Oh no, it's the Ughman (and the pond is the walrus), and the bromancer inculcates Leninist principles ...

 

The pond experienced its first black out of the winter last night and being reptile-trained, knew what it foretold - the arrival of the renewables apocalypse. 

The pond organised a raiding party to deal with the zombie hordes and bunkered down, only to be disappointed when the lights came back on twenty minutes later. Apparently the apocalypse had been postponed ...

Not so the dire prospect of  waking up on a weekend and contemplating reptile follies, and sure enough there was the bromancer in the extreme far right position of the digital edition, top of the reptile world ma...

Not the bloody war on China and not bloody Jennifer Westacott trying to make a name for herself ... while the genocide in Gaza picks up speed ...

For some reason the pond wasn't up for a genocide on a Saturday morning ...

Down below the landscape was equally depressing...

The pond realises that the dog botherer was also lurking, but he was just doing the Albo strut, much like "here no conflict of interest" simplistic Simon ...

Then there was Westacott herself, blathering on about hate speech while the genocide kept on keeping on, and the craven Craven determinedly confusing and conflating anti-Semitism with anti-genocide, as if it was impossible to have a fair degree of contempt for Hamas while also having a fair degree of contempt for barking mad Jewish fundamentalists determined on a genocide and the demolition of Gaza  ... and that's how the pond ended up with the Ughman ...

The pond knew at once, just by the snap, that the pond had yet again made a mistake - the pond often thinks of Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes and realises that we're all Sideshow Bobs ...

The pond knew it would regret stepping on this reptile rake ... and sure enough, lo, it came to pass ...

Oh dear sweet long absent lord, couldn't he have just gone off to teach in a Christian Brothers school, and given the odd boy a good whipping with a leather belt?

The reptiles compounded the blather with a video showing off a heavenly vision ...

Meanwhile on another planet, there was talk of book banning and bigotry and fear and hate and loathing of minorities ...

But that was in another place, and the pond had weirdly lumbered itself with the Ughman, proving that you can never get rid of the tyke urge to suffer guilt about unhealthy desires ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, just make it end, make it end now, and the pond was almost prepared to believe in miracles, because there was just a gobbet to go, and on the scale of pond suffering of reptiles, it was a relatively short one ...

The pond won't be making that mistake any time soon. What a prize portentous pontificating loon ...

The pond long ago gave up attending mass, but who knew that attending the lizard Oz would be like attending Ascension Sunday, or if you will the seventh Sunday of Easter, with Our Lady of Fatima day to follow ...

The pond used to routinely joke about the lizard Oz being the Catholic Boys' Daily, but sometimes the joke wears more than a little thin ...

Was there any sign of life, was there any hope, was there a silver lining to the dark clouds? 

The pond decided to turn back the clock a few days to Daanyal Saed in Crikey asking Is Sky News Australia's influence dying? (perhaps a paywall but the pond can never tell because of auto log in).

The piece had been referenced by correspondents, and there were graphs, which made it suitable for an ABC finance report, and there had to be some sign of hope after suffering, neigh enduring the Ughman ... (I am the walrus) ...

Just the opening image alone warmed the cockles of the pond's heart ...

Petulant Peta in black and white, looking suspiciously like Morticia in The Addams Family ...

Then came the graphs, as promised ...

Could it be, it all seemed very technical, but the pond was open to any suggestion that Sky had fallen from grace, like a graph on a downward spiral ...

If you like you can follow that link to The Atlantic to read Paul Farhi scribbling Right-Wing Media Are in Trouble, The flow of traffic to Donald Trump's most loyal digital-media boosters isn't just slowing: it's utterly collapsing ... (again maybe a paywall).

As you may have heard, mainstream news organizations are facing a financial crisis. Many liberal publications have taken an even more severe beating. But the most dramatic declines over the past few years belong to conservative and right-wing sites. The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing.
This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Righting, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore—essentially the Nielsen ratings of the internet—to track right-wing media. (February is the most recent month with available Comscore data.) Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent. (The site’s CEO and co-founder, Sean Davis, called that figure “laughably inaccurate” in an email but offered no further explanation.) FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing “only” 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago.
Some amount of the decline over that period was probably inevitable, given that 2020 was one of the most intense and newsiest years in decades, propping up publications across the political spectrum. But that doesn’t explain why the falloff has been especially steep on the right side of the media aisle.
What’s going on? The obvious culprit is Facebook. For years, Facebook’s mysterious algorithms served up links to news and commentary articles, sending droves of traffic to their publishers. But those days are gone. Amid criticism from elected officials and academics who said the social-media giant was spreading hate speech and harmful misinformation, including Russian propaganda, before the 2016 election, Facebook apparently came to question the value of featuring news on its platform. In early 2018, it began deemphasizing news content, giving greater priority to content posted by friends and family members. In 2021, it tightened the tap a little further. This past February, it announced that it would do the same on Instagram and Threads. All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites. The changes have affected everyone involved in digital media, including some liberal-leaning sites—such as Slate (which saw a 42 percent traffic drop), the Daily Beast (41 percent), and Vox (62 percent, after losing its two most prominent writers)—but the impact appears to have been the worst, on average, for conservative media. (Referral traffic from Google has also declined over the past few years, but far less sharply.)
Unsurprisingly, the people who run conservative outlets see this as straightforward proof that Big Tech is trying to silence them. Neil Patel, a co-founder (with Tucker Carlson) of the Daily Caller, told me that the tech giants want “to crush any independent media that was perceived to have been helpful to Trump’s rise.” Patel calls this a form of “Big Tech–driven viewpoint discrimination” that “should scare any fair-minded individual.”
A simpler explanation is that conservative digital media are disproportionately dependent on social-media referrals in the first place. Many mainstream publications have long-established brand names, large newsrooms to churn out copy, and, in a few cases, large numbers of loyal subscribers. Sites like Breitbart and Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, however, were essentially Facebook-virality machines, adept at injecting irresistibly outrageous, clickable nuggets into people’s feeds. So the drying-up of referrals hit these publications much harder.
And so far, unlike some publications that have pivoted away from relying on traffic and programmatic advertising, they’ve struggled to adapt. Rather than stabilizing amid Facebook’s new world order, traffic on the right has mostly continued south. Among the big losers over the past year are The Washington Free Beacon, whose traffic was down 58 percent, and Gateway Pundit, down 62 percent. Compare that with prominent mainstream and liberal sites, which, although still well below their 2020 heights, have at least stanched the bleeding. Traffic to The Washington Post and The New York Times from February 2023 to February 2024 was essentially flat. Slate’s was up 14 percent...

There's more at the link, but, be still beating heart, the pond will - spoiler alert - just do the last par ...

The precipitous decline in traffic to conservative publications raises a larger and possibly unanswerable question: Did these operations ever really hold the political and cultural clout that critics ascribed to them at their peak? Recall the liberal anger in 2020 when Ben Shapiro was routinely dominating Facebook’s most-engaged content list, generating accusations that Facebook’s algorithm was favoring right-wing posts and pushing voters toward Trump. Yet Joe Biden went on to win the election easily, and Democrats overperformed in the 2022 midterms. Now, as conservatives cry that Big Tech has crushed their traffic, Trump is running neck and neck with Biden in the polls, even with a legal cloud hanging over him and shortfalls of campaign cash. Maybe who wins the traffic contest doesn’t matter as much as it once appeared.

Ah, so it doesn't matter that no one pays attention to the pond, that's a sign of hope ... but it doesn't get the pond out of its duty, its persecution and suffering at the hands of the reptiles ... and no one knows better ways to persecute the pond than the bromancer ...

Not the bloody war on China for the umpteenth time ... talk about one note Johnny, talk about the pond's suffering...

You do me wrong to take me out o' th' grave.

Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound

Upon a bromancer wheel of fire, that mine own tears

Do scald like molten lead.

Oh well, no point complaining, it could be worse, the pond could be eating grass in Gaza ... best get on with the war ...

That mention of Vlad the sociopath reminded the pond of just how clueless the reptiles are... and how singularly inept the bromancer is, less a warrior than a loon in the grip of an all-consuming obsession ...

It's not just the reptiles'wilful refusal to have anything to do with the trial of the century ... they also don't have the first clue about the actual fighting going on right at the moment ...

The pond knew that there was trouble at mill because the pond's favourite Ukrainian coder had signed off and signed up, on the basis that it was better to fight than to end up in a Putin gulag ...

What could the pond do, but wish him well and hope that somebody would take out Vlad the Sociopath because in situations like these the pond isn't adverse to a little sniper action. 

The pond was well versed in the alternative reality sci fi notion of the chance to go back in time and take out Adolf when he was just a street painter, and knew the right Kristi thing to do ... out to the gravel pit with him, on the basis that his paintings were an abomination, and a warning of what was to come...

Meanwhile, the bromancer was stuck back in the 1950s blathering about Leninism ...

Wait, just wait, we'll get to the delusional Leninism bit, that was just the bromancer laying the groundwork, providing the litany that Catholics love, a bit like that interminable shot of chopper kit that seems to be on endless rotation at the lizard Oz, along with all the rest of the cheap stock shots and  moving pictures ...

The pond didn't need any visual distractions, the pond didn't need any reminders of what it was missing by staying loyal to the bromancer's blather about war with China by Xmas ...the pond knew it was missing out on the trial of the century, or at least the century thus far ...

The pond realises it had promised bromancer blather about Leninism, but wait, first more of the litany ...

Meanwhile, on another planet ...

On with the completely oblivious bromancer ... and, as promised, a classic bro line...

"The Chinese Communist Party is an authentically Leninist party, and the Chinese government is Leninist in character and approach."

Yep, it's straight out of a 1950s DLP pamphlet, and far be it for the pond to embark on a course in Leninism, but wouldn't it have been simpler to describe China as an authoritarian dictatorship? 

You know, like the country currently run by Vlad the sociopath, which bears as much resemblance to Leninism as the pond does to Groucho Marxism, or perhaps the country soon to be run by the orange Jesus, which will quite possibly resemble Groucho Marxism ...or perhaps the Three Stooges variant on Leninism...

Oh that's way too saucy for the Catholic Boys' Daily ...

Never mind, here's actual proof that the bromancer actually scribbles this sort of tosh about Leninism while stuck in a time warp jumping to the far right ...

The problem of course is that Campbell has emboldened the bromancer to blather on and on and on ... and what do you know, it's listicle question time ... and more nonsensical blather about "a truly Leninist power", as if B. A. Santamaria was still alive and raging on some TV program ...

How did the bromancer, and so the pond, get here?

Don't ask ...

Just take comfort knowing that that there's only two gobbets to go, and that the first one will mention the onion muncher ...

After all that, "The only price Australia can impose is public protest".

What happened to the war with China by Xmas, with the bromancer acting as newly installed Reichsmarschall, with the bromancer leading the Wehrmacht to victory against the Leninist horde?

And never mind that there's a real fight going on, right at this moment ...

Has the bromancer managed to sound so completely clueless, so completely irrelevant, barking at the Xi clouds, while Vlad the sociopath plots and schemes? Is the bromancer even more stupid than the isolationist GOP?

Possibly ... that's how he is most of the time, stuck with the onion muncher back in the 1950s ... still valiantly battling Leninism and apparently without the first clue that Franco was just a fair average dictator, adept at the killing fields and backed by the Catholic church ... in much the same way that Vlad the sociopath is backed by the Russian Orthodox church and every so often the current pope chips in to suggest that Ukraine give the game away ...

Never mind, the pond is just relieved to have reached the final gobbet ...

What else? Sadly the pond has entirely ignored the fun to be had this last week in British politics, wherein Sir Keir revealed he was just another politician, willing to go to bed with anyone ... even someone the cat dragged in from Dover ...