In which the pond writhes with the dog botherer, before selling out with the bromancer ...

 

So quickly they change ... from annotated evidence one day to  ... (click on to see the evidence large)...

 

Relax, correspondents, it goes without saying that the pond attended to the venerable Meade, as the pond always does, but apart from the Stokes gambit, the pond reeled away wondering just how Tom Switzer remained a thing at the ABC. He disappoints? In reptile land, he'd have been shown the door on the spot.

Speaking of showing the door, the pond won't be attending to Dame Slap ...

Sure, it's not on the voice or the Lehrmann matter, but as soon as the pond sees "virtue signal" in a reptile header, it blanches and ducks for cover ...

Ditto nattering "Ned", sounding exceptionally tedious and hooked up to that other matter ...

Instead, with a deep and abiding sense of perverse loyalty - a quality that marks much of the pond's herpetological studies - the pond stayed with the long-suffering dog botherer ...

Those links left the pond wondering, and for those who shared the pond's wonder ... a hint ...

One led to Dame Slap ...

No need to go on ... the dog botherer is doing the right thing and keeping it all within the house ... because another linked to petulant Peta ...

Enough already, and while it made the yarn even longer, the pond couldn't help but note that the third link was a reference to Linda Burney ...

Strewth, as they used to say in Tamworth, has the bromancer done a Switzer and slagged off his chums? Clearly the lad is suffering, and deeply mired in his misery ...

Quoting Joseph Heller and then another link, and this time to nattering "Ned"?!

What the heck, wondered the pond, as it pandered to the google bot. 

Is the dog botherer counting himself as among the 'leets that have come together?

We all know where "Ned" stands - he's for division, hate and fear-mongering, standing proudly with Captain plodding Potato from Queensland - but all the same, this Switzerish desire in the dog botherer to call out reptile comrades is shocking to behold ...

Naturally the dog botherer had to make it clear that he hadn't gone rogue, turned identity politics heavy, and might even have started to sound all squishy and soft and sentimental ...

Talk about passing strange ... and yet the dog botherer had reached his final gobbet ... and there hadn't been one celebration of climate science denialism or any of his usual outbursts, so no wonder he felt the need to slip in another disclaimer ...

Ah, if the pond had only known he was going to blather about leftist virtue signallers, the pond likely wouldn't have bothered. And what a splendid way to help achieve victory through unity ... after bashing his fellow reptiles, he couldn't resist a final divisive thrust ...

For the dog botherer to accuse others of shallow emotionalism and moral vanity is the icing on that reptile cake.

With all that, the pond had room for only one more this day ... choices, choices ...

Why there's Jacinta lurking just beneath the dog botherer, and the Angelic one still agitated about Calvary - what a cross she bears, and how crossly she does it - and there's the reliable Polonius, though as usual the pond will save him up for a Sunday meditation because there has to be some way to persuade correspondents to sleep in on a foggy Sunday morn (well it's foggy in Sydney for the Saturday at least) ...

So it was up to the bromancer to deliver the usual bromide of quasi-fascist authoritarianism, and lordy lordy, did he deliver in spades ...

There's a punch line at the end. It turns out this is a paid in kind piece of political hackery ... and it takes an unseemly amount of time to get to the reveal so the pond will cut to the chase and explain up front that this piece of hackery comes courtesy of the Danube Institute ...

They clearly knew their mark, and the bromancer delivered for them ...

Read that line about DeSanctus and weep. He's rightly not taking any measure to discriminate against LGBTQ people? 

Even US Today knows that's bull whatever ... (must keep the disapproving google bot in mind) ...

And so on...

But the Danube Institute has chosen wisely and carefully and knows that the bromancer is an artful spinner, distorter and denier of the truth of most matters, and will do his level best for them ....

Much like Florida ...

Yes, at this point, with the intent so naked and obvious, the pandering so insufferable, the pond began to think it might run a few cartoons, just as a way of making it through gobbets ...

Ah, the Inquisition returns ... the pond has been to that shop before ...

Still, they couldn't have selected a better mug punter than the bromancer to sell their shop-soiled routines ...

Again it's all entirely shameful, and on the matter of Hungary's behaviour in relation to Vlad the Impaler downright deceitful ...

It's impossible to count all the ways, but there's giving aid and comfort ...Hungary would not arrest Putin, says PM Orban's chief of staff.

And there's lickspittle fellow-travelling, and not just in the matter of keeping the gas flowing ... with this in April ... Hungary’s loyalties tested as Russia’s war in Ukraine grinds on

Hungary’s populist leader Viktor Orban has been playing the West off against Russia and China for years, but as the Ukraine war drags on, the pressure is rising, according to analysts.

“The Hungarian government continues to maintain close relations with Russia and supports the Russian war machine in various economic ways,” US Ambassador David Pressman said on April 12.

Washington backed these harsh words up by unveiling sanctions against the Budapest-based, Russia-linked International Investment Bank and three of its directors.

The measures marked a new low in relations between Hungary and its Western partners. However, worse could be to come.

Reports suggest that the announced measures are a shot across Budapest’s bows, intended to deter the European Union and NATO country to pivot away from Russia and China.

And Hungary’s ongoing refusal to ratify Sweden’s membership of NATO is seen as the trigger.

Ah yes, Sweden ... and so to the bromancer giving full weight and attention to the fellow-travelling apologists ...

Eventually even the bromancer couldn't stand it, and had to break ranks with an epic billy goat butt.

"None of this is to suggest that Hungary's policies towards Russia or China are right, or couldn't be better."

But indeed the entire point of the puff piece is to puff up Hungary and assorted policies of an authoritarian government ...

And so to another billy goat butt ...

"There is room to disagree with the balance Hungary has struck."

But the bromancer isn't about to let the billy goat get in the way of the hand that paid for his trip, and so we immediately get "It is not remotely a serious breach of human rights ..."

What did Amnesty have to say about Hungary in 2022?

Discrimination against LGBTI and Roma people persisted. Women’s sexual and reproductive rights suffered significant rollback. Teachers were denied the right to strike. Pushbacks of refugees and migrants continued in violation of EU law. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Hungary had violated the ban on collective expulsions. Other judgments from the Court were not fully implemented.

How about Human Rights Watch? Pretty much the same in its 2022 report ...

The government continued its attacks on the rule of law and democratic institutions in 2021. It also prolonged a state of emergency due to the Covid-19 pandemic, allowing it to rule by decree, including by imposing restrictions on freedom of assembly and access to public information.

The government continued its attacks on members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, harassment of independent media, and its discrimination of the Roma minority and undercut women’s rights. Access to the asylum procedure remains close to impossible.

But the bromancer has donned his supplied his sponsored rose-coloured glasses, being of the same sort of fundamentalist Catholic school, with an abiding taste for authoritarianism and ratbags of the onion muncher kind ...

In summary, freedumb in Hungary is like freedumb in Florida...and it's all a fascinating experiment, with another billy goat at the gate ready to blather "certainly with plenty of flaws" ...

In other times, it would have been called gilding the lily, with a faded, discoloured lily that needed a substantial amount of gilding, but these days, it's called being "a visiting fellow for one week", which a week imbibing the sponsor's message and working out the best way to spin it for the reptile readership...

In the end, it's a contemptible correspondent scribbling for a cash-starved rag intent on making almost any other media company in the country seem more honest, or at least less self-serving ...

And on that note, time to turn to the infallible Pope ...

In which the bromancer begins the war, before the hole in the bucket man returns, only to prepare the way for a Lynch mob ...

 

Dammit, the pond has had enough of reality. Who wouldn't want  to join Senator Mullin in shouting “I don’t want reality!"

Reality is vastly over-rated, especially when you remember that we're all caught in a butterfly's dreaming.

But what if it involves a pastor defending the Uganda death penalty or the hole in the bucket man blathering on about the voice yet again?

Doesn't matter, bring it on, but first the pond must turn to the news of the day, and here the bromancer was on the front line, as he always is ...

Right from the get go, and "it was always a difficult case to understand" the bromancer was in top bewildered form ...

But what's this? Elsewhere in the reptile rag came this ...

The pond has no idea where they find these profs, but find them they do, and of course he's right, in a reptile prof way. He was just a professional killer doing what a professional killer must do, so why not look the other way, turn a blind eye, don't go to the bother, fuss or expense of making a note in the war memorial?

How about a big snap to show the warrior in great pose? Downsized of course ...

Meanwhile, the bromancer was still rabbiting on, but for some strange reason the reptiles refused to run a warrior pose snap, and instead repeated the snap seen at the start of the bro piece, and the repeat of a line suggested a hasty attempt to get out of the gate early ...

"It was insane"? Relax, it's just the usual un-emotive, calm, rational response the bro routinely offers, unlike the ABC ...

Meanwhile, in that other piece, the shame of Tamworth got a mention, a man the pond believes was on active service during the Howard years, if at first as a Kiwi ...

Indeed, indeed, and besides, he's shaken the paw of the Queen, and look at all the chest candy.

That piece tailed off with an ANU Prof, John Blaxland saying that Australia had been too clever by half by too many expecting too much of too few, and blaming both Labor and the Coalition (presumably that includes the shame of Tamworth), while Greens defence spokesman David Shoebridge suggested speeding up compensation for the alleged victims of war crimes, as already recommended in the Brereton report, apparently unaware that it was Australia and the reptiles that were in the throes of a deep grief ... because what's the loss of a life up against the loss of a medal?

So the pond could turn to the bromancer for a closer ... and whaddya know, he too was blaming the government ...

Uh huh, but in the end, if you want to be a warrior, you must expect the odd infallible Pope cartoon ...

And now to show the pond's workings, and how it ended up back with the old relic doddering on about the voice...

Cackling Claire cackling on in the cause of tranny bashing? Sorry, that's a red card. And as for the meretricious Merritt?

The pond could recast that in a trice: "Giving voice to journalist's personal views is fraught. Freedom from bias is not enough. Journalists must also be free from the appearance of bias and the meretricious Merritt's tiresome, constant rabbiting on about the voice would appear to compromise that."

Fixed, and incidentally fixed for many other reptiles at the lizard Oz, and so the pond can move on to our Henry, who isn't much of a journalist, or economist, though he does have grand pretensions to being an historian ...

Spoiler alert. There's a truly great billy goat butt moment coming up, but first there's a lot to endure ... because in due course this mention of Ming will trigger the reptiles and they will feel compelled to show off their ancient Dover white Cinque ports god ...

As best the pond can work out, our Henry seems to be suggesting that something might have gone wrong. Would giving Aboriginal people a voice so that their point of view might be heard - as opposed to that say of a silly old white curmudgeon - be of any help in sundry matters?

Apparently not, though there seems to have been a few problems in the past, though the problems are perceived in the manner of a Colonel Blimp rather than an Aboriginal Australian ...

And at that moment, the reptiles, as foreshadowed, though for no particular reason - apart from the loss of a decent graphics department - decided to insert a huge snap of their great white god, Ming the merciless, the best of all cargo cults ...

Beyond the valley of the reptile caricature really. Want to discuss the voice? Throw in a shot of some fifties relic ...

What would the reptiles do without the great god Ming from the distant past, a figure almost as impressive as Baal ...

Indeed, indeed, so much better to have an old white loon lecturing and hectoring uppity, difficult blacks than to listen to them ... and now, to that great billy goat butt the pond had foreshadowed ... "none of that is to recommend returning to the policies Hasluck adopted", which is just a billy goat's way of saying we should return to the policies Hasluck adopted, or at least the Hasnoluckian vision ...

Back to the emotions routine. Right at the moment all this talk of emotional steam baths is really taking it out of the pond ...and yet in that suppurating bath of bigotry, comes the emotional moralising and the offer of a deeply emotional fear mongering, a remarkably paranoid "leap in the dark", which some might remember as the name of a movie ...

What a tiresome, tedious gherkin he is, but having done its traditional leap into the empty bucketvoid, the pond didn't want to end on a downer, and so was pleased to see that the reptiles had another offering from the Lynch mob ...

See how clever this Lynch mob is. By confusing and conflating PwC with diversity and climate science, you can find much to admire, and ways forward, and soon enough we might all end up living in Florida or at least ordering online from Uganda ...

Sorry, the main reason the pond went with the Lynch mob was to have a cartoon-led recovery, though as a bonus, there's more sniping about climate science and other forms of sinister innuendo ... you know, "net zero", as if climate science was some kind of thing a Lynch mob should take seriously. 

You name it, he's up for a blather about the bloody woke ... and is there anything more woke than climate science?

Ah, DeSanctimonious, and the pond won't enter into the fuss about how the narcissist wants it pronounced, and at this point the reptiles decided to slip in a huge snap of a sight the pond simply didn't want to see ... downsized, but still pretty intolerable, and all because what was once the reptiles' graphics department sees a word, and is immediately triggered into rushing out a huge snap ...

It's a pity the reptile graphics department is now such a wretched and tattered thing, but please allow the pond to help out with an illustration that's more relevant to the Lynch mob ...

That's better, on with the cruelty and the vindictiveness ... as the Lynch mob mourns the lack of traction for Pauline and her perils ...

Indeed, indeed, we should embrace our inner Rons, and get rid of all that nonsense about climate science ...

As for Victoria and all that woke nonsense, there are many great leaps forward to be made in terms of bigotry, hate, fear and loathing ...

Well it beats the very large image that the reptiles had slipped into the Lynch mob's piece ... naturally downsized by the pond ...

Might there not be a compromise, a way forward?

Nope, there was just the sounds of the baying coming from that Lynch mob, going full DeSanctimonious, and perhaps even raring for a fight with the house of mouse ...

What an incredible loon, what an astonishing effort, and what a tribute to the University of Melbourne. And if Ron DeSanctus is the answer, the long absent lord help anyone asking a question ...

But it did allow for that cartoon recovery ... with the immortal Rowe to hand to lead off a final flurry, with sundry rats and Lynch mobs in the attic ...

In which the pond does a Tootle and wanders off the reptile tracks...

 

The pond struggled this morning, it really struggled. It strayed off the reptile turf, and found it hard to get back to eating the lizard Oz grass.

After a correspondent's note, the pond started listening to James O'Brien on LBC, and he was on about a headline in The Times ...

Extinction? The pond thought the reptiles had already arranged that with climate change, or here if you like, but it seemed like a fruitful topic, until the pond saw the infallible Pope's cartoon this morning ...

Is that you Clippy? Where are you Clippy? Come on back Clippy ...

Worse followed. While listening to O'Brien, the pond started to browse, and came across another topic,  this time raised by Peter Jamison's feature in WaPo, The revolt of the Christian home-schoolers, They were taught that public schools are evil. Then a Virginia couple defied their families and enrolled their kids. (sorry, paywall).

It was a ripper read and moving past the tales of physical punishment and discipline and the relentless patriarchy and the disapproval of parents and family feuds, the pond found this moment the most poignant, after the featured couple had moved their children into a public school:

...About 10 minutes remained before the Bealls would have to pile into their minivan, and the children needed to get dressed — in their pajamas.
It was Groundhog Day, a damp night in February, and a low fire glowed in the hearth of the Bealls’ living room. Aaron and Christina sat on the floor playing card and board games with their kids, while Ezra sat on the couch, wearing headphones and absorbed in a game on his laptop.
Soon they would be leaving to attend their elementary school’s “For the Love of Reading Family Night,” held in the school library, where students were encouraged to come dressed for bedtime.
As Oliver rose to change (Ezra, the oldest, would not deign to put on his jammies), Aimee told her parents how her second-grade class had learned that day about Punxsutawney Phil.
Aaron looked at her in bewilderment.
“Phil?” he asked. “Am I out of the loop?”
His daughter stared back at him in disbelief.
“He’s famous!” Aimee said. She explained Phil’s role in predicting the length of winter.
“I knew about groundhogs,” Aaron said. “I just didn’t know about Phil.”
“He’s really famous,” Aimee said.
Christina smiled at her husband.
“Home-schooler,” she said.
These were the gaps Aaron and Christina had become accustomed to finding as they learned about a world whose boundaries extended far beyond the one in which they had been raised. There were so many things they had not learned, and perhaps would never learn.
Stacks of books on the living room’s end tables testified to their belated efforts at self-education: popular works by the biologists Neil Shubin and Robert Sapolsky, as well as “Raising Critical Thinkers” by Julie Bogart, a leading developer of home education materials who has criticized conservative Christian home-schooling groups. Aaron and Christina were still young, but they knew enough about the demands of life, work and family to understand that they could not recover or reconstruct the lost opportunities of their childhoods.

What's the odds they'd never seen Groundhog Day? Hollywood, California, Disney, the Great Satan, unlike the almost Amish lifestyle on view in Florida, preached and followed by the mango Mussolini and Ron DeSanctus tribe ... (irony alert).

But this was the punchline:

To the Bealls, who truly knew what it was like to learn through the lens of ideology, concerns about kids being brainwashed in public schools were laughable.
“People who think the public schools are indoctrinating don’t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated,” Aaron says. “It’s not even comparable.”

Put it another way. People who think the ABC is indoctrinating don't know what indoctrination is. The pond is required to read the lizard Oz. The pond is daily indoctrinated. It's not even comparable.

So with a hearty yelp, a hallo, a yoicks and a tallyho, it's time to see what the indoctrinators are up to today ... but the pond suddenly refused the first fence on offer ...

 

 

Even the pond's befuddled brain knew that wasn't possible. You couldn't read petulant Peta and simultaneously make the right call ...

You could learn to be a bigot, but that was likely not the best way to make the right call.

After that refusal, the pond immediately tried to do a runout, as aged ponies are wont to do ...

The reptiles are now fully into tranny bashing? There was another immediate refusal by the pond. It was too Florida by far ...

And the mere sight of Jennings of the fifth form sent the pond kowtowing and cantering off into the distance ...

Things were looking grim. Could the pond have a Musk moment (even though it always preferred peppermint Life Savers, before graduating to XXXX thanks to a German grandmother who liked it both peppery and minty) ...

Not really. There's only so much fun you can have with hubris and Ozymandias.

How about CNN? Truly the most pitiful of all, but they did offer Trump captured on tape talking about classified document he kept after leaving the White House?

Or how about Vanity Fair? 

The New York Times’ Elizabeth Holmes Profile Is Causing Drama in the Newsroom: “What the Hell Happened Here?”
As Holmes headed to jail Tuesday, business editor Ellen Pollock was put on the spot to defend a soft-focus profile of the disgraced Theranos founder, telling staff she didn’t “give a ***k” about the criticism.

Sheesh, the refusal to license "fug" from Norman Mailer's estate is causing the pond and the Google bot deep concern.

What about the Tampa Bay Times and the anti-woke brigade? 

Florida education debates rage on as hundreds attend Hernando school board meeting,  At the center of the storm was superintendent John Stratton, who survived attempts to remove him.

Why Florida's almost up there with Uganda, thanks to Ron DeSanctus and the orange one ...

Ingoglia said the lawmakers had no choice but to get involved.
“Certain school board members and certainly this superintendent are turning a deaf ear to the concerns of parents and grandparents in this community,” he said in an interview before the meeting, which he did not attend.
He sent out text messages through his Empower Parents political action committee, urging concerned residents to show up and voice their concerns over issues such as the teacher who showed fifth graders a movie that included a gay character. That story gained national attention after Rodriguez, an Ingoglia ally, complained to the Florida Department of Education about the teacher, who has resigned.

An actual gay? Cue a pond fainting fit ...

What an inspiration, and no doubt the local reptiles will also look to Uganda for inspiration ... once they've had their fill of tranny bashing.

But after all the grazing, finally the pond had to settle, so perversely it selected a piece of recycled fodder from The Times ...

How is Kissinger still a thing? Yet there he was, as bold as brass in a snap in the story ...

The pond realised it should have been reading The Nation's Henry Kissinger, War Criminal—Still at Large at 100.

Or perhaps David Corn in Mother Jones, pursuing the same theme with Henry Kissinger at 100: Still a War Criminal.

But there was an upside. 

The pond could sample a bit of the Daily Beast's Team Putin Spars Over Baffling Russian ‘Victory Plan’ in War (paywall friendly).

By this time, the pond had almost forgotten it was reading Roger of The Times having a debate with a notorious war criminal ...

An otherwise subtle historian? That's what they're calling war criminals these days?

Might as well be watching Russian TV ...

Amen to that, but that means the sooner sociopathic Vlad the impaler is gone - and not replaced by an AI generated clone - the better it will be for the world.

Meanwhile, Roger of The Times was soldiering on to a final gobbet ...

Kissinger will disagree? They take war criminals seriously at The Times?

Meanwhile, speaking of quisling sell-outs and lickspittle sell-outs, the lizard Oz editorialist was also at it, and the pond could thereby fulfil its brief and pretend it had actually paid attention to the reptiles this day ...

Restraint is essential at this stage? 

Well no. To borrow from Corporal Jones, if they don't like a drone up 'em, tough cheddar.

To use language and historical figures the reptiles might remember and understand, during the Blitz, Winnie didn't say, "feel free to bomb away Adolf, being British we understand that Chamberlain-style restraint is essential at this stage."

Easy for the reptiles to preach restraint, but if a drone happened to take out their fortress in Surry Hills, they might be singing a different tune ... perhaps along the lines of "we shall drone them on the beaches, we shall drone them on the landing grounds, we shall drone them in the fields and in the streets, and we shall drone them in the hills ..." (the original's here).

And with all that done, it was time for yet another distraction, this time thanks to the immortal Rowe ... and if you want to blame anyone for the pond doing a Tootle and wandering off the reptile tracks, blame James O'Brien ... he'll talk about anything and everything ... and what do you know, there's the whole of yesterday's show on YouTube, for gluttons for punishment ...