ... what with him being so ecumenical and all ...

Never mind, time to invite the bromancer to join in a dinkum seasonal celebration ...

The Greek writer, Lucian of Samosata (c. 125-180 CE), in his dialogue, Saturnalia, relates a conversation between the god Cronus (ie. Saturn) and his priest, in which he declares that people should enjoy themselves during his festival:

Mine is a limited monarchy, you see. To begin with, it only lasts a week; that over, I am a private person, just a man in the street. Secondly, during my week the serious is barred; no business allowed. Drinking and being drunk, noise and games and dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping of tremulous hands, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water,–such are the functions over which I preside. But the great things, wealth and gold and such, Zeus distributes as he will. (Lucian, Saturnalia II) (More Saturnalia here)

Corked faces? Could you use coal? That'd be something the lizards of Oz could get behind ...

As the pond finds itself here, enough already with matters such as the Epstein files ... what with King Donald's mob now taking over the DoJ's X account ...

Instead the pond wanted to share a few opportunities missed by the lizards of Oz, all the more poignant because they emanated from their kissing cousins at the WSJ ...

There was this profile of Witkoff ...



And so, endlessly on, and as well as all that, there was this profile of a vision splendid...



Talk about a vision to chill the soul, should such a thing exist in King Donald's world ...

And so endlessly on, and still bored by Xmas? Bored with family and/or friends? 

Bored by tedious Xmas games, songs, parties and bromancer singalongs?

The New Yorker arranged a delightful alternative form of boredom...though why they offered this as respite from the Xmas season must remain a deep mystery...

Yes, Boss
Peter Navarro, a tariff cheerleader, established a template of performative sycophancy for Trump Administration officials. Now that this is everyone's top priority, where does that leave him? Ian Parker on a lonely climb to power ...
Peter Navarro, Trump’s Ultimate Yes-Man (*archive link)

It's an exhaustive, and exhausting to read, slam dunk of a profile, and blessed with a portrait by the New Yorker's favourite cover artist ...




(Barry Blitt featured in that Propaganda film the pond featured recently linked to and is also on YouTube here)

It's impossible to do a modest selection of the slams, because there are so many of them ...

...many accounts, Navarro’s among them, tell of years of large and small humiliations. He was kept out of key meetings, including during the pandemic, when he wasn’t put on the main government task force; his calls weren’t returned; nobody wanted his memos, including one in which he misidentified which Administration official had written a hostile and anonymous Times op-ed. Olivia Troye, an adviser to Vice-President Mike Pence, has said that she had standing orders to take such memos out of Navarro’s hands, shred them, “and make sure he never stepped foot” in the Vice-President’s office. Navarro once grabbed Troye’s wrist to try to wrestle back some of his documents. (Navarro told me that Troye’s story was “utter bullshit.”) He became known as a West Wing lurker, and as someone likely to make a scene in a corridor—by, say, yelling at the head of the F.D.A. about the virtues of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment. Navarro has recalled, “I’d be sitting in the Oval or the Roosevelt Room fighting just about everybody else. And it was uncanny.”
Last July, in Milwaukee, he had a few hours of simple, happy fawning. It didn’t last. A few months later, as Navarro was upending the world economy, Musk called him “truly a moron.” And, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick once sneaked into the Oval Office, at a time when Navarro was known to have an appointment elsewhere, to persuade the President to put a ninety-day pause on most tariffs, and to type out a Truth Social announcement of the pause while they waited. (Navarro, by keeping to his schedule that day, added more than four trillion dollars to the S. & P. 500’s total market capitalization.)

Simple, happy fawning?

Even in the personal notes there were bon mots ...

...On July 17, 2024, just after midnight, Navarro was released from the prison camp in Miami. Later that day, he flew to Milwaukee, to make his second-ever speech at a political party’s national convention.
A woman named Bonnie Brenner flew with him. They were newly engaged. Brenner, who is in her early sixties, worked for decades as an assistant to senior banking executives. She and Navarro had met in the corridor of their apartment building, in Washington, D.C., not long after the January 6th riot. Navarro had then just finalized his divorce from Leslie LeBon, who had added a note to her website: “For all emails received regarding the Trump Administration, we will forward your email address to a politician of our choice and make a donation to them in your name.” In the divorce settlement, Navarro, who had orchestrated the Administration’s “buy American” rhetoric, got the Lexus.

Not to mention the endless backflips amidst the fawning ...

...Navarro, long rejected and unelected, made no attempt to set professorial boundaries in his new advisory role. He threw himself into every campaign argument. Trump hadn’t hired a kooky, maverick academic who happened to agree with him on tariffs, as has often been suggested. Rather, he’d found someone with no compunctions about performing agreement. Navarro, in his ethnic scapegoating, quickness to anger, and difficulty with noncompliant women, may have been temperamentally aligned with the MAGA movement he was joining. But, aside from the topic of Chinese black hearts, almost nothing that Navarro has said or written in support of Trump reflects views that he’d consistently articulated beforehand.
Unlike many people in the Administration, Navarro was prepared to take Trump’s words literally—when the President said he wanted to tear up NAFTA overnight, say, or to overturn the 2020 election. And Navarro has had the agility to follow, in a synchronized swerve, Trump’s changing message on any issue, from the value of the COVID vaccine to the finality of the Liberation Day tariff rates. (Navarro: “This is not a negotiation.” Trump: “The tariffs give us great power to negotiate.” Navarro: “The Boss is going to be chief negotiator.”) Navarro came to define himself against those around Trump who—lacking the rigor of his unsqueamish servitude—sometimes pursued strategies of delay and diplomacy. Navarro, using language from military aviation, told me that in the first Administration “there were simply too many bogies inside the perimeter” to “swiftly move the Trump agenda.” He has identified these obstacles as a “confederacy of globalists, Never Trump Republicans, wild-eyed Freedom Caucus nut jobs, and self-absorbed Wall Street transactionalists,” and he has taken the time to insult many of them individually, including John Bolton, Gary Cohn, Stephanie Grisham, John Kelly, Jared Kushner, Mark Meadows, Don McGahn, H. R. McMaster, Steve Mnuchin, Mick Mulvaney, Brad Parscale, Mike Pence, Rob Porter, Wilbur Ross, and Rex Tillerson. (He speaks warmly of Miller and Bannon, and had a soft spot for Anthony Scaramucci, because he also went to Tufts.)

By the end of the read - for those who make it - the pond guarantees that, after a quick, cleansing cold shower, even those who just did superficial skinny dip will feel the urgent need to head back to have a chat with family and/or friends ...

Still want more weirdness before returning to the Xmas bosom?

Try Ali Breland in The Atlantic ...

Charlie Kirk’s Movement Is at War With Itself
Turning Point USA’s annual convention turned into a four-day referendum over Nick Fuentes.

Inter alia...

...As I’ve previously written, the GOP’s old guard has been late to recognize just how much influence Fuentes has over young swaths of the party. Even at AmericaFest, some denial still lingered. On some level, that instinct was correct. Many people seemed unconcerned with fights over right-wing policy and ideology. “I had no idea there was friction,” Daniel Fisher, an attendee in his 30s from Pennsylvania, told me about the fight over Fuentes. “I’m not too well aware of what’s actually going on currently in the Republican political realm.” Many people seemed content to watch live versions of The Daily Wire and other conservative shows that were being taped in the main hall. When I spoke with the Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet this afternoon, he conceded that “there was family business being handled onstage.” He refused to directly talk about Fuentes, and directed me to a straw poll conducted by the organization. He emphasized that the results—AmericaFest attendees agree that Israel is the U.S.’s top ally—are evidence of unity within TPUSA.
But even the young people I spoke with who were opposed to Fuentes told me that he and his supporters are a serious problem for the future of the right. The Groypers have “taken over all of the TPUSA chapters in central California,” Adrian Ayub, a 28-year-old running for a spot in California’s state assembly, told me. I tracked down leaders of several TPUSA chapters in California who were at AmericaFest, and they agreed that Fuentes is a problem. Dylan Frazin, the vice president of the Cal State Fullerton TPUSA, told me that he was a “free-market capitalist” and that he was sick of ascendant “National Socialists” on the right. “I know people that have direct ties to Nick Fuentes that have been showing up to Turning Point meetings at other chapters in the California area,” Frazin said.
Young anti-Fuentes attendees I spoke with also repeated the same sentiment about him to me: The Boomers don’t get how much of a problem he is for the future of the right. “It’s true the Groypers are here,” Dimas Guaico, a 29-year-old advocate with Generation Zion, told me. “I feel like a lot of the leadership here, including TPUSA leadership, haven’t done enough to call Groypers out. “Now I feel like it’s too late.”
Even with its hundreds of chapters and get-out-the-vote efforts, TPUSA has always been a fundamentally online organization. Kirk was so successful in building TPUSA into a conservative juggernaut in part because he was better at marshaling the internet than other establishment groups. His famous “Prove Me Wrong” events at colleges, for example, were perhaps more about producing viral clips for the internet than they were about showing up at any specific college. But the same dynamic now also helps illustrate why TPUSA is beset by infighting. To generate relevancy and influence, social-media algorithms demand spectacle, conflict, and edginess. Fuentes is a master of all three. He doesn’t have the money or resources TPUSA does, but you don’t need those things to go viral or win hearts and minds online. And he didn’t need to physically be at AmericaFest 2025 to be inside everyone’s heads.

Still bored, still not ready to rejoin the party?

Try Suzanne Schneider's L'Afffair Carlson in the NYRB ...

Concern over antisemitism on the right has split the conservative world in two—and GOP gatekeepers have lost the ability to contain it. (*archive link)

...On November 5 the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, convened an uncomfortable meeting. “I made a mistake, and I let you down,” he told a hall full of the conservative think tank’s staff and fellows in a video leaked to The Washington Free Beacon. A week earlier Roberts had recorded a staunch defense of Tucker Carlson, whose recent interview with Nick Fuentes, the stridently racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic online personality, had split the conservative world in two.
Fuentes, a white nationalist, peppers his praise for Hitler with denunciations of the state of Israel and its American lobbyists. Carlson, for his part, was careful to stop short of blaming the Jews for Israel’s conduct during the interview with Fuentes and distances himself from the overtly fascist right. (“I’m totally anti-Nazi,” he told the podcaster Theo Von last week.) But over the past several years he has made his own rogue forays into openly antisemitic territory: promoting “replacement theory,” accusing George Soros of waging a “demographic war on the West,” and describing the Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” The interview with Carlson was tame by Fuentes’s standards, but he still found an opportunity to accuse “organized Jewry” of undermining American social cohesion. Carlson’s willingness to grant the interview, and his friendly, admiring tone, proved too much for many movement conservatives to stomach.

It's a long march, requiring a triumph of the will, to get to the end...

...the resurgence of open antisemitism on the right has many sources of fuel, from an unresponsive political system that leaves Americans distrustful of elites and vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking, to the live-streamed genocide committed in the name of the Jewish people. But in a prodigious twist of irony, the post-liberal thinker who has perhaps done more than any other to reestablish the intellectual legitimacy of white, Christian nationalism is the Israeli-American founder of the National Conservatism movement, Yoram Hazony. It was telling that, at the November 5 meeting, Roberts announced that he had called on Hazony, his “closest Jewish friend in the world,” to guide him through his personal and professional crisis.
Hazony, whose NatCon conferences have brought together hundreds of conservative intellectuals, policy wonks, and politicians, including Brexiteer Nigel Farage, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and a who’s who of the institutional side of the MAGA movement—from J.D. Vance to Tulsi Gabbard, Russell Vought, Sebastian Gorka, Josh Hawley, Steve Bannon, Patrick Deneen, and Roberts himself—has labored to construct a reputable theoretical scaffolding for ethnonationalism since the populist upsurge of 2016. His 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism presents a view of the nation that runs dangerously parallel to those that understand American Jews as a foreign pathogen within the body politic. The ideal political community, he posits, emerges naturally out of membership in families and tribes—from common history, culture, language, or religion. (The state of Israel is his template for his illiberal, nationalist vision of democracy.) All of this makes the idea of a multiethnic, multiracial democracy quixotic if not altogether farcical: “What is needed for the establishment of a stable and free state is a majority nation whose cultural dominance is plain and unquestioned, and against which resistance appears to be futile.”
Perhaps nowhere comports so poorly with Hazony’s idea of the nation as the United States, where the separation of church and state and the rejection of ethnicity as the basis of political belonging have allowed Jews and other minorities to flourish. But for Hazony “the United States is held together” by something quite different: “the bonds of mutual loyalty that unite the American nation, an English-speaking nation whose constitutional and religious traditions were originally rooted in the Bible, Protestantism, republicanism, and the common law of England.” To put it in Fuentes’s cruder idiom, the US will cease to be America “if it loses its white demographic core and if it loses faith in Jesus Christ.”
The two men think similarly not only about the US but about Israel. Both of their politics tend toward the inevitable conclusion that the Jewish state is the only place where Jews can genuinely participate in a national polity. In his 2022 book Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Hazony argues that public institutions in the United States should be organized around Christian principles, suggestively citing a conversation with the neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol, who allegedly told him that, “as a matter of political theory, he thought only Christians should be able to vote in a Christian majority nation such as America; and that, by the same principle, only Jews should be able to vote in Israel.” This statement, presented by Hazony without comment, is not so far from Fuentes’s argument that, as he reportedly told Alex Jones in 2021, Jews have “no place in Western civilization.” When it comes to Hazony himself, Fuentes seems to have taken these ideas to their logical conclusions, rejecting both Hazony’s American identity and the premise, central to Hazony’s thought, that there is such a thing as a “Judeo-Christian” tradition.
Whatever their personal antipathy for one another, Hazony and Fuentes are similarly aligned in seeing no way to separate Judaism from Zionism, arguing that the latter expresses the former’s true nature; where they differ is in how they assess the moral status of that project. In his interview with Carlson, Fuentes rejected the idea that “Israel has nothing to do with Jewishness, Jewish identity, the Jewish religion,” arguing that “the blood-and-soil nationalism of Israel, it stems from this ethno-religion which is Judaism.” After years of insisting that there is no daylight between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the right finds itself facing a new kind of influencer who is willing to take the package deal.6
For his part, Hazony seems loath to connect the dots between the ideology he has helped legitimate and the resurgence of antisemitism on the American right. In a recent interview with The New York Times’s Ross Douthat, he claimed that “Trump turns out to have probably the most pro-Jewish administration that there’s ever been.” On the day his comments were published, The Washington Post reported that the US Coast Guard would no longer classify swastikas and nooses as symbols of hate. (The policy was later reversed on account of the uproar it prompted.) To the extent that Hazony acknowledges an uptick in antisemitism on the right, his proposed solution is to send young conservatives on chaperoned trips to Israel. He may find that getting them to appreciate the wonders of Jewish life over there is easier than getting them to Shabbat dinner.

Or perhaps they could share a feast in Gaza...

Still wanting a distraction?

Off to the LRB then ...


The​ language and conduct of Israel’s unceasing war against Gaza suggests that there is something more than the rational interests of a nation-state at play. The sheer extent of the carnage hints at a pleasure in destruction, not to speak of a drive towards absolute victory which is bound to be self-defeating. However shattered the force of Hamas, however long it takes the Palestinians to re-enter the struggle, the actions of Israel will surely guarantee the permanence of this war. In this context, Trump’s claim in October to have personally resolved a ‘3000-year’ conflict acquires another layer of irony. It is hard not to see his proposal earlier this year as madness: a ‘riviera’ in northern Gaza with international, above all US, protection, and the ever dwindling fragments of the rest of the Strip to remain as ruins into the mists of time. ‘There are no metaphors in Gaza,’ the Palestinian journalist Abdullah Hany Daher writes. ‘There is only what is gone and what remains.’
The proposal is a parody in miniature of the two-state solution to which it also pays lip service. Reference to a potential state for Palestine was hedged in with conditions and, with considerable reluctance on the part of Netanyahu, was only included in the final hour. What it offers is two utterly unequal peoples up close and personal, divided by an ever shifting, Israeli-imposed, land-grabbing Yellow Line, which is rapidly hardening into a partition of Gaza in all but name. On 7 December, Israel’s army chief, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, called the line – which gives Israel control over 58 per cent of the territory – a ‘new border’. Israel appears to want two things: to achieve a total victory and to guarantee that the war with the Palestinians never ends. Not all but a significant majority of Israeli Jews support the war. It seems fair to ask: what is Israel thinking of?
In a cabinet meeting convened on 7 October 2024 to mark the first anniversary of the Hamas attack, Netanyahu called for the war to be renamed War of Resurrection or War of Revival. Operation Iron Sword, as it had been called until then, downgraded the cause. It was more suited to an incursion than to the full-scale military campaign unleashed in response to Hamas’s onslaught. Some ministers objected to the link with the 1948 War of Independence, or Nakba, to use the Palestinians’ term, a link made explicitly by Netanyahu. The war, they argued, was not a battle for the creation of the nation-state, even if it was deemed to be an existential fight for its survival. For Netanyahu, however, revival was of the essence: ‘We rose from the terrible disaster of 7 October. We rose with momentum to our feet and we returned war to our enemies. We established the national revival enterprise in the Land of Israel, in our strong and prosperous state. The same applies to the entire campaign: this is the war of revival for our people, a direct continuation of the War of Independence.’
If ‘revival’ is presented here as a smart business deal with a new shot of investment, the idea of ‘returning’ war to the enemy can be read in more than one way. Is Israel raining war down on the ‘aggressor’, no holds barred, or is violence being dispatched back to where it came from – ‘returned’ – in so far as Israel always presents violence as the responsibility of everyone apart from itself? Either way, Israel is rising from the ashes as a warrior state. In the eyes of Netanyahu’s critics, however, the war merited no new, grandiose title since the Hamas attack that provoked it was only made possible by criminal negligence on his part. Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition, took to Twitter/X to address the prime minister: ‘You can change as many names as you want; you will not change the fact that on your watch the most terrible disaster since the establishment of the country happened to the people of Israel. This government is not the government of revival, it is the government of guilt.’

It's another very long walk to the end, and a bitter end it is too ...

...against all evidence, Israel persistently denies the deliberate targeting of civilians. In the interview, Netanyahu took this as the moral divide between the conduct of the IDF and the ‘terrorism’ of the PLO. But carefully collated army testimony cites a tolerated ratio of one hundred civilians dead for every senior Hamas commander, up to twenty civilians for low-ranking personnel. This is one of the few statistics to emerge from Israel which does not provide estimates of the actual numbers of the dead: hundreds of thousands if we count those still buried beneath the rubble. In the words of the former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy, writing on the so-called ‘ceasefire’, ‘they have smashed the whole place up and can kill as they please.’ Consider one example out of so many: the case of Jumaa and Fadi Abu Assi, brothers aged nine and ten, killed in the town of Bani Suheila by a drone attack on 29 November (the agreed first date of the ceasefire was 10 October). They had been picked out as legitimate targets when they approached the Yellow Line in search of firewood.
What, exactly, is on offer? To ‘kill as they please’, or to become one of those people – Jews – who, in this sinister account, are there to be killed. In Netanyahu’s twisted vision, the Jews are always on the verge of catastrophe. Either you become a killer or you die. One thing seems certain. If you accept these terms, there will never be enough corpses to go around.
One more strand takes us back to Netanyahu’s Knesset speech of 7 October 2004 and what has unfolded since. When Netanyahu was a child, his father, the distinguished Jewish scholar Benzion Netanyahu, was writing his biography of the 15th-century sage Don Isaac Abravanel, who offered a messianic vision to save the world. The book was published in 1953, thanks to the painstaking efforts of Benzion’s wife, Tzila, who had deciphered and transcribed his handwritten manuscript. Reverence towards Abravanel passed down through the generations, seeping into the family atmosphere.
Following the expulsion from Spain, Abravanel fervently believed, there would be no redemption, no safe haven or national home for the Jews, without a divine force that would arise at the climax of an apocalyptic catastrophe. According to Avner Ben-Zaken, an Israeli historian of science, Abravanel has attracted followers among political philosophers and Hebraists from the beginning of the modern era to the present day. Fearful for the future, they shared a need and longing for political stability, which could only be achieved by insisting on a political threat, ‘even’, in Ben-Zaken’s words, ‘one that may be fictitious’. Abravanel was anticipating one of the most dangerous components of modern Israeli statehood as it would come to be personified by Netanyahu. Israel is always on the brink of disaster, as indeed are all the Jews. It will take catastrophe and a war of resurrection to save them. What should be aimed for is a ‘restrained catastrophe’, to be managed as a perpetual state of war which will render any definitive settlement impossible. Never ending the conflict with the enemy will act as an ‘adhesive’ to maintain the political unity of the Jews. It is a strategy fraught with risk – a breakdown of all restraint and a slide into new catastrophe. In 2015, when Ben-Zaken wrote his essay, no one was yet talking about genocide.
Netanyahu’s abiding fear is not that peace can never be achieved but that it might be. He is the Israeli leader who has most fully actualised Abravanel’s age-old dream. On his way to address Congress in March 2015, Netanyahu stopped off to visit his father’s grave and then released a press statement: ‘My father was never afraid to go out into the storm’ – the exact image used by Benzion Netanyahu to describe Abravanel. Legend has it that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, once told Netanyahu that he would be the last prime minister, the one destined to transfer the leadership to the Messiah. Meanwhile, bodies trailing behind him, he still seems to believe he can sweet-talk his way to the stars.

Even the Nine rags managed to offer something of interest on Xmas day, even if it was just a reprint of a WaPo outing ...

Sure it was a week old, sure WaPo had run it back on 16th December, safely stored in the archive, but at least they tried ... at least they reheated the chook with style, because nobody can do conspiracies, feuds and nonsense like Candace ...

And so to celebrate the season with TT ...


Splendid stuff ...King Donald and his minions have really nailed the meaning of Xmas ... aided and abetted by Bari Weiss, working hard to give lesbians a bad name ...

In the seasonal bromancer, lizard Oz, hive mind spirit ... quick, lock up the furriners ...

‘The holy family is in hiding’: nativity scenes at US churches push back on ICE



Meanwhile, hasn't this two month old John Oliver outing aged remarkably well? Come on down 
Bari, what a name you've made for yourself (not to mention the lesbianism you've traded off on while selling down the river)



Posted by at 5 comments:

Wednesday, December 24, 2025

Nil withdrawal symptoms; nil by mouth, ear or eye ...

 

Still not missing saurian studies, still not having withdrawal symptoms ...



The one exception that confirmed the many reasons for taking a holyday break ...




Still up on Xmas Eve? 

Is the lizard Oz editorialist running out of gas? 

Is there no coal to hand to help with the steaming, the frothing and the bubbling?

Desperate for ideas for last minute Xmas gifts? 

Do you have a reptile handy who would treasure a forever gift?



To which the infallible Pope provided a note this Xmas Eve ...



Meanwhile, the Streisand effect has kicked in, in a bigly way ...

Those following the machinations of Bari Weiss at CBS will have already seen the leaked video.

The pond is pleased to have discovered a transcript at Reddit. 

The pond can't vouch for its accuracy, but whatever ... it's still part of the Streisand effect...

Video Audio Transcription 60 Minutes: Inside CECOT 

Reporter: You may recall earlier this year, when the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan men to El Salvador, a country most had no connection to. The White House claimed the men were terrorists, part of a violent gang, and invoked a centuries-old wartime power, saying it allowed them to deport some men immediately, without due process, an unusual strategy that sparked an ongoing legal battle. Tonight, you'll hear from some of those men. They describe torture, sexual and physical abuse inside CECOT, one of El Salvador's harshest prisons, where they say they endured four months of hell. 

Reporter: It began as soon as the planes landed. The deportees thought they were headed back to Venezuela, but then saw hundreds of Salvadoran police waiting for them on the tarmac. Shackled, they were paraded in front of cameras, pushed onto buses, and delivered to CECOT, El Salvador's notorious maximum-security prison. 

Luis Muñoz Pinto: When we got there, the CECOT director was talking to us. First thing he told us was that we would never see the light of day or night again. He said, "Welcome to hell. I'll make sure you never leave." 

Reporter: Did you think you were going to die there? 

Luis Muñoz Pinto: We thought we were already the living dead, honestly. 

Reporter: We met Luis Muñoz Pinto in Colombia. He was a college student in repressive Venezuela and hoped to seek asylum in the United States. In 2024, he says he waited in Mexico until his scheduled appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in California. During that interview... 

Luis Muñoz Pinto: They just looked at me and told me I was a danger to society. 

Reporter: You have no criminal record. 

Luis Muñoz Pinto: I don't even—I never even got a traffic ticket. 

Reporter: Nevertheless, he was detained by Customs. He says he spent six months locked up in the U.S. waiting for a decision on his asylum case when he was deported. One of 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT between March and April. Inside, he says their hands and feet were tied, forced to their knees, their heads were shaved. 

Luis Muñoz Pinto: It was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn't take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves. When you get there, you already know you're in hell. You don't need anyone else to tell you. 

Reporter: He says the guards began savagely beating them with their fists and batons. Tell me about what they did to you personally. 

Luis Muñoz Pinto: Four guards grabbed me, and they beat me until I bled, to the point of agony. They knocked our faces against the wall; that was when they broke one of my teeth. 

Reporter: CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center, was built in 2022 as a key part of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's sweeping anti-gang crackdown. The massive prison, designed to hold 40,000 inmates, and its harsh reputation, are a point of pride for Bukele, who regularly allows social media influencers to tour it. 

Influencer: As you can see, we're literally in the middle of the desert. 

Reporter: Guards show off cramped cells where metal bunks are stacked four high. There are no mattresses or sheets. Inmates said they had no access to the outdoors and no contact with relatives. International observers warned CECOT was violating the UN standard for minimum treatment of prisoners. And two years ago, during the Biden administration, the U.S. State Department cited "... torture... and life-threatening prison conditions..." in its report on El Salvador. But this year, during a meeting with President Bukele at the White House, President Trump expressed admiration for El Salvador's prison system. 

Donald Trump: They're great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don't play games. 

Reporter: In March, the U.S. struck a deal to pay El Salvador $4.7 million to house Venezuelan deportees at CECOT.

White House Spokesperson: These are heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators, who have no right to be in this country, and they must be held accountable. 

Reporter: The U.S. government said these people are the worst of the worst. 

Juan Pappier: These people are migrants. And the sad reality is that the U.S. government tried to make an example out of them. They sent them to a place where they were likely to be tortured, to send migrants across Latin America the message that they should not come to the United States. 

Reporter: Juan Pappier is a deputy director at the nonprofit Human Rights Watch. In an 81-page report released in November, the organization concluded there was "... systematic torture and other abuses..." at CECOT and that "... at least 48.8 percent..." of the Venezuelans the U.S. sent there "... had no criminal record." "... Only 8 (3.1 percent) had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense." How do you know they weren't gang members? 

Juan Pappier: We cross-referenced federal databases, databases in all 50 states in the United States, and also obtained criminal records in Venezuela and in other countries where these people lived. And the information we obtained in the United States is based on data provided by ICE. 

Reporter: So, ICE's own records said... 

Juan Pappier: ICE's own records say that only 3% had been sentenced for a violent or potentially violent crime. 

Reporter: 60 Minutes reviewed the available ICE data. It confirms the findings of Human Rights Watch. It shows 70 men had pending criminal charges in the U.S., which could include immigration violations. We don't know because the Department of Homeland Security has never released a complete list of the names or criminal histories of the men it sent to CECOT. Rapid deportations have been a key part of the Trump administration's immigration overhaul. The administration considers anyone who crosses the border illegally to be a criminal. Illegal crossings are now at a historic low. But some immigration attorneys say the administration has used flawed criteria to justify deportation.

 Luis Muñoz Pinto: I have some tattoos. None of them have anything to do with any criminal group. I explained to them, saying that I didn't belong to any gang, to which the agent responded, "But you are Venezuelan." 

Reporter: 60 Minutes reviewed this document agents used to assess Venezuelans. A person with eight points was designated as a Tren de Aragua gang member and deportable. Tattoos an immigration officer suspected of being gang-related earned four points. Criminologists who study gangs say tattoos are not a reliable way to identify Venezuelan gang members because, unlike some Central American gangs such as MS-13, Tren de Aragua does not use tattoos to signal membership. 

Reporter: Venezuelan national William Lozada Sanchez was also deported to CECOT. He told us the guards there also accused Venezuelans with tattoos of being gang members. He detailed months of abuse and being forced into stress positions. So you had to be on your knees for 24 hours? 

William Lozada Sanchez: Yes, because they put a guard there to watch us so that we wouldn't move. 

Reporter: What would happen if you couldn't make it? 

William Lozada Sanchez: They'd take us to "the island." 

Reporter: What's "the island"? 

William Lozada Sanchez: The island is a little room where there's no light, no ventilation, nothing. It's a cell for punishment where you can't see your hand in front of your face. After they locked us in, they came to beat us every half hour. And they pounded on the door with their sticks to traumatize us while we were in there. 

Luis Muñoz Pinto: The torture was never-ending. They would take you there and beat you for hours and leave you locked in there for days. 

Reporter: Some of the deportees described being sexually assaulted by the guards. They were hitting your private parts?

Luis Muñoz Pinto: Yes. 

Reporter: With a baton? 

Luis Muñoz Pinto: No, they touched them with their hands. 

Reporter: And they did that to multiple people? 

Luis Muñoz Pinto: To most of us. 

Reporter: The men say they grew weaker by the day. They claim the prison lights were left on 24 hours a day, making it difficult to sleep, and that food and medicine were often withheld. Did you have access to clean water? 

Luis Muñoz Pinto: They never gave us access to clean water. The same water from our baths and toilets was the same water that we had to drink and survive on. If we had serious injuries, when the doctors examined us, they told us that drinking water would heal it. 

Reporter: So they're telling the injured prisoners to drink water, and the water's filthy. Luis Muñoz Pinto: Super filthy. The sicker and more injured we were, the better it was for them. 

Reporter: In late March, about 10 days after the first U.S. deportees arrived, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem toured the prison. Did they speak to anybody—any of the prisoners? 

Luis Muñoz Pinto: Never. Not with any of the detainees. They never spoke to us. We only saw the cameras. 

Reporter: At some point, Secretary Noem went to another area of the prison to record this video. 

Kristi Noem: I want to thank El Salvador and their president for their partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here to incarcerate them and have consequences. 

Reporter: The men standing behind her, heavily tattooed, who are those men? Do we know? 

Juan Pappier: We know that those men in her video are not Venezuelans. They are Salvadorans, probably accused of being gang leaders, probably people who have been in jail for many, many years in El Salvador. 

Reporter: Human Rights Watch was able to confirm that with the help of this intrepid team of students at UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center. 

Student: All the visible men have either an "MS" on their chest, or "13," or an "ES" for El Salvador, and all those gangs are associated with El Salvador. Not the Venezuelans. 

Reporter: To help verify the deportees' stories for Human Rights Watch, the team of students combed through open-source data for weeks. Students are trained in advanced techniques and follow strict international standards for obtaining digital evidence that can be used in courts. Analyzing satellite imagery, they mapped the prison and identified the building where the Venezuelans were held. And remember all those influencers who filmed inside CECOT? One toured an isolation cell. 

Influencer: These are the rooms of solitary confinement. And they get absolutely nothing to use to sleep or to rest. Just pure concrete. 

Reporter: A show-and-tell of the armory confirmed CECOT had the weapons the Venezuelans say guards used on them. 

Student: What we did see in these videos was the use of the T-batons on prisoners. Additionally, we also saw the use of painful body positions. They were showing that off in the video, and they do that sort of—a practice. Reporter: But it was this interview with the prison warden that proved to be most helpful. 

Warden: The light system is 24 hours a day. 

Student: One of the questions that we had was, "Are the lights on 24/7?" He said, "Yes, they are." So he's talking about how hot it can get in the prison. So there's this sort of pride around the poor conditions and around the suffering. 

Reporter: Using extreme temperatures or light to disorient inmates is also prohibited under UN standards. 

Alexa Koenig: I think one of the things that the work of this team has really shown is that a lot of these stories can be believed. If you can bring that together with the physical evidence, I think you have the strongest possible case for accountability, whether it's in a court of public opinion or at some point in a court of law. 

Reporter: The Department of Homeland Security declined our request for an interview and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador. The government there did not respond to our request. 

Reporter: In July, after four months, the 252 Venezuelan men were finally released from CECOT and sent back to Caracas in exchange for 10 Americans that had been imprisoned in Venezuela. The Trump administration has arranged more deals, some valued at millions of dollars, to offload U.S. deportees to other so-called third countries, nations to which they have no connection. Among them, war-torn South Sudan and Uganda, which have well-documented histories of torturing prisoners.

And after that, have a 'toon to celebrate ...



Meanwhile, followers of the far right in the disunited states will have been delighted by the civil war that erupted at the latest karnival konvention of extreme far right klowns ...

Per Crikey, and Charlie Lewis (sorry, paywall) ...


Harpers provided a lengthy preamble to the current feuding, which revolves in part around Israel ...

Letter from Washington
Turning Point
How the GOP consensus on Israel cracked
by Andrew Cockburn

A couple of teaser trailers ...




Being a war, it's impossible to keep up with all the fronts, all the latest twists and turns ...

Megyn Kelly Escalates Feud with Bari Weiss: 'More Truth Coming'.

Conservative radio host Megyn Kelly claimed there is “more truth coming” as she continues to rally against CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss.
Weiss has been heavily criticized by Kelly for publishing Shapiro’s speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in full, titled “Only Cowards Tolerate Conspiracy Theorists”, on her news site, The Free Press. Kelly has, in turn, tried to flip the “coward” label back onto Weiss.
“I was reliably informed this week that it is cowardly not to call out your friends with the unvarnished truth about their defects. So my days of being a polite friend (to her) are over. And there’s more truth coming,” Kelly said of Weiss in a post on X Tuesday.

"Conservative" is, of course, a misnomer ... though perhaps "barking mad loon" might have failed an editorial pub test.

And so on in relation to the current frontlines of the war, as complex and as rapidly shifting as Vlad the sociopath's efforts in Ukraine (watch out Russian generals!) ...MAGA Is Becoming a Leaderless 
Cult ...

...The president’s monomania has helped give him unprecedented control over the present state of his party. Over the last decade, it gradually dawned on Republicans that there were no circumstances in which Trump would tolerate dissent, precisely because there was no standard for Republican policy or practice he cared about beyond “are they with Trump or not?” Quickly or gradually, they all either left or fell in line.
But that monomania is a double-edged sword. The exact traits that have given Trump such historic control over the movement’s present are also now leaving Trump superfluous to the movement’s future. He can’t weigh in on questions about what comes after him because it’s not clear he’s even capable of grasping the concept of an “after.” “MAGA was my idea,” Trump said last month. “MAGA was nobody else’s idea.” And what it may turn into later doesn’t seem to be any of his concern.

...but back again for another trailer featuring the pre-history of neo-Nazis, anti-Semitism, Israel and the whole damn thing....




Don't expect to read anything of this in the lizard Oz hive mind, relentlessly devoted to its current jihad ...

And lastly for a little holyday comedy to add to the King Donald battleships, and assorted other brand name opportunities ...Trump-Class Battleships Are the Navy's Trump Ballroom (paywall)

It turns out that King Donald is a reincarnation of Bob Ellis.

Those who dimly remember Bob will recall his cavalier way with statistics and data, and the way he thought he'd conclusively proven a point by making up a percentage (at least 95.5% of whatever figures he used were wrong; at least 80% of the time he'd deliver his data with absolute certainty, and allow no quibbles. 10.5% of the time he'd adjust his figures by a percentage point or two).

It turns out that King Donald has a lot of Bob in him ...

Marie-Rose Sheinerman provided definitive proof in The Atlantic that Bob has returned to earth and lives inside King Donald's head ...


President Donald Trump likes to use a big number to anchor his point, especially when he wanders off on a tangent. Often it seems that a specific figure is on the tip of his tongue.
At this year’s ceremonial turkey pardon, Trump praised a farmer from Wayne County, North Carolina, for raising two “record-setting” birds, but then pivoted to his own electoral margin of victory: “I won that county by 92 percent.” (In fact, he won it by 16 percentage points.) At a McDonald’s corporate event last month, Trump claimed that the United States controls 92 percent of the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico (the Gulf of America, as he calls it). It’s really about 46 percent. Trump won the veterans’ vote, he said on Veterans Day, with “about 92 percent or something,” and in July, he said he won farmers—well, “by 92 percent.” (More accurate estimates of the portion of the electorate he won would be 65 percent of veterans and 78 percent of voters in farming counties, according to exit polls and election data.)
His fixation on the number between 91 and 93 has been a feature for a while. In April, Trump claimed that egg prices had fallen by 92 percent. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics said 12.7 percent.) And at a rally shortly before last November’s election, while railing against journalists and the media, he allowed that “not all of them” are “sick people.” Just “about 92 percent.” That one, admittedly, is difficult to fact-check.
I came upon this curious pattern in the course of tracking down the basis for a far more serious claim the president has made repeatedly as part of his justification for the U.S. military buildup near Venezuela. More than two dozen strikes on small boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed more than 100 people since September. The strikes have formed the core of the administration’s ongoing campaign to treat President Nicolás Maduro as a “narco-terrorist,” which many view as a veneer for wanting to see the Venezuelan strongman ousted from power and work with a new government to secure access to the country’s oil and rare earth minerals.
Read: Trump knows what he wants, just not how to get there
“The drugs coming in through the sea are down to—they’re down by 92 percent,” Trump told Politico on December 8. At a roundtable later the same day, he went with “92 or 94 percent.” Three days later: “Drug traffic by sea is down 92 percent,” Trump said in the Oval Office. A day after that brought a new estimate: “We knocked out 96 percent of the drugs coming in by water,” he told reporters.
More often than not, the president links the 92 (or more) percent claim to another: “Every one of those boats you see get shot down, you just saved 25,000 American lives.” In December alone, he has cited that figure—25,000 American lives saved per boat strike—on at least six different occasions.

So enjoying all the holyday reading to hand, so pleased to be taking a break from herpetology studies, so enjoying all the grift, or is that grit?




And if not exhausted, there's always a Bulwark Battleship podcast with Tim Miller and Tom Nichols to had, at least the opening 11 minutes or so outside the paywall ...

There's a link to The Atlantic there ...





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Tuesday, December 23, 2025

Cheers to all ... and yes, saurian salvation is always near to hand ...

 

Nothing's changed, nothing's missed ...




The one exception to the rule proves the rule ...




About what the pond has been observing this past year ...



Brave Golding didn't take a break; the pond will return to a kneeling position for Saturnalia ...




Posted by at 7 comments:

Monday, December 22, 2025

In which the pond exits stage far right for the year, with seasonal Saturnalia greetings to all ...

 

This is the last serious pond post for the year - the pond knew the jig was up the minute the venerable Meade abandoned her reptile watch to take it easy in the silly season. (As for Media Watch, and derelict cardigan wearers taking an extended break from hive mind duties, don't get the pond started).

The pond will drop in intermittently, especially if a reptile actually veers away from the current jihad - or for holyday snaps purposes - and in in the spirit of the season, the pond would like to begin with an incredibly stupid New York Times' headline ...

What Would Surprise Jesus About Christmas 2025? (archive link)

Just think about that headline for a moment. A nanosecond should suffice.

(1) If Jesus is, as is sometimes alleged, the son of, and a trinitarian section of, an all-knowing, omniscient deity, nothing about Xmas 2025 would surprise him (her if you will). 

Just like Santa, he'd know everything, including the 'who's been naughty or nice' list detailing the thoughts and deeds of the 8.2 billion or so currently on the planet. Just like the Dominican nuns used to remind a naughty pond on a daily basis.

(2) if Jesus was just the son of a carpenter, incapable of earning a living from his trade, and instead turning to speechifying and garnering disciples, with monomaniacal delusions of grandeur and a penchant for faking miracles, including a faux resurrection, pretty much everything about the last few thousand years would surprise him, including new strategies for goat herding, sheep tending, and fisheries management (not to mention ways of baking leavened bread. Did they have baguettes in the French style in AD 25? From what the wiki says it was an 18th century thing).

The pond gets it, it's that time of year, and if you want to, you can follow the intermittent archive link to see who's asking and answering the questions, so that you can get to this sort of splendid insight ...

Q: If Jesus were to time-travel and show up for Christmas 2025, what would surprise him the most?
A: I don’t think Jesus would recognize Christianity today. The idea that he was a pre-existent divine being who came into the world as a newborn is not found in any of his own teachings in our earliest Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and I think he would be flabbergasted to hear it.

So Brian's mum had it right: "He's not the Messiah. He's a very naughty boy! Now, p*ss off!" (*blogger bot approved).

And with seasonal reflections done, it was time to look at this day's lizard Oz line up and frankly it wasn't a pretty sight.




Mass murder of any kind is a terrible thing, and anti-Semitism led to one of the worst obscenities of the generally dire twentieth century, and in its current form (come on down Nick Fuentes) is completely offensive, but this relentless politicisation of a tragedy is also offensive in its own way ...

Golding put it one way ....



The infallible Pope in another way ...



The pond recognises it has an obligation to those too lazy to take an URL and head off to the intermittent archive, so for what it's worth here is pond regular Caterist joining in the jihad ...

Bondi should end refusal to reckon with imported malice
The status of permanent residency must be abolished. The only permanent residents in Australia should be its citizens. Everyone else is here on probation.

The irony is considerable, what with the pond dealing each week with the imported malice of the Caterist.

Sadly his imported malice has passed the probation period where we could summarily send him back to Pom land to teach the lads how to play cricket ... not that he could help them, what with them seemingly beyond help, and what with him being a prize maroon n'all.

As for the rest, as LeLievre put it ...




As for ning nongs of the Steve Hawke kind ...

Those who chant ‘from the river to the sea’ with understanding and intent: I despise you. Those who join the chant, perhaps without such understanding and real intent: you are misbegotten fools. Those who say ‘globalise the intifada’: look what you have wrought.
By Steve Hawke

Labor by blood?

Does the gormless twit have the first clue how that phrasing echoes the worst of the worst kind of thinking, the Deutschblütigkeitserklärung, or German notion of a blood certificate...

For the sake of the long absent lord, forget about blathering on about blut, it's one of the reasons we keep on ending up in the same mindless mess ....

And does he have the first clue how anti-Semitic he sounds, what with "from the river to the sea" deployed by all sorts?

Per Haaretz, yet again ...




Per Haaretz again ...




Per Haaretz yet another time, though there are many other moments...




Per Haaretz one last time, Gideon Levy under the header Undemocratic From The River to the Sea, way back in April 2018 ....

Inter alia ...









The pond regrets having to end the year this way, but when fools like Hawke revile the "from the river to the sea" mob, do they have the first clue who they're reviling?

Here, have a break, have a little light comic relief, of the kind the blut demands...





Only Major Mitchell broke ranks with the rest of the hive mind, but that was to deal with a war criminal, and in typical Major style, to do a major recycling of the words of another ...

As a pro forma, the pond will provide an intermittent archive link...

Journalist Aaron Patrick’s book, The Last Battle, offers a fascinating insight into what Australia asked its Commandos and SAS to do behind enemy lines in Afghanistan.

And the pond will do a teaser trailer ...




That done, the pond is tired of war and war criminals and murder.

Instead of ranting on in Major style about the virtues of being a war criminal, the pond would have appreciated an update on what the war criminals left behind ...

Things haven't gotten any better since the UN put out a press release back in August 2025 on the State of women's rights in Afghanistan ...




Sorry, it seems it's optional for the Major and the lizards of Oz, what with the Major preferring to do a bleeding heart routine about the triumphs of a war criminal ... rather than focus on the mess that was left behind.

But then it's hardly news that the pond despises religious fundamentalists of all stripes. 

Delusional pedlars of any kind of cult or religion are bad enough; fundamentalists more so ...




There's a reason the immortal Rowe included this shameless bird ...




... in his portrait of carrion eaters eyeing off a dove ...




And with all that, there's no chance to provide a final end of year celebration of Dozy King Don ... though next year is going to be a doozy with the demented dozy one and his drooling minions, so there'll be plenty of chances to come ...

In the meantime, thanks and best wishes to all the pond's correspondents, the only reason the pond gets out of bed these days ...

You can say Merry Xmas if you like (remembering that "X" is an entirely legitimate symbol), or you can just talk of seasonal Saturnalia greetings, but whatever, the pond wishes all the best for the holydays and for the New Year to all those who drop in and drop the odd note ...

It would be invidious to mention by name the most die hard contributors, the ones that make the pond's day by shouting "yiippee ki yah motherf*fucker" at the hive mind with regular posts, but you know who you are, and the pond appreciates you all ... (*blogger bot approved)

And so to close, and while it's already old, it's in the spirit of the season ...



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