loon pond

In which "Ned" goes Luddite, Dame Slap goes 18C, and the climate of reptile discourse goes to hell ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 20:45:26 +0000

Margaret Sullivan was writing about the US when she deployed the words "Sane-washing, sanitizing, pussy-footing and soft-pedaling", but they pretty much apply to the lizard Oz scribblers down under. (‘Reborn in the USA’)

And Parker Molloy thought "everyone’s doing a fair bit of cherry-picking to get to the conclusions they want to reach" in relation to the recent US elections (Everybody Wants Credit for the Blue Wave, Just a friendly reminder that the people pumping out post-election analysis pieces usually have their own agendas and vested interests - paywall)

And speaking of weird agendas, naturally "Ned" of the Everest climb brought his own interpretation to the results:

The pond suspects there was more to the midterms than Musk and AI, but whatever, the pond will accept this shift in reptile thinking, perhaps part of a general News Corporation realignment as they realise they backed a bunch of dropkick losers ... and Faux Noise itself has found itself in the category of a dropkick loser.

Even as the reptiles keep offering a totally useless version of AI, "Ned" decided big tech and the bros were a nice, safe, juicy target, and even invoked an alleged veygan ...

How could the pond resist asking the caps hating hive mind AI?

Glad that's sorted, on to the final "Ned" gobbet, more a base camp than an Everest climb this day, as somehow the Pope got dragged into the mix ...

Hang on a tic, wait a sec, half a mo, the pond had to check on that ...

Right ho, soul brother AI.

Now, what else?

The reptiles were at it again when it came to the climate.

Three reptiles were tag teamed to produce the usual doom and gloom scenario at the top of the digital "news", ma (all the usual abuse that's unfit to print):

EXCLUSIVE
Wholesale hell: power prices to double by 2029, modelling shows
The startling forecasts lump further pressure on Climate Minister Chris Bowen after he conceded Labor had ‘more work to do’ to deliver household bill relief while at COP31 this week.
By Perry Williams, Ben Packham and Jacquelin Magnay

When will the reptiles assemble a team to scribble about planetary hell as the worst impacts of climate change unfold around us?

The malignant Magnay doubled down with her own entry:

COP31
Bowen defends green push amid soaring power bills

COP31: Chris Bowen defends renewables as energy prices soar
Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen has conceded Australia is ‘not declaring victory’ on electricity prices while urging the world to rapidly increase electrification at COP31.
By Jacquelin Magnay

For no particular reason the echo Chambers tagged along ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
Voters hot under the collar over a frosty Albo
The PM is seeking to justify successive trips by linking them to efforts to ease the financial burden of those Australian families who can only dream of overseas travel right now.

Was "frosty" enough reason to include the echo Chambers in the climate action?

Nah, he was just helping out with the familiar reptile litany ...

...Global uncertainty is fuelled by the threat of China reclaiming Taiwan by force, trade wars, instability in the White House, conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, and soaring oil prices.
Closer to home, the slow rollout of renewables, accelerated shutdown of coal-fired power stations, failure to build-up adequate gas infrastructure and refusal to consider nuclear has put Australia on course for skyrocketing energy prices by 2029.

Ah, the suffering of poor old innocent, virginal, clean, dinkum coal.

What about climate science? Don't you worry about that ...

If Albanese and his besieged Treasurer Jim Chalmers weren’t under so much pressure, the Labor leader may have got away with attending his first COP summit since becoming Prime Minister.
Albanese would argue his government is proud champions of climate action and that Labor and Greens voters who put them in office would expect strong advocacy. That thinking ignores millions of Australians who are more worried about the cost of living and housing crises than global climate change summits.

Yeah, don't you worry about all those tall stories of catastrophes and disasters related to climate change.

The pond stuck figures in ears and consigned them all to the archive so that it could find the space to run the infallible Pope's response.

What else?

Well Jennifer went west ...

By Jennifer Westacott
The new airport is open – now comes the difficult par

Stop right there, that exceeded the pond's capacity for boredom in a bigly way. Off to the archive with you.

Perforce, the pond reluctantly turned to Dame Slap for its filler, as the Dame valiantly battled for the faux, bottle styled ranga ...

Uh oh, when Dame Slap writes about "good news", bad news is as sure to follow as a ceremonial MAGA cap-donning ritual.

You guessed it, we're back with the Bolter and 18C ...

"This is untenable"?

Is that in reference to the Dame Slap logic that sees her reverting to a "judicial invention dreamt up by the court" as the first line of defence?

Whatever, as the immortal George once remarked, bigots gotta do what bigots gotta do ... (I will always defend the right to be a bigot. It’s hypocrisy that annoys me more, *intermittent archive link)

Inter alia:

By golly, he and Dame Slap are on the same team.

Sorry, the pond hadn't meant to distract from Dame Slap's closing thoughts, aka the rage machine raging away ...

But will Dame Slap put herself back in her MAGA cap donning box? Will she ever reconsider her folly and repent?

Will she ever be brave enough to ask herself whey she frequently ends up sounding incredibly stupid, and holding the wrong end of the donkey?

The pond has been waiting a terribly long time for that moment, as the consequences of being a MAGAt continue to unfold ...

As a bonus to that bonus, Jack was on hand, wondering ...

By Jack Butler
Who’s responsible for Russell Brand’s right-wash?

Now there's a thought, what with Brand having insinuated himself into the fundie Xian evangelical circuit, and just as deeply into RFK Jr and the GOP ...

That's the snap they went with?

The dumb as a stick piss drinking Bear Grylls?

This was a WSJ pick up, and the pond wondered by Jack simply didn't assemble a few different, much more revealing snaps ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, what a way to defame a hapless lizard, and how they all like being jacked, eh Jack?

They were all at it ...

And what about these?

Would Jack ping all those lickspittle fellow travellers?

He did give a dishonourable mention to DT Jr, but managed to deflect from all the GOP and US Xian devotion by dragging in that silly Pom Bear, the equally silly Tucker, and the deeply weird Musk ...

Credit where credit is also due ...

Take it away Jack ...

So it goes Jack, what with the mad King already pedalling his pet "stolen election" lies ...and Kegsbreath valiantly invoking the Nuremberg defence.

And so to close with the immortal Rowe, and imagine the pond's surprise and pleasure to see that he too went the cricket ball/sandpaper riff ...

How are the reptiles not pleased? In their eyes the planet could do with a little more roughing up ...

And now, recorded as it happened ...

In which the bromancer goes pious, Dame Groan reverts to a snake day union bashing jihad, and the swishing Switzer goes full Dr. Jim ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 20:35:35 +0000

Great news for students of News Corporation ...

Fox News Suffers Stunning Wipeout in Election Ratings (*intermittent archive link)

Could that have something to do with the bromancer sounding morose this day, reverting in the end to the power of prayer as his only hope?

And not just all those luminaries ... Faux Noise too ...

... Fox suffered another blow, with viewership significantly down from the 2022 midterm election. Back then, Fox News averaged 7.422 million viewers; four years later, its viewership dipped by 41 percent.

But even at the depths of despair, the bromancer couldn't let go of the notion that mad King Donald had done some very good things ... a form of both siderism gone mad ...

His contempt for institutions? Is that another way of saying contempt for Murdochians?

At midnight, as the election results clearly pointed out the magnitude of MAGA’s loss, Trump called hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum to tell them that Fox polls are “terrible,” prompting the MAGA-friendly hosts to fact-check the president on air.
Trump also took his ire online. “FoxNews Ratings are way down (27%!) because they’re spending too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats!” he wrote on Truth Social. “All of those people who used to watch Fox, and no longer do, get it. It’s them, not me—My numbers are better than they have ever been.
He continued, “No wonder FoxNews Ratings are collapsing, and they’re going to go down a lot further. They’re way down, not because of me, but because they are AGAINST me! This happened once before, and Fox almost collapsed. It’s happening again!”
Trump ultimately said, “Fox News bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse.”

What to do? Well in company with the sacred Ross Douthat, what choice did the bromancer have but to go all religious?

Fundie ratbag Xians made a big, but understandable, mistake?

They're not the only ones ...

...Last Monday, Fox Corp CEO Lachlan Murdoch attributed the decline to “viewer fatigue.”
CNN’s media analyst, Brian Stelter, pointed out the flaw in this theory about its rival network: “If that’s the diagnosis, it’s unique to Fox, since other news networks are seeing viewership growth.”
The CEO of MSNOW’s parent company, Mark Lazarus, also clapped back, saying on Versant’s third-quarter earnings call, “We’re not seeing currently...not seeing any fatigue with our audiences.”
Murdoch’s explanation came after Fox’s October total day audience within the 25-to-54 demographic fell to its lowest monthly level in 25 years.

And so to a final suck on the fundie sausage in a way only the bromancer can do ...

Thanks to an attempt at Catholic indoctrination early in life, the pond became an atheist for life.

Let's hope the bromancer's prescription gives new life to the trend away from magical beliefs in not so magical beings.

And now to the obligatory Tuesday offering, and again good news, because Dame Groan has moved away from her usual Snake Day Jimbo jihad bashing, and has selected a new target ... unions.

Talk about reviving the good old days and ancient lizard Oz jihads ...

Sure there's a minor revival of the Jimbo jihad in that last par, but Jimbo plays just a small role in this day's "we've all been rooned, and we'll all be rooned some more ere Xmas day" ...

Bloody unions, small and useless, but amazingly potent, and with a heartless harridan calling the shots...

Come on down HR Nicholls Society:

Sorry, the pond only just noticed that use of "woke", which always triggers a contractual requirement ...

Perhaps that helps explain why Dame Groan is seemingly incapable of reading an award and applying its terms.

It's not so hard, it's something the pond once had to do on a daily basis, as a kind of pleasant warfare, but hey the pond isn't bitter about once being blackbanned as an alleged "scab" ... nor is the pond inclined to think that unions are the end of the world ...but you know what happens when Dame Groan gets a bone to chew (or should the metaphor invoke a cow with cud?) ...

And now to a flag that terrifies the reptiles, and the final "we've all been rooned, and we'll all keep on being rooned" shout from the lizard Oz rooftops ...

Take that, you wretches, and what joy for Jimbo, being given an early mark from Dame Groan's usual jihad...

And so to an apology.

The pond can't hope to cover every reptile doing or saying, and perhaps just as well, given the Major failure yesterday, what with there not being a single comment on the pond's late breaking Major outing.

All the pond can do is offer pointers to the intermittent archive, and teaser trailers for the best of the rest, like plucky Linda...

Scrapping AUKUS deal would threaten national security

The pond hopes that serious herpetology students get to the very end (spoiler alert), where plucky Linda advises ...

We must crack on at pace. That starts with speaking plainly to Australians about the threats we face and what it will take to meet them. Australians must then hold the government to account.

Crack on at pace? Blimey cobber, jolly good, put a little sandpaper on that six stitcher.

Better still, waiter, the pond would like a serve of Linda's gummies...

The pond took the trouble to check out the "pathway to Australia's nuclear-powered submarine capability" (pdf), and it showed "Planned delivery of UK's First SSN-AUKUS" in the late 2030s and the "Planned delivery of Australian's First SNN-AUKUS" in the early 2040s.

The first locally (part) made sub in the early 2040s. Why it's about as good as waiting for a fast rail connection between Sydney and Melbourne.

Good luck with all that future younglings, because the pond will be long dead and gone, but does venture to suggest that warfare will be very different from what these lumbering behemoths will be expecting...

Plucky, resolute Linda was over on the extreme far right.

Leading the reptile "news" across the way from her were a couple of stories...

Has there ever been a far right party the reptiles haven't learned to love?

EXCLUSIVE
Coalition and One Nation to align for maximum damage on Labor
Such a move will likely deepen losses for Ben Carroll’s government at the November 28 Victorian election.
By Anthony Galloway

Giving the fake ranga a break, what could possibly go wrong with that?

Damn you AI, you think you're so bloody clever ...

The pond finds it hard to pay attention to the deep south's doings, and as for the canny Cranston, he was just doing the usual reptile Jimbo jihad ...

EXCLUSIVE
Labor’s cabinet denied key Treasury advice on tax proposals
Treasury advice excluded from tax changes provided to Anthony Albanese’s cabinet minister
Australia’s most powerful economic department has been silenced in the room where tax policy is decided – leaving only ministers within Jim Chalmers’ portfolio privy to Treasury’s true views.
By Matthew Cranston

It's all reptile noise, and it's designed to serve a greater purpose ...

By cutting off antagonistic Anthony and the canny Cranston, the pond had just enough room for the swishing Switzer, especially as he only took up two gobbets.

In this outing, the swishing Switzer took the Jimbo jihad to a whole new level, by invoking Dr. Jim, a move which surely has a limited appeal to younglings, what with Dr Jim's wiki telling the pond that he was treasurer of Australia up to 6th June 1975!

1975! Even with the pond's uselessness at maths, and allowing for a little rounding, that's 51 years ago, though it does give the pond some idea of the lizard Oz's demographics ...

As if the naked absurdity of all this blather wasn't enough, the swishing Switzer attempted a little both siderism in his final gobbet, namely "In fairness, Chalmers has not sought to emulate Cairns".

In fairness?

What's the point about resurrecting boogeyman Gough and ogre Dr. Jim if not to be completely unfair?

And to what avail? How many - apart from the aged pond and similar - can recall the tragic sight of Dr. Jim attempting to flog his tomes just outside an entrance to the Prahan markets?

Sheesh, even Joyce Evans' photos of him in situ are buried in the National Archive and all the pond could find was this snap of him and Junie at Roselands on 24th November 1975, flogging "Sex, Prejudice and Politics" and "The Quiet Revolution" ...

What a desperate, pathetic sod this swishing Switzer is ...

Such a stupid, irrelevant man ... and so desperate too, and so for relief the pond turned to the immortal Rowe ...

The pond finally understood the purpose of the immortal Rowe showing off his skeletal structures.

Proof that there was no AI here, here NO bloody AI!

Now for some real Faux Noise entertainment, as state regime media keeps on giving ...

And the entertainment never seems to end ...

A Major late-breaking 4 pm special ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 05:00:00 +0000

Devoted herpetologists will remember that tragic day only too well ...

ABC's Insiders drops conservative commentator Gerard Henderson (*intermittent archive link)

The pond only mentions that eternal, never-ending source of Polonial petulance because of that sting at the very end ...

On Monday, Australian columnist Chris Mitchell praised new Insiders host David Speers as “scrupulously fair and the best political interviewer in the post-Laurie Oakes era”, while reporting that Henderson’s future on the program was uncertain.

That was then ...as the pond climbed into its time machine, and went back to see the sweet devotion the turncoat, the traitor, the rat in the rank, once inspired ...

And that's why the pond had to kick the Major to a late breaking four pm slot, because what fun to do a compare and contrast ...

This is the Major now, and it will turn out, as the sorry tale unfolds, that Speersie is now just one of a fetid swamp of dissidents and traitors that arouse the Major's ire.

Just the sight of him smirking and sitting down with Albo in some faux bush setting was enough to send the Major right off ...

The Major was outraged at all the hurtful attacks on Bid, bloody leftists the lot of them ...

But you'd expect that from those shameless rogues in those other places ...

Fear not for Bid, she'll be alright, but bloody Speersie, what a disappointment, what a betrayal, as the Major dipped into his always ready bucket of bile ...

Back in the day, how sweet Speersie was in the eyes of the Major ...

But that was then, and since then, attitudes and arteries have hardened ...

Fear not for Bid, she's back ...but that bloody Speersie ... he's just one of the pack, one of the left media nodding away ...

Outrageous. Sure the entire point of the cartoons was to fuel social media hate, but how outrageous for Speersie to point it out.

And then he clearly failed the obligations imposed on all cardigan wearers by the Australian Daily Zionist News!

That bloody Speersie ...

What a betrayal ... and yet how sweet he once was ...

The pond realises this time jumping between the Major then and the Major now might be confusing - the pond managed to confuse itself in the drafting - but it's crucial to understanding the Major's righteous indignation, his sense of betrayal ...

It's bad enough that he has to contemplate a couple of shameless deep state rogues consorting together in the most sinister way imaginable - Twiggy and the talking tampon King Chuck - and forcing the Major to his favourite, the odious Shellenberger, to help in his shellacking ...

But it's the betrayal by Speersie, once the apple of the Major's eye, that cut the deepest and hurt the most ...

Those days are gone, long gone.

These days Speersie is just one in a long line of ABC hustlers, cardigan wearers, con artists and shakedown merchants, sent to torment the Major whenever he steps off the golf course and heads for the nineteenth hole ...

You know, bloody drongos who try to take climate science seriously ... and look, here's another in the conga line ...

Eek, what a closing thought, terrifying to the hive mind ...

Chuck and Twiggy and Albo, all part of the deep state, all conspiring together in plain sight ... and no doubt that's another thing that rogue Speersie, always clueless, will fail to mention.

No wonder the pond stopped watching The Insiders once noble Polonius had gone, and Speersie was given the chair.

And now, as the reptiles had proffered their Beta AI at the end of the Major's piece, the pond felt the need to ask a simple question ...

Perhaps that was too blunt, so the pond had another go, and the AI bot proved charmingly elusive and inconclusive ...

As if the lizard Oz would straight out call the Major a climate science denialist.

Sure that's what he is, but you don't get far in the hive mind by plain speaking the truth.

"The provided texts"?

If you only dwell in the hive mind, all you'll get is the hive mind speaking to the hive mind.

Stupid hive mind bot ...

And so to a couple of cartoons ... just for the fun ...

In which climate change is all the go, with the Bjørn-again one leading the charge, while the flood water whisperer turns up late to down play the bros ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 20:33:28 +0000

The both siderist NY Times has recently been running fear stories about the mad King and science:

How Trump Is Dismantling America’s Scientific Research Machine (*intermittent archive link)

The American Brain Drain Claims Another Scientist (*intermittent archive link)

Hah. The lizard Oz down under is blessed with a superabundance of scientists, though somehow they only seem to specialise in climate science denying faux science.

Pick of this litter is the Bjørn-again one, who these days is so widely disregarded that he can only find homes in the likes of the Bangkok Post (*intermittent archive) and the New York Post...

... and in that same proud tradition, that same august company, ladies and gentlepersons, the lizard Oz ...

Top notch denialism, as only the lizard Oz can manage.

Weep your eyes out, brain draining Unites States ...we haz teh science ...

So what to do when climate change aids in the production of a major disaster near you?

Simple. Install an alarm, heed the warning, and run like hell ...

Yes, don't worry about what climate change might produce. Do absolutely nothing beyond a few simple alarms, and all will be well.

Elsewhere in the rag, the climate, and an accompanying tinge of climate science denialism was strong this day ...

The pond could only hint at these delights with teaser trailers ...

EXCLUSIVE
Billionaires at odds over ‘UN get-together’
Billionaires Ryan Stokes and Andrew Forrest clash over Chris Bowen’s COP31 climate summit
A stark divide has emerged over climate action as business leaders weigh Australia’s push for global ambition with an economic crunch at home.
By Perry Williams and Jacquelin Magnay

How the reptiles love confusion, chaos, clashings and conflict in this arena ... while Ben was also packing it ...

EXCLUSIVE
Revealed: Bowen climate ‘integrity’ unit’s COP31 talking points
Chris Bowen’s ‘information integrity’ unit puts positive spin on COP31, power prices
A taxpayer-funded kit tells businesses and community groups to ‘add your own logo’ to government climate claims ahead of the conference.
By Ben Packham

Sam was on hand to unveil yet another deep pockets conspiracy ...

EXCLUSIVE
Meet the new deep-pocketed climate activist making a $1.1bn splash
Major Australian philanthropists launch $1.1bn climate funding initiative modelled on US anti-coal group
Australia’s most influential climate donors are backing a new group aiming to unlock $1.1bn for climate causes by 2031, modelled on a US coal plant slayer.
By Samantha Hutchinson

Not dear, sweet, precious, virginal, innocent, deeply clean Oz coal?!

The pond could only offer teaser trailers because over on the extreme far right of the digital edition, simpleton Simon was sounding alarums ...

Those dastardly perfidious Europeans were involved in a major climate stitch up ...

Beware the fine print in FTA with Europe
By Simon Benson

Forget the archive, please allow the pond to swallow it whole ...

Just look at her ... malignant, stern, like some bloody headmistress ready to give us all a caning.

No wonder simplistic Simon was right to blow the whistle ...

Terrifying. The pond rarely pays attention to simpleton Simon, but the thought that Australia might actually have to pay more than lip service to action on climate probably sent the hive mind into a kind of Jonestown fever, a complete Kool-aid meltdown ...

The pond simply couldn't resist asking the lizard Oz's AI a question ...

Why was the pond disappointed and surprised?

With all the fuss about climate the go, the pond decided that there was no room for the Major's rather standard slagging off of rival media - that bloody turncoat Speersie - but realising he has many fans, decided to allocate him the rare honour of a late 4 pm pond slot.

That gave the pond room to contemplate the flood waters whisperer, on hand with a most important missive pertaining to the bros ...

By golly the flood water whisperer is up on all the latest trends and the newest terminology amongst the bros ...

And what better time - with the cases of Russell Brand and the Tate brothers just a few amongst many - to follow the bro line?

All this, of course, is in aid of an Australian Daily Zionist News interpretation of what matters ...

And after that little outburst came the capper, with the pond deciding to put it in print rather than in screen cap form ...

Antisemitism makes no distinction between men and women, children and the elderly, civilians and combatants. Other evidence presented to the royal commission shows that antisemitism and the antisemitic-adjacent cause of Palestine are rife in the universities where the fixation on violence against women began.
The intelligentsia’s determination to elevate misogyny into an all-purpose explanation for murderous extremism suggests a calculated reluctance to confront a far more uncomfortable truth.

There you have it ...

the antisemitic-adjacent cause of Palestine

So voicing any concern about the ethnic cleansing currently being conducted in Gaza and the West Bank makes you antisemitic adjacent?

At least it's out there in print ... the sociopathic embrace of climate science denialism, and the joys of ethnic cleansing, and life with the boofhead, headkicking lizard Oz bros, down there with the droogs of of the moment...

And so to the Rowe of the day ...

The immortal Rowe shared an explanation of the scaffolding he uses to erect his wondrous portraits, and the pond felt compelled to share it ...

Meanwhile ...

In which the pond does its best to avoid the mad King, and so gets lumbered with Polonial prattle, the Ughmann, Dame Slap and the dog botherer ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 21:00:00 +0000

The pond has been sated, saturated, is as full as a goog with the doings and disasters of mad King Donald and his cavorting minions, swimming in a feverish American swamp ...

There could be only one cure, one solace, plunge back into the icy deep end of the local reptile pool to refresh and relax with a burst of parochial hive mind news.

What a relief to return to the Polonial bosom.

Even if the pond had not the slightest interest in the cavorting of assorted Libs or in the Victorian scene, it was better than contemplating details about ballots and voter suppression in some bum f*ck South Carolina or Mississippi county:

What a relief, turgid prose of a domestic kind, and a chance to marvel at Polonius's devotion to Bid, together with his tremendous, admirable desire to join the Canavan caravan.

Bid has been in the news of late, what with having to apologise for failing to declare 16 flight upgrades - what's the point if you can't sit at the pointy end?

She'd been off in London declaring a war on left-wing globalists - a veritable Trumpian down under - as well as being a stout-hearted devotee of guns (while curiously insisting we should shed a tear for the Bondi shooting, performed by loons armed with long arms) (Graudian her here).

The Canavan caravan is under attack from the faux ranga, who inevitably turned up in the second gobbet, as Polonius did a fair imitation of the departed vote whisperer Antony Green ...

Talk about devotion ... voting all the way down the ticket.

Good luck with that, as Polonius wrapped up this outing by suggesting we all listen to Bid ...

Tremendous stuff, and after that induced slumber, the pond woke briefly to wonder if it had to give up all US jokes?

The pond did think of heading off to Nick, discussing the current lizard Oz Jimbo jihad ...

Jim-Junking Complex: tell ’em they’re dreaming
Criticism of Jim Chalmers obscures collective government responsibility. Instead of trashing the Treasurer, his Labor critics should try contributing to fixing the economy.
By Nick Dyrenfurth
Contributor

What a disgrace. It's a wonder the reptiles didn't drum him out of Surry Hills ...

The pond couldn't waste precious time on that sort of heresy.

Does Nick have the faintest idea who he's scribbling for, who he's giving comfort and succour to?

The pond wanted a serve of standard size Jimbo jihad, and the Ughmann was just the unreformed former seminarian reptile to deliver the goods.

Just look at the snap of perplexed Jimbo that starts off this round of the jihad ...

Sheesh, even by the Ughmann's climate science denying standards, that was a desiccated coconut effort and it didn't get any better in what quickly turned into a "Ned" style Everest climb (forget trudging through the Amazon with a machete, we're in thin air territory) ...

The pond gets it. That comical snap of the open-mouthed, gesticulating, finger pointing Jimbo says it all.

It's a disaster, we'll all be rooned, and it's the fat cat cardigan wearers wot done it, but do we have to spend a bigly 12 minute bot read on the matter?

Is it so tedious that the reptiles felt the need to fling in the dog botherer as an AV distraction?

Second thoughts, once the unreformed seminarian reverted to his standard religious metaphorical mumbo jumbo, the dog botherer seemed like a sight for sore eyes ...

The pond asked for it, and it was given unto the pond ... the pond knocked on cardigan wearer doors, and they were opened. Every one who asketh will receive the news that we'll all be rooned ...

He's into boiling bunnies? What a sicko, talk about preverts.

If only a cleansing biblical flood would cleanse the earth of reptiles ...

At this point, Dame Slap hovered into view. How could the pond resist?

All good, but then the next gobbet took an ominous turn, as Dame Slap invoked the mad King ...

All good, but yet again the pond was reminded just how Dame Slap routinely manages to get things wrong.

Her donning of the MAGA cap is embalmed in the intermittent archive ... In a ballot box, nobody can see you vote ... but every so often the pond likes to drag it out of the mortuary for an inspection ...

Oh dear, the fallout took a long time to happen, but it didn't end well, and somehow Dame Slap, in the grip of a colander memory, can blithely talk of routs...

Why does she expect anyone to fall for her latest guff after that crazy MAGA cap-donning stuff?

Say some more ...

...A few days later, a few remarks from Donald Trump’s chief White House strategist Steve Bannon confirm the level of crazy that has settled into the US political landscape. “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” Bannon tells The New York Times.
“I want you to quote this. The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand the country. They still don’t understand why Donald Trump is the President of the United States.”
Boom. “White House tells media to shut up”, raged the left-liberal media, proving in record speed Bannon’s critique of the media. That is a threat, roared The Guardian. The Huffington Post used Bannon’s remarks to accuse the Trump administration, barely a week old, of already looking like the worst of Richard Nixon. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour likened Bannon’s shut-up comment to the working of a totalitarian regime, quipping this is how you angle for an order of merit from the presidents of Egypt, Russia and Turkey.
Dear Christiane, Turkey locks up more journalists than any other country. The US doesn’t imprison journalists for doing their job, whichever way they want to do it. Yours sincerely, Janet.
Default outrage prevented the media from hearing Bannon’s real point: the media should listen more if they want to understand why Trump is President. Like the Upper West Side poetry group, the media still don’t want to listen and learn. Like the anti-Trump protesters, they still don’t want to understand Trump’s supporters.
We know the outraged left-wing press didn’t listen to Trump supporters because even the publisher of the NYT apologised to subscribers after the election for its coverage. The Washington Post tried to make amends by running letters from Trump supporters. Pity the Post wasn’t interested before the election.
We also know that sections of the left-liberal press openly adopted an oppositional stance to Trump because they admitted as much. Writing on the Daily Caller website last week, Rachel Stoltfoos reminded us that former National Public Radio boss Ken Stern advocated oppositional tactics because Trump is “an affront to American democracy”. Tellingly, Stern admitted the price: “The next time Fox News or Breitbart caterwaul about media bias, the claim will have substantially more bite.”
The bite marks of bias grow deeper and more grotesque the longer the left-wing media refuses to listen. At his first official meeting, Trump spoke at CIA headquarters in Virginia. He was given a standing ovation and cheered during his speech. Over at CNN, TV hosts hyperventilated about Trump’s self-congratulatory remarks while standing in front of the agency’s memorial to its dead officers. CNN’s TV stars didn’t report the audience cheering Trump because they weren’t listening.
Last week The Economist downgraded the US from a full to a flawed democracy. Its so-called Intelligence Unit explained the downgrade was due to a “further erosion of trust in government and elected officials there”. Using more intelligent criteria — say, the ability or failure to listen — the Intelligence Unit should have downgraded a media that failed to listen to Trump supporters, not to mention the woman who refused to listen to people she nicknamed deplorables. Where’s the flaw in a democracy when the candidate who listened most to those who are wary of DC politics won a democratic election and is now President?
While American left-liberal media outlets resume normal programming of blocking their ears, top-rating shows on Foxtel’s Sky News Australia will be leaving the studio this year to listen and report on grassroots issues from people outside the big cities. As Sky’s David Speers said: “It’s incumbent on us in the media to do a better job of listening to those people who genuinely feel they’re not being heard or genuinely represented by the governing class.”
Trump’s win is a wake-up call for our politicians to do the same or else feel the eventual backlash of shy voters emboldened by the privacy of the ballot box.

Oh yes, let's feel the backlash. Let's wake up to the woke. (Those were the days, with Speersie in his natural home before he headed off to white ant the ABC).

Back to the present, and the pond understands that all the reptiles at some point fall into litany mode, and so it was for Dame Slap this weekend ...

Maybe not so much a gaslighter as the mad King for whom Dame Slap donned the cap and bent the knee ...

The pond knew it would be hard to avoid contemplating the Unites States, and turned to the dog botherer for a final bout of domestic relief.

Surely he'd deliver what Nick had labelled Jim-Junking Complex, and Albo Derangement Reflex, and sure enough, just look at those wretched miscreants at the start of the show, all sepia and downcast, captured in inimitable hive mind fashion like cornered rats ...

The dog botherer was on fire ... and in the next gobbet the reptiles doubled down by showing him savaging the mad King for his Iran folly.

Strange, the pond can recollect back in the day that the dog botherer was very keen for Iranian action, as when he did a confab with that other Jimbo ... (saved to the other Jimbo's site)...

That was then, and this is now, and the jihads must continue. Do your work, colander ...

It was litany time, this variation reverting to an old reptile favourite, a pox on all their houses, with the usual standard "pox on renewables" as the default dog botherer climate science denying default position ...

Note the cheap jibe that somehow climate science is simply about improving the weather, because if you stopped paying attention to science teachers in third form, that's pretty much all you've got ...

Not just climate science, but a standard serve of the Australian Daily Zionist News.

At this point, the pond would usually wander off to Haaretz, or take in a report on actual climate science ...

Haaretz is easily covered ...

It's Clear – Israel Now Has a Plan for the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians From Gaza
Someone conceived it, there were discussions of pros and cons, alternatives were suggested, and all done in air-conditioned conference rooms. For the first time since the war of revenge in Gaza began, it's clear that Israel has a plan – and it's a far-reaching one
Gideon Levy

Adolf Eichmann began his Nazi career as the head of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration at the security agency charged with protecting the Reich. Joseph Brunner, the father of Mossad chief David Barnea, was three years old when he fled Nazi Germany with his parents, before the evacuation plan was implemented.
Last week, Barnea, the grandson, visited Washington in order to discuss the "evacuation" of the Gaza Strip's population. Barak Ravid reported on Channel 12 News that Barnea told his interlocutors that Israel has already begun talks with three countries on this issue, and the irony of history hid its face in shame. A grandson of a refugee of ethnic cleansing in Germany discusses ethnic cleansing, and no memory comes to mind.
In order to "evacuate" two million people from their country, you need a plan. Israel has been working on one. The first stage involves transferring much of the population into a concentration camp in order to facilitate an efficient deportation...

And so on, and on target, on course, on schedule, block aid, and deliver collective punishment, all part of the joy of a cleansing ...

All that's needed is a scheme to stay in power ...

Netanyahu Is Plotting a Final Power Grab for Israel's Democracy. His Loyalist Shin Bet Chief Is the Key

With moves lifted directly from the playbooks of dark regimes, the prime minister and his lackeys will do everything to undermine the election results – dragging Israel into its worst constitutional crisis yet

Amos Harel

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his closest associates, and his accomplices in Israel's security services and media outlets are swiftly dragging Israel toward what will be the most severe constitutional crisis in the country's history – and even this is too mild a way to describe the events that unfolded in recent days.

With moves lifted directly from the playbooks of dark regimes, Netanyahu is now actively trying to hold a regime coup: Evading recognition of election results, threatening violence, consistent and harsh incitement against minorities, and taking advantage of Israel's secret services.

On Wednesday morning, the Central Elections Committee published the final election results, saying that an examination of thousands of ballot boxes had found no evidence of irregularities or any compromise to the election's integrity.

Committee Chairman Justice Noam Sohlberg said that intelligence presented to him by the Shin Bet security service allegedly indicates a widespread phenomenon of money flowing into Israel from foreign countries, "originating from unknown parties with undisclosed and even hostile interests who intended to promote their influence." Sohlberg added that the suspicions involve enormous sums and "thousands of people, perhaps even more." The Shin Bet is expected to continue its investigation.

Even that, however, won't be enough to satisfy the right-wing bloc, certainly after the harsh allegations cast by Shin Bet chief David Zini.

On Netanyahu's main propaganda outlet, Channel 14, broadcasts titled "Ballot Box Terror" have been running almost nonstop since last week's election. Knesset members, panelists, and social media activists affiliated with Netanyahu have been preparing the ground for a clash over claims of voter fraud among Israel's Arab public...

And so on, and as for the climate - dog bothering weather if you will - how about a taste from Scientific American?

Earth’s ‘life support systems’ are breaking down, climate scientists warn
“The climate emergency is already here” (* intermittent archive link)
By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron

Earth faces “rapid destabilization” as a result of climate change, an international group of scientists find in the latest edition of an annual checkup of the planet’s “vital signs.”

“This is no longer a warning for the future; it is a diagnosis of the present,” the authors write.

The report, the latest in a series called the “State of the Climate,” measures 16 key markers of Earth’s climate. Seven of these have reached “record extremes,” says report co-author Christopher Wolf, a research scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates. These extremes include soaring greenhouse gas concentrations, melting sea ice and sea-level rise—driven largely by human activities.

“Global warming appears to be accelerating,” Wolf says.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a by-product of burning fossil fuels, has reached record-high levels (428 parts per million), as have other greenhouse gases such as methane (1,940 parts per billion) and nitrous oxide (340 parts per billion). The ocean has absorbed a record-breaking jump in heat, which, in turn, has helped fuel unprecedented sea-level rise. At the same time, higher temperatures have meant record losses in the Greenland ice sheet and glaciers.

“Earth’s life-support systems are being pushed beyond stable limits, with changes unfolding faster than our ability to respond,” Wolf and his co-authors write in the report.

Humans are in danger as a result: since September 2025 climate change has fueled myriad natural disasters, including floods in Albania, Bali, Brazil, Columbia, Greece, Indonesia, and Vietnam; heat waves in Europe, India and the U.S.; wildfires in Australia and Florida; and more, the report finds.

The future, the report warns, may be bleak.

“We are increasingly concerned about the risk of crossing climate tipping points that could lead to irreversible changes,” Wolf says...

But not the dog botherer.

His climate change concerns and his understanding is about on a par with mad King Donald ... which is to say, much like a demented, doddering old ruler who imagines he somehow inherited his uncle's genes ...

Does this litany even take in a whiff of Covid and RFK Jr? You betcha ...

Such a loyal far right populist, always with a kind and optimistic word for the faux ranga ... and yet, just yesterday, the pond strayed into the mighty 'Gong's public library and picked up a copy of that other rag ... a rare experience, because the pond can't remember the last time it had a tree killer edition in hand.

‘They don’t have a clue’: Covert tapes expose One Nation turmoil, Rinehart influence claims

Nick McKenzie, Toni Ambrogetti and Paul Sakkal (*intermittent archive link)

One Nation’s former national campaign director has been captured on covert recordings warning that billionaire Gina Rinehart is secretly dictating party strategy and top adviser James Ashby may be using the political party to enrich himself.

Despite Pauline Hanson sacking loyalist Sean Black after the Coalition put pressure on her for employing the formerly jailed rapist in key One Nation backroom roles, he claimed on the tapes to have quietly continued working for the populist party after his removal.

Heard bemoaning the party’s lack of competence to wield the significant power it is chasing in upcoming elections in Victoria, NSW and federally, he warns that rampant nepotism could see Rinehart puppets or inexperienced One Nation insiders, such as Hanson’s daughter Lee, given key political or policy roles, or even elevated to governor-general if the party ever secured government.

“They don’t have a clue what democracy is,” Black, who served One Nation for eight years including as campaign manager between 2023 and April 2026, said on one recording.

In another, he cautions that Rinehart has disproportionate influence over One Nation and especially the party’s chief strategist, James Ashby.

“James’ view on policy is that the policy comes from Gina or Gina’s acolytes, and that is it,” Black states.

He also claims to be worried Rinehart is pulling One Nation’s strings using proxies such as Rinehart company chief executive and ex-Northern Territory chief minister Adam Giles.

Giles made a $500,000 donation to One Nation earlier this year, which he said in April was paid out of his bonus from Hancock. At the time, when other large donations linked to Rinehart including a plane were also publicised, Treasurer Jim Chalmers described Hanson as a “wholly owned subsidiary of Gina Rinehart”...

By golly, if we work hard at it, we might almost match the court of the mad King, if only in a small beer way ...

Maybe Gina's not up there with Elon in terms of wealth or patronage, but dammit, she's doing her level best ... and some day perhaps the faux ranga could match the king himself (in an alternate universe).

The reptiles must themselves resolve to do better, be best, aim higher as we used to promise at Tamworth Public School...

There is much to admire, and to imitate ...

MAGA-Curious CBS Boss Bari Weiss’ Side Hustle Admits Wild Mistake

William Vaillancourt

Bari Weiss' opinion news site, The Free Press, has acknowledged an embarrassing error in its coverage of Abdul El-Sayed, the nation's first Muslim senator-elect.

El-Sayed, who faced Islamophobic attacks throughout his campaign and opposition from pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, defeated Republican Mike Rogers. In his victory speech Tuesday, El-Sayed pronounced his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, and used three other Arabic expressions: "inshallah" (twice), "Alhamdulillah," and "habibi."

The Free Press blew that way out of proportion.

The site, which is marketed as "Honest," "Independent," and "Fearless," inaccurately claimed in a Nov. 4 post on X that El-Sayed "gave his victory speech in Arabic last night."

In the corresponding video, reporter and host Maya Sulkin made the same claim.

"So that is the first Muslim senator in American history giving his victory speech in Detroit—in Arabic," she said, with what appeared to be an air of skepticism.

X users called out the false characterization. One asked Grok to analyze what percentage of El-Sayed's approximately 20-minute address was in Arabic. Its answer: 0.27 percent.

About 44 hours after making the post, The Free Press finally replied to it with an acknowledgment:

"CORRECTION: This post and opinion video states that Abdul El-Sayed gave his acceptance speech in Arabic. That's not accurate. In fact, he said a few phrases in Arabic, but the majority of his speech was in English. The Free Press regrets the error."

Come on reptiles, come on, there's much more Islamophobia to explore and exploit, there's even more climate science and ethnic cleansing denialism to promote.

Truly demented dementia calls ...

Already the mad King's cries of electoral fraud are resounding around the land...

... and now he has his beloved enforcer to make it so ...

A big, not so beautiful book of reptiles, foreign edition, with the bromancer and "Ned" leading the way ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 21:22:21 +0000

Inescapable.

Even the local reptiles couldn't look away from the fruits of News Corporation's American endeavours.

A little shiver of delight ran through the pond reading about simpleton Sharri, full, complete and utter disrespect, quailing and wailing, as in the Weekly Beast ...

‘Crushing and terrifying’ midterms result leaves media in fear of civilisation and capitalism crumbling
Caitlin Cassidy

...The Australian, in a frenzy of alliteration, called it the “Donald deflation” and a “MAGA mauling”, brought on by “Trump the trasher”.
The national broadsheet also found room on the front for a piece on Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, headlined “Far out: far-left radical to be first Muslim senator”.
El-Sayed’s victory had some commentators proclaiming the end of western civilisation. Over at News24, Sharri Markson began her program with: “Far-left extremist Abdul El-Sayed wins in Michigan, in a shocking result.
“This is the most crushing and terrifying result of the evening,” she continued, going on to repeat a false claim that El-Sayed has links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
“How can Americans vote for an anti-western, anti-American lunatic, as Trump describes him? What does this say about American values, and about the strength of western civilisation? You can’t help but worry that it’s crumbling, and capitalism with it.”
The “extremist” platform of El-Sayed, a former county health official who describes himself as a “capitalist who understands how capitalism works”, includes backing universal healthcare and regulating monopolies, as well as ending US military aid to Israel, while calling its war in Gaza a genocide.

If El-Sayed can carry out another part of his platform - dethrone Chuck Schumer and his imaginary friends - and the pond's delight will be complete ... Chuck Schumer should quit – but would his imaginary friends agree?

The pond will report on a couple of the local jihadists carrying on standard local jihads on the morrow, but for the moment, the pond must go with the flow, and brood about local reptiles brooding about what News Corporation helped wrought.

The pond makes no apologies for length - this is a beautiful bumper book for boy and girl herpetologists - and what better way to begin the flow than with a lengthy urination by the bromancer?

It's in the small print, but warning, the reptiles timed this as a ten minute read, which is way above the time taken for a standard sex act by the average Australian male, so be cautious ...

Good old bromancer, always looking on the bright side of life, but currently the United States hasn't any discernible means of correcting the excesses of a mad king, deep in the grip of dementia, and able to make all kinds of forays into foreign affairs, not least offering covert and overt support to said Vlad the sociopath, while carrying on his own foreign adventures, as the pitiful and the cowardly try to bail out from the adventures they offered their full support for ...

Did the pond mention that there would be cartoons as well as the lengthy and turgid exegesis?

Now marvel at the way that the bromancer can't contain two conflicting thoughts in his head.

Apparently the mad king is a much diminished figure. Apparently at the same time, he'll have the power to attempt spectacular and foolish things ...(oh and the weakness will also be a danger)...

The pond has already covered the couch molester with a cartoon.

What to say about the bromancer's analysis? Much the same as might be said about former Texas governors ...

Truth to tell, without a few 'toons, the pond would find this a hard ride ...as the bromancer, in classic Australian Daily Zionist News style, does his best to exonerate Benji for his role in the Iran folly ...

Is there anything more shocking than all of that?

Perhaps the way that the facilitators and enablers at Faux Noise - the bromancer's American kissing cousins - stayed loyal right up to the bitter end, and were rewarded by a bigly drop in ratings and rats in the far right ranks rushing to allocate blame ...

The pond would have loved to share more of the infighting and ankle biting, but it's there at Media Matters ...

“A clown show”: The right-wing media blame game over the midterms is full steam ahead
Reeling from Republican losses, conservative hosts blamed each other, the party, and Donald Trump himself
Written by Noah VanDowe & Zachary Pleat

Never mind, the pond is stuck with the bromancer ...almost bringing himself to say that the mad king was almost worse than Biden (as if such a thing could be):

Ross Douthat? Didn't he head off to help ruin CBS?

...Despite being an early skeptic of Donald Trump’s politics and popularity, Douthat has since downplayed the president’s authoritarian and fascist tendencies while attempting to rationalize Trump’s behavior.

He has also criticized Democrats for their “resistance” showcases, spurring condemnation from those on the left that Douthat has been incorporated into a sort of “anti-anti-Trump” persona among the American intelligentsia, apparently ready to castigate Trump’s critics even as he himself scrutinizes the president and his policies.

Good enough to score a sit down with the mad king ...as the reptiles decided to add to the burden of the read with a couple of graphs ...as if wading through fundie tykes blathering on about core Western values wasn't enough to produce a Technicolor yawn ...

"The brilliant Rod Dreher...?"

That lickspittle fellow traveller supinely selling his soul?

...Dreher's experience as a 2021 fellow at Hungary's Danube Institute and his observation of Viktor Orbán's government persuaded him that Christian conservatives could still win and wield substantial political power. "Orbán was so unafraid, so unapologetic about using his political power to push back on the liberal élites in business and media and culture", Dreher told The New Yorker's Andrew Marantz in 2022. "It was so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative government can do if it's serious about stemming this horrible global tide of wokeness." Dreher also argued that the U.S. Republican Party needs "a leader with Orbán's vision—someone who can build on what Trumpism accomplished, without the egomania and inattention to policy, and who is not afraid to step on the liberals' toes." (much more, and even worse, at his wiki)

With all these fundie tykes floating about, it's inevitable that the bromancer would reveal his Islamophobia and turn his piece into a medieval crusade ... with an image designed to terrify and horrify the hive mind ...

The bromancer can never help himself... Trump had many good instincts.

Yeah, sure ...

The pond shouldn't leave the bromancer's analysis without noting the way that many in the hive mind were determined to stay loyal ...

That's the spirit "C", doing an "O" for the mad king ...

And so to "Ned", and the good news is that this Everest was remarkably short and easy, as if for once words had failed the portentous, pompous pundit ...

Eek, it's Bond ... Caleb Bond ...

Well he's not going to be the new one ... so on with "Ned", with Hannity making a guest appearance, to remind the pond of the many ways and means the Murdochians helped stuff the Unites States...

Stop right there. Full marks? The excesses of progressive culture? Suck on it "Ned" ...

Cruelty has always been a feature ... and the pond was reminded of a couple in recent readings...

Why Immigration Agents Don’t Quit in Protest

How a culture of dehumanization and denial keeps ICE and Border Patrol personnel “at war with an enemy that does not fight back.”(*intermittent archive link)

By Francisco Cantú

...In early 2026, after the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during Operation Metro Surge, in Minneapolis, the journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that many immigration agents were “getting seriously paranoid” about the public backlash to the shootings. The operation was so unpopular with the rank and file that Border Patrol and ICE struggled to find personnel for the deployment. By July, morale among immigration officers had dipped below its nadir during the Biden Administration, with agents now complaining of being overextended, inundated with novice recruits, and undermined by inflammatory rhetoric from on high. Agents said that they had previously found motivation in their jobs by “being able to stop bad people and narcotics from coming in,” and expressed frustration that the Administration’s political posturing was distracting from their duty to “protect the public” and to focus on “the very worst of the worst.”

The sociologist Irene Vega, in her 2025 book “Bordering on Indifference,” draws on a series of interviews with Border Patrol and ICE agents to analyze the “moral economy” of the immigration-enforcement workforce. From the moment agents arrive at the federal law-enforcement academy, she writes, they “are trained and socialized as police officers, and taught that their raison d’être is to protect America by preventing the entrance and executing the removal of noncitizens deemed unwanted by the state.” The inherently bureaucratic nature of enforcing immigration law has always been at odds with the paramilitary image that is sold to most recruits. Agents prepare for violent criminal encounters and cultivate a “warrior mentality” despite the fact that they are most often, as Vega writes, “at war with an enemy that does not fight back.”

Many agents who have quit for moral reasons cite this tension. In a 2019 article for The American Scholar, Brendan Lenihan, a former Border Patrol agent, wrote, “The federal government taught me how to shoot an assault rifle from a moving vehicle and how to fast-rope from a hovering helicopter, but never did anyone explain how to go home at the end of a shift and forget about the migrants I’d apprehended and their stories.” As with Childress, the accumulation of nonthreatening encounters eventually made his job untenable. “I left the Border Patrol because I was exhausted by the tragic stories,” he wrote, “and because the more I saw, the less affected I was by events that had once seemed shocking.”

How is it, then, that so few agents seem to arrive at this moral breaking point? Nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown. It has become customary for agents to mask their faces from public view—D.H.S. maintains that this is to prevent doxing, but it is also emblematic of a growing perception of this work as shameful. In off-duty social situations, agents often obscure what they do to avoid awkwardness and scorn, even hiding the nature of their employment on dating apps. “We can’t always support what happens just because it’s one of us,” a Border Patrol agent had told a private group chat in the wake of Pretti’s killing. And yet, even as their work has grown increasingly cruel, there has been no exodus of agents who reject it.

And so on, and now the mad king has replaced Wildes with Stephen Miller so that the cruelty can continue, while over in The Bulwark Anderew Eggers noted the routine casual cruelty directed at TG folk, something the reptiles at the lizard Oz also have an appetite for ...

...Which is exactly why the issue proved so useless for Trump and Republicans in 2026. They forgot that the whole implicit promise of their own anti-trans stuff in 2024 was about building a case that they were better equipped than Democrats to deliver on affordability—a case that they then spent two years blowing up. Instead, Republicans somehow got it in their heads that what voters wanted was a bunch of gratuitous cruelty against trans people just for the sake of it: We can say “retard,” “pussy,” and “tranny” again! Use AI to put James Talarico in a dress in ads and dub Annie Andrews “Tranny Annie”—that ought to do the trick.

What a shock, in retrospect, that it blew up on them so spectacularly.

And yet Stephen Miller is now the CoS. There's cosplay for you ... and then came relief. A final short gobbet ...

Again the pond should note the deep ambivalence in the hive mind, shown in a sample of comments attached to "Ned's" outing ...

And so to the lizard Oz Editorialist, with quirky opening snap ...

The lizard Oz editorialist was ambivalent ...but as they've got their caps-hating AI bot well trained ...

... why should the pond think the lizard Oz editorialist would be any better?

Dissemble away ...

And now Stephen Miller is the CoS ...and maybe it wasn't an election, so much as a jail break ...

The pond realises that it's now officially way over length, but as he's thematically related, the pond should give Stewie a break, even as he rabbits on at great length ...

The point is that perversely Stewie manages to offer a spotlight on the incredible futility and gigantic waste involved in the AUKUS scheme...

Well yes, all that and more ...but the reptiles preferred to fling in a gif of a missile on the move ...

Stewie was on the side of the subs... (and a war with China, though perhaps not by this Xmas) ...

Um, maybe disentangle those bases? Or should we experience Musk Ukraine syndrome?

The reptiles flung in a reminder ...

Stewie had just a couple of shorter gobbets left in him ...

The pond interrupted there so it could admire the billy goat butt dressed as an "However"... as Stewie reluctantly admitted a few saucy doubts and fears ...

The pond isn't too worried about "people power", not when the subs show promises to be the new Snowy 2.0 of defence projects ...

Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is the new CoS, and just as in the failing days of the Roman emperors, what a spectacle there'll be for the next few years, with Australia tailing along behind, ready to suck up whatever kicks come our way ...

And the kicks keep on coming ...

In which Killer and Our Henry see off the Red blues in their own ways ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 21:12:59 +0000

Boring.

The reptile Jimbo jihad is getting exceptionally tedious ...

There was the canny Cranston rabbiting on yet again, briefly top of the digital world ma ...

The pond couldn't wait to click him into EXCLUSIVE intermittent archive oblivion ...

EXCLUSIVE
Fresh ideas, stat! Chalmers’ productivity policy SOS
The Treasurer has asked Treasury officials to develop new productivity policies for next month’s mid-year budget update as Australia’s productivity rate sits at -0.2 per cent.
By Matthew Cranston

Ditto the Jess jihad carried out this day by Johnno, moving from potholes to smoking ceremonies (damn you, difficult, uppity black people) ...

EXCLUSIVE
Truth, treaty and Victorian Labor’s ceremonial smoking of taxpayer money
A $14,000 sand circle, a $218,000 production bill and free tickets – how Victorian taxpayers were hit hard for a single night celebrating Labor’s Indigenous treaty.
By Damon Johnston

On the other hand, any excuse for a couple of Goldings...

Over on the extreme far right, heroic David was casting stones in aid of the rich ...

Trusts tax is both wrong and unfair
Australia’s peak business lobby has warned the government’s proposed discretionary trust tax contains three foundational flaws that threaten small business owners and economic growth.
By David Alexander

Just a note on the completely disinterested source (allegedly):

David Alexander is chief of policy and advocacy at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Further research for anyone who cares ...

No wonder the rich are complaining. New research reveals that revenue equivalent to a quarter of Australia’s GDP flows through trusts.

...“No wonder some of the richest Australians are complaining about the new minimum 30% tax rate on discretionary trusts,” said Dr Richard Denniss, co-CEO of The Australia Institute.
“For too long, many of the wealthiest Australians have used trusts to avoid paying their fair share.
“To say these changes are long overdue is an understatement. In his tax review way back in 2010, then-Treasury Secretary Ken Henry raised the alarm about trusts being used as a way to evade tax.
“The basis of a progressive tax system is those who have more, pay more – because they can afford to.
“When you close loopholes which enable rich people to pay less tax than low income earners you make the system fairer.
“You also raise more revenue to provide the services which benefit all Australians, like a good health system, schools, roads and supports for those living with disabilities.”

Or you can dwell in the Murdochian approved world of suffering billionaires... and speaking of tax and the rich paying their way, the pond had another question for the lizard Oz's caps-hating AI:

Guess that's what happens when your AI is restricted to the hive mind, and so can't catch up with the keen Keane in Crikey ...

Despite its pretensions to lecture Australia about its values and how it should be run, the Murdoch family’s News Corp really has nothing to do with Australia. It is a foreign company, and it serially pays no tax here, despite earning billions in revenue on our shores.
In 2024-25, according to the Australian Tax Office’s corporate tax data released today, News Australia Holdings — the official name of News Corp’s Australian subsidiary — racked up 10 years of paying precisely zero tax. For that year, it earned $1.89 billion in revenue, made more than $300 million in profit (a record for the past decade) and paid nothing in tax.
Indeed, there’s a peculiar steadiness to News Corp’s tax dodging. For the past four years, it has earned around $1.8 billion in revenue and paid no tax on around $300 million in profits in 2023-24 and 2024-25, and $200 million in profits in 2021-22 and 2022-23.
You can go all the way back to when the first corporate tax transparency data was released for 2014-15 — the result of a Rudd-Gillard government initiative (opposed by the Coalition) — and find News Corp’s main company has paid no tax across those years, on revenue of, in total, $23.9 billion and profits of $1.38 billion.
The only News Corp entities to pay tax in that time were an investment company, which paid $200,000 (sic) in 2017-18 on $291 million in profits, and a pay TV financing arm, which paid $8 million in 2015-16. Real estate listing oligopolist REA Group, which News Corp part-owns, paid $246 million in tax.
Otherwise, News Corp’s only contributions to Australia are social division and the fostering of hate and resentment.

Speaking of divisions, the infallible Pope was on top of them...

Enough already, the pond should get down to its herpetology studies, and luckily Killer Kreighton was to hand, koping as best he could with the American disaster.

In klassic Killer form, he came up with a kolossal kaper, a JD whiz for the ages ...

"His natural and more polished successor"?

Relax, that's just Killer speak.

It's his way of window dressing the loser Vance, the cynical, humbugging, overweening, ambitious ratbag currently trying to put daylight between himself and the mad king...

...Yesterday, as the Republican blame game got going, Trump wasn’t the one laying out the case for how the GOP could regroup and recover. That job fell instead to Vice President JD Vance. And remarkably, the case Vance made was one more in keeping with his own views than with his own administration’s party line. In a long treatise on X, Trump’s veep laid out the ways his own administration had brought calamity upon itself.
“There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is,” Vance wrote. “But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone. . . . The reason we lost is the war.”
To woo back the voters they lost, Vance argued, the administration would need to end the Iran war, refocus itself on cost-of-living issues, put America first, and “change our relationship to Israel.”
This would be extraordinary stuff from any vice president—let alone Trump’s, with his mobland obsession with personal loyalty. Vance has found plenty of ways this year to get the word out about his own reservations about the Iran war. But this is the first time he’s said fuck it and just started posting on main. And why not? What has he got to lose? Vance’s odds of winning the presidency in 2028 have never been lower, and even he must see that there’s certainly no path there anymore as Donald Trump’s Bestest Little Guy. Of course, it doesn’t seem very likely to work: There’s only so much you can do to distance yourself from a White House when you’re its second-in-command. And you can only bemoan so much about the need to end the war when you led the negotiations that failed to end it. (Andrew Egger in The Bulwark)

Say that line again ...

"...you can only bemoan so much about the need to end the war when you led the negotiations that failed to end it."

Music to the ear, but the couch molester has caught Killer's eye, as if somehow the taint of JD's craven, lickspittle toadying could be erased in a single blink ...

Now marvel at how Killer transforms an electoral disaster into describing Democrat positions as increasingly unpopular (has he ever been diagnosed as suffering from myopia?):

The pond was deeply touched by that snap of the mad King, waving a forlorn farewell and jetting off into the distance ... as if he'd do that before he got the chance to lead the first dance in his magnificent new ballroom...

In the past, fickle as he is, Trump could have acted as a pillar of order for conservative media: Get in line behind him or lose your White House access and audience. But with Trump inexplicably choosing to spend the election aftermath on Wednesday touring the under-construction White House ballroom, shellshocked Republicans ran wild. Even Brilyn Hollyhand, the Charlie Kirk knockoff who rose to a small level of prominence after Kirk’s assassination, criticized Trump for blowing a chance to rally the party.
So too did Walsh, who posted of the ballroom event, in which Trump seemed childishly gleeful watching beams being pulled by cranes: “This is far worse than I anticipated.” (Will Sommers, The Right's Election Meltdown Is Just Getting Started)

And he signed the beam "Love"!

Sweet joy, this is far better than the pond anticipated.

Killer kantered to a lame konclusion by celebrating the striking down of the right of women to control their bodies ... and the racist underpinnings of the Roberts court, with the Chief Justice himself devoting decades to the judicial art of punishing black people ... (see the reformed Toobin's Mapping Mississippi White in the NYRB (*intermittent archive link):

If that's what Killer thinks will save Trumpism and advance couch-molesting JD into the stumblebum doomed world of Gerald Ford, then hello bottoms ...

Truth to tell, the pond had waited with baited (giant bear trap size) breath to see if Our Homeric Henry would apply Thucydides to the US election fall out ...

Alas and alack, he decided to stay true to his Australian Daily Zionist News duties ...

That made the pond wonder how things were going with Benji ... and just maybe he might yet face his day in court, because such is the depth of the loathing, most unlikely bridges are forming ... per Haaretz ...

Eisenkot Secures Parliamentary Majority, Paving Clearest Path to Forming Gov't
Both Arab-majority parties backed Eisenkot, while United Torah Judaism – traditionally aligned with Netanyahu and Likud – declined to endorse either candidate (*outside the paywall, but just in case)

Gadi Eisenkot emerged from President Isaac Herzog's consultations with the backing of 67 of the Knesset's 120 lawmakers, giving him a parliamentary majority of recommendations and strengthening his chance of receiving the mandate to form Israel's next government.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received 46 recommendations, from Likud, Shas, Religious Zionism, Zehut and Otzma Yehudit. United Torah Judaism, traditionally aligned with Netanyahu's bloc, declined to recommend either candidate and said it was "not committed to any bloc."
Notably, all Arab-majority parties decided to recommend Eisenkot. The Arab-led Joint List joined Mansour Abbas' United Arab List in backing him, saying the decision was aimed at replacing Netanyahu's government.

Sorry for that brush with the now, the point to Our Homeric Henry is tedious journeys into the past to shore up his fatuous positions ...

At that point, the pond wondered if the hole in bucket man still wrote his copy with a quill dipped in ink, and delivered it to the lizard Oz bunker in Surry Hills by way of carrier pigeon, or did he "follow the science" and use a computer and the full to overflowing intertubes?

The only certainty is that the level of argumentation in that last paragraph was garbled to the point of meaningless gibberish, trotting out words such as "new credentialed elite" and "hegemonic in academia and our cultural institutions" as if they actually meant something ...

What was he proposing in relation to Covid? Follow the anti-vax ways of RFK Jr? Follow the mad King's advice to inject bleach? Swallow horse pills?

How would he assess the impact of climate change? By ignoring the science and resorting to a tea leaf reading with the Delphic Oracle?

He can just blather away the implications of stories such as Cryosphere faces permanent damage when world overshoots 1.5C, scientists warn?

Never mind ... there's yet more tosh and blather to wade through, we are in verbiage stepped in so far that, should we wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er:

Is it odd to hear a Zionist-inclined loon blather on about salvation and fanaticism?

No, it's more than odd.

To an atheist thanking god they're an atheist, it's deeply weird, and the final gobbet didn't sound like sanity might be returning soon ... as Our Henry patiently explained the rationale for Greater Israel, the colonial expansion of the state into Gaza and the West Bank ...

And yet, every so often, the worm turns, the disenfranchised get a break, and there's a break (however brief) from the persecution of the different and minorities...(though probably not to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, whatever happens to Benji) ...

And so to a bonus just because it was there ...(and also because it could be done in just two gobbets) ...

Dammit, it goes without saying that religious leaders shouldn't give the first toss about any so-called duty of care.

Their only care is to consign sinners to an eternity of hellfire ... you know, womyn wanting a say in their bodies, shellfish eaters, rogues wanting to mix fabrics, the sort of rule breakers that infest Leviticus ...

Religious leaders' fears over digital duty of care ...

If you can't berate teh gaze, and TG folk and such like, what's the point?

Next thing you know you won't even be able to prey away teh gaze ...

And what happens when sinners flood the intertubes with doubt, as the pond found via a link in Will Sommers' piece for The Bulwark..

The Right’s Election Meltdown Is Just Getting Started
Everyone with a podcast is feeling terrible, and they’re ready to fight about it!

The pond can't get enough of doubting Laura ...

Carry on clucking, Chooka ...

The pond took it all terribly seriously, and was deeply moved, so deeply that it felt compelled to look up this foul bird preaching for the sanctity of church-enforced orthodoxy ... (if somehow that rabble of competing voices could be prevented from denouncing each other as heretical sinners and splitters destined for an eternity of hellfire) ...

Waddya kno, this chook infests the pond's old stomping ground, the UNE ... reminding the pond once again how pleased it is never to have endured an Armidale winter and Oxford refugees for decades ...

Ah, he's a bloody useless Anglican.

Back in the pond's day, Opus Dei was all the go.

And with that done, time to wrap up proceedings with the immortal Rowe ...

The immortal Rowe really has captured the beast in his portrait. The pond realises it's wrong to tamper with art, but had an unseemly desire to zoom into CU to see the fine print ...

How is it not possible to gloat, in a very British and seemly way?

Want an explanation for the rout? Consider the bromancer, or the reptiles at large, or perhaps look at the fluff in your belly button ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 20:33:01 +0000

What an excellent afternoon's entertainment.

Hand it to Hollywood, they can still turn out the occasional blockbuster, with this epic running into the Oz night.

All the pond's favourite villains were there - looking at you Vivek, looking at you Elon - and in proper old fashioned style, copped their comeuppance in spectacular fashion:

The pond did pause for a moment to think of the lizard Oz, and dropped in at precisely 5.10 pm yesterday to cop this memento:

Of course it only got better after that, and this morning the reptiles were still reeling, while the pond was still rocking ...

The dirty work was left to Joe and Stewie, the hapless reptiles assigned to sort through the pieces ...

HISTORIC ROUT
Donald deflation: Democrats seize US congress in backlash against Trump
Democrats seize US congress in massive backlash against Donald Trump
Democrats have swept both chambers of congress in a ‘blue tsunami’, flipping deep-red states in a stunning rebuke of Donald Trump’s presidency.
By Cameron Stewart and Joe Kelly

And a massive backlash against Faux Noise and its routinely nauseous embrace of nauseating agendas, brave lads, don't forget that ...

MAGA MELTDOWN
Senate shock as Trump’s red-state firewall crumbles
Democrats seize Senate control as Trump’s red-state firewall crumbles
The deep red states of Texas, Kansas and South Carolina have turned blue in a horror night for Donald Trump, his MAGA movement and Republicans, with Democrats potentially flipping up to nine Senate seats.
By Joe Kelly

Shouldn't that read "in a horror night for Donald Trump, his MAGA movement, Republicans, and a fawning Faux Noise and News Corp", Joe?

MAGA has had its moment: it’s the beginning of the end
Republican midterm disaster signals beginning of the end for Donald Trump MAGA era
Donald Trump’s grip has almost certainly passed its peak.
By Cameron Stewart

Shouldn't that read "beginning of the end for the Donald Trump Faux Noise era", Stewie?

Viaduct? Quack, quack ...

As always, it was the bromancer's outing that compelled the pond's attention, and the pond was so pleased, it saved the piece to the intermittent archive so it would always be there for the bro's devoted fans...

How Donald Trump crushed the Republican Party and handed power to US Democrats

Take it away bromancer ... and please remember to do your both siderist thingie ...

How sweet it is to sup on News Corp tears.

The bromancer has struggled along these last few years explaining how the demented mad King managed to do good things, and in the midst of a rout, he was at it again, in a way that demonstrates he shouldn't ever be given a hammer, for fear he'd just keep hitting himself in the face ...

There you go ..."And Trump has had some significant policy successes in his second term."

And best of all, his enthusiastic stuffing of the planet received the bromancer's wild-eyed support ... "His pro-fossil fuels, pro-energy policies ..."

And indeed, as the infallible Pope noted, the demented one was in top form on Gaza just before the rout ...

The bromancer finally got around to doing a bog standard billy goat butt ...

The reptiles decided to bless the bromancer's closing gobbet with snaps of assorted losers, while omitting any mention of the biggest loser...

Too delicious, but the pond will accept any losers the reptiles care to nominate ...

Shouldn't that coda read "Only I can do it with the help of Faux Noise. And we sure did it this time"?

The weirdest take on all this?

Ben packing it, as he kept up the lizard Oz Albo jihad ...

Wounded President a headache for PM
A humiliated, lame-duck Donald Trump threatens to become Anthony Albanese’s biggest foreign policy headache as he looks abroad for wins he can no longer deliver at home.
By Ben Packham
Foreign affairs and defence correspondent

Here's how you do it. Associate Albo with the drop dead loser, and bingo ...

Ben, Ben, Ben, it was looking so good, and then you had to drag moth-eaten Artie out of the closet?

Is this the best the lizard Oz could do:

Oh it'll be shock and awe all round ... with News Corp marvelling at what it's helped achieve ...

But what of the rest of the reptiles this shock and awe day?

Special mention for fossilised Jack, still clinging to the nags as a way of life ...

Cup Day nuppers back the wrong horse
The ‘Nup to the Cup’ protest movement drew poorly attended lunches, while Flemington welcomed its largest crowd since the pandemic and TV ratings climbed.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

Nothing like a cancer stick, a schooner and a flutter eh Jack?

And a note that some foolishly believe you should pay attention to the lizard Oz agenda, and even attempt a sensible discussion ... as if any reptile was interested in sense, or sensibility for that matter ...

Diverse paths to youth extremism

The Australian Human Rights Commission says religiously motivated extremism and misogyny-fuelled online movements are now converging to radicalise Australian children through the same digital pathways.
By Hugh de Kretser, Lorraine Finlay and Deb Tsorbaris

...The fact our submission discussed issues such as misogyny, online grievance-based movements and the “manosphere” does not mean we regard those issues as more significant than religiously motivated extremism. Rather, it reflects the inquiry’s focus on the drivers of radicalisation and the growing evidence that young people can be drawn towards extremist views through a variety of connected pathways, particularly in digital environments.
The commission’s position is straightforward. Australia needs an evidence-based response to radicalisation. It should focus on prevention as well as enforcement, respond to the growing risks facing children and young people, and address the diverse pathways through which people are drawn towards extremist violence.
Understanding those pathways does not mean overlooking the threat posed by religiously motivated extremism or the danger of antisemitism. On the contrary, it strengthens our capacity to respond to them.
Hugh de Kretser is president of the Australian Human Rights Commission; Lorraine Finlay is Human Rights Commissioner; and Deb Tsorbaris is National Children’s Commissioner.

Trying this on with the lizard Oz is roughly the same as attempting to get the mad King to accept he had a role in the big rout.

Speaking of the path to extremism, this is petulant Peta day in the lizard Oz ... and what a relief to be able to ignore her, as she tried to crank up the Jess volume to 11 ...

Jess Wilson shifts the national contest
Victoria’s official election campaign has begun, with the Liberal leader offering voters clear policy alternatives to Labor amid a damaging week of government revelations.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

The pond dropped out at the point of the obligatory bashing of TG folk.

Note to Peta: the trans guff just bombed out spectacularly in the US ... best steer clear of the culture wars for a few weeks.

Instead of wasting time with her, the lizard Oz editorialists landed to give the pond more of the treat that will keep on giving for days.

What the pond was looking for was a bout of loser pique, a fit of just you wait, Henry Higgins, just you wait ... and the lizard Oz editorialists obliged.

They've only just discovered those matters now?

Couldn't they spot the pigeon droppings a little earlier? (Or is that an owl helping the rats with wings out?)

Never mind, wrap it up ...

The sheer, compleat, hectoring, lecturing cheek.

As if News Corp had anything to offer other than its own ideological ambitions, as articulated by those tragic souls trapped within the hive mind cult.

But as for those responsible for the epic failure, it's surely payback time... Trump blamed Fox News for Republican losses even as network's hosts went easy on him ...

And so on, still dissembling, still genuflecting, still equivocating, still both sidering in classic bromancer style ...

...Just before 10pm, Fox News host Will Cain said: “I look at the pros and the cons of the last two years under Donald Trump, and the pros significantly outweigh the cons.”
While primetime host Laura Ingraham acknowledged that the election was a “referendum on Trump”, she said that “overwhelmingly his policies have been phenomenal for the country. Overwhelmingly, the stuff he’s promised, he’s done, and it’s worked out fabulously.”
Despite his earlier comments, Hannity said that Trump’s policies “are rock solid”, that Iran “had to be done” and that his intervention will eventually be proven right.
One person who shared in the belief that the president was not responsible for the losses was the president himself. “I don’t view it as a hit on me,” Trump told the Fox News panel, adding that “historically, I think I’ll be judged for having done the right thing,” and largely placing the blame on the Republican candidates who were defeated. He repeated his contention that the outcome would have been different if he had been on the ballot.

The reptiles have taken to featuring their brand of AI at the bottom of assorted yarns, with sample questions offered as a way to interact with the reptile brain ...

The pond decided to play the game, only to discover that this brand of AI hated caps and was determined to be clueless ...

The pond tried another angle, and again drew a "no caps" blank ...

And with that the pond turned to the immortal Rowe for the closer ...

Another fine visual reference ...

It's always in the details, and on this raft of fools there were some splendid details...

Perhaps the biggest question. Will there be life for the likes of The Bulwark and The Daily Beast after the collapse? Quite possibly ...

You can throw the loons out of government, but you can't throw them out of the country, and some are way gone ...

In which the reptiles do Jihad No. 1 - Jimbo and Albo - and Jihad No. 2 - Islamics! - and Dame Groan makes a very short appearance ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 20:11:05 +0000

The Jimbo jihad and the Albo angst was in full swing this day, with a tag team led by the canny Cranston and the echo Chambers both at it ...hard...

RATE RISE
Next year will feel like a recession, warns RBA
Inflation to take six months longer than expected to tackle, RBA warns amid interest rate rise
RBA governor Michele Bullock says Australians will feel like they are in a recession from next year
Despite avoiding an official recession, the Reserve Bank governor has warned Australians will feel poorer as the official interest rate hits an 18-year high.
By Matthew Cranston and Thomas Henry

The pond only needed the headlines ... doom, gloom, disaster, fear, as the echo Chambers evoked the nightmare ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
PM’s dream of winning a third-term could turn into a nightmare
Recovery or bust for PM and Treasurer after latest RBA rate rise
Labor insiders fear Anthony Albanese has drunk too much of his own 94-seat-winning Kool-Aid by believing the economy will miraculously bounce back just in time for a May 2028 election.

It was a trifecta, with doubting Thomas coming up the rear ...

PROPERTY SLUMP
Chalmers’ tax changes pushing property market to new lows: RBA
Tax changes drive plunge in property investment as RBA slashes predictions for housing construction
The Reserve Bank have slashed its projections for dwelling investment, warning Labor’s budget tax changes had collapsed investment in the Australian property market.
By Thomas Henry

With all that safely parked in the intermittent archive, the pond could look around at its leisure, only to discover that on the extreme far right of the digital page, it was more of the same ... only weirder ...

Treasurer needs to stop channelling Jennifer Hawkins
Jim Chalmers is throwing us back to 2008 and the GFC but he will need more than pleading for world peace to get our economy out of this mess of his making.
By Jenna Clarke
Culture Writer

Even the "culture writer" got dragged into the jihad? (Whenever the pond hears "kultur" it reaches for its Glock).

It was so inane, so asinine, that the pond couldn't resist a little taste treat ...

WTF? Hemlines, the Birdcage, Lady Gaga and Jennifer Hawkins ... and Jimbo?

And there was more, but the pond had to cut Jenna off in her prime.

Deeply weird stuff - stick to kultur Jenna, it suits you - but wait, there were also pearls of wisdom on the same theme ...

RBA raises rates, but Chalmers is really to blame
Five rate rises, an 18-year high and a Treasurer who won’t face the music – Australians are paying for Canberra’s spending addiction.
By David Pearl

There was more - Jimbo, Jimbo, Jimbo, did anyone mention Jimbo? - but if the pond wants this sort of feeding of the chooks, it will always turn first to Dame Groan for a damn good groaning.

As for the pending US election?

It was so far down the page it might have been invisible, a bit like the news of Faux Noise's ratings slump, what with the job of being state regime media difficult in these troubled times: Fox News ratings drop is due to ‘viewer fatigue,’ Murdoch says on eve of midterms

The pond had to turn to TT to get ready for the viewing fest later in the day ...

But the pond digresses.

The lizard Oz is the pond's beat, and the pond should note a subsidiary jihad this day, what might be called Jihad No. 2:

It was the Australian Daily Zionist News at it again ... with Noah flooding the rag with an anxiety attack ...

EXCLUSIVE
Forget Islamic radicals, manosphere is main security threat: HRC
Despite spy chief Mike Burgess saying Islamic extremism is still the dominant terror threat, the Human Rights Commission says deradicalisation efforts should not focus so much on religion.
By Noah Yim

Any word on the white Xian nationalists who line up behind News Corp?

Never mind, Noah flooded the rag with outrage - remember the Islamics, forget the genocide and the ethnic cleansing and the bermb, berming of Iran ...

Predictably that sent Dame Slap right off ...

COMMENTARY by JANET ALBRECHTSEN
Another radical failure by the AHRC
AFP data shows religious extremism drives most radicalisation, but the $36m-funded Human Rights Commission has instead focused its inquiry submission on misogyny.

Okay, that's more than enough of that. The rest is in the archive for anyone who cares ...

Back to Jihad No. 1 for that groaning, and while it was a bit long in the tooth - it first turned up yesterday in the lizard Oz - it looked good, with a trifecta of grimacing villains at the head of the show ...

Imagine the pond's bitter disappointment when the entire groaning could be swallowed in a single gobbet.

It was more a single tictac than a pack of Allen's XXX extra strong mints (so hard to find for anyone with Germanic tastes):

That was it? That was all the old biddy could muster?

Sheesh, the pond should have stayed the course with Jenna and Jennifer Hawkins.

The pond felt enormous guilt, and reverted to Jihad No. 2, because the lizard Oz editorialist chipped in, with some splendid AI artwork to set the tone...

The rag's one time graphics department keeps degenerating in ways that were once unimaginable, and sorry Frank, the pond realises you took the credit, but that looks like pure AI slop, not helped by the Matrix humbug in the background ...

Must do better Frank, you look like the mad King's Truth Social postings.

As for the actual content, it read a bit like AI slop too ...

It's only Islamic fundamentalists that have it in for womyn and teh gays and TG folk?

Pull the other white nationalist barking mad fundamentalist GOP News Corp Faux Noise Xian leg.

Finally back to Jihad No. 1 for a little 'toon commentary, with both the infallible Pope and the immortal Rowe evoking a horse race ...

Before proceeding, the pond would like to note a few John Hanscombe thoughts in The Echnida (it's an easy subscription and you also get a 'toon a day)...

Let's begin with that race in Melbourne which despite the best efforts of its backers no longer stops the nation.
According to an Essential poll published on The Guardian website, only 9 per cent of Australians have a high interest in the race, 23 per cent are moderately interested, 29 per cent have a low interest and 39 per cent have no interest at all.
No matter how many times the TV networks try to reignite interest with silly hats, glimpses of the filthy rich quaffing Champagne in the Birdcage and bogans in spiv suits passing out on Flemington's Front Lawn, the evidence gets clearer every year. We've lost interest in the Melbourne Cup. It's a dead horse.
But it wasn't the only one enduring a whipping yesterday. The Reserve Bank took the riding crop to borrowers in its own forlorn race that's meant to stop inflation. Borrowers could be forgiven for feeling like dead horses after being flogged repeatedly with a very blunt instrument.

Well yes, but as the lizard Oz proves, there's a market for endlessly flogging dead horses.

And so to said 'toon whippings ...

And while the pond's in the mood, the pond should also note that it's completely over AI and Google, and the way that the search function has been completely ruined. (Google owns Blogger, just don't blame the pond).

The pond usually leaves First Dog alone in his Graudian kennel - the full version is here - but this really struck a chord ...

Okay, this is slightly long in the tooth too, but the old dog still has a few comedic tricks up his sleeve ...

In which the bromancer and Dame Groan sort everything out, but other reptiles are also keen to help ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 20:22:17 +0000

"O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!", said the ecstatic toot-tooting Mr Toad, to which the pond might add, "oh frabjous joy", because the reptiles have discovered a "secret" black hole.

EXCLUSIVE
‘Money monster’: Labor’s secret $170bn budget black hole
The mystery missing billions in Labor’s federal budget have sparked serious concern about spending blowouts fuelling inflation ahead of Tuesday’s Reserve Bank rate decision.
By Matthew Cranston

And the canny Cranston inspired the lizard Oz editorialist to go right off the rails - dammit, somehow they managed to link it to the Melbourne Cup!

What astonishing skill, what relevance! How these "secret" black holes keep on giving...

Meanwhile, the Australian Daily Zionist News was at it again ...

Schools’ role a lesson in turning back tide of antisemitism
Teachers are already refusing to teach Muslim students about the Holocaust, so a new curriculum mandate is unlikely to repair Australia’s crumbling civic foundations.
By Alex McDermott

The pond won't go there - it's in the archive - but will mention Jeff Sparrow's outing in Crikey, which luckily can be found outside the paywall ...

Jillian Segal’s report is a Trumpian plan to curtail free speech (*intermittent archive link)
The new report by Anthony Albanese’s special envoy to combat antisemitism is as conspiratorial as it is a genuine threat to anyone expressing criticism of the state of Israel.

...Ostensibly, the report lays out priorities to combat antisemitism. Yet Segal pays only the most cursory attention to the rapid growth of the far right, even as genuine neo-Nazis like Thomas Sewell and his White Australia friends reach audiences (online and IRL) unthinkable even a decade ago. She pledges instead to combat what she calls “modern”, “progressive” antisemitism, which, she claims, manifests “through the language of social justice and human rights”.
To that end, Segal wants, among other things, a special ombudsman to monitor the ABC and SBS; new codes of conduct for cultural organisations; restrictions on the use of grants for arts, sports or research; the operationalisation in higher education of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s definition of antisemitism; a review of the school curriculum; and “continual review and reform by … governments of gaps in the legislative framework”.
All this is warranted, she says, because “the language of human rights and its greatest crimes — apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, etc. — has increasingly been appropriated” against Israel. On that basis, Segal seeks the institutional adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, explaining that “criticism of the Israeli government” should only be considered legitimate if “the level and standard of scrutiny applied is equivalent to the standards to which one would hold other governments in similar circumstances”.
There is a roll call of experts accusing Tel Aviv of genocide: a partial list includes Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, Genocide Watch, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, the Middle East Studies Association, Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières, Physicians for Human Rights Israel and the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
In the name of Segal’s vaunted equivalency, we might expect to find Israel listed alongside the other regimes Australia currently sanctions for human rights violations (beyond individual ones directed at Ben-Gvir and Smotrich). You’ll be shocked to learn that this is not what Segal seeks. The scrutiny she considers appropriate was demonstrated back in 2023, when Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong had the temerity to suggest Israel might “cease the attacking of hospitals”.
In response, Segal, then president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, cosigned a statement condemning Wong’s remarks that said they “only serve to demonise the state of Israel and its supporters”. The same logic dominates her report. Segal argues that claims Israel has committed genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid “allow for the depiction of anyone who associates or aligns with Israel as complicit in its purported evil”. But when confronted by genocide, most of us do not worry that our condemnations might upset those who “associate or align” with the perpetrators.
In Segal’s report — a document in which the word “Gaza” appears only once — the feelings of Israel’s supporters take precedence over all else. For her, “the Palestinian cause” represents a “gateway issue, of sorts … used by far-left activists to magnify their appeal and prominence and to attempt to introduce traditionally moderate Australians to radical and anti-Jewish propaganda”.
It’s crazy, conspiratorial stuff.
The report warns that “references to “Zionists” can function as a proxy for Jews, particularly where Jews in Australia are treated as collectively responsible for the actions of Israel (acts of conflation)”. That’s certainly true, which is why organisations like the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA) make the distinction between Judaism (a religion and ethnic identity) and Zionism, urging the recognition of “the political and religious diversity of the Australian Jewish community”...

And so on, and the pond guarantees you won't be reading any of that sort of stuff in the lizard Oz until at least the twelfth of never (and that's a very ...)

What you will be reading is the pond's very favourite reptile, the bromancer, skipping right past the current electoral action...

Luckily the bromancer wasn't in to Tucker and his theory about the mad King wanting to nuke the mad Mullahs ...

Unearthed Clips Show Carlson Repeatedly Claim Trump is Weighing Iran Nuke Strike

... but the pond did enjoy the way he managed to articulate three war aims, as if the aims of the mad King and minions were remotely coherent and comprehensible, as opposed to being roughly equivalent to Melbourne's weather, ever changing ...

The bro's insights were bolstered by a beaming blonde of the kind beloved by Faux Noise...

How the bromancer loves the drumbeat of war, how he loves to pound the skins, but then he wasn't appointed Reichsmarschall des GroßAustralisch Reiches so he could practise his knitting skills.

Has it though? The pond supposes it's a matter as to whether it's AIS-visible tanker tonnage, or black ships running dark ...(who knew there were sites dedicated to tracking the traffic?).

In conclusion, how about a shot of crazed jihadists, designed to terrify the lizard Oz hive mind, and send them on their own jihad? Sure thing...

Curiously, Luckovich had another figure in a similar pose ...

Meanwhile, it was left to the echo Chambers to propose a solution to what might ail the country.

While the pallid, wan bromancer ran up the white flag of despair, the echo Chambers knew what had to be done...

Albanese must get in Trump’s ear
Anthony Albanese faces pressure to use upcoming Trump summits to end wars the government blames for devastating Australia’s economy.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Get in his ear! How easy is that, what a quick fix ...

Yes, forget all that blather fest with King Chuck and the remnants of empire, and as for taking climate change seriously, in what alternative universe are we living?

What needs to happen is that Albo needs to sort out mad King Donald, and maybe get on board with him, and as for what might happen in the mid-terms and what that might produce in the United States? Fergeddit...

The trips that do matter are the ones where Albanese crosses paths with Trump. The Quad meeting in the Philippines is critical. Albanese also cannot miss the opportunity to visit Trump’s home state of Florida for the G20 summit. Albanese, who briefly encountered Trump in New York during UN General Assembly week, had a lengthy phone call with the US President in mid-August. The pair spoke about the conflict in the Middle East, Chinese aggression in the South Pacific, the 75th anniversary of the ANZUS treaty, the AUKUS defence pact, critical minerals, and artificial intelligence.
With the US ambassador to Australia David Brat and the Australian ambassador to the US Greg Moriarty both in place, the relationship between the White House and Albanese government should be strengthened.
As Australians tighten their belts, Albanese must prove the summit season is value for money and secure outcomes that are critical to the nation’s economy and security.

How easy it is to wrangle a mad King and fix what needs fixing.

And now always better late than never for the infallible Pope ...

And that serves as an introduction to the real Tuesday treat, a rampant Dame Groan, revived by the prospect of disaster, and the hope that we'll all be rooned, if not by the end of the week, then certainly by Xmas ...

Please begin with one of those astonishing reptile collages for which there's no credit ...

The pond was shattered to discover that the Groaner hadn't discovered the black hole featured by the canny Cranston and the lizard Oz editorialist, but perhaps that was because it was too "secret".

On the other hand, the Dame didn't need cheap tricks like that to arrive at totally rooned gloom ...

Eyes wide shut now ...

Potent points, and Dame Groan wasn't done yet ... it was time for the cardigan wearers to cop a pounding, together with Jimbo ...

Not Petey boy again. Will the reptiles ever tire of their desire to return to the ancient days of Petey boy and the lying rodent?

And then all too soon the pond had arrived at the final gobbet of despair, what with all this talk of EVs and batteries and renewables, when the world is in tip top shape, and if there was just more coal and more emissions, what a fine prospect for the younglings ...

The pond has laid out the Dame Groan banquet, and expects correspondents to enjoy the feast ... with the important message from the Dame that there's no need to worry about all those other horses in the race aiming to make life miserable ...

And with the immortal Rowe setting the tone, so to a final thought from the reptiles, actually talking about the current election campaign, and hoping against hope that maybe the GOP might yet survive ... at least in the Senate, what with it all being really hard to turn the Titanic around ...

And with that a couple of 'toons ...

Old news now, but the pond can watch train wrecks over and over again ...

In which the echo Chambers scores top jihad spot, the Major is Majorly tedious, Lord Downer goes nihilist, simpleton Simon tries to swim agains the tide, and the hive mind and the Caterist rush to correct him. Phew!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 20:30:10 +0000

The reptile Jimbo jihad, accompanied by the always active Albo ambush, swung into even higher gear early this morning.

Some might have thought that the reptiles couldn't crank it up beyond eleven, but little did they know ... with the echo Chambers the jihadist in chief ...

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: Labor slumps as Jim ranks worst among ministers
aka Newspoll: Labor slumps as voters mark down Jim Chalmers
Jim Chalmers has claimed the mantle of the worst-performing senior minister, as Labor’s primary vote falls.
By Geoff Chambers

EXCLUSIVE
$3bn trusts tax raid looms as PM steps in to plot cost-of-living relief
Trusts tax to rip most $3bn from business in first year of Jim Chalmers’ revenue crackdown
Anthony Albanese has ordered rolling cabinet meetings with his Treasurer to finalise a savings package and non-inflationary cost-of-living measures in the mid-year budget update.
By Geoff Chambers and Richard Ferguson

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
This could end badly for Albanese’s successor-in-waiting
Some inside Labor are now contemplating a scenario where both Albanese and Chalmers are forced to flee from an angry posse.

This echo Chambers is a one man threshing jihad machine, tilting at Jimbo windmills, with Fergo as his plucky Pancho.

It was a hive mind wet dream start to the week ... but remarkably the reptiles seem to have, at least temporarily, abandoned the search for golfballs ...

Over on the extreme far right, the Major was doing his level best for the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

Israel’s election result proves it is no apartheid state(dodgy but readable link)
When the Middle East was at the forefront of Cold War hostilities, the focus on Israel was understandable. But why do global media outlets still stack Jerusalem bureaus?
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist

The Arab parties? Aren't they just a bunch of terrorists?

In a series of posts on X on Tuesday, Netanyahu attacked Arab voters, describing them as “Muslim Brotherhood supporters” and accusing them of “raiding the polling stations and stealing the elections”.
In a separate post, Netanyahu referred to a picture of a large queue that appeared to show Palestinian citizens in Israel at a polling station, and called on right-wing Israelis to “go out and vote for Likud”, referring to his political party and describing the situation as a “matter of life and death for us”.
Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, said on Tuesday that it had received numerous reports from Arab voters of attempts to discourage them from casting their ballots. Adalah said it had also been told that queues at polling stations in Arab-majority towns were moving very slowly and, in some instances, had stopped altogether. It also reported a lack of ballot slips printed in Arabic. (Here)

And the spawn didn't fall far from the racist tree (only as far as draft-dodging Miami)... per The Jerusalem Post (just to take a break from Haaretz)

PM's son Yair Netanyahu deems Israeli Arabs 'greatest danger' to Israel besides Iran
The Prime Minister's son, Yair Netanyahu, claimed Israel "cannot survive long-term when 20% of its population identifies with its enemies and wants its destruction."

The pond is well over these jihads, and what a relief that Lord Downer arrived to seize his natural place in the firmament, in the nick of time to save the pond from them ...

Did the pond say what a relief?

What a relief to have Lord Downer arrive on the scene, and with his infinite experience and skill prove that he was a nihilist and that voting was largely a complete waste of time...

What even-handedness, what skilled discernment, up there with the Major himself.

Did the pond mention His Lordship's hard won infinite experience and skill?

The pond was entranced yet again by His Lordship's sage advice to do nothing, and all would be well, and sameness and a lack of change would calm the universe ...

It's business as usual in Israel, and never mind the ethnic cleansing and the genocide, and it's business as usual in the States.

As His Lordship turned to eye off the mad King's kingdom, the reptiles were so excited by a little MAGA hat-tossing that they featured it bigly ...

Excellent. The mad King can dabble in a demented way in foreign affairs, while indulging every so often in a little show biz hat tossing.

What joy for Buddy Holly, as His Lordship did a final hat toss of his own ...

Indeed, indeed, it all fits His Lordship's motto: voting is a waste of time, why bother, everything stays the same ...

Every so often there's a reptile who tries to pander to the pond, and swim against the hive mind tide.

So it was with simplistic Simon this day ...

Slashing migration will cause more harm than good

Forget the Uber driver stereotype: new data shows recent migrants are nearly twice as likely as Australian-born workers to hold a university degree.
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

The hive mind wasn't having any of that claptrap and nonsense.

Who cares about doctors and nurses? What geriatrics need are plumbers, tradies who can plug up a fractured artery, or pour some Drano into a blocked heart...

Oh the hive mind went wild with anger ...

The pond suspects that simpleton Simon only trolled the hive mind to make sure they were alive, and so in a position to receive the correct and proper message from the Caterist.

It takes a black sheep migrant to know the dark and sinister ways of black sheep migrants ...

Dammit, there are wretched trouble makers amongst us, but more of this anon, as the flood water whispering Caterist foamed on ...

The quarry whispering Caterist maintained the rage through a third gobbet ...

That culminated in a fiery denunciation, an inquisitorial denunciation ripe for the ages ...

...These people are non-citizens, owed nothing by Australia other than the civility we extend to visitors. There is no reason, other than naivety, why they should be allowed such a convoluted form of due process.
Once a court finds a non-citizen guilty of anything more serious than an unpaid parking fine, they should be out on their ear. We don’t need the tribunal to re-litigate the character question when a check of their criminal history tells us everything we need to know.
A successful migration program requires tough rules that are unflinchingly enforced. We must not allow it to be weakened by misguided sentimentalism or misplaced pity.

And what about those wretched sorts who act in a way that produces a massive defamation payout?

What good are these black sheep to the body politic?

Strip them of their citizenship, the pond says, having been lathered up into a righteous Caterist frenzy.

Send them back to where they came from ...

Does the pond have any candidates who come to mind?

One does seem like a jolly good candidate ...

Nine and Nick Cater ordered to pay Wagner family $3.6m in 60 Minutes defamation case (*intermittent archive link)
Justice Peter Applegarth says report defamed family and was ‘recklessly indifferent’ to the truth

How does a journalist who was recklessly indifferent to the truth, and indeed concealed information which might have led to an alternative understanding of events, still scribble for the lizard Oz?

Ah, that's the delightfully different way that migration has contributed to the hive mind...

Deport, deport, deport ...

And now, to take up Lord Downer's theme, what could possibly go wrong after the mid-terms?

And now this from Vlad the sociopath land ...

Presenting the Bromancer and the Ughmann...(patent for title pending, way better than Thunderbolt and Lightfoot) ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 20:39:36 +0000

Sad.

Russian society being ‘systematically crushed’ says Novaya Gazeta as newspaper announces closure

The pond urgently needed an uplift, and not from the usual sources, agreeably, richly comical though they were ...

Liberal senator admits mistake after grilling ABC execs about Gaza journalist’s ‘Hamas’ ID
Amanda Meade

The pond realises that timelines means this is already an old, much featured and loved meme, given an outing on Kimmel and endlessly on the likes of MS NOW, but dammit, if only one correspondent missed it, then repeating it will be worthwhile, especially as it involves Faux Noise...

“You mentioned the rally getting started here in Rock Hill,” Fox correspondent Lucas Tomlinson said during The Faulkner Focus. “We’ve got Tom right here, kind enough to answer a few questions. Tom, why are you here this morning?”
“Well, in the late ‘70s, I was a little too young to get involved and, um, go to South America for the Jonestown Massacre, but this is as close as I’ll ever get, so that’s why I’m here,” the man replied.
Tomlinson was caught off guard by the man’s candid response referring to the mass murder-suicide orchestrated by Jim Jones, the leader of the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project cult, in 1978.
“Wait, the Jonestown Massacre?” the reporter asked.
“That’s right,” Tom confirmed. “There’s nothing like seeing a cult right up front, man.”
Tomlinson, visibly embarrassed, immediately scrambled to find another MAGA supporter to save the segment.
“Alright, so maybe—maybe this is not a Trump supporter right now,” he said, patting Tom on the shoulder and walking away. “See, there are some, uh, pro—anti-Trump here people now.” (Fox News Duped by Anti-MAGA Troll at Trump Rally)

As a coda?

Fox News Host Appears Embarrassed by Trump Rally Attendee Who Says He's There to ‘See a Cult

One critic, riffing on the comparison to the Trump rally and the infamous Brian Jonestown Massacre, said,"The only difference between Jim Jones and Donald Trump is that Trump would charge his followers money to drink the poison."

And what better way to introduce the bromancer, regular sipper of kool aid, for this weekend's domestic hive mind entertainment?

The header: Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor
The US midterms herald ugly rise of far-left Democrats

The cry to listen to the bot: Listen to this article
9 min

Fulfilling a minimum reptile demand for any reptile column - a snap that makes a politician look as much like a noisy, shouty harridan as possible: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks at a campaign rally. Picture: Getty Images

The plea for attention to be paid by the mighty G: Make us preferred on Google

Deep down the bromancer is more than MAGA curious, he's MAGA friendly, so, whatever the outcome of the pending midterm elections, how pleasing it is to see him writhing on his own spit of bile and bigotry ...

These tumultuous, gripping US midterm elections will decide much more than just which party – Republican or Democrat – controls the Senate and House of Representatives for what will be an action-packed last two years of Donald Trump.
They will profoundly influence the political evolution, even the identity, of each party. The Democrats, benefiting from Trump’s epic unpopularity, could see a big chunk of their party enact a dismal red-green alliance – Islamic-themed activism focused on Palestine and antisemitism in partnership with ideological leftists. This combination is poisoning Europe and has its nasty counterpart in Australia.
Meanwhile, the Republicans, heading for defeat in the house and trouble in the Senate, are making feeble progress at best towards a viable post-Trump program.

The bromancer tried to carve out his own angle, his own truly unique approach, but truth to tell, it was just a way of serving up his reliable brand of patented fear mongering ...

This column will be one of few on the midterms not focused on which party wins but, rather, who wins within each party.
As election results emerge on Wednesday Australian time, focus on four key Senate races: Michigan, Maine, Texas and Kansas.

One of the few?

How he treasures his delusions.

First came the demonising of the Islamic, following on the ugly tradition of racism in the GOP:

In Michigan the Democrats chose Abdul El-Sayed as their Senate candidate. He’s a doctor and former health official. He’s also as near to an outright antisemite as modern, mainstream elective politics in the US has produced. He reacted to a terrorist attack on a Jewish synagogue in Michigan initially by saying: “Hurt people hurt people … violence is a cycle.” He declares Israel as evil as Iran. He wants to end the US’s small aid funding to Israel (which goes entirely on Israel buying US military equipment). In his own rhetoric he has ludicrously implied the US can’t afford necessary social spending because it’s spending too much money on Israel. He’s also suggested US foreign policy is controlled by Israel.

But, billy goat Zionist butt, that last line just happens to be true, what with mad king Donald falling into line with Benji, and bermb, bermb, bermbing Iran, as instructed, and now to enhance the fear ...Michigan Democrat senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed speaks at a midterm campaign rally. Picture: AFP

Inspired by that snap, the bromancer ran hard on the fear ...

Recently a political committee supporting his candidacy, controlled by friends of his, has run a TV ad in which a wife tells her husband: “You’re going to have to put those eggs back. We have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians.” The husband in the ad comments that Israelis get universal healthcare, don’t they, “we probably pay for that as well”. This is pure conspiracy-laden, Jews are to blame for everything, nutty and deranged classical antisemitism.
El-Sayed’s campaign says it has nothing to do with the ad yet won’t denounce or criticise it. El-Sayed routinely issues instant, extravagant, almost endless moral judgment about everything else. But he won’t stand up against even the most outrageous, dishonest and blatantly antisemitic advertisement in modern mainstream politics, supporting his candidacy.
El-Sayed campaigns in the Senate race mainly on universal healthcare and cost of living, but frequently intrudes Israel. He strikes a macho pose, does a lot of sub-Pete Hegseth fitness posing and knows how to get noticed on TikTok and social media.
Three important things about his Jewish/Israeli obsessions: they have been part of his entire political life, they were important in his Democratic primary victory, and they will define his foreign policy approach if he gets to the Senate.
He’s always been on the far left and for years held Barack Obama’s presidency in contempt from a left standpoint.
This latest offensive ad has been denounced by numerous senior Michigan Democrats. But Obama campaigns enthusiastically for El-Sayed, as do Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other senior Democrat leftists. None of the candidate’s extreme and prejudiced positions and past actions have ruled him out of mainstream politics, as, say, support for the Ku Klux Klan would automatically and rightly rule out a Republican candidate. That’s bad news for Democrats, and for America.
The Michigan Senate seat was held by a Democrat who is retiring. The Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, is a perfectly respectable former congressman and former FBI agent. If El-Sayed wins a big battleground state such as Michigan, it will convince Democrats they can win the presidency in 2028 with a far-left politician like Ocasio-Cortez.

Perfectly respectable?

Mike Rogers spent years voting against priorities now championed by MAHA

Michigan paper declares it won't seek comment from Mike Rogers due to 'lies and bigoted attacks' on El-Sayed

Eek, not the appalling Cheesecake Factory man: Barack Obama speaks at a rally in support of Abdul El-Sayed in Detroit, Michigan. Picture: Getty Images

Time for more lies, distortions and warped realities ...

For an almost exact reverse of all that, look at the Senate race in Maine. This is a state that normally votes Democrat. But it has a long-term incumbent Republican senator in Susan Collins. She’s stubbornly independent and decides issues as she sees the merits of each case. She is one of very few Republicans to maintain her independence from Trump.

Susan Collins stubbornly independent?

Must the bromancer force the pond to hie off to the both siderist NY Times?

In the Senate, Collins Often Defies Trump but Rarely Stops Him (*intermittent archive link)
A New York Times analysis of Senator Susan Collins’s voting record shows that she frequently breaks with Republicans but more seldom changes an outcome.

A New York Times analysis of Ms. Collins’s voting record over the last decade paints a more complicated picture. It shows that she breaks with her party more than any other Republican senator. It also reveals that her defections — which frequently helped Democrats block parts of Mr. Trump’s agenda during his first two years in office — have rarely thwarted the president during his second term.

Read the whole thing. It's more informative than the soothing bromancer nonsense doing his best to help out Collins:

She has managed at times to moderate Trump policies, a rare and precious skill in his increasingly undisciplined second term.
Her Democrat challenger, Troy Jackson, is from the left. He has all the left obsessions on Israel, wants to abolish immigration enforcement and favours wildly unrealistic government spending. If Collins survives in Maine, it’s a great fillip for common sense and reality in US politics.

As for Talarico, the only question is whether the bromancer would toe the vegan line, and spew on about his devotion to meat, aaah, but he discovered easier paths to tread ... "a little bit left" and "weird" is more than enough to damn that pasty-faced wimpy Texan in the minds of lizard Oz readers:

A different equation applies in the Texas Senate race. Trump campaigned against a sitting Republican senator, John Cornyn, and helped Ken Paxton unseat Cornyn in the Republican primary. Paxton is the Republican candidate from hell. To describe all the scandals he has been involved in would take up all the words in this column. Trump didn’t care about that. He just wanted a toadying loyalist.
The Democrats chose a smart candidate, James Talarico. He’s a little bit left, and has in the past said some weird things on gender issues. But he’s also a teacher studying to become a Presbyterian pastor. His version of Christianity allows him to support abortion up until birth and other progressive social positions.
But Republicans have made such obvious political use of Christianity, with even Trump himself claiming to follow Christian policies while dishonouring the Christian ethic every day, that they certainly have no serious grounds to question any Democrat’s Christian faith.
Texas is the second-most populous state in the US. With Florida, it’s the heart of Republican politics, as important to Republicans as California is to Democrats. If Paxton loses to Talarico it will demonstrate yet again that in picking sycophants Trump imposes the very worst candidates on the Republican Party. The road to post-Trump Republican recovery will run away from Trump. When Trump leaves the White House, his backing will surely count much less in primaries.

Eek, another shocking sight: Bernie Sanders speaks in support of Wisconsin Democratic Congressional candidate Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin. Picture: Getty Images

The bromancer's deep Xian streak continued ...

Talarico can speak in a plausible conservative dialect. That’s clever politics, the opposite vibe to the red-green alliance in Michigan. Talarico is also a member of an important, growing class, Democrat pastors. The most fascinating of these is Adam Hamilton, the Democrat Senate candidate in Kansas. You could hardly imagine a more solidly Republican state than Kansas. But the incumbent Republican senator, Roger Marshall, is very unsympathetic. He seems to spend much of his time in Florida. He was formerly a medical practitioner famous for suing patients who couldn’t pay their bills, charging them 18 per cent interest and getting them arrested.
He never expected to face a competitive contest. His Democrat challenger, Hamilton, is a Methodist megachurch pastor. He’s on the liberal side of Christianity but there’s no serious dispute about his religious convictions. If Democrats find that Christianity is a winning political credential for them, that would be good for American politics. It would surely at least keep them away from antisemitism. For Republicans, if they can’t hold Texas and Kansas, they’re in a world of pain.

How weird and offensive does this line get?

GOP’s Moreno targets El-Sayed with a religious test that even many Republicans can’t pass
Steve Benen

The closer we get to Election Day, the more hysterical Republican rhetoric has become when targeting Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic U.S. Senate nominee in Michigan. Donald Trump, predictably, has helped lead the slanderous charge, condemning the candidate as a "jihadist" who "should not be allowed to serve in our Senate."
As is too often the case, the rest of the party has followed the president's lead and headed for the gutter. Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said El-Sayed "sleeps in a bin Laden jersey." Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaigned in Michigan this week and thought it would be good idea to trash the scientific and literary accomplishments of a half-billion Arab Muslims. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas this week explicitly said that "there is a very real risk that Americans will die" if El-Sayed is elected and serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
But it was something Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio said during a Wednesday night rally that stood out as unusual.
Making the case to Buckeye State voters who can't cast ballots in Michigan's Senate race, the GOP senator suggested that El-Sayed should be disqualified from serving in the chamber because he does not accept divinity of Jesus Christ.
"This character, Abdul El-Sayed, can be nowhere near Washington, D.C.," Moreno said. "Do you think he understands that concept, that our rights come from God Almighty? That Jesus came here for our salvation? He should be nowhere near Washington, D.C., and [Republican candidate] Mike Rogers is going to kick his ass on Tuesday."
So, a few things.
First, whether Moreno understood this or not, he was speaking at a rally that was intended to generate support for the GOP ticket in Ohio — a ticket led in part by Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republicans' gubernatorial candidate, who is Hindu.
Second, when Moreno was sworn in as a senator, he swore to support and defend the Constitution, which includes Article VI, clause 3 — a provision that says "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
And third, as Moreno really ought to know, roughly 1 in 3 Americans are not Christians, and the idea that they should be disqualified from congressional service because of their beliefs is plainly insane. Indeed, let's not forget that there are Jewish Republicans in Congress and the White House Cabinet who would disagree with the senator's belief that that "Jesus came here for our salvation."

All that and more, but always, the bromancer remained tone deaf and clueless, as in closing he attempted his own form of pitiful and pathetic bothsiderism:

It goes without saying that Trump and other Republicans make personal attacks on their opponents as dishonourable as those of the left Democrats. Bad behaviour flourishes on both sides. But while the worst of MAGA seems to be unravelling (with some of its good bits remaining), and Republicans must find a new synthesis of traditional values and contemporary policies, the Democrat far left is accelerating.
American politics, and the whole world, need decent Republicans and decent Democrats, which, policy differences notwithstanding, we mostly had until the past 10 or 15 years. The battle within each party is as important as the battle between the parties. I’d rather see a Marco Rubio v Gretchen Whitmer (successful Democrat governor of Michigan) presidential contest in 2028, than an Ocasio-Cortez v Tucker Carlson match-up. Just kidding about Carlson being a possibility, of course, but you get my drift.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

Marco Rubio, that lickspittle quisling, spineless, cynical fellow traveller who sold his soul to Trump long ago is the hill on which the bromancer wants to die?

Principles jettisoned, is former Trump foe Marco Rubio playing the long game?

Now what sayeth the hive mind? For once there seemed to be a little confusion ...

Scary stuff ...

What else? Well the reptiles were all in on Jess early this weekend ...

The pond heaved a sigh of relief.

No need to go all the way with Galloway and Jess ...

Jess Wilson vows to take fight to Anthony Albanese, saying Victoria has been ‘embarrassing’ at national cabinet
By Anthony Galloway Victorian political editor

The pond could catch up on this parochial pothole-driven jihad when it mattered ...

State of play: can Jess Wilson restore Victoria’s political clout?
Consumed by spiralling debt and Covid’s aftermath, Australia’s second-largest state has turned inward.
By Anthony Galloway

What else? Well the reptiles have cannily taken to holding back their big guns - the Ughmanns, the dog botherers, even "Ned" - until later in the weekend.

That just left the likes of snappy Tom following up on a bog standard jihad ...

Labor loses public trust as economic growth takes a hit
A $6m golf club grant exposes ‘grey corruption’ – and Anthony Albanese’s admission could cost Labor far more than votes.
By Tom Dusevic
Columnist

And the Angelic one getting agitated about breeding issues, in the way of fundie tykes ...

The childcare subsidy is an economic money pit
Why is it normal that some babies and children spend more of their day in these places than with their parents?
By Angela Shanahan
Columnist

Go trad stay at home wife!

The pond did its duty - the pair are there in the intermittent archive for masochists interested in a read - but decided to cheat, because how could they possibly compete with the Ughmann, sneaking in to deliver his standard climate denialist sermon?

The Ughmann bobbed up just in time...

Splendid stuff. It's all the way with stuffing the planet.

Can Vlad the newspaper-suppressing, Ukraine invading, sociopath help out? Sure can ...

Yes, yes, let's all muck in, let's dirty the planet bigly. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh it's all great fun. What's that? More alarmist nonsense?

Fiddlesticks. As if the Ughmann cared for any of that nonsense ...

Now let's hear it for the cockroaches, because all Minnsy were the borogroves ...

Thank heavens for that snap of satanic coal mills looking good, but here the pond came to a dilemma.

The pond wanted to honour the way that the reptiles managed to drag in a bog standard snap of windmills looking truly evil and threatening ...

... but at the same time the pond wanted to honour the dog botherer's role in spreading more FUD about EVs ...because, you know, who better to talk about it than the flood waters in quarries whispering Caterist ...because, you know, who could have heard about using solar power to charge your EV for free?

Having nuked the country to save the planet - as if the planet needed any saving - it was time for a last gobbet for the unreformed former failed seminarian ...

The pond might have missed out on the recent lizard Oz BoM jihad, but when it comes to stuffing the planet, there's a new reptile contribution coming along with monotonous reliability.

And now it being the season ...

It was entirely fitting that the Graudian labelled him an "acclaimed thespian" because no one could match that voice ...and he fought the good fight ... Before his death, Patrick Stewart had considered becoming a U.S. citizen so he could do more to oppose Donald Trump.

May it be made so in a few days time in honour of his memory ...

The pond realises this has already done the rounds, but it's just still in season ...

In which Our Henry goes full Thucydides and Killer sheds a tear for billionaires ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 20:33:53 +0000

The pond appreciates that some studious and diligent herpetology students are inclined to be completists - how else to discover the lizard Oz is getting weirder by the day? - so it behoves the pond to note what it missed from Our Heroic Homeric Henry last week, when the brave lad abandoned his Zionist duties to frolic with the perfidious French ...

The political edifice Macron built to remake France is dead and buried
No stranger to street rebellions, this time the republic is facing an existential problem with no obvious solution.

Did the pond say he abandoned his Zionist duties?

Of course not ...

...That symbiosis brought a darker dimension to the violence. The Islamists’ entrenched antisemitism is part of the milieu in which these youths have grown up. Palestinian flags, and those of Hamas, were widely displayed; a synagogue in Paris’s 19th arrondissement was pillaged and desecrated; Jewish stores in Marseilles were reportedly singled out for attack.
As they ransacked luxury stores, jubilant looters cried “Bismillah” –“In the name of Allah” – over spoils ranging from handbags to electric scooters, now being sold on eBay.
And the wider challenge to republican authority is stark: in a survey published last November, 57 per cent of French Muslims aged 15 to 24 said that respecting Islam mattered more than respecting the laws of the republic.

And so on and so forth, and in much the same spirit, the "we wuz robbed" spirit inspired by mad King Donald has been taken up by Flávio Bolsonaro, and by Benji, with great enthusiasm ...

Eisenkot Says Netanyahu Leading Influence Campaign to Undermine Election Results

...The Joint List said Netanyahu is trying to steal the election, and they "will not be deterred by incitement and attempts to undermine the results."
The party said right-wing figures are making "vile lies and baseless" accusations that demonstrate their fear of the Arab community. "This is a coordinated campaign, funded by Likud figures, that began many months ago and is aimed at undermining the election results and their legitimacy," the party said in a statement Thursday.
The Joint List further called on opposition leaders to "stop cooperating with Netanyahu's vile lies and the racist Kahanists, to stop being puppets on Netanyahu's strings, and to stop advancing his campaign of incitement."

It's only free and fair if you win, and it's always second class citizens in an apartheid state, with no one daring to form an alliance with the "untouchables".

But the pond made the mistake of looking back, when huzzah, Our Heroic Heraclitean Henry was back this Friday and in top ancient Greek form ...

The header: By Henry Ergas
ALP’s moral weakness breaks our civic bonds

The plea for a bot voice to deliver the goods: Listen to this article
8 mins

The caption for the high art: The School of Athens by Raphael shows Plato and Aristotle (centre) in discussion. (Here)

Cry out to the mighty G: Make us preferred on Google.

The pond has tried to steer clear of the Haines tragedy - on the Polonial principle of avoiding politicising and making judgements until the facts are known, even if Polonius and his reptile companions only establish such principles in order to evade them.

But the pond couldn't help noticing this ...

Alleged Helen Haines attacker Brendan Nugent was likely in psychosis, prison report says

A prison assessment of the man who police allege deliberately rammed federal MP Helen Haines has found no indication of extremism or links to political groups or ideologies.
The ABC can reveal an initial evaluation of Brendan Nugent, taken in the days after he was arrested, said he held delusions of being persecuted and was most likely in a state of psychosis...
...A source with knowledge of Mr Nugent's assessment said it also indicated he had a "significant mental health disorder". It is understood schizophrenia is currently being considered as one of the possible diagnoses.
"So far nothing is indicating extremism," the source said.
"There's no group, no ideology, no intention."
They said that "conspiratorial" social media posts unearthed in the days after the alleged attack — referring to Israel, Gaza, climate change, the Kremlin and notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein — were more likely a symptom of paranoia and his mental health deteriorating.
"Persecutory beliefs are the most common kind of delusion, and they often latch onto whatever in the news. So you see Ukraine and the CIA turning up alongside fears about his own safety."
The source said the assessment did not rule out that Mr Nugent had a grievance.
"She'd been a friend of his family for more than 20 years, and she was his local member. That's not a random choice. When paranoia takes hold, it usually pulls in the people around you."
Mr Nugent has been withdrawing from alcohol and cannabis since being in custody.

Bear that in mind when reading this patented, prize piffle and tosh ...

There were few things the Greeks feared more: the internal strife, called “stasis”, that tore the polis apart as the restraints that made civilised life possible collapsed.
Plato gave it an unforgettable image: sailors who cast aside the pilot, seize the helm, throw their rivals overboard and fall upon the stores, threatening their own survival.
So, too, stasis wrecked civil governance, opening the way to ruin, foreign subjugation and the extinction of freedom.
The attack on Helen Haines brings that ancient fear into Australia’s present. Coming after three years of unprecedented antisemitic vitriol and violence, it forces us to confront the erosion of what the Greeks called civic friendship: the bond that made a shared political life possible despite searing disagreements.
It was that bond the self-governing cities of Renaissance Italy sought above all to preserve.
Machiavelli called it the “vivere civile” (living civilly): a fellow-feeling that fell short of friendship but imposed an obligation to settle disputes through the laws. It rested on civility, understood not as mere etiquette but as a branch of morality.

Just to affirm Our Henry's devotion to classical references, as a way of attempting to sanitise his thinly disguised bigotry, the reptiles flung in a visual confirmation of his "dictionary of quotations" ways ...A statue of Machiavelli near Florence.

More flowery references flowed from the quill ...

If the word “civility” came from the city, the moral discipline came from the cloister: from the rules that let monks and novices, strangers in close and permanent proximity, live together without quarrel or violence. Erasmus, an Augustinian canon, made those rules into a civic code. “What else is a city,” he asked in 1518, “but a great monastery?”
Propagated through the new medium of printing, civility’s moral code proved essential to England’s recovery from its blood-soaked civil wars. By forbidding “hatred, contempt, insult and arrogance,” wrote Hobbes, it could sustain a “constant civil amity”. And while the laws, Edmond Burke observed, “touch us but here and there, now and then”, the norms of civility work by “a constant, steady, insensible operation, like the air we breathe in”, making self-restraint a habit.
Nowhere did that habit take deeper root than here in Australia. An isolated society thrown together from convicts and gentry, soldiers and squatters, was obsessed with mutual respect: not everyone could eat with aristocratic elegance, writes historian Penny Russell, “but most understood, only too well, when they were being insulted”.
What the colonists rejected was undue deference, not courtesy. Australia, John Hirst argued, was culturally democratic long before it was politically democratic: the respect for ordinary people that others had to fight for was secured in a “democracy of manners” whose essence was not to obliterate difference but to overlook it.
However, a parliament cannot overlook difference; its business is to peacefully channel and resolve it. That is why the colonial legislatures immediately and enthusiastically adopted the rules of the House of Commons Thomas Erskine May had codified in 1844. Address the chair, not your opponent; attack the argument, not the man; avoid and withdraw offensive words: together, historian Judith Brett showed, those rules allowed the sharpest disagreement without enmity, so that the weapons of debate, as May put it, were “wielded according to the laws of a more civilised warfare”.
Nor did those rules stop at parliament’s doors. The union branch, the debating club and the hospital auxiliary all ran on simplified versions of Westminster procedure. “The smallest and the greatest meetings of the land,” Brett wrote, “were linked by their shared deliberative procedures.” Universal too was the expectation that those who sat in parliament would behave at least as well as those who ran the local fete.
But that expectation rested on a habit, and from the late 1960s a generation set out to unlearn it. Self-restraint was recast as repression, to be renounced in favour of authenticity, expressive freedom and jouissance; politics became the onstage performance of behaviours once confined backstage.
From performance, it was a short step to violence. “The great lesson of May ’68,” a French Maoist declared in 1970, “is that violence pays.” And “fascism” was transformed from naming a movement into an all-purpose licence: if your opponent was a fascist, civility was appeasement and violence a duty.

Did Our Henry just attempt to absolve and disappear "fascism" from the discussion? Rioting students block Lussac Street in Paris in May 1968.

The lesson that the pond took from that is that cavorting in the streets has been an intrinsic part of French life since the great days of the late 18th century.

Was it wrong to also remember Herr Adolf in this context? If your opponent was a Communist, a socialist, or just a Jew trying to get by in the Weimar republic, civility was appeasement and violence a duty.

Could this wretched Henry be any more offensive? Never underestimate his seemingly infinite capacity for bigotry, fear and loathing ...

Long confined to the ultra-left, that cult of violence has found new carriers in the “progressive” left’s alliance with the Islamists. Within hours of October 7, 2023, Jews were being taunted on the steps of the Opera House; last October, while keffiyeh-clad protesters pelted Melbourne’s police with bottles filled with shards of glass, Hamas’s flag was cheered as the Australian flag was burnt. The blood was scarcely dry at Bondi before a taxpayer-funded artist refused to “mourn fascists”, placing a murdered Jewish child beyond the reach of civic compassion.

At last there came what all have yearned for ... a return to Thucydides ...

Hatred thus acquired the mantle of virtue and the refusal of civility became a badge of righteousness. That inversion recalls what made stasis so terrifying in Thucydides’s account: the corruption of the language in which citizens judged one another’s deeds. People “altered, at their pleasure, the customary significance of words to suit their deeds”, reducing speech to barbarous nonsense.

What has any of this got to do with Haines, though that's what set Our Henry off?

Not much. We're now well into standard litany mode ...

Social media has made that corruption into a business model. A study of 1.3 million posts by members of the US congress found that their incivility rose by almost a quarter between 2009 and 2019. The rewards were substantial: by the decade’s end, the most viciously uncivil posts drew some 15 times as many reposts as civil ones. Nor are our parliamentarians far behind, as Labor’s co-ordinated assault on Linda Reynolds so graphically proved.
The restraint being unlearnt on social media does not stay there; and our governments and public institutions have done nothing to stand in the vitriol’s way. In July 1846, when a mob stormed a Melbourne hotel flying Orange banners and shots were fired, the Legislative Council immediately banned processions inciting religious and political divisions. If people “are to be allowed to annoy and insult others because they differ in opinion”, a Melbourne newspaper asked, “where is peace and order?”.
That question was still being asked, and properly answered, more than a century later. Faced with violence on our campuses in the late 1960s, vice-chancellors did not merely name and expel the offenders; they were charged and convicted, and those who reoffended were jailed.
Today, the world’s highest-paid vice-chancellors have allowed threats, harassment and intimidation to persist for months on end, rarely chastising offenders they did not dare name, much less credibly punish. Meanwhile, as violent antisemitism escalated, Labor offered pious hand-wringing instead of leadership, treating each outrage as an aberration and each warning as an over-reaction.
Yet the warnings could not be starker. The Director-General of Security now ranks political violence alongside espionage among ASIO’s gravest concerns, and has felt compelled to plead for civility.

Again the pond felt compelled to wonder.

Precisely how did all that portentous pomposity relate to the Haines tragedy, and a man reportedly in the grip of psychosis?

Apparently if you throw in Plato and Machiavelli, the offensive circle of patented bullshit is compleat...

The attack on Haines should lend his words even greater force. For Plato’s parable still rings true: the sailors who seized the helm never meant to sink the ship; they simply stopped caring whether it stayed afloat. That is what the collapse of Machiavelli’s “vivere civile” does to a democracy anaesthetised by complacency and crippled by its leaders’ moral weakness.
The laws cannot transform a fractured society into heaven. They can prevent wreckers transforming it into hell. Unless our government shows the courage to confront them, it will not be the Greeks’ fear that awaits us; it will be their fate.

Every so often the pond thinks it should go into therapy as a way of understanding why it's so addicted to this completely addled inability to understand any discernible form of reality ... but perhaps it's best (certainly cheaper) to exorcise it by way of a blog post ...

But there's clearly a market for this sort of swill, with the hive mind of the lizard Oz a living, breathing, seething sea of hostility. See a sample of Our Henry's comments ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, cleanse the palate with a couple of Golding 'toons ...

And so to other notes on the jihads and early this morning the Australian Daily Zionist News was in full swing ...

FINDINGS
‘Pervasive progressive hate’, antisemitism envoy’s new blueprint
‘Most pervasive’: Jillian Segal calls for sweeping crackdown on progressive antisemitism across institutions
Special envoy Jillian Segal has sharpened her aim on antisemitism to target its ‘modern, progressive’ element in an updated report covering universities, health, media and the arts.
By Lucy Carroll and James Dowling

Maybe ending the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza and the West Bank might help? Or even just accept into the system the Arab parties that played the election game? You know, instead of a full blown theocracy ...

CRIME AND COURTS
Segal’s strategy to combat hate
Antisemitic hate crime victims to receive court anonymity under proposed legal overhaul
Special envoy Jillian Segal’s newest report suggests new education for police and judges after a contentious judgement took aim at her preferred definition for antisemitism.
By James Dowling

And the other jihad bubbled along nicely, thanks to the cranny Crantson ...

EXCLUSIVE
Demands grow for audit of Albanese and Chalmers spending
The PM refused to commit to net savings in the upcoming mid-year budget update, despite spending reaching a 40-year high outside Covid.
By Matthew Cranston

The totally unbiased sources making the call from inside the house?

Inter alia ...

Robert Fisher, a head of state departments such as welfare under both Labor and Liberal governments, said he would back a version of the 2014 federal commission of audit, of which he was a commissioner.

Tony Shepherd, who chaired the Abbott government’s National Commission of Audit, agreed another audit was required.

Peter Crone, chief executive of the last audit’s secretariat, said there was no doubt Australia’s current economic situation and levels of government spending meant an audit was now required.

The lizard Oz editorialist, perhaps peeved that nobody could be bothered diving beneath the fold to read their rants, turned up over on the extreme far right to back the jihad ... and early in the morning it was top of the digital world ma ...

THE AUSTRALIAN’S VIEW
Economic critics from all sides, but are you listening Mr Albanese?
In slamming ‘partisan’ critics of Labor spending, the PM is trying to deflect attention from homegrown inflationary pressure.
By OUR EDITORIAL WRITERS

That's more than enough of that. As usual, the immortal Rowe did it better ...

Besides, what the pond was really yearning for was a strident defence of the wealthy, the filthy rich, the tech bros struggling to get by on their last few billion, though still with enough billions to try to buy an American election.

Who better to pander to theirs and the pond's needs than Killer Creighton of the IPA?

The header: By Adam Creighton
Politics of envy driving wealth tax campaign

The chance to hear it bot style: Listen to this article
5 min

Let's hear it for the mighty G: Google co-founders Sergey Brin, left, and Larry Page at their company headquarters in Mountain View, California, in 2004.

Say it again for the mighty G: Make us preferred on Google.

Killer was on an anti-tax crusade worthy of the IPA:

Even John Maynard Keynes, renowned champion of bigger government, conceded an economy couldn’t thrive with taxation more than 25 per cent of GDP.
Yet today, state and federal governments combined extract taxes well in excess of 35 per cent of GDP, and their combined spending is brushing up against 40 per cent, according to the IMF Fiscal Monitor.
So it’s disappointing to hear that familiar if obnoxious clarion call to increase the GST – as if rejigging the tax base is our biggest problem amid the biggest increase in spending since the Whitlam era.
Peter Costello, who introduced the tax in 2000, is right to warn against lifting the rate beyond 10 per cent. Consumption taxes are a stealth tax, making them easy to gradually increase. Lift an income tax rate and workers’ take-home pay very noticeably falls. Lift a GST to 11 per cent and people barely notice. The Rudd government in 2008 even made it illegal to show prices exclusive of GST.

Cue a snap of Keynes ... British economist John Maynard Keynes.

Killer was heartbroken at the sight of billionaires on the run, refugees suffering from rampant persecution ...

Is it any wonder France, which pioneered the rollout of consumption taxes back in 1954, is wallowing in government spending equivalent to 57 per cent of GDP!
The misguided clamour for more tax amid a global spending crisis has taken an even more ridiculous form in California, where voters next week face a ballot that would impose a 5 per cent, supposedly one-time, excise tax on the state’s billionaires. Economist Thomas Piketty, the eminence grise of the global wealth tax movement, prefers wealth taxes up to 90 per cent annually.
Polls point to a knife-edge result for what’s known as Proposition 40, less than a week out from US midterms that might see the Republicans lose control of both houses of congress, laying the groundwork for similar mad-hatter proposals at the federal level.
The mere whiff of a Californian wealth tax has already slashed the $US100bn ($142bn) projected revenue to $US30bn, according to new research by Stanford University economists Benjamin Jaros and Joshua Rauh. Seven billionaires, including PayPal’s Peter Theil and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have decamped to other states, taking almost $US540bn, or nearly 30 per cent of the alleged tax base, with them. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who would face a $US11bn charge under the possible regime, has told the SEC he is considering joining them.
California’s billionaires already contribute between $US3.3bn and $US5.8bn in state income taxes alone, and the perpetual loss of some of that revenue would leave the state’s total tax take almost $US39bn lower, Jaros and Rauh estimated in their October National Bureau of Economic Research paper. “Billionaire departures, and the fact that new founders would think twice about locating to California, have significant potential economic effects if the location of jobs and innovation shifts elsewhere,” they added.
That the already disastrous proposal has been pushed by fellow Frenchmen and Piketty acolytes Gabriel Saez and Gabriel Zucman is bizarre, given their native France’s own failed history of wealth taxation.
The chronically underperforming debt-riddled economy has been hobbled by a wealth tax since the 1980s – another, if less “successful”, French tax innovation. By 2008 it had driven €200bn ($316bn) in wealth out of the country and was costing the French government twice what it raised in other forgone revenues, according to a well-known study by Eric Pichet. “In an open world, the (French) wealth tax impoverishes France, shifting the tax burden from wealthy taxpayers leaving the country on to other taxpayers,” he concluded. And the world is even more “open” than it was then.
Even if wealth taxes didn’t drive the wealthy away, they wouldn’t solve the public spending crisis – there’s simply not enough rich people to prop up the fiscal largesse. Last year the left-wing Australia Institute advocated a 2 per cent annual wealth tax on Australians with more than $5m in assets excluding super and their primary home, suggesting it would raise (laughably) $41bn a year, about half as much as the GST.

At this point the pond became seriously alarmed, not so much by Killer's devotion to the interests of the wealthy, but at the sight of Petey boy ... Former treasurer Peter Costello has warned against raising the GST rate. Picture: John Feder

That chin, talk about a picture of a kind of Dorian Gray - couldn't the reptiles have found a kinder snap?

Never mind, Killer's karing for the kavorting billionaires was a remarkably short outing, as he made a final plea for understanding and sympathy ...

The federal government alone is facing a headline deficit of around $60bn this year.
“Even if the annual wealth tax was restricted to the 200 households on the (AFR) rich list, it would raise around $12.5bn per year from their $625bn wealth,” the Institute’s economists naively estimated, by incredibly multiplying 0.02 by their total wealth.
If the government truly wanted to raise more revenue it would slash spending to get inflation and ever-rising interest rates under control. A major recession will clobber revenues, whatever tax rates and bases are set.
Wealth tax advocates should read some more of their favourite economist Keynes, not only on the maximum taxation countries could bear, but also on the wisdom of wealth taxes themselves.
In the late 1920s he referred to them as a “new and disturbing form of taxation” that might only be used to lower income tax rates on ordinary people. Such a rational argument appears lost on today’s wealth tax zealots, who appear to be motivated by envy as much as anything else.

How refreshing. Usually the "zealots" in lizard Oz parlance are climate change zealots in the grip of a religious cult. Now it seems that they're also "wealth tax zealots".

So much zealotry, so much zealous projection.

Please, let the rich run wild and free, and should you happen to find yourself in the vicinity of one, remember to tug your forelock, and do a Uriah Heep and announce that you're "ever so very 'umble" and that Killer sent you to lick their boots and kick your last bit of change into their bulging purse... lest you appear a zealot...

Once again the hive mind was Killer's kaptive krowd ...

Ah, the dreams of being a clever billionaire, dodging taxes and following Rafferty's tax rules.

Now just for the balance ...

Against Oligarchy, Part II: Wealth Taxes
Going where the money — and the power — is
Paul Krugman

Say no more, the rest can be found via the link, though it ends in a paywall, at which point Abbie Hoffman types might head off to the intermittent archive.

The pond can't always be serious. Paul Krugman often ends his posts with a musical link, and dammit, if Krugman can do it, so can the pond, though perhaps the music might not be to Krugman's taste, and certainly done without a Nobel prize as proof of taste (though Killer lacks that credential too) ...

Ah, wot the hell Archy ...

In which sundry reptile jihads are noted, but the pond must honour its devotion to the mad monk's bromancing chum...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 20:39:19 +0000

With the best will in the world - malice is infinitely preferable - the pond couldn't find anything remotely appealing in this day's lizard Oz...

Thursday is petulant Peta day, and what luck that the intermittent archive was working, and the pond personally supervised placing her there...

PM defended $6m golf grant, then his story fell apart
A senior government official has contradicted her own minister under oath, confirming sewerage works were never part of Anthony Albanese’s $6m golf club grant.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

With the reptiles resembling a wrestling tag team, over in the "news" section it was the Jimbo jihad that continued apace ...

PRICES
Charade of savings as inflation rises and RBA hike on the cards
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has refused to commit to net savings in December’s budget update as inflation hits 4.3 per cent and a fifth interest rate rise looms.
By Matthew Cranston and Thomas Henry

The best that could be said for that outing?

It provided yet another reminder that the reptiles have a seemingly inexhaustible supply of comical Jimbo snaps...

Oh there were charts and graphs and doom in abundance, and just below that, Geoff "the Echo" Chambers (a joke shamelessly stolen in the way mad king Donald uses Neil Young music in his rallies) was also all in on the jihad ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
Trouble in Labor ranks as blame game gets personal
Jim Chalmers has entered the political danger zone after name checking Anthony Albanese and other ministers for their ‘parts’ in driving the government’s tanking popularity.

How disappointing to discover the reptiles did have limits on comical Jimbo snaps, with a quizzical Albo no substitute ...

The lead "news" item top of the digital page early was a bog standard contribution to the long running Victorian jihad ...

SEEING RED
Victoria’s decree: free pass on obscene debt ends … today
Victoria ranked last in national competitiveness for a third straight year. Now, sporting and business leaders are uniting to demand answers from both major parties on the state’s ballooning debt crisis.
By Samantha Hutchinson and Anthony Galloway

It ends ... today!?

Say what?

They've brought the election forward, comely Jess won in a canter and issued a bold statement?

Nah, they just wrote a letter ...

That "It ends...today" surely was an attempt by the headline writer to win the much revered but long lost Campbell Reid award ...

Not a single reptile offered the wit of the infallible Pope ...

Damon (why wasn't he named Damien?) chipped in with a bonus jihad contribution, apparently unaware that potholes have been a feature of Victorian life under every kind of regime ...

Labor’s $200bn debt finally hits the road
Potholes have become the symbol Victoria’s decline – and voters are blaming Labor for running out of money to repair the roads.
ByDamon Johnston
Melbourne Bureau Chief

Damon was in apocalyptic "time has arrived" mood, but it was just another chance to recycle that letter...

It was a Killer line, but apparently the reptiles haven't discovered how shutter speed can avoid blurring ... or maybe they were trying for a neo-realist look.

And where on earth is Dyelsford?

Jack the Insider favoured the Albo jihad, while resolutely refusing to be polite.

The pond personally, politely, sent him to the archive cornfield ...

Polite politics merely act as a shield for dodging scrutiny
Calls to tone down political rhetoric shield the Albanese government from scrutiny over its dirt file on Helen Haines and a $560m pork-barrelling program.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

There was just one outlier to all these jihads, with Jamie proposing a jihad on the tech bros ...

How Canberra can call Big Tech’s copyright bluff
Australia’s creative industries face the same AI copyright ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ ultimatum that Britain resisted – and a key insider says ministers must hold their nerve.
By Jamie Njoku-Goodwi

The pond didn't have the foggiest idea who he was, and the reptiles didn't give a clue, but the text suggested he was British, and so he was ...per his wiki, with an impeccable number of PMs to his name, including Theresa and Rishi, with Lynton Crosby and Matt Hancock also in the mix ...

If only the reptiles had reverted to their climate science denialist jihad ...

Whatever, and what with Israel determined to remain a fundamentalist ethnic cleansing theocracy, and what with Benji, having already reverted to second Holocaust muck, going the full Arab hate routine ...

ISRAEL VOTES
Election ‘stolen by Arabs’ claims Netanyahu’s Likud party despite narrow lead
The Likud Party has demanded an investigation into fraud and intimidation at Arab polling stations as the final count shows Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc with 53 seats, Gadi Eisenkot’s with 48 and the Arab parties on 19.
By Anne Barrowclough

... the pond knew at precisely 8.51 PM last night who would be the reptile du jour ...

This is an ongoing situation, as Haaretz helpfully tracked ...

But what did the Australian Daily Zionist News make of the situation?

As always, the bromancer was there to help the pond with all the answers ...

Thankfully the bromancer ignored the surge in voting for Arab parties. Who would want second class citizens in an apartheid state having a say in proceedings?

Best celebrate Benji's survival skills...

Subtle, but it didn't trouble the bromancer, busy relishing ironical smiles... as the dog botherer turned up to help...

The fawning and the adulation continued into a third gobbet, with the bromancer at the heart of the action ...

But at the very end, the bromancer broke down.

All he could offer was confusion, chaos and an abundance of rhetorical questions ...

...The future now is utterly confused. For much of Netanyahu’s prime ministership, his reputation as a hawk meant he often didn’t have to take military action. Israel’s enemies were scared of him. He talked tough but governed prudently. After the shocking Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, all that changed.
Netanyahu now is determined to cut down Israel’s enemies by military means and re-establish Israel’s deterrence. But does he go too far? Is he so polarising he needlessly damages Israel’s international standing? Does he still have the sound judgment he exhibited at his best? How do his own political circumstances affect Israeli strategic policy?
It may well be that Netanyahu gets to answer all those questions, for Israel and the world, from the Prime Minister’s office.

The ethnic cleansing and the genocide can continue?

What a relief.

And that left the immortal Rowe to summarise the situation ...

And there had been the pond hoping that some reptile down under would take up the cause and excoriate the defaming of the Cheesecake Factory ...

Now here's a viewing suggestion for the bromancer ...

A potpourri of reptile pleasures, with Dame Slap on offer in full for advanced students ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 20:40:20 +0000

The pond has become incredibly lazy in its approach to herpetology studies, and so when the intermittent archive has a little hissy fit, it throws a spanner in the pond's works when it comes to covering the the lizard Oz hive mind.

Of late the pond has preferred to do a collage, a montage, a potpourri (never fragrant), a medley, a hodgepodge, an assemblage, a miscellany, which allows fellow advanced students to study at their own pace and leisure.

And incidentally it saves the pond the time and the tedium of spending too long in company with the likes of "Ned".

Others might want to do this morning's Everest climb, but the pond is content to offer a teaser trailer and a link ...

Tempted? Feel a fire in the loins, a lust to read further?

How a Jess Wilson win could shape the attack on One Nation
A Liberal win in Victoria — where the party has surged ahead of both Labor and One Nation — could rewrite the federal political rule book.
By Paul Kelly
Editor-At-Large

That's enough of those hard yards for the pond.

No need to go there, and no need for the pond to indulge in the latest outpourings of the Australian Daily Zionist News, though the reptiles were so keen on this one it was top of the digital page early this morning ...

EXCLUSIVE
Landmark antisemitism plan revealed for nation’s schools
The national curriculum agency has proposed reforms mandating detailed Holocaust study and antisemitism education for Australian students for the first time.
By Lucy Carroll

Speaking of ethical conduct, will students be exposed to the latest example of ethnic cleansing, a latter-day genocide, with Gaza down there with the Warsaw ghetto?

Meanwhile, Mr Rubenstein lost the pond from the get go by talking about "Israel's vibrant democracy", which reminded the pond of talk in ancient times by rulers of South Africa of its "vibrant apartheid-based democracy"...

Israel’s vibrant democracy faces a deeply divided vote

As Israelis began going to the polls, Benjamin Netanyahu still divided the electorate but there was far greater consensus on the existential threats facing the Jewish state.

By Paul Rubenstein

Vibrant?

Long Lines and Police Presence at Arab Polling Stations Delay Voting, Legal Center Says
Adalah, an NGO advocating for Arab rights in Israel, urges election officials and the police chief to intervene. Officers were reportedly asking voters for ID to enter the polls, although they lack the authority to do so, according to Adalah

Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, says it has received numerous reports of systematic delays at polling stations in Arab communities across Israel.
"There are numerous reports of severe slowdowns at many polling stations," Yeela Raanan, a member of a team monitoring election integrity in Bedouin communities, told Haaretz.
In many Bedouin communities, Raanan said, "people report waiting for hours, and polling station staff are taking a very long time to verify each voter's identity."
Haaretz has also learned of reports of police officers at several polling stations in these communities. In the southern town of Tel Sheva, 20 Border Police officers were reportedly deployed to a single polling station, while footage showed officers entering polling stations in Segev Shalom.
According to the reports, officers were asking voters for identification, a responsibility that Israeli election law assigns to polling station officials. Their presence was reportedly delaying and disrupting voting.
Adalah urgently wrote to Police Commissioner Danny Levy, Central Elections Committee chairman Justice Noam Sohlberg and the chair of the Be'er Sheva Elections Committee, demanding immediate action to ensure that voting could proceed unhindered.

At some point - why not here? - the pond likes to throw in a cartoon reminding students of what they might be missing in the real world, with thanks to the infallible Pope ...

Then it's back to the grindstone, and instead of AI, why not the war with China (no later than Xmas) to produce a little surge of fear and loathing?

By Rowan Callick

12-point plan for Taiwan isn’t an academic exercise (dodgy but readable)

This is usually the turf of the bromancer, but he's been distracted of late by other weighty matters ...

No worries.

Dictator comrade Xi has been studying the mad king and learning the finer points of how to run a country into the ground ...

And the pond was vastly relieved that after the Haines tragedy, the reptiles could get back to routine business with an outing that bashed indies, teals and greenies all in one go ...

By Will Glasgow

Samuel Terry founder Fred Wollard backs teals with $591,000 despite fossil fuel ties

Splendid stuff, and with a dose of gassing the planet as a bonus ...

Sadly there is always an essay component for advanced students, a more detailed study of a reptile in full flight, from beginning to end, from alpha to omega, and this day it's Dame Slap ...

Um, that last line sounds a little stale, what with recent events in Serbia and Hungary (and who had Brazil on their bingo card?), but never mind, we're always up for mindless rhetoric, where a right wing populist mindlessly celebrates other mindless loon populists.

Some students, who might have come late to the story, might wonder why Dame Slap is getting all hot and bothered about Europe, but it's in her nature.

The pond always likes to remind these Johnny and Janey come latelies of Dame Slap's Trumpian origin story ...

Of course she's going to be down on Europe, and the perfidious French, and the recalcitrant Germans, and the rest of that unseemly mob ...and speaking of MAGA caps ...

Now back to bashing those bloody cheese eating surrender monkeys and their kind...

Back in the day the pond always liked to show the inspiration for Dame Slap, showing how she could dish it out to any of those cultists believing in the fake religion of climate science, showing her teaching style:

Just hard bloody work at climate science denialism, and as for keeping those naughty European pixies in line ...

Speaking of naughty children, and climate science denialism, the pond was still catching up with the latest reptile effort in that sphere, thanks to Media Watch ... Climate BOM-shell

Sorry, the pond is always getting distracted from the text at hand ...but it does sort of tie in with Dame Slap's hysteria about sovereignty, and climate, and her devoted denialism, and all that jazz, worthy of Brexit in its hey day (didn't that fall on very hard times?)

Oh if we wanted a belly laugh there's plenty to be found, and they're right up Dame Slap's MAGA cap-donning alley ...

And so to some good news, because every so often the pond doesn't need to resort to the intermittent archive.

Sometimes a featured piece can be swallowed whole...

By Our Editorial Writers

Public sector union boss claims rate rises are ‘economic sadism’

Sure, it's just a standard bit of Jimbo bashing, sure it's just a regurgitation of other bits of the hive mind, but remember this is a hurdy gurdy collage, and it's rare when the lizard Oz editorialist steps out into the limelight.

It deserves to be celebrated ...

Job done comrades, and you'll have your reward should the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way ever produce a miracle and take charge of the economy ...

Meanwhile, relax, everything is looking good ...

And speaking of good ... and being on the up and up ... though he really did need a shoe, for the banging thereof on the table ...

In which we'll all be rooned with Dame Groan, Geoff chambering a round, and the bromancer doing Australian Daily Zionist News duties ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 20:26:08 +0000

Sheesh, is Alt for Norge the new talking point for the week? What with the foul-mouthed mad king launching yet another attack on Norway ...

Relax, Norwegians, you're in good company: Canada, Greenland, Denmark, the sh*thole countries of Africa, Mexico, most of Europe and hapless, done down Ukraine ...and that's just for starters.

And speaking of Ukraine, who'd have guessed that Vlad the Sociopath would be accused of war crimes?Ukraine: Investigators find Russia committed war crimes by targeting civilians

And while mired in the excrement of state Russian TV, this opening to a yarn struck a chord with the pond:

There’s this old joke about a guy’s first day in hell. He’s being given the orientation: Here’s where we keep the pitchforks. Here’s where we make the printers. Then the time comes to pick his eternal punishment. The first room is fire and brimstone, eternal agony. “That’s not for me,” the man says. The second is full of people being eaten by animals. “Pass,” he says. In the third room, he finds people sipping coffee while waist deep in excrement. “I think I can handle that,” he says. The door closes behind him as a demon yells, “Coffee break’s over! Back on your heads!”

Alex Galbraith in Salon used that as a way into the cesspit that is Faux Noise host Jesse Watters' cesspit, Even Jesse Watters seems tired of pushing Fox News’ culture war.

But the pond thinks it's just as good an introduction to the daily inversion the pond experiences in the land of the lizard Oz reptiles...

For years now, the pond has done a running joke about Dame Groan living in the land of Said Hanrahan ...

And so around the chorus ran
"It's keepin' dry, no doubt."
"We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan,
"Before the year is out.

Knock the pond down with a feather, the reptiles ran with the gag and stuck it in the header...with the Groaner taking us on yet one more road to roon (she has so many roads)...

Think? The pond should think?

Luckily this road to roon only ran to two more gobbets ...

So much fuss about something not going to happen?

But that's what happens when you travel the road to roon ...and are likely to bump into all sorts of odd bedfellows or fellow travellers, including Walshie, because strangely the road to roon always leads back to some golden age ...

Speaking of the road to roon ...

Unfortunately the intermittent archive was having one of its hissy fits, so the pond was unable to find (or save) this featured yarn in the archive...

Bosses answer Jim Chalmers’ calls to nominate where he should cut
By Matthew Cranston and Thomas Henry

This might, or might not come in handy later ...

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation%2Fpolitics%2Fbosses-answer-chalmers-calls-to-nominate-where-he-should-cut%2Fnews-story%2Fc23dfe0c36ae3f2250050149c333d801

The canny Cranston and his mate assembled some grand suggestions, but the pond liked this one the best ...

Graham Bradley, the former president of the Business Council of Australia and former chairman of EnergyAustralia, HSBC, Stockland and GrainCorp, had a long list of spending cut ideas for Dr Chalmers.
“The government needs to reseize federal departments by eliminating duplication with state government agencies in areas such as planning, education, environmental approvals and licensing generally,” Mr Bradley said.
“The government needs to have the courage to impose means tests on many welfare payments, including NDIS (and) child care subsidies.
“It needs to reduce or eliminate federal subsidies for renewable energy projects even if this slows the energy transition and requires further life extension of coal generators. Unrealistic federal time targets are driving up costs.

Well played Gra Gra, another excuse for a toon while on the road to roon...

With the archive (briefly?) on the blink, the pond thought it might indulge Geoff chambering his round in just a couple of gobbets ... what with him being in condescending Dame Groan mode ...

The pond sometimes wonders what rags like The Daily Beast will do if they run out of mad king fodder - currently King Donald and his comical minions are an inexhaustible trove of treasures - but just as pressing is the question, what would the reptiles of lizard Oz do for kicks if they didn't have Jimbo to kick around?

Go on, Geoff, send him a condescending memo ... and make sure the graphics department helps out with a kinda blue snap of a man caught in a grimace ...

The hive mind preaching self-awareness?

The comedy never ends.

Now drum roll maestro, wheel in the immortal Rowe to set the tone for this issue of the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

Hat tip to that portrait on the shelf...

The immortal Rowe rarely misses a trick. Per Haaretz, sorry no archive listing ...

Netanyahu Lawyer's Firm Received $1.25 Million From Key Trial Witness James Packer

Australian billionaire James Packer reportedly paid Netanyahu's lawyer's firm $50,000 a month for two years. Saying the payments were unrelated to the trial, Packer denied the claim, saying the firm represents him in 'personal and business affairs'

Australian billionaire James Packer paid at least $1.25 million – 1.78 million Australian dollars or 3.85 million shekels – to the law firm of Amit Hadad, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's attorney, the Australian newspaper The Age reported Monday.

The investigation, published on the eve of Israel's election, uncovered a trail of monthly bank transfers of $50,000 over the past two years, from a bank account controlled by Packer's company to the account of the law firm representing Netanyahu.

On the same day the investigation was published, Hadad filed a motion on behalf of Netanyahu's defense team requesting that Packer and two of his employees be allowed to testify from abroad, with their testimony broadcast by video link to the judges in Israel.

According to the investigation, the first monthly payment was made on September 23, 2024, from a Citibank account belonging to Packer's legal firm to an account held by Hadad, Roth, Shenhar at Mizrahi Tefahot Bank. A source familiar with the details reportedly said the payments urgently needed to be investigated to determine whether Netanyahu had received an undisclosed benefit from Packer.

acker insisted that the bank transfers to Netanyahu's lawyers were payments for work carried out on his behalf, including "deal finding" in Israel, where he has business interests, and that they were unrelated to Netanyahu's trial.

The Australian newspaper also reported that a Netanyahu spokesperson asked for comment replied: "I couldn't give a monkey's about your questions. We are very busy. We have an election on right now."

Packer did not deny making the monthly payments but declined to comment. Hadad also declined to comment.

Packer's representatives responded that the law firm represents him in his "personal and business affairs." "Any claim that I paid even a single cent toward the legal defense of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is false. Anyone who claims otherwise risks being sued."

Packer was expected to testify as a key prosecution witness in Netanyahu's corruption trial in Case 1000, in which he and businessman Arnon Milchan are alleged to have provided Netanyahu and his wife with gifts and other benefits worth hundreds of thousands of shekels.

But the pond digresses. On with business, because it was the bromancer's turn this day to set the pace for the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

Splendid stuff, and as usual, that provided the pond with an excuse to head off to Haaretz to answer as to what Israel is for. The mall!

As Long as the Mall Stays Open, Israelis Can Live With War Crimes
Israel's liberal public wants to continue with its comfortable routines and consumerist lifestyle. Maybe sanctions that disrupt their vacations, binge-watching and shopping outings will force it to face reality?
Ofra Rodner

The pond would usually provide a link in the archive but this will have to do ...

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/culture/2026-10-23/ty-article-opinion/.highlight/as-long-as-the-mall-stays-open-israelis-can-live-with-war-crimes/000001a1-4024-de23-a5fb-deb5ac3e0000

Meanwhile, the bromancer was lathering himself into his usual frenzy ...

Stop right there.

The pond could overlook the spineless attempts at a little both siderism designed to downplay the current ethnic cleansing and genocide going down in Gaza and the West Bank, but the pond couldn't stand by while the bromancer tried to cleanse the Catholic church ...

At best the Catholic church for centuries had a deeply ambivalent relationship to Jews, as exhaustively laid out in the wiki Catholic Church and Judaism

For many centuries the church was the prime source of anti-Semitism and bigotry, and when the church got around to denouncing it in the strongest terms, what they were doing was denouncing their own wretched history.

Just a sample:

A few years later, within the responding Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church begun a process of self-definition in the face of the various heterodoxies and heresies and in this context also reopened the question on the status of the Jews. While Jews would be still tolerated, the justification was now the expectation that they soon converted and thus initiate the Second Coming of Christ. In 1553, following the Bragadin-Giustiniani dispute, the Inquisition confiscated the Talmud and burned it first in Rome, then in many other Italian cities in 1553, as it perceived the Talmud as a hindrance to Jewish conversion. Two years later, Cardinal Caraffa, a Grand inquisitor and hardliner against heretics, dissidents and Jews, became pope and ended the more tolerant policies of his predecessors. In 1555, he issued the bull Cum nimis absurdum, in which he ordered the construction of the Roman Ghetto and imposed restrictions on the Jews, such as prohibiting them to engage in most professions outside of moneylending, owning real estate and limit them to one synagogue per city. Pius V went a step further and expelled the Jews from all cities of the Papal States except for Rome and Anconca.In 1593 Pope Clement VIII expelled the Jews from the Papal States with the bull Caeca et Obdurata. At the same time, the new Tridentine Catechism, result of the Council of Trent, acknowledged that the Jews had historically crucified Jesus...

Back to the bromancer, pinning the blame on the Islamics and trotting out the Nazi card... while skipping over the roles of the church, the Crusaders, the Inquisition, the pogroms and the like (as outlined in The Times of Israel, too long to quote here)

Actually the leaders of the current government of Israel have managed all the demonisation of Israel by themselves, wanton cruelty, and a level of vengeful destruction that has seen Gaza virtually obliterated, a kind of collective punishment that has led to many charges of war crimes ... and for what? So that mall life can carry on ...

Was it just a casual coincidence that writer Ofra Rodner referenced binge-watching in the land of the lotos eaters?

Possibly not, because the bromancer's solution was a little binge watching ...

And so the wanton cruelty, the immensely destructive collective punishment and the war crimes continue.

Speaking of war crimes, there's another criminal still out and about ...

Take it away Jamelle Bouie ... (though the pond humbly proposes it's not just Republicans who should have to answer for the mad king and the ketamine-fuelled Uncle Leon) ...

In which the Major, the flood water whispering Caterist, and simplistic Simon jostle for attention ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 20:20:54 +0000

In the pond's absence, apparently the reptiles of Oz went into the mother of all climate science denying jihads.

The pond was blissfully unaware, and only caught up with the news when Graham Readfearn bobbed up in the Graudian with The Australian reports ‘widespread errors’ in BoM temperature data. Where is the evidence for those big claims?

The usual suspects - Lloydie of the Amazon leading the way - were involved, together with a couple of ring ins of dubious credibility and weird credentials.

There's no need to repeat Readfearn's debunking, but the pond did like the closing flourish ...

...Lloyd wrote that the audit report had been sent to the bureau “on behalf of Mr Berger” by the independent Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie, who received a letter back from the bureau explaining its investigations, and saying accusations of fraudulent or deliberate data manipulation had “no basis in fact”.
Wilkie told Temperature Check he wasn’t asked by The Australian to comment and “felt uncomfortable” the article might have been interpreted as him having doubts about the bureau’s integrity or its climate data.
“I found The Australian’s coverage of the matter to be quite feverish, and red meat to its audience, which flooded one article with about 1,000 comments,” he said.
He had “no reason to reconsider my trust in the bureau,” he said.
Attacks on the bureau’s temperature records have been orchestrated by climate science deniers for more than 15 years. Previous episodes have been described by scientists as “harassment”. One former bureau boss described the source of previous attacks as a “fever swamp” of climate science denial that had wasted scientists’ time.
On each occasion, The Australian newspaper, rather than the scientific literature, was the journal of choice for sceptics to make claims of a conspiracy within the bureau.
In the meantime, the climate isn’t paying attention.

That last line contained a jolly link to Global heating will hit at least 1.8C, UN warns, and there are ‘no good outcomes’

Global heating will reach at least 1.8C under even the most optimistic future, well beyond the Paris agreement goal of 1.5C, according to a UN report that warns every fraction of temperature rise intensifies destructive extreme weather, glacier melt, ecosystem loss, and island and coastal city submersion.
The report by the Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme confirmed overshooting the 1.5C goal inscribed in the landmark Paris agreement of 2015 was now “unavoidable” and, despite some progress in addressing the human-caused climate crisis driven by burning fossil fuels, likely in the next few years.
It said: “There are no good outcomes above 1.5C”.
Heating of up to 3C above preindustrial levels could lead to glaciers losing more than a quarter of their mass by 2100, raising sea levels by up to 13cm. Global food production could decline by up to 14% by 2050 if there are not effective strategies to adapt...

And so on, and fun times guaranteed for all, and while the pond said it wouldn't look back, these zealots are as bad as the mad mullahs of Iran (actually at least the mad mullahs acknowledge climate change is real, while doing little useful about it.)

The reptiles love to talk about climate cultists, religious climate zealots and so on, but it's all projection, since none of them are scientists, and they must rely on others to deliver the required bunkum.

Should this active conspiring in the destruction of the planet be celebrated?

Probably not: as any good Xian white nationalist would know, it's way past time to invoke Revelation 11:18: "The time has come to destroy those who destroy the earth!" (GNT version)

The pond wondered if the destroyers might return for a return bout of destruction, but this day there were fresh jihads to follow...with talk of Malware's folly featuring blather about the "administrative elite", which presumably doesn't mean the "Liberal leet".

The pond did a double take at the name of the author ...

Snowy 2.0: A monument to this nation’s energy policy hubris
In the mind of the administrative elite, there has never been an energy policy problem that could not be fixed by taking ever more power for themselves.
By Bruce Mountain

This mountain of a man tackling a mountainous problem briefly sounded like an Old Testament prophet lashing at the heathens ...

...Of course a minister, or prime minister, of the mind I am encouraging would have asked these questions before committing large chunks of taxpayers’ money. It is too late to dream of lemonade from these rotting lemons. But mindlessly flogging a dead horse does not make the best of a bad lot. The sunlight must be allowed in to begin to disinfect these weeping sores.
Australians seem to be fed up with the governing elite scrounging from the people’s pockets to fund their failing grand-plan vanities.
Those who don’t sniff this breeze and set their sails accordingly will get the comeuppance that is long overdue.
Bruce Mountain is director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre.

The pond confesses that the VEPC had passed it by, but for the curious ...it's actually a bunch of Victorian academic boffins, at a centre set up with Victorian government money... almost, you might think, fellow travellers with governing leets...

Also out and about was the Major, himself a member of the reptile leets, revealing his usual taste for Islamophobia ...

Why do these reptile media leets always blather about Australian media leets?

If the pond could banish just one word from the admittedly limited reptile hive mind vocabulary, "elite" would be it, both because of its monstrous stupidity and its hypocrisy ...

The Major blathered on in his usual Zionist way about Marxists and Greta and the left and Macron, and then went all "Western civilisation", as the reptile hordes are wont to do.

As the full piece is available in the intermittent archive, with the pond personally supervising the uploading thereto as Australian media elites ‘colour blind’ to the ugly truth of France riots, the pond decided to reduce this Major outing to just two more gobbets ...

This one's a bit of a gob stopper, reliably rabid ...

It turns out that the hysterical Major is prone to the Great Replacement Theory, an odd place for a Zionist to land ..

The “great replacement theory,” whose origins date back to the late 19th century, argues that Jews and some Western elites are conspiring to replace white Americans and Europeans with people of non-European descent, particularly Asians and Africans.
The conspiracy evolved from a series of false ideas that, over time, stoked the fears of white people: In 1892, British-Australian author and politician Charles Pearson warned that white people would “wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by people whom we looked down.” The massive influx of immigrants into Europe at the time fostered some of these fears and resulted in “white extinction anxiety.” In the U.S., it resulted in policies targeting immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century.
In France, journalist Édouard Drumont, leader of an antisemitic movement, wrote articles in the late 19th century imagining how Jews would destroy French culture. In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian poet and supporter of Benito Mussolini, argued that war and fascism were the only cure for the world. Fascism, then and now, worked to ensure white dominance.
This was followed by the eugenics movement, an erroneous and racist theory that supported forced sterilization of Black people, the mentally ill and other marginalized groups, who were all deemed “unfit.”
The 1978 book entitled “The Turner Diaries,” a fictional futuristic account of the overthrow of the United States government, further contributed to white nationalist ideas.
Collectively, these gave rise to a global movement that attracted a wide range of white supremacist, xenophobic and anti-immigration conspiracy theories. These theories were formally codified in the work of Frenchman Renaud Camus, first in his 2010 book “L'Abécédaire de l'in-nocence” and elaborated in his 2011 book “Le Grand Remplacement.”

Cue the Major, at one with Petey boy, and the notion of breeding like rabbits to avoid the grate replacement...

The long absent lord help anyone who feels the need to "Ask The Australian" and its version of AI nonsense, unless they're interested in climate science denialism or furriner hysteria.

On the other hand, that snap of Petey boy, grinning like a prize loon, says everything that needs to be said...and always provides a lift to the pond's day ...

Luckily the immortal Rowe was to hand to celebrate for the Major ...

Or should the pond have been welcoming the return of Wilcox, with talk of the great erasure being proposed by Zionists of a Major kind?

Meanwhile, the Caterist was out and about, and frankly the pond didn't have on its bingo card the notion that the flood waters whisperer would use the movie 9 to 5 as an inspiration... In Australia, childcare has drifted from choice to control

It was such a curiosity that the pond decided to give the quarry whisperer a go, despite having personally saved the piece to the intermittent archive so that all could enjoy it at their leisure ...

On the other hand, no need to get too enthusiastic. Screen caps would do...

But surely it did get simple again, what with the Caterist simpering over 9 to 5, which the pond vaguely recalls was a Jane Fonda-inspired (not Hanoi Jane!) entertainment of a modest kind?

Roger Ebert gave the film 3 stars out of 4 and called it "pleasant entertainment, and I liked it, despite its uneven qualities and a plot that's almost too preposterous for the material." Ebert singled out Dolly Parton as "a natural-born movie star" who "contains so much energy, so much life and unstudied natural exuberance that watching her do anything in this movie is a pleasure."Vincent Canby of The New York Times was less enthusiastic, writing, "It's clearly a movie that began as someone's bright idea, which then went into production before anyone had time to give it a well-defined personality."
Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film 2.5 stars out of 4 and wrote, "The most pleasant surprise is the appearance of Dolly Parton, who with this one film establishes herself as a thoroughly engaging movie star. The biggest disappointment is that this Jane Fonda comedy about a trio of secretaries out to get their boss doesn't have more bite ... Instead of getting darker and darker, 'Nine to Five' gets lighter and lighter until it loses most of the energy it established so well early on." Variety stated, "Although it can probably be argued that Patricia Resnick and director Colin Higgins' script at times borders on the inane, the bottom line is that this picture is a lot of fun." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the film "appears to be an audience pleaser that never misses an intended laugh. However, it strays so far from reality for so long that it threatens to become mired in overly complicated silliness and to lose sight of the serious satirical points it wants to make. Happily, it does pull together for a finish that's as strong as it is funny."
Gary Arnold of The Washington Post thought the film "runs a merely weak comic premise into the ground with coarse, laborious execution". He thought that Dolly Parton was the film's "only reassuring aspect", as she seemed "an instantly likable natural on the movie screen, too".[19] David Ansen of Newsweek called the film "a disappointment ... It's not wild or dark enough to qualify as a truly disturbing farce and it's too fanciful and silly to succeed as realistic satire. Politically and esthetically, it's harmless—a mildly amusing romp that tends to get swallowed up by its own overly intricate plot."
Ronald Reagan wrote in his presidential diary that he and his wife Nancy watched the film on Valentine's Day 1981. He wrote, "Funny—but one scene made me mad. A truly funny scene if the 3 gals had played getting drunk but no they had to get stoned on pot. It was an endorsement of Pot smoking for any young person who sees the picture." (links at source)

Good old Ronnie Raygun, but hey nonny no, on we go ...

As for the Caterist's blanket dismissal of that blanket assertion, don't expect details of test results, and extensive discussion thereof, expect only a certain kind of quarry whispering blankness ... or even worse, expect a tedious trudge with the Tudge ...

If trudging with Tudge is the solution, the pond couldn't work out the question ...but did note a certain irony, with the Caterist strident about politicians interfering in family, while pushing the notion that the trudging Tudge could righteously interfere .

The pond also noted that once again Petey boy was front and centre ... we must breed like rabbits to save the very fabric of society!!

The Great Replacement Theory lives on in the hive mind!

As for the right of women to work?

Get thee to a trad wife lifestyle, and begin your breeding program ...

That weekend infallible Pope seemed like a decent punctuation point, what with "Rage Corp" providing a generous sewer load of crapulence.

The pond decided it could skip the reptiles being wildly excited by its latest Newspoll, which featured at the top of the digital page ma ...

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: Wilson’s Libs on course to end 12 years of Labor rule
Victorian Opposition Leader Jess Wilson is likely to lead a majority Coalition government, according to the latest Newspoll.

It'll be what it will be ...and so the pond also skipped several other reptiles slobbering and slavering over the result ...

But the reptiles also made a big splash for simpleton Simon ...

The pond never has much time for simplistic Simon, but decided to give him a go, only to bitterly rue the result of this form of lazy, indulgent adventurism ...

That was a lot of general blather, and simplistic Simon continued on that way ...

This was all very well, but very contingent, and yet Simon had promised an earth-shattering prophesy. Would it come in the last gobbet?

Say what?

"It may be" the most consequential for decades?

He's willing to bet his house on the way that the future of both federal leaders "may be" decided by the end of next month?

Such bold predictions, such an incredible prophet, such an astonishing seer, but may be the pond wasted its time, may be this is a wretched reptile pretending to be prophetic, scribbling with as much assurance as the pond deciding that this may be the time it can pick a Melbourne cup winner ...

And so to wrap up proceedings with another immortal Rowe, which may or may not be relevant to the lizard Oz's AI ...

By golly that Drysdale painting could be found in almost every Tamworth home once upon a time, with the Hill End outing having its own wiki ...

And now for an AV distraction ... with the world's humanitarians now rejoicing at the company they're forced to keep ...

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 21:00:00 +0000

The pond always tries for inclusivity and diversity, but a second attempt to wade through "Ned" was just too onerous.

Spoiler alert, if you managed to make it to the bitter end, you discovered another reptile attempting to distance himself from his American kissing cousins ...

...“The consequences of failing to do a deal should not be understated. Realistically, it will be at least five, more likely 10 years, before Europe opens the door to Australia again. In the meantime, competitor exporters in Canada, New Zealand, India and Mercosur (South America) will exploit their advantage.
“The sticking point is the deal’s current concessions in relation to labour standards and climate change. On one reading, these provisions reflect our existing obligations under adopted ILO rules and the Paris Agreement – the latter signed by Tony Abbott, ratified by Malcolm Turnbull and written into our own free-trade agreement with Britain by Scott Morrison.
“On another reading, they are a problematic intrusion into a future government’s ability to regulate industrial relations and decarbonisation. It is these provisions which will be highly scrutinised by the Coalition through JSCOT to ensure future governments can make and change policies in the nation’s economic interest.”
The Greens have trailed their coat on the deal. Their trade spokeswomen, Sarah Hanson-Young, has said the deal could help workers and the environment. “I have had constructive talks with Minister Farrell and will continue to engage constructively,” she said. If the Greens decide the climate and environmental provisions are meaningful, they might be tempted, but that would be a leap.
One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce has been circumspect, saying the Nationals have been too fast to oppose the deal and has suggested its benefits need to be assessed. One question: is Gina Rinehart a likely winner from the FTA?
Finally, there should be no mood in this country for the childish anti-European prejudices of JD Vance when many European nations are increasing their defence budgets. Urgent responses are under way in a number of Eastern European nations against tangible threats from Russia – responses far more serious than anything Australia is doing. The idea we don’t need closer institutional economic and strategic co-operation with individual European nations as well as the EU is absurd.

That's as much as the pond could manage.

The full 15 minute bot read marathon is at the internet archive (in dodgy layout), The Coalition veto on Labor’s free-trade agreement with EU.

The reptiles might like to pretend they had nothing to do with Faux Noise's gift to the world ... but Faux Noise is still trying to herd the faithful MAGA to vote for the GOP, so the mad King can carry on in his patented, verging on the demented, definitely unhinged way ...

And so to an equally onerous burden, Polonius prattling on about the Haines tragedy.

Here you have to remember that the crocodile tears and the faux sympathy conceals past attitudes, as seen in the Jess Malcom and Joe Kelly offering Pro-ALP record sparks warning on ‘fake independents’ Helen Haines, Zali Steggall and Rebekha Sharkie.

Back in April 2022 the reptiles toed the Josh line ...

New analysis shows crossbench MPs Helen Haines, Zali Steggall and Rebekha Sharkie have voted with Labor on two out of every three divisions in the 46th parliament, with the Morrison government using the data to warn Australians against supporting “fake independents”.
Ms Haines voted with Labor 67.92 per cent of the time, Ms Sharkie 64.64 per cent and Ms Steggall 66.04 per cent, according to research from the Parliamentary Library.
All three independents hold former Coalition seats – Indi in rural Victoria by 1.39 per cent, Warringah on Sydney’s northern beaches by 7.2 per cent and Mayo in the Adelaide Hills by 5.1 per cent respectively...
...Mr Frydenberg on Wednesday called out the failure of independent candidates to nominate who they would support in a minority government despite campaigning for transparency and accountability in politics.
“Independents are fake independents,” the Treasurer said. “They are being run and organised and are acting as a political party. Their strings are being pulled elsewhere by Climate 200. They’re running on a Labor Party platform.”

Of course the reptiles would argue it was just vigorous discourse, a healthy but polite disagreement, as they went about the business of demonising independents as Labor party stooges, daring to back "the Palestinian agenda", or faux greenies, rabid climate science believers, and some kind of dangerous radicalisation of the body politic.

Naturally they've now seized on the behaviour of a clearly sick puppy to make political capital from a tragic assault on an MP, and naturally Polonius seized the chance to slip in his own politicising of the matter.

Yesterday the pond noted the absurdity of the lizard Oz headline offered to Polonius...

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

Alleged attack? No, the attack was real, but it could be alleged that the vicious assault was done by a deeply disturbed loon.

The pond did appreciate the sentiment in the header for the splash ...

Say that again? Let’s not politicise this attack until we know all the facts

Keep it in mind for the rest of this post.

Could Polonius stick to that promise?

Of course he couldn't. What followed was a performative both-siderist tract, followed by a politicising of the attack ...

If Calwell's attempted assassination by Peter Kocan wasn't political, then much the same could be said about the current matter, allowing the caveat, until we know all the facts

But in typical style, Polonius broke into full politicisation, regardless of the facts ...

Did everyone notice?

The most significant acts of political violence in modern Australia's history have been instigated by the extreme left.

To rephrase, the memory hole as far as right wing journalists explains how the Polonial memory hole swallowed Captain Francis de Groot, and all the other far right ratbags who've briefly taken centre stage over the years.

And in the next gobbet Polonius whittered on in the same way ...

Australia remains a relatively peaceful place. Yet there is reason to be concerned about the developing axis between religiously motivated radical Islam and the secular radical left.
So far this combination has been restricted in Australia. But recent developments in France and some other Western European nations demonstrate the potential problem.
This is not the first time the radical left has been a danger to freedom in Australia.

Remember the injunction? Let’s not politicise this attack until we know all the facts ...

Forget it Jake, it's Sydney Institute syndrome ...

So glad to see: Let’s not politicise this attack until we know all the facts

Now let's drag 'Nam into it ...

Stop right there. There was a link attached, and it led here ...

Commentary
By Nick Dyrenfurth
Anger is no longer a political by-product. It’s the business model

Well yes, the Murdochians have long made anger, fear, hate, division, and loathing their business model, but expecting them to admit it is a bit like expecting navel gazing would produce some kind of introspection.

Imagining it's all the work of social media is to miss the way that social media finds its sources in the mainstream media - in much the same way as the ABC seems to find many of its stories and attitudes revealed to it by the lizard Oz.

But the pond digresses ...the real point is this ...

Polonius has always had a war monger bee in his bonnet when it comes to 'Nam ...so naturally he was tut-tutting and clutching his pearls ...

The demonstrations in the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s against the Australian commitment to the Vietnam War were frequently violent. For example, it was all but impossible for members of the Coalition government to enter some university campuses at the time. And there were violent street demonstrations aimed at police.

Who wouldn't take to the streets to protest this complacent drivel?

And there's the real rub.

Polonius was always a war hawk and a war monger, a man who believed that the Vietnam War was worth fighting and dying for (just not him, it's much better to wage the war in print than be a mug punter rustic conscripted to head off to the front lines).

There was some pushback to that piece ...

In April 2015, on the fiftieth anniversary of prime minister Robert Menzies’s decision to commit Australian combat forces to South Vietnam, political commentator and columnist Gerard Henderson wrote that it was a “correct decision taken in the interests of Australia.” He argued that the 521 Australian soldiers who died there “did not die in vain” because that ten-year war gave Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand time to equip themselves to handle the communist victory in Vietnam in 1975 much more effectively than would have been possible in 1965.
This is a big call, particularly given the fact that, of the 521 Australians who died, 185 were conscripts; surely this must be of some moral relevance to any judgement about the outcome. And it is impossible to judge the “correctness” of the Vietnam war without considering those who came back injured and damaged, unable to lead a functioning life again.

Off to fight in a mindless, meaningless war, all because your marble came up, and Ming the Merciless and Polonius deemed it so and fitting. Moral relevance? Not a reptile concept ...

The Vietnam war is perhaps the best example of extreme far right violence inflicted on hapless conscripted boys in the last hundred years, not that we're the only ones featuring lap dogs of war ...

And then things went completely down hill, because all the reptiles were busy politicising the Haines assault, with the Ughmann joining the conga line ...

Remember that refrain? Let’s not politicise this attack until we know all the facts

The reptiles, accustomed to fear, hate mongering and incessant jihads about grievances, simply couldn't follow that simple injunction ...

Day after day, the reptiles respond to any dissident or disrespectful minority or pesky furriner in a fast, disrespectful and intolerant way, yet none are so blind as those that refuse to gaze at their own navels ...

Now it's beyond time to invoke that mystical entity, "The West"...

Yet more of the attitudes embedded in the Australian Daily Zionist News, but who or what is "The West"?

That obsession with bums is deeply weird, for a party always ready to indulge in homophobia, but perhaps that's the new version of "The West".

Now it's time to do a a mini history of political violence, so that ultimately "the left", marching through the institutions, can be labelled the worst offenders (why did all the reptiles leave out the Battle of Broken Hill and the Battle of Brisbane?)

Now for a little both siderism, but please remember the ultimate aim of the mission, of point of the jihad, the relentless politicising of the attack ...

Time now to pin the blame on the left-wing donkey, apparently a strategy approved by all who live inside the lizard Oz hive mind ...

Ah, the old conga line, a favourite routine when it comes to verbal violence, and yet when the pond looks around, much of the current violence in the world seems to have a far right dictatorial hue ...

But apparently it's the left the pond should fear, not the whole pack of rabid reptiles ...

Mobilise?

When the reptiles give up their climate science denialism, their relentless scapegoating of TG folk, furriners and the like, and their daily litany of online rage - the only saving grace the paywall that means you have to pay to be radicalised - then the pond will take seriously this sort of sanctimonious and righteous bleating...

The first step?

Perhaps we should nationalise the Murdochian press ... or face more decades of a circular firing squad, as each day they all line up to announce that, one way or another, they've had a gutful ...

Speaking of having a gutful, the pond always strives to be comprehensive, which means at least noting the dog botherer, also sublimely unaware of the ostensible Polonial mission ... let’s not politicise this attack until we know all the facts

Did anyone think the dog botherer could follow that call?

A more interesting question is what happens when a hate and fear monger accuses others of hate mongering? What happens when anyone suggests civility?

Damn it, there'll be no civility here, there'll just be a bog standard dog botherer pile on, seizing every chance to politicise the attack ... Hatemongering PM has a nerve to call for civility.

Here no civility, no politeness, no thoughtfulness or graciousness, just the snarling and the exposed gnashing teeth of a slavering hound, down there with that Baskervilles beast ...

At this point, the pond broke.

It was the sight of Sharri, full disrespect, that did the pond's head in.

When the reptiles pause to consider the female Teals and independents, it's only so that their dirt unit can lump them together as a disgrace, a pox on the country.

Remember these sorts of wars?

Teal-linked body hits back at Liberal Party’s fresh attack on community independents

...A new website, called Teals Revealed, which has been authorised by the Liberal Party, claims that a communications company employed by several independent candidates has “deep links to the Labor Party and GetUp”...

...The attack website also attempts to tie independent crossbenchers to the Greens based on shared voting patterns in Parliament.

It mirrors the attack line trotted out by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and conservative lobbyist group Advance in recent months.

“Australians certainly can’t afford three years of a Labor minority government, one in which the green Teals or the extreme Greens hold the balance of power,” Dutton said at a Liberal Party state conference earlier in the month...

...The Australian reported that the website will be backed up by advertising on social media, traditional media and letter drops...

...The Liberal Party – among other dubious accusations levelled at independents – claimed that their success would unleash chaos upon the Australian Parliament.

Now butter wouldn't melt in their Teal and indie bashing mouths?

It was too much, and the pond decided that a top and tailing of the dog botherer would be more than enough.

Genuine masochists could suffer the full experience via the intermittent archive link above.

Truly there was nothing new to see ... because, don't ya kno, it's all the fault of the left, and yet weirdly, the reptiles decided to slip in an example of "Juliar, ditch the witch", with the dog botherer defending the mad monk, because whipping out a chaff bag and dropping Gillard far out to sea is just normal political discourse in the hive mind.

It's beyond the valley of the insufferable, as the dog botherer ended in full "litany of grievances" mode ...

We're so far from Let’s not politicise this attack until we know all the facts that we're deep in another country, a hive mind where any connection to reality is tenuous, but where jihadists and crusaders will use any event to reinforce their world view, will use an assault to conduct assaults on their enemies, to wage wars, jihads and crusades...

Never mind the tragedy, seize the chance to turn it into a baseball bat to bludgeon anyone with a slightly different view of the universe ...

Speaking of world views, why not a riff on The Simpsons, kompleat with a different kind of Krusty Klown ...

Yet another reminder of what News Corp has given unto the world ... though to be fair, it's not just Faux Noise ...

And now to conclude with a summary of the past week of madness ...

But is there hope? Be still, beating heart ...

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 20:28:50 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too light a tone for an ongoing genocide?

Why not just further simple mindedness?

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's really a form of deflection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suppressing democracy and extracting resources at the expense of its people

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

And again ...

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

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

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

Vladimir Putin, the Humanitarian

Please update your dictionaries accordingly.

By Alexandra Petri

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

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

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

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

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

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

Priorities bromancer, priorities!

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

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

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

Is there any further irony to be found?

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

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

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

By Gerard Henderson

News24 Columnist

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

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

It's an "alleged attack"?!

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

Even so, the point stands.

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

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

The real problem? Delusional religion.

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

A toe in the water with a Heroic Homeric Our Henry outing? Sorry, no can do, but there's bigotry central and a Killer serve ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 20:01:21 +0000

The pond has safely landed, which is more than can be said for some unfortunates, but is still getting its proverbial horse manure together.

A lot has happened since the pond took a temporary leave of absence, but the pond takes the view briefly promoted in that Don Henley song The Boys of Summer:

Out on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac
A little voice inside my head said, “Don't look back, you can never look back”
I thought I knew what being a dedicated herpetology student was, what did I know?
Those days are gone forever, I should just let those reptile rantings go ...

Even with the chaos and anarchy of new surroundings, and even with the letting go, how could the pond miss the opportunity to be an Our Henry completist?

But when the pond went there, the cupboard was bare. No Henry in sight, he'd done a bunk and disappeared into the night.

Instead there was endless musings on the Haines tragedy, for which only the infallible Pope would serve ...

And the immortal Rowe had a thought for Murdochians and reptiles everywhere ...

The pond was pleased to discover that amidst the carnage, there was still room for an old-fashioned serve of bigotry ...

The pond is always astonished at the way that the lizard Oz can drag this sort of rhetoric out of dank darkness and into the view of the hive mind ...

Stop right there.

Let's go back a little further than Magna Carta.

The pond has been paying attention to the LRB (not the band), and became befuddled working out what or who was exactly a Briton or a Britain while reading Pablo Scheffer's Frightened Chicks ...

...It is into this society that the first of the ‘Angles or Saxons’ arrived. Though the events surrounding their appearance remain mysterious, Higham agrees with Bede and Gildas (and most modern scholars) that they were invited by the early British kings. One of the knottiest issues facing the rulers, he writes, was ‘how to both maintain social order and secure themselves against external attack, pending the return of imperial troops’. British society had been demilitarised for centuries, and many of its experienced soldiers had disappeared with the imperial forces. Equipping an army can’t have been easy at a time when farmers were struggling to get decent ploughs. Gildas thought the decision to task outsiders with the island’s defence was an act of ‘desperate and crude mental dullness’, but at the time it must have seemed uncontroversial: Romans had for many years been hiring barbarian foederati to protect the northern frontiers.

The archaeological record over the next century and a half shows Anglo-Saxon settlements spreading like inkblots across the British landscape, starting in the south-east (where the mercenaries may originally have been stationed as coastguards) then moving gradually north and west. By the late ninth century, the English kingdoms stretched from Exeter in the south-west to Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth in the north-east. (Like the Romans, the English didn’t make it to Strathclyde and the lands beyond the Forth, which remained culturally Celtic.) Two questions in particular have been the subject of debate. How did the incomers g0 from being a few small rebellious bands to a dominant cultural and economic force? And what happened to the Britons?

The traditional account follows Bede’s description of the Anglo-Saxons’ raising an army, massacring or displacing the natives and filling the empty land with Germanic farmers – what the historian David Dumville once described as a ‘cultural genocide following resisted invasion and colonisation’. Reading the early notices in the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, it’s hard to disagree. ‘In this year Ælle and his three sons, Cymen, Wlencing and Cissa, came with three ships to the land of Britain,’ the entry for 477 states, ‘and there killed many Britons and drove others in flight to the wood.’ By the time the annal was put to parchment in the ninth century the British had been rechristened wealas (foreigners), a term that was soon used to refer to slaves and which eventually provided the name for Wales, a Celtic stronghold beyond the grasp of the English kings. One of the more unflattering Old English riddles hinges on a double entendre about a wonfeax Wale – a dark-haired slave girl, or a dark-haired British woman – who has been feorran broht (brought from afar). That the woman in question is described as alien suggests that the perceived connection between the British and their old heartlands had been comprehensively severed.

Many Britons appear to have fled to Wales in the fifth and sixth centuries. Linguistic evidence shows that Latin speakers – the former elites – retreated west, where they fortified old settlements and reoccupied abandoned Roman forts. Welsh court poets began calling the lost lowland territory ‘Lloegyr’: a foreign land, inhabited by foreign people. Other Britons went to the Continent, establishing enclaves in Galicia and Brittany (where Celtic Breton is spoken to this day). Yet Higham persuasively rejects both the idea that the Anglo-Saxons had a large army and that the Britons were fully displaced. Drawing on archaeological and legal evidence, the picture he paints is of a steady trickle of small warbands crossing the North Sea, settling in fertile valleys, killing or expelling the local landowners and subjugating the peasants.

These first ‘Anglo-Saxons’ were far from homogeneous: analysis of DNA in early English graves shows they came from as far away as Norway and Gaul. And, at least initially, this was not a total conquest. Some areas remained under nominal British control as late as the seventh century. Parts of Hertfordshire, for instance, seem to have resisted English encroachment for decades, stubbornly remaining in their old Roman towns and worshipping their old Christian cults. The name of the small river Beane, which winds from Stevenage to Hertford, probably comes from a Brittonic word akin to the Welsh bychan (‘little’). Members of certain early royal lineages later claimed by the English had distinctly British names: Cerdic, the first king of Wessex, whom Alfred the Great claimed as an ancestor, and the Mercian kings Pybba and Penda. The name of Æthelwealh, the last independent king of Sussex in the seventh century, translates to ‘noble Briton’. It’s not known whether these men were part Celtic by descent, or simply named in an insular tradition. But Higham suggests that this was a time of ‘strong regional identities, some of which may have been more or less British’.

Subjugated islanders probably made up the majority of the population in the new English enclaves. They are almost invisible in the archaeological record, however, which is dominated by the free English farmers, or ceorls (churls), who ruled over them. Although in time the word ‘churl’ would carry distinctly unaristocratic associations, the richer among the early ceorls were served by enslaved cupbearers and commanded dependants known as hlafæta (loaf-eaters). Higham sees them as central to the spread of Englishness. It was through the ceorls, he argues, that the English language, customs and material culture became markers not just of ethnic identity but of social position. Over a number of generations, as the ceorls conquered and exploited more and more British-held lands (which in time cohered into the first Anglo-Saxon kingdoms), their mores came to be adopted by anyone seeking higher status.

What a mess, what a melting pot, what a multicultural storm of confusion, but as we were talking about historical amnesia, why not go there?

And so to the final serve of rancid bigotry, and waddya kno, he tried to revert by serving up a billy goat butt, dressed up in the form of a "yet" ...

The pond was reminded of another recent read, by a certain Brendan Nicholson, that caught the eye, and which evoked recent pond experiences in the area of medical care ... Before weighing into the immigration debate, spend a night in hospital (*intermittent archive)

It’s time for a serious reality check.

Anyone trying to weigh the so-called “immigration debate” should spend some time in an Australian hospital.

Immigration is being used cynically as a political wedge by those harking after a long-gone monoculture without regard for facts or practical consequences.

I recently spent several days in hospital where my experience before, during and after an operation demonstrated how deluded and dangerous this low-grade politics is. Any healthcare experience is a reminder that more than half the Australian population was born overseas or has at least one parent born overseas. My blood samples were taken days before by technicians of Nepalese and Indian heritage. The taxi driver who turned up at 5.40am to take me to hospital was a cheerful bloke from Delhi who took me straight to the correct entrance in a sprawl of medical facilities.

I was prepared for my operation by a nurse of Nepalese origin. Then I was put under by an alert anaesthetist from India who’d rung me in advance to check on a mistake I’d made in my paperwork.

The surgery was carried out by an excellent doctor of Pakistani origin, who explained carefully and clearly before the operation what would be done, and why. Over the next five days I was cared for by nurses whose families were from India, Nepal, the Philippines, Tibet and Ethiopia; a cosmopolitan mix of Muslims, Hindus, Christians and others, along with several we would once have classified as Anglo-Celtics.

If the politicians pushing the anti-immigration line could instantly send most of these people “home”, those of us connected to medical devices would have awakened to a largely still and silent building, sadly missing their skills and cheerful approach.

The anti-immigration lot will throw up their hands and say that of course they don’t mean to banish “those” immigrants. That’s not the point.

The reality is that with an ageing population and declining birthrate, cynically harking back to the White Australia era risks unleashing racism that can dishearten and discourage people that our workforce badly needs.

That lowest common denominator debate and the way it’s being delivered – basically blaming immigrants for everything – is highly offensive, unsophisticated and riddled with misinformation and contradictions.

Having a multicultural society brings great benefits and we’ll be in serious trouble if they all go “home”. Certainly, fix any rorts but leave the rest alone...

And so on, and well yes Brendan, but you can't stop bigots doing what bigots gotta do ...

While the pond won't be looking back at assorted reptile stews, now fetid and ruined by exposure to the noon day Tamworth sun, there are plenty of 'toons worth catching up with ... including the immortal Rowe, staying in the bigot spray moment ...

And so to Killer, and the pond apologises for the use of caps, but it's part of the readjustment and the returning ...as Killer headed into Mike Pence territory, the man the MAGA mob wanted to hang ...

The Mont Pelerin Society? Birds of a Hayekian feather flocking together, but as Killer mentioned potholes ...

And so on, and the trouble with a pothole analysis is that you're liable to end up in a pothole, but you hardly expect a mob of insular academics and lickspittle fellow travellers to get out on the back roads ... I Drove An Empty Two Lane Road Into Never Before Seen Indiana

The pond doesn't usually stick in an AV distraction in the middle of a reptile rant, but confessing to a letch for backroads decline and decay seemed appropriate, what with Killer infatuated with Killer buildings celebrating the killing fields ...

Good old Mike Pence ...

Sorry, the pond is incredibly distracted, and struggling to cope with this plunge back into the hive mind...

Big Pharma? That's genuine commerce?

They're just as much in bed with government as Uncle Leon is (and lordy lordy is he into government subsidies in a big way)

Lilly and U.S. government agree to expand access to obesity medicines to millions of Americans

Medicare beneficiaries with obesity or overweight will have access to Zepbound and orforglipron, if approved, at $50 a month

INDIANAPOLIS, Nov. 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) today announced an agreement with the U.S. government to expand access to its obesity medicines and reduce patient costs. The agreement builds on Lilly's longstanding commitment to finding solutions with policymakers that improve access to life-changing medicines. In 2020, Lilly partnered with the Trump Administration on a pilot program that paved the way for Lilly to be the first company to cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35 per month. Lilly will now improve access to nearly 40 million Americans living with obesity on government insurance programs and millions more who pay out-of-pocket. Unlocking access to these medicines can be game-changing for Americans with obesity – a risk factor driving more than 200 associated diseases, including heart disease, strokes and certain types of cancers.

"Today marks a pivotal moment in U.S. health care policy and a defining milestone for Lilly, made possible through collaboration with the Trump Administration. As we expand access to obesity treatments for more Americans and advance one of the most innovative obesity pipelines, we remain focused on improving outcomes, strengthening the U.S. healthcare system, and contributing to the health of our nation for generations to come," said David A. Ricks, Lilly chair and CEO. "This agreement adds to our established commitment to affordability – from being the first company to cap insulin out-of-pocket costs at $35 per month to launching LillyDirect, an end-to-end digital healthcare experience."

The only tragedy is that the company couldn't manage to screw the Australian taxpayer and the federal government and type 2 diabetes sufferers, but no doubt they'll keep trying ...

And that brought the pond to the last Killer gobbet ...

That's more than enough Hayekian nonsense for early in the morning, especially as there's been a great betrayal and a few consequent 'toons ...

Speaking of the joys of public execution ...

A few 'toons to fill in the break ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:00:00 +0000

The pond's on a break, but couldn't resist this evocation by Matt Wuerker of cartoonists past ...

Wueker himself isn't beyond the odd historical allusion ...

Beyond the ancien régime, the pond still enjoys the evocation of mythical critters as a way of bashing real ones ...

And here's a couple of matters the pond is pleased to be taking a break from ...

The pond heads off for a break in a blaze of western civilisational glory, with Our Homeric Henry failing his Greeks test ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 20:12:26 +0000

As this is the pond's last post for a little while, and - it goes without saying - also the day that Our Heroic Homeric Henry strides on to the scene - the pond wanted to end with a "western civilisational" bang, not a woke whimper.

What better inspiration than liddle Marco's speech in ancient Greece, echoing ancient Greek wisdom down through the ages to arrive at a corrupt Kimberley and a mad king irritated because only he can do corrupt in his court.

For those coming in late, or those who've already forgotten, liddle Marco delivered what he imagined was a presidential speech, designed to launch his 2028 bid, and orchestrated against a carefully chosen backdrop, though he could have achieved the same effect by staying in Washington and using a green screen:

The pond won't bother to link to the speech - it's easily found, and it was meretricious tosh and revealed liddle Marco to be a tone-deaf twit - but the pond was agog at the notion that Our Henry might rise to the challenge and demolish Marco.

Certainly others did ...

Marco Rubio is promoting troubling ideas about ‘western civilization’
Ted Widmer

...again and again, Rubio wandered back to a precarious theme, that history is decided by “great men” who defy adversity and conquer lesser peoples.
He almost seemed to be writing out text for a video game (Super Mario?), offering “an arena for great men to test and prove themselves”, where they can show off “fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory”.

There was also this in Salon, though alas the pond can't quote it all ...

Rubio’s Greece speech is MAGA’s latest classical cover story
The Trump administration keeps borrowing ancient prestige to make its brutality look noble
By Curtis Dozier

...scratch the surface of the history Rubio cited, and those ideals look about as worthy of celebration as a new data center being built in your hometown or having to pay $6 a gallon for diesel.
The secretary’s examples of Western heroism were the Spartans at Thermopylae and the philosopher Socrates, both of whom, he said, illustrate the “Western” willingness to “pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.” But the Spartan militarism that Rubio so admires came to define the city state’s culture only because they had no choice but to devote all state resources to maintaining an army sufficient to suppress the revolts of the massive number of enslaved fellow Greeks upon whom the Spartan economy depended. And the most plausible explanation for why Socrates was executed is that he had been an intellectual mentor to several of the men who ruled Athens as a violent, dictatorial junta in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war; it was Socrates’ student Plato, who devoted his talent to sanitizing the political reputation of his teacher by painting him as a courageous free-thinker.
Rubio mentioned the influence of Plato as a key link between ancient Greece and the founding of the United States. But Plato’s influence upon the framers of the U.S. Constitution consisted primarily in legitimizing their conception of the new nation as an inegalitarian state in which only those whom they deemed worthy would have access to political power.
Yes, Socrates taught and Plato wrote, as Rubio said, in the Parthenon’s shadow. But when ancient Greeks looked at that temple they saw a monument not to democracy but to the wealth and power Athens had amassed for itself by its coercive, imperial treatment of their fellow Greeks. The construction of the Parthenon was funded by income from the lopsided, extortionate alliances into which Athens bullied other city-states on the pretext of providing protection against the defeated Persians coming back to impose slavery upon the Greeks. It almost seems that Rubio knows this, because his warning to Europe sounds a lot like that ancient Athenian propaganda: “The course we take will determine whether the West . . . resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.”
Oppression and exploitation of marginalized groups, promotion of authoritarian rule, imperial domination and wealth extraction; these aren’t aspects of “Western Civilization” that anyone should be proud of. But Rubio is, or said he is, because these are the aspects of that heritage that correspond most closely to the Trump administration’s view of the world.
In fact, the secretary’s speech was pretty direct about this. When Rubio decried how, before Trump, “we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history,” he can only be referring to the removal of Confederate statues that served to celebrate white supremacy. His grandiose description of America before European colonization as “an open and wild land” that “became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition” erased the role of genocide and displacement of Native Americans people in this process.
But why should anyone be surprised to hear something so egregiously shameful from a Trump administration official? This is the very history that Trump has worked to suppress in museums, including the Smithsonian, and national parks nationwide.
You can sense the desperation for legitimacy in Rubio’s choice to give this speech in Athens, where he hoped the ruins of the parthenon would lend prestige to his claims. You can sense it in the fulsomeness of his praise of “Western Civilization,” as if just repeating “virtue” or “honor” enough times will paper over the corruption scandal surrounding U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. These visual and rhetorical clichés are intended to make Trump’s policies look respectable, but all they do here is reveal the profound weakness of the administration. They can’t point to any genuinely positive accomplishments. Going into the midterm elections Trump and his party have nothing to run on. So instead we get a speech like this — a ham-fisted appeal to the die-hard MAGA base, the kind of people who actually want to live in a dictatorial, corrupt police state and to delude themselves about history.

And liddle Marco also aroused the ire of Xians, as in this outing in the WSJ ... though alas this day the intermittent archive decided to have one of its hissy fits, "too many requests" being the excuse du jour ...

The Pagan Nationalism of Marco Rubio’s Athens Speech
The secretary makes serious arguments, but he leaves out Jerusalem. (*intermittent archive link)
By
William A. Galston

This time it was the Xians getting their noses out of joint ...

...Mr. Rubio characterized this relentless struggle—fueled by what the Greeks called thumos, “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride”—as the “heart of great civilization.” Without it, he declared, nations lose their will to fight, even to survive. In our times, he said, Europe has abandoned thumos for comfort and safety, rejecting the pursuit of excellence in the name of an egalitarianism of mediocrity. The Continent can save itself only if it can “awaken from its long slumber” and again embrace the “fire” of times past.
But Europe’s era of fire led to colonialism—and to the backlash against it that has shaped world politics up to the present day. In the 20th century, national self-assertion generated two conflicts that devastated Europe and left few parts of the globe untouched. The European Union, which President Trump regularly reviles as an anti-American plot, represents a collective decision to prevent the recurrence of such conflicts.
Under the Trump administration, Mr. Rubio says, the U.S. has made a different choice, “the unapologetic pursuit of national power,” coupled with the understanding that power requires not only the economic, technological, and military means to exercise it but also the demonstrated willingness to use it when prudence and diplomacy fail.
The power to do what? Mr. Rubio (or his speechwriter) seems to have read Thucydides up to Pericles’ funeral oration but no further. Fifteen years later, the Athenians sent their navy to the neutral island of Melos, demanding that the Melians abandon their neutral stance, join the Athenian-dominated Delian League, and pay tribute to Athens. The Melians refused, appealing to justice. The Athenian envoy dismissed their appeal. In the real world, he replied, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
It was in this spirit that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ridiculed Canada’s refusal to knuckle under to U.S. trade demands: “I don’t think you can be in a tit-for-tat with someone who’s 13 times larger than you are.”
Untethered from law and justice, overweening power becomes dangerous not only to those on its receiving end, but also to those who wield it. The Greeks understood that when daring and pride go too far, they mutate into reckless and self-destructive hubris.
Egged on by demagogues, Thucydides narrates, Athens embarked on a war of choice—the Sicilian expedition, the disastrous failure of which contributed to Athens’s eventual defeat in the Peloponnesian War. Hubris leads people and nations to overestimate what their power can accomplish and to underestimate the effectiveness of their opponents’ response. This lesson isn’t obsolete.
In his celebration of Greek virtues, Mr. Rubio ignored their opposite—religious virtues. The Bible praises Moses as the humblest man on earth. In Proverbs we read that “pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” There is considerable daylight between the secretary of state’s paean to power and the Sermon on the Mount—which isn’t to say that I would bet America’s survival on the proposition that the meek shall inherit the earth. I suggest, unoriginally, that what we call the West emerged from, and is sustained by, the continuing tension between Athens and Jerusalem, not either in isolation from the other.
In 2022, Nate Hochman, the young man who is now Mr. Rubio’s chief speechwriter, published a prescient article tracing the decline of the religious right in the Republican Party and the rise of a less religious form of conservatism that embraces national self-assertion over any form of universalism, including Christianity. Mr. Rubio’s speech is evidence of this shift.
Years ago, I was the token liberal at a conference dominated by conservatives of various stripes. When I expressed concern about the rise of Christian nationalism, a traditional conservative acquaintance replied, “If you’re worried about Christian nationalism, wait till you see the pagan version.”
I’m beginning to understand what he meant.

Even the National Review showed contempt, again with an Xian spin ...

Marco Rubio’s Earnest, Flawed Defense of the West
By Joseph Loconte

...Rubio’s narrative is hobbled by both historical and conceptual errors that create, at best, a misleading (and MAGA-friendly) account of the American story.
“Here, in Athens,” Rubio said, “we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West.” They include “fierce individuality,” “relentless ambition,” “daring exploration,” and “a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory.” Here is a secular account of Western civilization that might have come from the pen of Voltaire on the eve of the French Revolution.
Left off the list were the transformational concepts of the Jewish and Christian traditions: the biblical teachings about men and women bearing the image of God, about man’s alienation from the Creator, and about God’s redemptive vision for humankind. Without these beliefs, there would be no Western civilization.
There are also important factual errors in the speech: the claim that the Greeks offered us a model of republican government (Greek democracy was decidedly not a republic, a fact that terrified the American founders about the prospects of direct democracy); that “the Greeks gave us history itself” (the Jews were writing narrative history roughly a thousand years before Herodotus); or that the Greeks invented the idea that “there is a rational order to the cosmos” (the opening chapters of the book of Genesis in the Bible establish the rationality of God and his created order).
Given his audience in Athens, Rubio can be forgiven for failing to draw attention to the implosion of Greek democracy. It, of course, ended in the most brutal and protracted war of the classical world: a 25-year bloodbath between the Athenian empire and Sparta and its allies. In their two-volume defense of Western civilization, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, co-authors Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins underscore the moral damage resulting from Athenian self-interest, the appetite to dominate others, and the inordinate love of honor. As they summarize it: “The Greeks, so proud of their superiority over the Persians, had turned themselves into barbarians.”
The Greek historian Thucydides, the most reliable contemporary chronicler of the Peloponnesian War, was relentlessly honest about the catastrophe. Greeks committed atrocities against fellow Greeks; women and children were enslaved; prisoners were slaughtered; cannibalism occurred during the sieges. “Love of power operating through greed and through personal ambition,” he wrote, “was the cause of all these evils.”
Yet Rubio sidesteps this dreary history and comes very close to turning the vices of the ancient world into virtues. The architects of the Parthenon, representative of the Greek spirit, “held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others” and to be engaged in “that constant struggle for distinction.”
The greatest of the Greek philosophers would take issue with this view of human flourishing. “Justice in the life and conduct of the State,” wrote Plato, “is possible only as it first resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.” Aristotle, in his Politics, also viewed the character of a political society as dependent on the character of its citizens. “For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all,” he wrote. And the aim of political life? “Justice is the bond of men in states, for the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society.”
The concepts of virtue and justice, however, appear nowhere in Rubio’s account of the achievements of the West and of the American political order. There are references to “heroism, honor, duty,” but they are extracted from any moral or religious context. There is a nod to Christianity and “the empire of Christendom,” but no hint of the civilizing impact of the Christian gospel on the Greco-Roman world. Rubio thus praises Achilles for his “pursuit of eternal glory” but seems unaware that it was Achilles’s cruelty, uncontrolled rage, and ego — his hubris — that led to his undoing. Maybe the reason for Rubio’s silence about these vices is that they match too closely with those of the president he serves.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Rubio’s speech is the total lack of any democratic purpose to American foreign policy. Instead, the nation’s great aims are to “reindustrialize our economy,” “rebuild our factories,” and “fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.” Again, the unanswered question recurs: toward what end?
In Reagan’s Westminster speech, he made the defense and promotion of democracy the moral lodestar of America’s engagement on the world stage. “So let us ask ourselves: What kind of people do we think we are?” Reagan said. “And let us answer: free people, worthy of freedom, and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.” On display was Reagan’s profound belief in American exceptionalism, the idea that America’s national interests must be framed — and constrained — by its democratic and religious ideals.
It was this belief, rooted not in Greek philosophy but in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, that helped the United States to defeat imperialistic Japan and Nazi Germany in the Second World War; create the Nuremberg Trials to bring to justice the Nazis for their human rights atrocities; launch the Berlin Airlift to rescue West Germany from Soviet tyranny; design the Marshall Plan to provide an economic lifeline to Western Europe; and support the democratic Solidarity movement in Poland, which set off a series of democratic revolutions that ultimately brought down the Soviet Union.
These facts seem to be lost on the Trump administration. Rubio’s answer to Reagan’s question — “What kind of people do we think we are?” — will do little to restore America’s self-identity as an indispensable defender of human freedom. Quite the opposite. The “moral imagination” of America and the West, as described by the secretary of state, lacks the moral ballast of biblical religion: the true source of both American greatness and national renewal.
Without it, American exceptionalism — like Greek exceptionalism — will lie buried under the ruins of a once-great civilization.

That's about the biggest build up the pond has ever done for a reptile entrance, but it was all there, Greeks, Thucydides, Aristotle, Xians, etc. etc.

What a chance to rise to the challenge, what a golden chance to deliver stern denunciations and profound references.

So what did Our Heroic Homeric Henry do?

Blew it bigly ... and stayed full Trumpian ICC-hating Zionist, with just another rabid rant for the Australian Daily Zionist News.

Talk about a major disappointment ...

The header: By Henry Ergas
Nobel Peace Price: Purveyors of hate poison legacy of Holocaust

The plea to listen to the bot: Listen to this article
8 min

The caption for a snap designed to evoke fear and loathing: Former ICC judge Navi Pillay, who was awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. Picture: AP

The plea to pander to the G bot: Make us preferred on Google

Our Henry decided to offer a bog standard defence for the ethnic cleansing that's been going down in Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention southern Lebanon and Syria. The cheapest trick is to argue about the definition of genocide and drag in the Holocaust, and Our Henry is the cheapest of tricksters:

The award of the Nobel Peace prize to South African jurist Navi Pillay, who has spent decades as one of Israel’s most strident critics, comes as no surprise.
Unlike the committees that award the other Nobel prizes, which are drawn from Sweden’s learned institutions, the peace prize committee is appointed on a party-political basis by the Norwegian parliament. Politics is not incidental to the process; it is encrusted in its nature.
Nor is it a coincidence that the committee that awarded Pillay the prize is chaired by Jørgen Watne Frydnes, the Labour appointee whose term ends in December. A longstanding critic of Israel, which he considers an “apartheid state”, Frydnes called the accidental killing in Gaza of Al Jazeera “journalists” (who moonlighted as terrorists) a “grotesque attack on the freedom of expression”. Crowning his chairmanship by canonising Pillay can only enhance Frydnes’ adulation by Norway’s vehemently anti-Israel left.
The underlying issue, however, is neither Frydnes nor Pillay. Both are symptoms of a broader disease: the chronic abuse of the term “genocide”.

How feeble was the outing? No Thucydides, just Francis:

Centuries ago, Francis Bacon warned about the “shoddy and inept application of words which lays siege to the intellect”. In the case of “genocide”, the siege began at the word’s birth.
When Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, he devoted a mere 16 pages of a 671-page book to it, producing, as historian Anton Weiss-Wendt puts it, “an indictment rather than a clear delineation” of a crime.

A snap of an alleged villain followed: The Head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, right, speaks with the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Navanethem 'Navi' Pillay via video link at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo on October 10. Picture: AFP

And so to avoiding what's going down in Gaza and the West Bank by way of semantic and pedantic quibbling, with bonus Holocaust, always a reliable diversion and distraction:

Genocide, for Lemkin, could be “political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious and moral”. The concept’s sweep was as vast as its boundaries were indistinct.
That lack of precision reflected, at least in part, how indelibly the nature of the “crime of crimes” had been burnt into the public mind. If Auschwitz gave it a name, the photographs of the camps gave it an unforgettable immediacy: heaps of emaciated corpses, survivors scarcely distinguishable from the dead.
The new term therefore meant something far worse than a massacre. What it meant, wrote Helen Fein, in one of the works that defined genocide studies, was the killing of “people in captivity, people who have surrendered, or people without a state or political organisation that can offer a credible threat to the perpetrator” – or, put more formally, “the asymmetrical slaughter of an unorganised group by an organised force” serving no military purpose.
That had been the fate of the Jews of Europe, transported across a continent solely to be murdered. Their extermination continued as defeat closed in on Germany, the machinery of death consuming the resources of a collapsing regime. “Mere Jewish survival”, as historian Steven Katz puts it, “was the active enemy”.
So too in the Armenian genocide, which had featured prominently in pre-war discussions of the crime Lemkin named. Yes, thousands of Armenians, armed by Russia, deserted to the enemy or rose in revolt against the Ottomans; in the fighting that broke out at Van in 1915 neither side took prisoners.
But their extermination as a people occurred after they had been defeated, their weapons seized, their resistance broken. The Armenians, said Talat Pasha, the Ottoman interior minister, “can live in the desert but nowhere else”. Some 300,000, mainly women and children, were driven to the wastelands of Der el Zor; by September 1916, barely 12,000 remained alive. They, too, were then butchered, as were those who had escaped the death marches.
Nor did the Ottoman regime spare the Syriac Christians, who had played no role in the hostilities. Utterly defenceless, they were mercilessly slaughtered. Far from punishing the crime, the Turkish parliament granted pensions to the perpetrators’ families in 1926.

Throw in a snap of another villain: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Picture: AFP

Erdogan provided Our Henry with another chance to avoid mentioning what's been going down in Gaza and the West Bank courtesy the current government of Israel:

None of that has troubled Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Having assured the world that “a Muslim cannot perpetrate a genocide”, he now accuses Israel at every opportunity of committing one. The history of his own country is absolved by assertion; Israel is condemned by incantation. For him, as for Pillay, the mere fact of Palestinian casualties tars Israel with the “crime of crimes”.
The Genocide Convention’s drafters had recognised the danger: that civilian losses in war would be conflated with genocide. “In modern war,” the official commentary on the draft convention noted in 1947, “the civilian population inevitably suffers severe losses.” Yet “even heavy losses on the civilian population in the course of operations of war”, it stressed, “(do) not as a rule constitute genocide”.
The fundamental distinction was between war’s dreadful toll on civilians and the deliberate elimination of a people in cold blood. The State Department confidently believed that the requirement of “an overall plan to destroy a human group” would ensure that was understood. It had reckoned without Stalin, who meticulously revised each of the Convention’s successive drafts.
In June 1948, a confidential State Department report noted that the Soviet bloc had secured “what they frankly described as an ‘educational’ document, not for ‘jurists’ but for the ‘peoples of the world’, in other words, a propaganda weapon”.
Soon enough, that weapon was turned on the United States. But it was against Israel that the venom flowed most freely. Of the 1037 references to genocide published by Pravda between 1948 and 1988, fully one-fifth were aimed at Israel – twice as many as concerned the Vietnam War.
Thus, in 1952, Soviet fronts claimed Israel was pursuing a “genocidal campaign” against the Arabs; within a week of the Six Day War, the Soviets demanded an end to Israel’s “genocide against the Arabs”, and; on June 6, 1982, they branded Israel’s entry into Lebanon “a policy of genocide against the Arab people”.
As the accusations multiplied, the word’s meaning dissolved. By 2015, some 80 countries, home to four-fifths of humanity, had been accused of “genocide”, with the term’s infinite varieties covering everything from the extinction of languages to the disappearance of often barbaric cultures. “Genocide” had become, concluded Weiss-Wendt, “a hollowed-up vessel that could be filled with any meaning”.
Yet drained of precision, the word retained its power, which fed on the memory of the greatest slaughter of Jews in history: the more sacred that memory became, the more potent its appropriation. Turned against Israel, the accusation consummated an outrageous inversion: the murdered Jews supplied the moral authority for demonising the Jewish state. And what more damning charge could there be than to charge the people marked for annihilation of perpetrating the same crime against others?
But the dead cannot be conscripted into that monstrous travesty without falsifying how they died. Nor can the parallel be sustained without suppressing how this war began and whom Israel was fighting.
That beginning was the massacre of October 7. As for the enemy Israel confronted, it was heavily armed, had vowed to repeat the atrocities “again and again”, and did nothing to protect, and everything to deliberately imperil, Gaza’s civilians from the wars it had chosen to unleash.
That is the war Pillay’s commission branded genocide; that is the verdict the Nobel committee has now enshrined, lending its authority to “A wash of lies / That eats like acid at the feet of men”.
And with it, a prize for peace has desecrated the memory, and tarnished the legacy, of those who perished in war-torn Europe’s darkest crime.

A minor quibble.

Shouldn't Our Henry's thumb bio start this way?

Henry Ergas AO is a rabid ranting Zionist who learned nothing from his sojourn in Europe, before returning to Australia to deliver weekly Zionist rants to the Australian Daily Zionist News.

Instead the reptiles offered this ...

Henry Ergas Columnist
Henry Ergas AO is an economist who spent many years at the OECD in Paris before returning to Australia. He has taught at a number of universities, including Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the University of Auckland and the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique in Paris, served as Inaugural Professor of Infrastructure Economics at the University of Wollongong and worked as an adviser to companies and governments.

For once there were a few cracks in the hive mind. A few weren't on board, though there was also the usual reliable collection of full-blown loons...

Luckily there was also a recent infallible Pope to hand ...

As for the rest of the reptiles this day, the pond stayed shattered.

With the intermittent archive doing a bunk, all the pond could do was note some seminal contributions, and provide a url ...

There was an outing on the Canavan caravan ...

‘Worst’ trade deal sells out Aussie jobs
European steel tariffs stay at 50 per cent, cheese subsidies remain intact – yet Labor is calling its EU free-trade deal a win for Australia.
By Matt Canavan
Contributor

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fcoalition-demands-urgent-changes-to-eu-trade-deal-amid-growing-backlash-from-farmers%2Fnews-story%2Fe297381d5721cdb32605ae2866dab5a2

Worth hanging around for when the archive comes good?

Nah, not really...and ditto the craven Craven ...

Australians want less immigration. Universities can’t keep ignoring it
As public support hardens for lower migration, the hardest choices can no longer be dodged, especially by universities that have turned international students into a business model.
By Greg Craven
Columnist

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fno-amount-of-cash-will-satisfy-our-aristocratic-unis%2Fnews-story%2Fdc938b5b8bd91190ecdeac79fbcb789c

The pond would have cut him short anyway ...

See that reference to the 'leets? That's where the pond would have dropped out of this tedious class.

Does the gormless one fancy he's a member of the 'leets, or does he fancy himself as a dissident 'leet at one with the common herd, or is he just a humbug down with the fake ranga?

Even Killer Creighton was off his oats ... but as this is the last post for a while the pond thought it should attempt a little completism, especially as in the first gobbet Killer attempted to swim against the reptile tide ...

What's weird is that embedded in all that is the notion that News Corporation is stuffed full of "sensible people" ...

Luckily in his next gobbet, Killer decided to bash old folks, as if ageing wasn't already doing the job (note the fancy way the reptiles are now using sub-headers):

With vulgar youff dancing in the streets with Killer, it was on to bashing the poor buggers who decided to put themselves in harm's way for no particular benefit. Who wouldn't be traumatised at the entire waste of time the Afghanistan adventure produced?

And that was that...and as for the "news"of the day? It was just greenie bashing and more celebrations of the fake ranga, what with the splitters everywhere these days ...

It was a never no mind for the pond, what with the Greens having decided that Australia should offer no military support to Ukraine ...

“The Greens have been clear from day one that we’re a party of peace and non-violence, and we don’t support military aid to the Ukraine,” Shoebridge told this masthead in an interview in his Sydney office, referring to a party position that has not gained significant attention. (here, paywall)

Looks like the pond will have to find the latest iteration of the Happy Birthday Party at the next election, but it does segue to the latest immortal Rowe ...

The Greens in bed with the mad King, Uncle Leon and Vlad the sociopathic invader?

Who would have thunk it, but then again in times past they did manage to cut off their carbon tax nose to spite their climate science face ...

As for liddle Marco, Jamelle Bouie had a few thoughts - he comes from the both siderist NY Times, but nobody's perfect ... Marco Rubio does not know a thing about "Western civilization"

Lordy lordy, that the pond should be approvingly quoting Rory.

For those wanting to avoid the rest of the blather, just after the 22minute mark Rory begins talking about liddle Marco, comparing him to a Victorian headmaster blathering on to his students about the glories of the British empire ... How does Marco Rubio’s Parthenon speech fit the Trump administration’s ideas on European “civilisational erasure” – and how does it depart from traditional Republican rhetoric?

In which Dame Groan saves the penultimate post day by arriving to gas the country, and gas the planet ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 20:33:34 +0000

This is the penultimate post by the pond before going dark for an indeterminate amount of time.

It's not so much the physical move, which will happen in a day, but getting computers back up, reconnecting to the intertubes and sorting through an enormous amount of junk.

It would be nice if, in these last few days, the reptiles managed to publish something compelling, something that sustained interest in the pond in the dark times, but that's just a measure of the pond's delusional devotion to herpetology studies.

Instead say, any commentary on Ukraine being sold down the river, there's just a bog standard continuation of the endless war on Jimbo, with these yarns briefly at the top of the digital rag...

STATE PUSHBACK
NSW to waive stamp duty as Chalmers charges ahead on trust changes
NSW has become the first state to rule out individuals and businesses being hit with stamp duty should they restructure their trust arrangements following federal Labor’s reforms.
By Sarah Ison, Lachlan Leeming and Julie-anne Sprague

They needed three reptiles to put together that sorry tale? More talk of the suffering of the trusty rich?

This is the way that endlessly rippling waves and water wear down coastlines and rocks.

Only two reptiles were needed to help in the next phase of the agitated jihad ...

ALP AGITATION
Sting in PM’s tale as Albanese walks away from boast
Anthony Albanese has walked back his claim of personally reversing the ATO credit card ban as Labor MPs say internal morale has hit a new low.
By Greg Brown and Rosie Lewis

Geoff chambered a bog standard round ...

Dr Jim’s record falling flat in treasurer match-ups
The fact that the Prime Minister has been forced to step in and clean up Chalmers’ mess on several occasions is a bad look for the Treasurer.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Over on the extreme far right, Jack the Insider joined the chanting children in this version of Lord of the Flies ...

Past is past, Dr Jim … it’s your future I’d be worried about
Chalmers should forget about nostalgia, otherwise we might wistfully recall a time when giants of Australian political history really strolled the corridors of power.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

It's the repetition of visual images as part of the jihad that introduces a certain visual numbness ... with Jack recycling a lizard Oz favourite.

Talk about an inexhaustible ability to recycle old hits ...

And Geoff's piece was also a reminder of past visual glories...

It's the sheer inane repetition, the mindless ongoing sloganeering that means the rag is a propaganda sheet of the lowest and basest kind, that some days gets to the pond.

But why worry about images?

Well think of the alternatives.

it's Thursday, and that's petulant Peta day, and she was on a crusade worthy of a medieval Xian king ...

Taxpayers deserve answers over ALP grants to Islamic groups
The notion that taxpayers are left funding any individual or organisation connected with radical Islam should see urgent and immediate action.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

The pond absolutely refuses to indulge this sort of crusade - there's always the archive for Peta cultists - but as a counterpoint might note an alternative in another place ...

Brethren a controlling sect, not a religion, former and current members say
Lindy Jacomb was a naive 20-year-old member of the Exclusive Brethren, living at home with her family, when spiritual curiosity got the better of her. So she wrote to her church’s global leader and other elders. (*intermittent archive link)
Michael Bachelard and Sherryn Groch

Here's the nub of that piece ...

...On Friday, the electoral matters committee will ask hard questions of Hales – unprecedented for a man who for decades has answered only the inquiries of his own acolytes. He tried to get out of the grilling but failed.
At stake is not just his church’s reputation, but millions of dollars in tax exemptions.
Charities in Australia are prohibited from campaigning for political parties, and Hales’ church runs a dozen charities with hundreds of millions in assets. Research in the UK reveals the Brethren use these riches almost entirely for their own benefit. A finding that the church was involved in electioneering could seriously imperil these generous concessions.
A number of right-wing groups have leapt to Hales’ defence. Holding him to account is a threat to religious freedom, they say.
Turning Point USA, the controversial US right-wing organisation, called on the Trump government to lobby Australia over Hales’ questioning, with pastor Lucas Miles worried that, “If this approach succeeds against one church, it becomes a precedent of intimidation for all”.
The Coalition members of the committee have labelled Hales’ grilling a “witch-hunt”. The Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, Michael Stead, and his organisation, Freedom for Faith, say the Brethren is a simple “mainstream Christian denomination,” whose members “have as much right as any other Australian to participate in the electoral process”.
“Religious leaders (are not) automatically responsible for the political choices, associations or conduct” of their members, Freedom for Faith told members of the committee in an email. (Neither they nor the Coalition responded to recent questions about Hales’ long history of antisemitic comments.)
Experts who know the Brethren better say these defences are wrong-headed. Reverend Tim Costello, a senior fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity and former president of the Baptist Union of Australia, said Hales’ church “regard the rest of us Christians as so unfaithful that they will not worship, fellowship or even eat or drink with us.
“And the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren break up families … this is not freedom of conscience or freedom of religion.”

And so on, and the chance of reading anything like that in the lizard Oz?

Between zilch, zero and zip ... (and yet any sensible atheist might wonder why all these churches get endless tax breaks and government indulgences)

What you get in the lizard Oz is endless hate, fear, division and loathing ... and the need for shadows to get on board the fake ranga agenda ...

Here's another piece the pond wouldn't touch with a barge pole ...

Labor’s ‘digital duty of care’ amounts to radical state censorship
Labor’s legislation is the most radical mass-censorship legislation any Western government has proposed in the internet era.
By Michael Shellenberger

That's the same loon that the pond recently noted was a charlatan, and yet he has the cheek, in the time of mad king Donald and tech bro billionaires, to blather about "western civilisation"...

...beneath these political and strategic motivations is a deeper intolerance towards different points of view. The left since 2010 went from demanding the cancellation of controversial speakers, to government censorship, to the celebration of the killing of Charlie Kirk for the things he said. This intolerance stems from the left’s dogmatic certainty that it is right and moral and its opponents wrong and immoral.
Western civilisation rests upon the idea that the truth emerges from dialogue and thus that free speech is the enabling foundation for democracy. The West’s first great martyr was Socrates, whom the government ordered to death for the things he said.
The Albanese government’s demand for censorship and the ability to wage informational warfare through the use of fake accounts is an attack on this Western tradition of free speech and democracy. I encourage the people of Australia to use their voices forcefully to oppose it.
Michael Shellenberger is the CBR chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech at the University of Austin, the founder of Public.News, and the president of Civilization Works. He was a guest of the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia.

Yet another reminder, per his wiki ...

...Shellenberger has faced accusations of "bad science" for his comments on climate change in Apocalpyse Never; he has also been criticized for arguing with prominent climate scientists on social media and "apologising" to the world on the behalf of environmentalists.
A panel of scientists organized by Climate Feedback analyzed the claims he made in his "apology" article, concluding that they were "inaccurate or mislead readers by contradicting available evidence or using scientific data out of context." A Snopes article, which consulted multiple scientists that Shellenberger had cited, was similarly critical; Michael Mann called one of Shellenberger's central arguments "completely wrong," and found it was also contradicted by the very IEA source Shellenberger used to support it.

He's also in the grip of a demented form of transphobia and can be relied upon for endless blather about "woke" ...

The pond doesn't want to get in the way of its final post tomorrow featuring Little Marco, and "western civilisation" and Socrates, but what the heck ...

Rubio’s Greece speech is MAGA’s latest classical cover story
Curtis Dozier

...The secretary’s examples of Western heroism were the Spartans at Thermopylae and the philosopher Socrates, both of whom, he said, illustrate the “Western” willingness to “pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.” But the Spartan militarism that Rubio so admires came to define the city state’s culture only because they had no choice but to devote all state resources to maintaining an army sufficient to suppress the revolts of the massive number of enslaved fellow Greeks upon whom the Spartan economy depended. And the most plausible explanation for why Socrates was executed is that he had been an intellectual mentor to several of the men who ruled Athens as a violent, dictatorial junta in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war; it was Socrates’ student Plato, who devoted his talent to sanitizing the political reputation of his teacher by painting him as a courageous free-thinker.

And with that preview done and dusted, what else was there to contemplate this day?

The pond feared that, by eliminating all the basest of the reptile loons, it had arrived at a blank canvas, but huzzah, old faithful war horse and rogue biddy Dame Groan hovered into view to warn that we'll all be rooned ...

The header: Judith Sloan
A workable gas reservation policy? I think not

Hear the clarion call of the bot: Listen to this article
4 min

The caption for the frankly terrible opening illustration: Australia's oil and gas infrastructure as the lifeblood of the nation's economy. Sources: iStock. Artwork: Frank Ling

The plea for the mighty tech bro G: Make us preferred on Google

There will be a few wimps who will say that they've read all this before, but remember, it's not just the art of endless visual representations, there must also be endless text recylings.

Dame Groan groaning about gas and renewables is an eternal, never ending classic ...

There are legitimate grounds for a government imposing a gas reservation policy as long as it’s declared before investments are made. Those risking their money can assess whether to proceed based on the requirement that a certain percentage of output must be reserved for domestic use.
But that is not what the Albanese government has in mind. It wants to impose conditions on the big gas exporters to reserve 20 per cent of their output to be available for domestic use. In this way, the domestic market can be somewhat oversupplied – a figure of 110 per cent is mentioned – thereby creating downward pressure on domestic gas prices.
Bear in mind here there is not one domestic gas market in Australia and there are major constraints because of the lack of pipeline connection. And why would Western Australia want to participate because it has its own scheme? It also doesn’t bear thinking how the scheme would work in the Northern Territory because there are no substantial case users there.
The whole idea reminds me of that famous quote from Friedrich Hayek: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
Throw in women and I’m fully on board.

It's part of the reptile lexicon to throw in dire examples of renewables, with dastardly solar the thumb image for this AV distraction ...

Next video thumbnail
Australia would be ‘entirely reliant’ on renewables if Albanese government got its way
The Samuel Griffith Society Executive Director Mia Schlicht says Australia’s energy system would be “entirely reliant” on wind and solar if the Albanese government got its way.

Any mention of renewables always sends Dame Groan deep into the deep end of the "we're all rooned" pool ...

Let’s be clear here: the Albanese government’s previous attempt to regulate domestic gas prices when they soared after the outbreak of the Ukraine war was a complete disaster. Some misguided Treasury officials thought it was possible to control both price and quantity, suggesting that they should never have passed their economics degrees.
The end result was exemption after exemption, with domestic gas prices remaining high. Good one Jim, good one Chris.
Let’s be clear on another matter: the coal-seam gas fields in Queensland would never have been developed were it not for meeting export demand. It’s all very well to try to turn this around and expect those LNG exporters to meet domestic needs, but if that had been the case in the first place, the investments, certainly the extent of them, would probably never have occurred.
Recall also that the Rudd/Gillard government contemplated introducing a reservation scheme at that time and rejected it.

Is there anything that will appease here? Sure, an image celebrating sweet, dinkum, virginal, completely clean and innocent Oz coal A coal seam gas well head in the Surat Basin, Queensland.

At this point some cynic might attempt a Graham Readfearn billy goat butt ...

Heretics!

Dame Groan wasn't having any of that sort of carry on ... she was all in on gassing the planet, as you'd expect from a Santos devotee ...

It’s worth noting here the complete hypocrisy of some of the states, particularly Victoria and NSW, in this policy space. Their governments complain about high gas prices but have done everything in their power to block new gas developments.
The Victorian government even went to the trouble of inserting a “no fracking’ provision in its constitution – I ask you? This was done in the full knowledge that the once ample gas supplies in Bass Strait were running out. NSW produces no domestic gas at all and yet it has impeded the development of the gas project at Narrabri at every step of the way – both Coalition and Labor governments.
In fact, various plans to import gas into Victoria and NSW are reasonably developed. The costs would be horrendous, but supply might be able to be guaranteed.
So, what should we make of Resources Minister Madeleine King’s presentation to the National Press Club? It was easy to gain the impression she didn’t much want to talk about the gas reservation policy, preferring to drone on about the importance of resources, particularly critical minerals.

Cue the villainess herself ... Madeleine King addresses the National Press Club in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

Her presence made Dame Groan very mad ...there was no way that renewables should be allowed in country, not when it and the planet could be gassed.

She quickly skated over the details of the now tabled reservation legislation, pointing to the watered-down ministerial discretion. She also mentioned eliminating loopholes and the potential for gaming – read my lips, the bureaucrats would have no idea about this stuff.
The key danger is that the intervention will drive domestic prices below the long-run marginal cost of new gas projects. Add in the large element of uncertainty and it’s entirely possible that investment in local gas projects will simply dry up. Of course, there are plenty of activists on the Left who would be happy with this outcome.
Any short-run relief in terms of gas prices would very quickly be followed by much higher prices. While King regards gas as vital to Australia’s energy future, including for the processing of critical minerals and firming the electricity grid, her words could easily turn out to be hollow.
The scheme doesn’t come into play until 2028, but the disincentive to invest has already started. The truth is that Australia has oodles of gas; it’s just that it’s in the ground. It may stay there for many years, if not decades. Talk about shooting ourselves in the foot.

Shooting ourselves in the foot? Maybe ...

Never mind, the hive mind was right behind Dame Groan ... except for one heretic ...

And as this is the penultimate post for a time, the pond thought it would drop in on the lizard Oz editorialist for a last whiff of what's behind the hive mind ...

Achieve a two state solution while Benji is all in on a greater Israel from the river to the sea? Good luck with that, as the ethnic cleansing continues apace.

And there was this effort, a rousing reminder of the Dame Groan reptile way ...

And with that the pond will be up tomorrow for a final post, hopefully then returning in goodly time for ongoing reptile disasters, including the pending US election mid-terms, because what could possibly go wrong?

That's cruel ...

Finally a reminder of one of the cankers at the core ... Alex Gibney says Universal ‘wavered’ over releasing Elon Musk documentary
The revelation comes after the four-hour film’s Venice premiere drew a string of criticisms and insults from the founder of SpaceXAI

In which the bromancer goes rabid and bites the mad king, while Dame Slap stays rabid and savages Malware ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 20:21:03 +0000

This day the lizard Oz jihad on Jimbo cranked up another notch (it's way beyond eleven):

SIGNATURE SPEECH
‘We shouldn’t turn on fellow Aussies,’ says Chalmers but PM undermines Jim
The Treasurer warned left-wing activists not to campaign against One Nation voters from a position of ‘smug moral superiority’, but an Anthony Albanese anecdote undermined his Treasurer.
By Greg Brown

Talk about an easy target for a Brownie bushwhacking...

Jim Chalmers has warned left-wing activists not to campaign against One Nation from a position of “smug moral superiority”, declaring his budget of tax hikes was needed to stem the voter drift to the “far right” as it showed Labor was up-ending the status quo.
Declaring his lifetime in the battler suburb of Logan meant he “carried with me” a “genuine respect and understanding”, the Treasurer said supporters were “mourning a loss of control” and treated “feelings … as real as facts” but counselled that Labor “shouldn’t turn on them”.
The significant speech was delivered minutes before Anthony Albanese publicly admitted to rolling his Treasurer and personally intervening to extend the deadline for businesses to pay their tax bills via credit card.

And so on, and moving quickly along to avoid the sight of roadkill, and with the reptiles having spent the last week pumping up the Josh volume (it was way beyond eleven), it was left to Geoff to chamber a round at him ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
Frydenberg to come riding back? Hold your horses
Is Josh Frydenberg back in federal politics? It’s not a done deal yet in the former Liberal treasurer’s mind
Josh Frydenberg is expected to poll and focus group every nook and cranny across Kew, Hawthorn and Camberwell before deciding to run against his Teal nemesis Monique Ryan in 2028.

Who cares, who gives a FF? Is he attempting some modern version of a vacillating Hamlet?

Beyond the valley of the pallid, the insipid, the ineffectual and the weak-kneed, while over on the extreme far right, the MAGA cap-donning Dame Slap was conducting her own personal jihad against Malware...

The pond just had to savour that snap of a preening Malware, jostling up against a man who's out of his depth ...

As for the actual content, thank the long absent lord for the intermittent archive ...

The ‘broad church’ is in ruins. What now for the Libs?
One simple thing would be to expel Malcolm Turnbull from the party. If he wants to play martyr, let him. It can’t be any worse than it is right now.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

As soon as a scribbler insists on "MUST", the pond knows that it must ignore the blather, but the pond is prepared to go as far as a teaser trailer ...

Sigh, not the "climate ideology" again, said by a scribbler without a 'science' bone in her denialist body.

The pond had not the slightest interest in defending Malware, nor in this jihad against him, nor the blinkered bigotry involved in it ... but, as always, Dame Slap managed an astonishing display of projection ...

That screen cap missed the barking mad nub of it ...

Liberals took leadership roles championing the voice was a betrayal of the most basic tenet for conservatives: that every human being must be treated equally under our founding document, the Constitution.
If you didn’t support the dogma on net zero, you were treated as a philistine. If you didn’t agree with the voice, you were likely labelled a racist.
This is how the left treats freedom of speech – agree with it, or it will shame you into silence or submission.
The complete surrender of the Liberal Party on traditional centre-right cultural issues was so abject that some Liberals – even former prime ministers – adopted a deliberate strategy.
Don’t talk about the culture wars, they said. Instead, discussing immigration became racist, expressing gender-critical views was hateful and questioning DEI was straight-out oppression.
The problem for the Liberal Party is its left flank. Can we please stop calling them “moderates”; there is nothing moderate about them. More comfortable shuffling around the left ecosystem of Labor-Green-teals, they cannot avoid responsibility for the cultural and economic carnage under way in this country.

Join with Dame Slap and go further right, beefy boofhead, and soon too you'll be donning a MAGA cap and surrounded by shadowy figures ...

Luckily the bromancer was on hand to save the pond from the madness ...

Watching him cope with what Faux Noise has bequeathed to the world should become a national sport, as the reptiles gave him a big splash...

The reptiles' artwork is achieving new levels of AI brilliance on a daily basis ...

The header: By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor
Donald Trump’s making the worst decisions of his US presidency

The pleasure of a bot voice read: Listen to this article
5 min

Huzzah, a return of Frank with his usual frankly feeble collage, with a meaning and significance impossible to decipher: Donald Trump stands defiant amid swirling symbols of conflict. Pictures: iStock. Artwork: Frank Ling

The desperate cry from behind the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

Usually the bromancer tries a both siderist tack. You know, King Donald has done some good things, but some of his decisions have been mildly unfortunate.

Not so this day. The bromancer was beside himself, quivering with indignation, though the sight of a jelly thinking it had a spine might unnerve some...

Under the twin pressures of looming mid-term congressional elections, and the physical and intellectual decline which almost always begins to afflict men in their ninth decade, Donald Trump has in the last few days made the worst decisions of his presidency, if not his entire life.
One of the worst things Trump has ever done as president is to reverse course on Russia and Ukraine and reward Vladimir Putin for nearly five years of murderous aggression against Ukraine.
Trump has suspended US sanctions against Russia so that it can sell several hundred thousand barrels of diesel to the US and other parties. This suggests how desperate Trump is politically. He says this will reduce US fuel prices. In fact the Russian supplies are probably not big enough to affect US retail prices, certainly not before the mid-terms on November 3. Trump desperately wanted something to announce.
Consider the strategic cost of the incoherence of US policy and the shocking strategic betrayal of Ukraine. Barely five minutes ago Washington was going to levy punitive sanctions against India for buying Russian oil and thereby contributing to Moscow’s war effort.
Now that Trump needs the fuel, all that’s thrown in the trash can.
Not to mention that this is a morally indefensible and contemptible way for the US to treat its ally, Ukraine.

Not before time there came an AV distraction ...

Next video thumbnail
Trump fumes over the ‘ridiculous’ war as Putin and Zelensky ‘don’t know how to make a deal’
US President Donald Trump expresses frustration against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky for ‘not knowing how to make a deal’ over the ongoing war. “Last month, they lost 32,000 people mostly soldiers … it’s ridiculous that war,” Mr Trump said. “I settled eight wars … I thought this would be one of the easier ones but it’s not. “We’re going to get that deal done.”

The bromancer carried on ranting ...

Russia invaded Ukraine without any cause or justification. This is black and white. Ukraine fought back heroically and received help from the US and Europe. An American leader with one scrap of decency would help raise the cost of Moscow’s aggression and persuade it to agree a ceasefire.
Trump’s only effort to exert leverage, instead, is against Ukraine.
Trump wants Ukraine to give up territory within the Donbas, and beyond, which Moscow has been unable to take by military force. Putin has apparently told Trump that if Ukraine does that, he’ll end the war.
But this would leave Ukraine gravely at risk strategically, behind not only reduced but less defensible borders, and open to subsequent Russian invasion after the Kremlin has a few years to recover and digest its winnings.
The single most repellent factor in Trump’s political persona is his sycophancy towards powerful dictators – Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un. He’ll act against weak dictators like Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and he thought he could get a quick victory in Iran. But strong man dictators get nothing but servile deference from Trump, interspersed with very occasional bouts of fatuous bluster.
Perhaps nothing more fully indicates his increasingly erratic mixture of hubris, ego, miscalculation and personalised magical thinking than Trump announcing that Russia and Ukraine had agreed on a ceasefire of strikes against each others’ energy infrastructure.
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky had no warning of such an announcement. If Putin made some kind of nod to Trump in a private telephone conversation, the Russians nonetheless showed the contempt in which he holds Trump by bombing Ukrainian energy targets hours after Trump’s announcement.
Putin humiliated Trump, so naturally Trump lashed out at Zelensky. Trump demanded Zelensky be replaced as president, a demand previously made only by Putin. Trump’s officials threatened to refuse even to allow European governments to buy US weapons for Ukraine, and to cut off intelligence from Ukraine.

Say what? If Putin made some kind of nod to Trump in a private telephone conversation...

WTF?

Still pandering? Still unable to cope?

He lied, he made it up, he's in the grip of sundowning dementia ...

"Well, they agreed. You know why? ... 'I said you agree'"

He was talking to himself in the wee witching hours, while between Truth Social posts.

Cue a snap of the demented king ...Trump wants Ukraine to give up territory within the Donbas, and beyond, which Moscow has been unable to take by military force. Picture: AFP

All the same, the bromancer's turning continued in a most satisfying way ...

Trump is intimidating US allies, fawning over US enemies. It’s ugly and counter-productive.
This is Trump behaving much worse than in his first term – indeed undoing allied co-operation projects he prosecuted in his first term – much worse even than in the first 18 months of this term. Can Trump no longer handle pressure? Is frustration with the way the world refuses to co-operate with his delusions now leading him into policy by wild temper tantrum?
These are gravely worrying times for US allies, which should nonetheless keep the alliance structures in place in the hope that Trump settles down, and alliance mechanisms can be fully revived after Trump’s gone.
But in some ways the most grotesque Trump move in recent days was allowing Pete Hegseth, who has no business being US Defence Secretary, to announce that Washington would livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, convicted of a terrorist mass shooting at a US military base in 2009.
Australians, most Western citizens, no longer support the death penalty. However, it has wide support in the US; 27 US states still practice it. Bill Clinton authorised executions when as Arkansas governor.
However, to conduct an execution publicly is immoral and profoundly offensive. It will make the executed terrorist a hero among jihadists everywhere and provide them with priceless propaganda footage. It also gravely coarsens American life. And it’s a fundamental abuse of human rights.
Even a prisoner to be executed is a human being and deserves to have his human dignity respected. Civilised societies like the US do not, as a matter of policy, taunt, torture and publicly humiliate prisoners. This is just sick, a graver offence to civilised values than anything Trump has come up with previously.
If this is what the next two years of Trump look like, we’re entering dark times.

"Entering", bromancer?

It's been dark times these past ten years, thanks to you bloody Murdochians ... but as a result of the bromancer's turning, the hive mind began to show a dangerous tendency towards splitting and schism ...

The pond almost fainted when QLA replied to Ian with a dire heretical answer: "Yes"!

What a relief to see a few of the hive mind stayed solid, even as it came to this in the lizard Oz.

Relax Ian, settle back for a fun reversion to Roman times:

What else?

Well there was Nick, but the pond is always inclined to think he should get nicked...

The Greens denounce US-style ‘imperialism’… then embrace it
They need the kind of politics capable of speaking to people outside activist group chats.
By Nick Dyrenfurth
Contributor

It was just the usual serve of Zionism, servicing the needs of the Australian Daily Zionist News, and a reminder of how John Curtin must be revolving in his grave at a furious pace ...

Oh and the reptiles found space for Jane Hume, but she would say this, wouldn't she?

Labor’s climate red tape is a killer for small business
Australia’s businesses should be building our prosperity, not buried in paperwork.
By Jane Hume
Contributor

Climate change? Climate science? The impact of the changing climate on all forms of business, long, short, and tall?

Go whistle at the wind ...

And while embracing AI and bots and importuning Google to pay attention, the reptiles felt brave enough to serve up a little AI bashing, apparently unaware that refusing to use "SI" made them the enemy of the people ...

I’ve worked in AI for years. The tech giants are taking us for a ride
What the government is proposing is extremely unpopular, with virtually no supporters but the AI companies themselves.
By Ed Newton-Rex

There was an infallible Pope for that ...

Eric was also briefly over on the extreme far right, a rare concession to the lizard Oz's business coverage ...

‘Shotgun wedding’: Inside the ASX’s bitter biotech stand-off
Two companies united by the goal of saving lives are at war with each other in an ASX power struggle involving billionaires, a fund manager kingmaker and a mystery stakeholder.
By Eric Johnston
Associate Editor

The pond rushed through that mob, but the least the pond can do is reassure the MAGA-fied lizard Oz hive mind that some things were still normal, in their usual abnormal way ...

Know who else isn't a member? Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and North Korea, fine company for the reptiles ...

And with that noted, and as the pond will shortly be signing off as it makes a move to Pixie Paddocks (aka Fairy Meadowns), the pond wanted to save a little space in order to point of a few Fintan O'Toole moments.

The pond has always had a soft spot for Fintan O'Toole in the NYRB, a way to recover some brain cells after hard days hitting the lizard Oz books.

Gulliver’s Warning
Like Gulliver in Lilliput, “greatness” in the political realm depends on the existence of a group deemed puny or weak. (*intermittent archive link)

In celebrating one of the pond's favourite books, Fintan also managed to put in the boot ...

...The reactionary politics of today is a politics of the sublime—pain invoked, pain distanced, pain rendered politically delightful. This was true of Brexit, which depended on invoking an idea of Britain (in fact a free and prosperous country) as enslaved and oppressed by the European Union. And it is true of Trump. Before him American political rhetoric (including conservative rhetoric) had a grammar of uplift—the American Dream, Kennedy’s New Frontier, Reagan’s Morning in America, Obama’s arc of history bending toward justice. But Trump, from the beginning of his campaign in 2015, went for the full sublime. He created a vision of America as a hellhole—what he called in his first inaugural address “American carnage.” He imagined it for his fans as a country on the verge of obliteration. But he also presented, of course, a dramatic denouement: the appearance of what Gulliver called “the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World” to transform this abjection into its opposite—greatness.

And he was in fine form when the hard copy of the magazine arrived in the letterbox early this week ...

Devils in America
The lessons that Donald Trump learned from Roy Cohn—lie, cheat, engage in unlimited corruption—now shape official government policy in the US. (*intermittent archive link)

The book reviewed:

American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump
by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark
Scribner, 509 pp., $32.00

Fintan provided a timely reminder that the rot in American politics goes way back to the 1950s, and to the deeply closeted Roy Cohn (shades of the parrot),, the mad king's McCarthyist mentor:

...In 2017 Trump famously asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” The answer stares at him from the mirror: he is his own Roy Cohn. Though the influence of his lawyer and fixer on the young Trump is common knowledge, not the least of the virtues of Bird’s punchy, racy, and appropriately nauseating new biography is the renewed force it gives to this cliché. There is something eerie about the thoroughness of Trump’s mimicry of Cohn’s way of dealing with the world: lie relentlessly, refuse to pay small bills, respond to all criticism with smears and threats, claim all defeats as triumphs, sue everybody all the time, weaponize the law and, when you can, the entire justice system, learn from the Mafia, use the phone to avoid leaving a paper trail, always present your highly privileged self as a victim of the elites, divide the world into allies to be used and enemies to be abused, into the winners who must be flattered and the losers who are there to be exploited in every imaginable way.
Trump’s language is Cohn’s language (always preface a big lie with “if you wanna know the truth”) and so is his whole style of public speaking—Cohn taught him to ad lib everything. Above all, Trump learned one very big thing from Cohn: that the veneer of morality in the American upper class is very thin. Cohn proved conclusively that there is no limit to its tolerance for corruption. Trump got that message—and so did Jeffrey Epstein.

These were just a few of the delicacies served up ...

...Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the screenplay for The Apprentice, makes Cohn a full-on deconstructionist who tells the young Trump that “there is no right and wrong. There is no morality. There is no Truth with a capital T. It’s a construct. It’s a fiction. It’s manmade…. You create your own reality.” And, one might add, your own unreality. More than anything else, Cohn was a swindler, and like all good con men he knew how to disappear from the domain of hard facts. Bird writes that “he left behind no private papers, not even an archive of his legal career. He had destroyed just about everything.”

...Just as Cohn defied the distinctions between reality and unreality and between life and death, he also broke down the divisions between fame and infamy. He grasped with remarkable clarity the truth that American celebrity has no moral content. When Trump claimed in the 2005 pussygate tapes that “when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything,” he was merely stating the facts as Cohn had shown them to be. Cohn made himself, first and foremost, a star. After that, none of his crimes ever really mattered, except in the sense that notoriety was even more valuable than adulation.

...For the rich and famous, Cohn thus combined the magnetic attractions of both obscenity and obscurity. Everyone knew at some level that he was a very nasty piece of work but everyone believed that, like some black magician, he was able to command the forces of darkness. It was always better to have Satan in your corner—even if the devil was as likely to defraud you as to help you.
And “everyone” means an astonishing range of the rich and famous: from the Catholic archdiocese of New York (Cohn was close to Cardinal Francis Spellman and his successor, Cardinal Terence Cooke) to Mafia hoodlums like “Fat Tony” Salerno and Carmine Galante; from his great friend Si Newhouse, the owner of Condé Nast, to Bianca Jagger (whose divorce from Mick he handled); from Rupert Murdoch to Estée Lauder, from the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to the owners of Studio 54, the nightclub at which he himself was a fixture. Nancy Reagan called him often from the White House because he could supply a fix of her favorite drug: gossip. Cohn became the connective tissue of New York society: at his parties Andy Warhol could meet Trump (whom he called “really good-looking…. He’s a butch guy”) or Chuck Schumer.

And this was the closer ...

...The gay community in Provincetown was disgusted by the sight of Cohn with underage boys on his yacht. Disturbingly, Bird, ignoring the dynamics of sex trafficking, refers to these children as “hustlers,” a term he would surely not apply to Epstein’s victims. But he does give a shocking account of the experiences of Richard Kerr, who from the age of eight was incarcerated in the notorious Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast, which was run by pedophiles with alleged links to British intelligence. Kerr says that when he was sixteen he was trafficked to have sex with Cohn in Venice.
The account is entirely credible, but it will fall back into the category of rumor, gossip, innuendo. Even if it is true, how could the rich and famous and the righteous Republicans for whom Cohn is still a patriotic hero possibly have known such things? For them, it was enough to know that Cohn’s unscrupulous brutality was at their service. In everything he did, he confirmed for them the only truth they ever really wanted to know: that, in the end, there is only power. In his all-inclusive depravity, he liberated them from the nagging burdens of morality. A world in which Cohn could thrive was a world in which truth and justice were indeed mere constructs.
Bird’s horrifying biography makes the ultimate political triumph of this malevolence seem far less surprising. In Angels in America, Kushner has Cohn ascend, after his crucifixion, to heaven and then return “dressed in a fabulous floor-length black velvet robe de chambre.” He must surely now come down from wherever he is and enter the President’s Bedroom on the second floor of the White House, in the early hours when the Truth Social posts have stopped, to sit quietly by the bed and relish his vindication. He is the founding father of the rotten republic.

And that's just the beginnings of why the Unites States doesn't want the scrutiny of an international court, but does want to stage public executions ...

The pond revisited that movie recently, and decided it was inclined to be tortured and overwrought, but with some tidy performances ...

And now, as talk of public executions is all the go, and stonings in the square is the thing du jour in federal parliament (well played Liberal MP Angie Bell), why not go the full Old Testament hog?