In which the pond has another Seinfeld moment, and does a post about nothing ...

 

Today is the day the pond almost cracked and gave up herpetological studies completely, or at least began to think it was time to roam more freely.

Let's face it, could any reptile at the lizard Oz come up with the sort of unaware, post-ironic, post-Domain headline?

 

It even had an animation, and it reminded the pond of all the real estate stories the pond had once consumed back in the day when Fairfax was Fairfax and the eastern suburbs was a thing ...

Meanwhile, back at the lizard Oz, what could they come up with? Turned out that this day was a valley of parched real estate desert ...

Petulant Peta conflating reptiles and Liberals with an already departed Anzac day, Bearup still being unbearable, and more on the voice, and Alice Springs and comrade Dan?

It was too much for a bear to bear, let alone, the pond, and the tree killer edition promised no better ...

Sure some might get a laugh at the line at the bottom, "Now is the time to be misinformed", but the pond had rung the juice out of reptile promotions long ago ...

Below the fold was even more depressing ...

Simplistic Simon, the craven Craven doing Bazza and Warren still blathering about the voice? 

What's the pond supposed to do with that Mötley Crüe?

Look at the opposition, look at what was on top of WaPo this morning ...

The pond could go for any of those. A rape trial, the spectacle of the GOP actually trying to govern, and the house of mouse stepping up its war with Ron DeSanctus a notch! Now that's entertainment ... and it would be easy enough to step around the paywall and indulge.

Reluctantly the pond decided it would be content with a two minute warning and it would give a new reptile a go ... just to fill in the time ...

Naturally the pond did its research and discovered that the reptiles had fallen under the sway of exactly the sort of consultant that the reptiles routinely deplore on a daily basis. 

Head off to Redbridge Group and you'll find this ...

Eek, say what, what's that? 

He helped comrade Dan, and now he's explaining vulgar youff to elderly lizard Oz readers? 

The pond almost fainted. Couldn't it just turn to today's infallible Pope to explain to vulgar youff that times were tough?

Done and dusted. Do the reptiles really need a consultant to explain that the answer to everything isn't potato? (Contra Colbert!)

But no, they insisted on inserting a snap of a potato ...

All this talk of vulgar youff is just going to induce anxiety and fear in the reptile readership. What's the point? 

And then the reptiles slipped in a snap of long lost times, completely meaningless to vulgar youff and reminding the lizard Oz demographic that neither potatoes nor the price of birthday cakes amounted to a hill of beans ...

No pivot point in sight? That's a very cruel reminder that the pond's pivot point jokes from Silicon Valley are now cruelly dated ...

Sweet long absent lord, was it really back in 2014? And what was the answer then? “Until then, we need to do what any animal in nature does when it’s cornered—act erratically and blindly lash out at everything around us.”

At least it's still sound advice for reptiles ... as for the rest ...

And so to a bonus, and all the pond could find was a lizard Oz editorial. 

Now the pond had already done its research and watched the Jimmy Kimmel opener that had induced laughter in Morning Joe, and so was pretty much up for it ...

Indeed, indeed, and the controller of News Corp and Faux Noise is aged ... (well, here's a tip, he was born on 11th March 1931 in Melbourne, you do the math or go catch a tram).

Okay, okay, amid that scenario, the reptiles are deeply fucked ... and perhaps it does explain why there's been so much trouble in recent times ...

Sheesh, and is that the best cartoon they've got? A snake oil salesman joke, as if the best original snake oil sellers had ceded their claim to fame?

The pond would settle for almost any other sort of cartoon, even one from The New Yorker ...

What new messiah is around the corner to spew bile at the lizard Oz, let alone Faux Noise? And what of the old messiah?

That's a relief ... and how's the family going?

As for the rest the immortal Rowe had provide all the commentary the pond needed ...

Meanwhile, the lizard Oz editorialist was still fixated in a final gobbet ...

Uh huh ... and the age of the owner of the lizard Oz is, and actuarial estimates say about that that the answer is Lachy?

That reminded the pond of a piece by David Hardaker in Crikey, Where to now for Lachlan Keith Murdoch and the values he espouses?

There'll be a paywall, but just a sampler, and sadly he's no longer in the vulgar youff category ...

That Intercept story can be read at Power Transfer How Lachlan Murdoch Went From Studying Philosophy at Princeton to Exploiting White Nationalism at Fox News ... 

You just have to go there, and not just for the thesis, though the thesis is rich pickings ...

And so on and so forth, and what a reminder to Succession devotees that they're  on the wrong horse. You simply couldn't slip in a Kantian Lachy to the storyline and sell it to lovers of superior soap ... and yet here we are. If you're hungry for a snack, why not snack on a Lachy?

Never mind, tomorrow will be better, likely the hole in the bucket man will come down from the attic to lecture vulgar youff on their failings and on Thucydides, and the pond can get back to business as usual ... and perhaps even offer tidy solutions to current reptile dilemmas ...

Oh that cartoon set the pond off again.

The pond simply can't let it go without mentioning Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic, asking Will Tucker Carlson Become Alex Jones?, some time ago now, but some things never get old ...

The final moments of Tucker Carlson’s last Fox News broadcast are perfect. His studio desk is strewn with pizza boxes. Across from him is the delivery man who’d traveled from Pennsylvania to bring him his favorite slice: sausage and pineapple. “It is a disgusting order, but I have no shame,” Carlson says with this mouth full, grinning. He then turns to the camera to wrap the broadcast with one final lie—“We’ll be back on Monday”—and a plug for the Fox Nation docuseries Let Them Eat Bugs, which alleges that the environmental movement to eat insects is, somehow, part of a global conspiracy. That’s it: One of America’s most popular and influential cable news shows ends with its host sharing the frame with a massive bug dead on a plate...

Forget the dead bug metaphor. The pond has said it before and will say it again. Canned pineapple and canned beetroot are reminders that civilisation died in a canning factory ...

Warzel added a rider, another reminder that reality always beats Succession ...

...It felt like this final, absurd moment was ripped straight from Infowars, the far-right conspiracy website founded by Alex Jones. The Infowars model revolves around constructing a durable, alternative reality based on grievance. It reduces the world to a battle between good and evil (the site’s tagline is “There’s a war on for your mind!”), using lies, conspiracy theories, and theatrics to incite fear in the audience while positioning the host as a noble crusader. And it relies on alternating between righteous indignation and a winking, farcical tone that helps obscure the show’s real political project: taking dangerous, hateful, and reality-defying ideologies from the fringe and projecting them into millions of households every weeknight.

And that's why pineapple on pizza flourishes. Warzel went on to do an extended comparison of Tuckyo with that other scumbag ...and ended this way ...

...Carlson’s legacy will live on in a legion of angry and paranoid former viewers. But his centrality in our current politics—and all of the danger that represented—came from his platform. Up until this morning Carlson was a man who sat at the very top of a toxic information ecosystem, one that cycles fever-swamp, message-board garbage upward and outward. At least for a moment, the cycle is broken. Carlson’s megaphone is gone, along with a captive audience. Stripped of his time slot, Carlson has lost the last, thin veneer of credibility separating him from the conspiracy theorist he’s been aping. Tonight, the only difference between Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson is that one of them has a show.

Credit where credit is due Charlie. 

That's actually the chairman's legacy and he still has a show, in fact he still has a network and a bunch of newspapers down under, and soon the black smoke will rise from the chimney with news of a new messiah... and the rest of us are left with aging Tuckyo jokes ...

In which the spoilsport reptiles snatch away the green M&Ms and leave the pond with "Ned" and the groaning ...

 

It's probably as entertaining a weekend as the pond has had in some time, not that you'd know any of it from the lizard Oz. 

Tuckyo committing a hideous crime with pineapple pizza - no wonder he wanted to fuck chocolate lollies - and much fuss was made about his departure, and it was still echoing about, though not in the lizard Oz ...

By the way, that Sky News explanation came from the Bolter and was clearly a lie, though a suitable match to the lying ways of the canned pineapple loving Tuckyo: 

“Tucker was actually sacked … by Lachlan Murdoch, the day-to-day boss of News Corp.
“And the scoop is that he was sacked essentially for thinking that he was bigger than Fox News.”

The Chairman is in his dotage and didn't have blood on his knife, and it's just to do with Tuckyo's ego? Pull the other one ...

The immortal Rowe had a fitting cartoon for the Bolter and all the rest of the lying reptiles ... and he could clearly sniff out the truth of what went down ...

With the comedy so rich, it was time to reach for a red card and ensure a very dull Wednesday. Naturally Dame Slap was sent from the field...

 

Whenever a reptile talks of 'groupthink', you instantly know it's an exercise in projection ... and what is it with paying attention to Morgan, notoriously weird when it comes to Markle, and so full of morganatic malarkey, and as for the notion that lawyers are doing it for money? 

Projection ...pure Slappian projection ... as the one time lawyer takes the chairman's shekels to back the no case ... though why she had to shark poor Ellie Dudley can be left a mystery ...

And so to below the fold, and the pond couldn't help but let out an involuntary groan ...

That's all there is? If it's not rabid ranting about the voice, it has to be defence and NDIS?

The only interest in "Ned's" piece was his unerring ability to sound like a pompous twat ...

The reptiles decided to break up "Ned" with snaps, and the pond went with the flow, but did want to note this change of header in yesterday's piece by the Dibbster ...

 

When the Dibbster was hidden in the digital edition, it was bland talk of a thorough appraisal recognising the dangers, and then when the Dibbster was given a more prominent spot, it was head for the hills, they're coming with little or no warning ...

Such is the art of the reptile, but the comedy was only a temporary relief from "Ned", because the pond knew at some point that the portentous pedant wouldn't be able to resist a listicle ...

Phew, invasion's not the real issue? That's a relief. For a moment there the pond thought that time wasn't on our side and we might have little or no warning ...

Now on with blather about triumph of the will and the message ...

Ah the old balance of power routine. You could do a really long wiki entry about the notion of the balance of power in international relations, and perhaps tease a few correspondents, but instead the pond will just look at the snaps ...

Phew, there were only three major problems in "Ned's" listicle, and he got through them quickly, presumably because the tree killer edition had already done its best to generate hysteria ...

It seems the missiles are coming in slomo, but the good news is that there's just a short gobbet of slomo "Ned" to go ...

Yep, it's the old rhetorical question ploy.  

The pond can play that game. 

"Will the reptiles ever leave their bubble?" "Will the reptiles ever notice what's happening at HQ?" "Will the reptiles ever take note of the bleeding obvious?" "Will the reptiles keep avoiding tasty M&Ms?""Will the chairman ever carry a baseball bat?"

Never mind, it's on with the groaning, though these days the pond only does it because some correspondents perversely enjoy the outing.

It arrived a day late by Dame Groan's usual schedule, but it might as well not have arrived at all ...

Once again the reptiles decided to break up the text with tedious snaps, and once again the pond went with the flow.

Well if you can't fuck a green M&M, life quickly loses its meaning and you might even get tempted by a Wilcox cartoon ...

Sorry, sorry, that would have been handy for a different groaning, but all the same it's more visual fun than a wide meaningless shot of the chamber ...

Now back to the groaning ...

Ah, of course the Groaner would find a way to work in a groan about climate science. Dammit, what's that? Former president of Kiribati backs legal case against Australia over inaction on climate crisis.

Now that should set off a good groaning down the track, but for the moment back to your islands, we're groaning about those bludgers pretending to have a disability, and ruining everything ...

600,000 of the bludgers! Didn't the Spartans have the right idea, and put them out into the snow? Or something like that ... the pond was momentarily distracted by balance of power issues and memories of Thucydides ...

The principle involved in preserving the balance of power as a conscious goal of foreign policy, as David Hume pointed out in his Essay on the Balance of Power, is as old as history, and was used by Greeks such as Thucydides both as political theorists and as practical statesmen. A 2018 study in International Studies Quarterly confirmed that "the speeches of the Corinthians from prior to the Persian Wars to the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War reveal an enduring thesis of their foreign policy: that imperial ambitions and leveling tendencies, such as those of Athens, Sparta, and Thebes, should be countered in order to prevent a tyrant city from emerging within the society of Greek city-states.

Come on, it's such a tedious, predictable bit of groaning about the NDIS, of course the pond was going to seek relief, and do an ancient Henry routine, much as the reptiles decided the best thing to do to distract from the groaning was to feature a snap of comrade Bill in comical pose ...

As for those with disabilities? If the pond might just channel Dame Groan - the pond can feel her ectoplasm strongly - fuck them, it's off to the snow country with them ...

And with that, it's Tucker time, and a chance to explore new job opportunities, what with the lad having burned his way through the main cable channels, and even PBS ...

In which the pond almost says tanks, but no tanks for the tedium ...

 

The pond dropped in on the ABC, a rare event in itself, to catch a little of the repeat of the Faux Noise saga and then stayed for Media Watch, and immediately regretted the decision.

First there was a bashing of the ABC for not behaving like the Daily Snail or the Murdoch tabloids in the Thorpe matter, as if an obviously disturbed woman should be hounded. What if it had been a cleaner? Would that have been newsworthy? 

Drunken outbursts are a dime a dozen, and there was nothing particularly political or policy driven in her carry on. Thorpe is no longer an official greenie and likely enough will eventually no longer be a member of parliament, so what was newsworthy about the carry on? Unless you happen to be a feral member of the Sky after dark mob or a Daily Snail tabloid type rooting in the muck for a sniff of tabloid truffle. That's what Media Watch wants the ABC to aspire to?

The pond remembers reading a long time ago about a pissed as a parrot thugby league player being dropped in the gutter outside Glebe police station and wondering why it was reading the story. Was it a chance to help the man begin a twelve step program? Eventually he did change his ways and now he's everywhere, and the pond still can't remember why it read that story, or another about him drunkenly trying to enter the wrong motel room.

Then the show did a tired rehash of everything everybody already knew about the Dominion/Faux Noise matter. 

The only fresh angle here was the coverage, or lack of it, by the local reptiles, but that was tossed off lightly at the end of the segment, because only the Bolter came to the party. 

Then came a pounding of the Terror for the sort of appalling tabloidism the show had urged the ABC to adopt in the Thorpe matter, because you can never get enough Terrorising or Daily Snailism, except when you've had too much..

After all that let down, then came the news this morning about Tuckyo Carlson, but the show was out of sorts with the times and didn't catch the fuss ...

 

It isn't the fault of a weekly show that it misses out on big stories and then must play catch up, but it urgently needs a facelift.

As for the reptile reaction to the ABC provocation by doing its Faux Noise re-run, there was the sound of ... crickets. 

The hapless reptiles couldn't say boo to a goose as the chairman wielded the axe and all sorts of loons came out of the cupboard. 

The Graudian's live coverage had some fun, and it wasn't of the 'disturbed woman ranting on the footpath' kind ...

It almost made the pond miss the news that the Georgia DA would be announcing charges this summer ...

And it wouldn't be a story these days without a contribution from wacky, zany, wild-eyed Marge ...

Meanwhile, the Tuckyo angle even made it into the reptile bubble down under...

You had to hunt for it beneath the snap of the funny politician with a bemused grin and the reptiles raging about defence, and when the pond clicked on it, it was shocked to see the source ...

Ignore that snap of Tuckyo trying to estimate the damage he's done to the United States, and proposing it was only the size of his penis. 

Instead look at the source. Dow Jones? Not even the WSJ? And where's Killer when he's needed? As for the story, it was short and by the numbers ...

What the story lacked was the minutiae of the Macbeth-like blood letting ... per the Graudian ...

Carlson’s departure appeared sudden. As of Monday morning, Fox was still previewing his show that evening, where he was set to interview the Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy. Carlson’s last show, on Friday, ended with the host eating pizza and saying, “We’ll be back on Monday.”

The doomed man ate a hearty meal of pizza? Put it another way ...

Enter Murdoch.

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison pizza'd chalice
To our own lips... 

But enough of the fun, the pond must return to its herpetological studies and the daily reptiles, though this day it's particularly hard ...

No Tuesday groaning by Dame Groan? What's the world coming to?

And everyone obsessed with the DSR, and nary a kind word for it? 

Actually there were a couple of kind words, but you had to head deep into the reptile wilderness to find them ...

Ah Monsieur Dupont, you've missed the boat on this one, you and the Dibbster have clearly missed the  main game ... it's the reptile wilderness for you ...

As for other policy matters, the pond would have been better off turning to a Wilcox ...

Or perhaps the full First Dog, delighting an esteemed correspondent at the Graudian here ...

The pond could only sample a few of the splendid policy initiatives which might sort out the funding crisis ...

The pond knows it doesn't know and the pond couldn't kayo less and yippie-ki-yay motherfucker, as Bruce said to the baddie ...

Sorry, sorry, way too many distractions and so the pond settled in for its dose of the bromancer saying no thanks, no tanks ...

The bromancer's fear of tanks is a running joke at the pond, up there with Killer's fear of masks, and we'll eventually get there ... but in the meantime, keep the powder dry and the missiles firing ...

Poor bromancer. The pond supposes he had to find something to whinge and moan about, but what about the tanks? And what about the war with China, which didn't happen by last Xmas, but surely will happen before the next Xmas ...

Indeed, indeed, and there was an immortal Rowe to hand to sort out the matter ...

It's always in the detail or the double take ...

And now to the matter of tanks, because the current war in Ukraine has shown how a stunning display of missile firepower can quickly produce a result, and end a war in a matter of days. 

Just ask Vlad the impaler ... or settle for that tanks rant all bromancer readers knew would come ...

Meanwhile, the pond still has slightly used copies of its Brisbane Line plan available at a knock down price ...

And so to a pond coda, and for once it wasn't another reptile of the lizard Oz kind. 

For those who didn't sign up to help the minnow fight the authoritarian not so crypto fascist monolith, the keen Keane yesterday returned to Crikey and began his story thusly (sorry there might be a paywall hitting that link):

If you think that Fox News spreading lies about the 2020 presidential election, and the direct relationship between that and the January 6 2021 insurrection, are now merely matters of historical interest, take a look at the current polling for Donald Trump against his strongest Republican challenger, Ron DeSantis.

Well yes ...always willing to take a look at Ron DeSanctus ...

But please do carry on, the pond apologies for interrupting ...

Trump will almost certainly be his party’s candidate to face off against Joe Biden in 2024. And he is promising more aggression, more authoritarianism and more retribution if he wins. That’s bad news for US democracy, and for countries like Australia that rely on the US for their security (and we’ve stupidly doubled down on that to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars under the Albanese government).
Fox News will lie again to help Trump back into power, if it can. Not because (or merely because) Trump aligns with the reactionary values of the network, or of the Murdochs, but because it’s good business. The Murdochs long ago discovered that vast profits could be made from a media outlet that functioned as a political party, selling grievance, victimhood and conspiracy theories of demonic “liberal elites” to older white Americans. Trump is the avatar of the Murdoch business model, whatever personal feelings Rupert may have about him.
The costs of that model — polarisation, extremism, political violence and incompetence — are borne by everyone else. Or at least they were until COVID began killing Fox viewers who believed the anti-vaccination and “it’s all a hoax” tripe peddled by the network.

Well yes, and there are other matters worth mentioning ...

Sorry, sorry, do go on ...

When I pointed out the role played by Fox News — and thus Rupert Murdoch and his family — in the January 6 insurrection, much of the information about the inner workings of Fox News had yet to emerge from the Dominion case. But it was hardly an act of prescience on my part. It was already a common topic of commentary in the US media. One of the United States’ best media commentators, Brian Stelter, had explained in detail the extent to which people within Fox News had decided that the prospect of losing extremist viewers due to the fact that the network was endorsing a reality-based analysis of the 2020 presidential election was too much.
My only original thought was to reflect the fact that we’d just had the 50th anniversary of Watergate in early June, and note how far Trump exceeded the previous historical exemplar of presidential misconduct, Richard Nixon — and how much the US media landscape had changed since the 1970s. Thus the now slightly even more famous phrase “unindicted co-conspirator”.
For a statement as unexceptionable as that, it came as a surprise when a personal lawyer for a member of the Murdoch family not even named in the piece contacted us in order to threaten litigation. Surprising for a media mogul with his own array of platforms and, he says, a deep commitment to free speech and a free press. And surprising for the lack of legal nous. Every lawyer that our then-editor-in-chief Peter Fray spoke to — and he spoke to a lot of them — concluded that Lachlan didn’t have a chance. After a good faith effort to resolve the matter, during which we took the article down, a lack of progress meant we had to fight...

Then there was talk of the minnow v authoritarian fight, with this excerpt included ...

...Perhaps Murdoch assumed we’d roll over. Instead we worked out a battle plan, called on our subscribers and took our case public. Facing an existential threat, we called for help from people who share our mission of holding the powerful to account. They responded in droves.
Murdoch’s legal team, and News Corp, later tried to portray this as part of a deliberate campaign all along to use Murdoch as a fundraising tool — as if the original article had been written to order as part of Operation Use Lachlan To Boost Subscriptions.
Well, memo for Mr Murdoch — and for every other reader. I’ve never written to direction at Crikey, and have never been asked to. I write what the evidence leads me to conclude, rightly or wrongly, even if it offends readers because I’m not supporting their favourite political party or cause. I intend to keep doing that. I’m too old and foul-tempered to do anything else.

Well yes, the pond is old too, and reading the reptiles can produce a foul temper on a daily basis, which is why the pond always turns to cartoonists for a little help to get through the day.

But let's not leave it all to the keen Keane. 

Cam Wilson produced some splendid comedy involving that triple A plus loon Malcolm Roberts ...

...After Roberts spoke for nearly two hours, the “Dare to Question” event opened up to questions from the audience.
One frustrated attendee, who gave the name “Pell” and said that he was facing “15 charges at the moment”, launched into a bizarre conspiracy-laden rant which was met with applause from the audience.
His two-minute question accused former prime ministers, Crime Stoppers and the Country Women’s Association of being run by secret societies and he said his town’s embrace of the 15-minute city policy was a ruse to bring in open-air prisons. He also claimed that Paul Keating was a necrophiliac.
In response, Roberts asked his name and then professed not to know about the situation: “And this is symptomatic of our society. I can’t comment on these secret societies because I make statements based on data.”
Pell responded: “See, I want to start a military wing. I’ve got this freedom thing. Like the IRA, they always had a military wing, right? Cause they need to have some credibility. And they need to have some force. If we want to police the police, give me some frickin’ hard hitters.”

The CWA being run by a secret society?! So that's what the pond's sister has been up to all these years ...

Talk about a rapid unscheduled disassembly. You've got to admit the brightest incandescent bulbs always attract the weirdest moths ... and it almost makes the reptiles seem like a dowdy bunch of try-hard losers and drop kicks ...

And so to end with a tanks for the memories note about all the good times ... because the pond suspects that at long last the chairman is losing his grip in his dotage ...