loon pond

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?

The radicalisation of the pond continues with a serve of Dame Groan and the bromancer ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 20:57:57 +0000

So one minute the lizard Oz was reporting that the radicalised suicidal and homicidal co-pilot was part of a premeditated operation planned by the likes of Iran (here); and the next minute that he'd been radicalised by living in Australia.

That the pond could understand. The pond has been dangerously radicalised by being exposed to a daily diet of lizard Oz "news" and opinions.

Who could add to the pond's radicalisation this day?

A horde of contenders rushed into view, but these days the pond has become selective in its diet.

While the pond appreciated Toby's assault on the perfidious French - how diabolical and insulting to call them Greeks - it lacked the necessary radicalising fizz...

Has France become the new Greece of Europe?
History shows that financial crises can spread remarkably quickly once confidence begins to deteriorate.
By Toby Johnston

... so the pond personally supervised its transfer to the intermittent archive so that its feeble attempt at radicalisation was to hand for all.

Ditto Damon (Damon?) Johnson's effort, which could only radicalise forlorn southern sparrows (you know who you are...

Why Labor is backing One Nation’s Pickering to join debate
Warren Pickering wants in. Ben Carroll wants him in. Why Jess Wilson is not so sure.
By Damon Johnston
Melbourne Bureau Chief

As for the "lead" news story, the only thing of note was the new snap of a completely bewildered Jimbo ...

EXCLUSIVE
Trusts trap: Tax office, Labor in twin hits as businesses brace
Trusts trap: ATO and Labor in twin hits as businesses forced to pay heavily
Small businesses and families face up to $13.3bn in restructuring and advice costs as the ATO cracks down on decades-old trust paperwork errors ahead of Labor’s looming reforms.
By Sarah Ison and Thomas Henry

The pond would love to be the fly on a wall in the editorial meetings where hit jobs are handed out ...with stout-hearted old diggers joining with Pauline to set up a wail ...

EXCLUSIVE
Hanson issues enterprising put-down of Chalmers
The One Nation leader attacked the Treasurer’s lack of private sector experience and told business chiefs her party is their champion.
By Geoff Chambers

"Enterprising"? "Issues"? What judicious, wise use of words ...

COMMENTARY by DENNIS SHANAHAN
Five months in and Dr Jim’s budget blunder still causing pain
No budget still at the centre of negative news and politics nearly six months after it was brought down can be called a political success.

On the upside, all this spared the pond from more Josh v. Beefy Boofhead, or freedumb boy ...

Besides, if the pond wants this sort of stuff, it won't turn to a recycling of the thoughts of a fake ranga. It'll reach for the OP Bundy rum ...

A strong Hayekian start, with subtle flavours of Robin Hood on the back palate.

And then there's the coffee. Let the overlords drink coffee!

The pond did its best to care, but it sounded just like another jihad ... one day death taxes, the next trusts, then the price of coffee (remember the good old days when you made your own and developed skills at making heart and fern shapes?) ...

It must be time for an AV distraction ...

By golly the reptiles seem to have an inexhaustible supply of snaps of Jimbo looking quizzical or bewildered ... and so to the final gobbet ...

The pond acknowledges it gave the old groaner short shrift by dishing her out in screen caps, but why not swallow down your daily dose of "we'll all be rooned" in four short gulps?

On with even more dangerous radicalisation, this time at the hand, or keyboard, of the bromancer.

He always knows the best way to get a firing squad of stupidity into top shape...

The header: By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor
The Greens are the worst antisemites

The call of the bot: Listen to this article
7 min

The caption of a snap of a possible Satanist: Green Party leader Zack Polanski delivers his speech during day one of the Green Party annual conference. Picture: Getty Images

The yearning for the Big G's attention: Make us preferred on Google

Not the bromancer, not another edition of the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

Correspondents sent into terminal despair at the thought know the pond's drill.

First a little balance by reverting to a Haaretz story which takes up the themes explored in that notorious documentary NAZA.

There's an interview with the co-director on YouTube.

A new documentary, “NAZA,” provides a searing look into the inner-workings of the Israeli military’s operation in the Gaza Strip. Its namesake is derived from a Hebrew military term for “collateral damage.” Academy Award-winning director and investigative journalist Yuval Abraham joined Jacob Soboroff to discuss the film's implications, and the discoveries he made while making it.

The Haaretz story provided details of war crimes in abundance:

'Even the Lowest-Ranking Target Justified Civilian Casualties': Israeli Intelligence Soldiers Detail Gaza Policy Shift (*intermittent archive)

This is how ethnic cleansing goes down ...

...According to A., who was also involved in the mission, those in the strike cell knew that a particularly large number of civilians could be harmed. Military Intelligence's calculations of potential collateral damage put the figure at roughly 250 to 300 people, so the decision was referred directly to the chief of staff for approval. The IDF, by contrast, says its collateral damage estimate was around 100 people. The soldiers say far more were ultimately killed.
After the strike, A. says, a damage assessment was conducted to establish what had happened on the ground.
"Among other things, we relied on figures coming from Hamas, which we considered relatively plausible, even if they weren't 100 percent accurate," he says. "As time went on, we realized the death toll was around 250. I remember being stunned that we were bringing down several densely populated buildings, killing and injuring hundreds of people, to kill a battalion commander who, just a few weeks earlier, hadn't even been someone we were supposed to gather intelligence on."

There's a lot more in that story, but it's time for the bromancer to keep radicalising the pond ...

The Greens political movement, in Australia and internationally, has emerged as an important generator of antisemitic prejudice, indeed hatred. The election of David Shoebridge as leader of the Greens doesn’t moderate this ugly trend, but consolidates it.
The Greens, in Australia and internationally, partly emerge from, and embody, the dominance of the far-left worldview that now dominates Western universities, especially in the humanities. This is a central element to the crisis that afflicts Australia and most Western societies. Universities have become, in part, agents of hatred, prejudice, ideological extremism and delusional paranoia in public policy.
It goes without saying that many good things happen at Australian universities. But there’s also a profoundly ideological crisis on our campuses. The royal commission into antisemitism, as well as mostly ignoring Islamist antisemitism, has barely touched university antisemitism, especially humanities’ classrooms. The real reason authorities baulk at confronting ugly antisemitic demonstrations is that these demonstrations give expression to the universities’ broader intellectual environment. To change them fundamentally would require a cultural revolution at universities. None of our leaders are up for this.
It should be noted this is a bipartisan failure. The Coalition was in office for a decade and no useful reform of universities, schools or other cultural organisations more widely took place. This is not a question of freedom of speech. It’s a question of vast taxpayer funding being used to undermine and destroy the basic tenets of civic and human decency.

Human decency? Per Haaretz:

The soldiers' accounts describe an entirely different approach to warfare since October 7, 2023, in which even the lowest-ranking target justified civilian casualties. Their testimony suggests that the high casualty figures the army calls collateral damage were not isolated mishaps or individual identification errors, but the result of a strike policy stretched to its limits. Haaretz has published similar accounts throughout the three years of war. These policies, combined with an effort to compensate for the intelligence failure of October 7, led the military to turn a blind eye to a civilian toll unlike anything it had ever seen.
'We were striking small fry'
One change the soldiers describe after October 7 was the opening of the intelligence apparatus to untrained personnel.
"People arrived at Military Intelligence who weren't from the unit, reservists who'd never even served in intelligence, brought in from all sorts of places," says A. "They sat in the Targeting Directorate looking for the most insignificant targets, the small fry, so they could kill them. Anyone displaying Hamas symbols on Facebook or identifying themselves as Hamas was marked as a target. Some were Hamas members, some were fighters too, but they really were small fry."
D., who served in strike cells – rear command teams that coordinate drone and other aerial strikes and act as the "eyes" of troops on the ground – reinforces that account as he describes how the criteria and methods changed.
"We were always told that things would look different in a war," he says. "But this was something else entirely. Suddenly, the IDF was striking even the lowest of the low indiscriminately, and everyone had forgotten about conserving ammunition. We were striking Hamas drivers. That's how far it went."

Apparently here's a local variant of alleged Satanism, given the honour for daring to point out the indecent: David Shoebridge holds a press conference at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

On with the lesser Lesser commaning all to "make it so"...

Opposition shadow education minister Julian Leeser has introduced a bill to try to force universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism, which has been officially adopted by the Albanese government, all the states and indeed even the National Student Ombudsman, but not the majority of Australian universities.

Stop right there. This was one submission in relation to that matter (you'll need to search to find the link, it being a pdf download):

Shades of grey bro, shades of grey ... though perhaps not for you or the lesser Leeser:

Speaking, powerfully, on Monday to support his bill, Leeser said: “When it comes to antisemitism, our public university campuses have a lot to answer for.”
Addressing the universities directly, Leeser said: “In far too many cases, you have allowed Jew-hate to become normalised on your campuses. It always hides behind the fig leaf that the abuse and intimidation is not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist or anti-Israel. This is a pathetic and ridiculous excuse when the targets are overwhelmingly Australian staff and students, and we all know the word Zionist is just the politically acceptable way to say the word Jew.”
Leeser correctly identifies a key fellow traveller of this ideological sickness as the Greens party. He says: “The Greens are the party of antisemitism.” Last week this stark reality was revealed in all its ugliness in Britain. The British Greens are led by Zack Polanski, surely the most odious purveyor of hatred and extremism in mainstream Western politics. Australian Greens periodically express admiration for the British Greens.
The British Greens passed a formal resolution at their conference last week that declared Zionism is racism. They further declared that modern Israel should not exist at all, that the Jews of Israel should live as part of “a single, democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine”. The resolution praised and encouraged resistance against Israel “by all means available under international law”. Senior Greens figures promoting the resolution were clear that includes armed struggle.
A central feature of all this is to understand what Zionism is. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines Zionism as “a movement aiming at the re-establishment of the Jewish nation in Palestine”. Note the word “re-establishment”. Jews have lived in Jerusalem and surrounding areas for thousands of years. It’s insane to call Israel a colonial nation. However, whether you like Israel or not, Zionism means, as the OED says, the idea that there should be a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Stop right there.

What is Zionism and why do some critics describe it as racist?
Green party debate over the motion ‘Zionism is racism’ comes amid renewed arguments over the meaning and history of a contested term

Shades of grey, bromancer, shades of grey.

Palestine wasn't some pristine terra nullius.

There were people living there, and they'd been there for a long time...

Stay still What is Zionism? The different meanings of a contested term

...Most of these allegations concerned the alleged mistreatment of Jewish students and faculty who identify as Zionists, or merely refuse to denounce Zionism. That has led some administrations, such as Haverford’s, to explicitly affirm that it is forbidden to harass or otherwise discriminate against students who support Zionism – since such behavior has become increasingly common on some campuses in recent years.
As a scholar of Israel studies who teaches about Zionism, what strikes me when I read such statements is how narrowly they define it, reducing Zionism to a single belief in “the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and statehood in the land of Israel.”
This ignores the fact that there are multiple “Zionisms,” rather than a singular “Zionism,” and that the term has more than just one meaning. It is, at best, oversimplified to describe Zionism only as the belief in the right of Jews to have a Jewish state.

Shades of grey, bromancer, shades of grey ...

Oaky, the pond's interrupted more than enough. Cue a snap of the lesser Leeser: Federal Liberal MP Julian Leeser. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

And cue the bromancer ...

Modern Israel has been an independent state since 1948, just under 80 years. Every government, opposition and political party in the West that recognises Israel, such as the Albanese government, is definitionally Zionist. To call Zionism racism is to declare Israel, uniquely among all nations, wickedly illegitimate. Further, what the British Greens have done is stigmatise all British Jews who have any sympathy for Israel at all, who even utter the Jewish prayer “next year in Jerusalem”, as racists.
In doing this, the British Greens are intensely racist themselves, and justify racist persecution of Jews. Jews who attend “Zionist synagogues” are thus racist. Therefore, in this grotesque inversion of morality, to oppose racism the left opposes Jews. This is ugly antisemitism. The Nazis would approve.
Polanski is in his way so cowardly that he didn’t attend the vote on this resolution at his own conference. Under severe media scrutiny, he later said he would have voted against the resolution although he agreed with its substance. Happily, Polanski lost the by-election for former Labour leader Keir Starmer’s seat. Labour under Andy Burnham held on.
But the Greens, having passed this infamous, antisemitic, racist resolution, won a shocking 33 per cent of the vote. The British Greens are polling 11 per cent nationally. Other antisemitic parties poll well over 4 per cent. That means we now live in the unimaginable historic moment of so mainstreaming antisemitism that more than one in seven British voters now support openly antisemitic parties.

Did the bromancer have to drag climate science into it?

He did, he did ...Greta Thunberg ...only to mourn the way that those bloody alarmists could hold more than one thought in the old noggin at a time ...

Hang on, hang on, say that again ...

Shoebridge is less verbally extreme than Mehreen Faruqi, whom he defeated for the leadership. But he leads a completely extreme party. While his language is marginally more civil – though he’s happy to call Coalition politicians “scumbags” – the substance of his leadership is extreme.

In mango Mussolini days, you're going to get agitated about a term. a word, a concept, that's within your lexicon?

The Australian’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan discusses the “terrible breakdown in civility” which has taken place in American politics.
“Both sides of American politics, driven partly by social media, are very dangerously demonising each other,” Mr Sheridan told Sky News host Andrew Bolt.
“When the worst of them generally are that, they are idiots; they are not really murderers and wannabe dictators and scumbags and all the rest of it.” (Less than 1,400 views for the bromancer and the Bolter? Happy days).

So the pond can call you an idiot and a barking mad Zionist, and that would pass the bromancer smell test?

On to the last flourish of extremist bromancer ...

He has himself shared and lauded maps that show Israel erased in one big Palestine sign, he’s identified with the “Free Palestine, from the river to the sea” slogan, he’s accused Israel of attempting to wipe the Palestinian people out, he’s described the accidental and tragic death of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom as Israeli “murder”, he routinely describes Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide and says the Albanese government is “deeply complicit” in this genocide.
Shoebridge leads a far-left, extremist party, the Greens, as destructive an element of the sickness at the heart of our culture as anything we’ve seen.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

Speaking of the sickness at the heart of our culture, a sample of the lizard Oz hive mind at work ...

On the upside, the pond was spared the bromancer frantically scribbling that mad king Donald had done some good things, generally unspecified ...

And here's an interesting addendum.

This is the sort of censorship routinely featured on a daily basis by the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

Susan Abulhawa wins fight to restore censored Oxford Union speech on Israel apartheid

The deletions included her references to booby-trapped toys in southern Lebanon and allegations of sexual torture against Palestinian detainees, including her account of the death of Gaza surgeon Dr Adnan Al-Bursh. Other cuts removed criticism of Zionist claims to supremacy and of conduct during the Gaza genocide.

Here's the Oxford Union bit about the settlement ...

susan abulhawa and the Oxford Union are pleased to confirm they have resolved the dispute that arose between them regarding the publication of an edited video of her speech in the 28 November 2024 debate "This house believes Israel is an apartheid state engaged in genocide"

And here's the restored argument ...

What kind of warped notion of compassion allowed the Caterist into the country?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 20:25:36 +0000

"I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap" - the mango Mussolini to his cult devotees.

"We can write the silliest things and you'd write approving letters to the editor" - the reptiles of Oz to their hive mind followers.

Come on down Major Mitchell, and prove it's so ...

What’s really behind the French riots?
France’s manufactured left-wing school riots are a warning to us al
The left is trying to harness this Muslim youth wave to compete with Le Pen in what will likely be a polarised election when Macron goes.
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist

Eek, it's an Islamic youth wave. Be afraid, be desperately afraid...

Should the pond continue to pander to this kind of alarmist drivel?

Here the Muslim population is small by comparison, but it is important in outer suburban seats held by the Labor federal government. The Muslim vote is influential enough that neither the PM nor the premiers of NSW and Victoria were prepared to call for the banning of pro-Palestinian marches on October 7 last week – analogous to marching for Satan on Easter Sunday.

As always, the Major himself spends his time amplifying bad sources, in this case a certain Shellenberger, which means the pond must provide a reminder ...

...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. (wiki)

So it was then, so it still is now.

Whatever, the Major is in the intermittent archive, and his blather about the usual suspects is even more tiresome than usual, so the pond will only offer a sample ...

Ah, nuking the country to save the planet, though in the same breath, the Major will hasten to assure you that the planet doesn't need saving from climate change, what with it being a Satanic conspiracy of the first water.

Meanwhile, it was poll day, a reliable way for the reptiles to sway the ABC news cycle, with bad news for Pauline only in the sub-header ...

EXCLUSIVE
Newspoll: Labor warned that spendathon ‘must come to an end’
Terrible 20s: Albanese, Taylor and Hanson all stuck below 30 per cent primary vote in Newspoll
More than one in two Australians want the PM and Jim Chalmers to cut spending as an inflation-fighting priority, according to the latest Newspoll, which also reveals a slip in voter support for One Nation and Pauline Hanson.
By Geoff Chambers

As happens with this sort of manufactured "news", Geoff chambered his own round ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
PM’s keeping it cool despite One Nation and economic woes
After securing a second-term, winning 94-seats and watching the demise of the Coalition, Anthony Albanese is reminding colleagues that they’re not halfway through the current term and time is on Labor’s side ahead of a May 2028 election.

One note surely appealed to devotees of Barners:

...How right-wing is the Coalition prepared to go without alienating the centre that helped deliver Albanese a landslide victory last year? The challenge for Angus Taylor and Matt Canavan, who are struggling to cut through and differentiate their messaging from One Nation, is to devise policies that appeal to conservative values but are clearly distinct from Labor and One Nation offerings.
While Labor figures are confident of winning the NSW election and picking off traditionally safe Liberal seats, One Nation is expected to perform strongly across the state.
If the Nationals are obliterated, Canavan will need to explain how he intends to save the furniture, outside of rah-rah speeches.
The 45-year-old Gold Coast-born Nationals leader – who studied economics at the University of Queensland, worked at the Productivity Commission for six years, and was a senior executive at KPMG – does not have the same authentic appeal as his ex-boss and One Nation defector Barnaby Joyce. As one senior government source quipped: “Barnaby is a phenomenon. The voters seem to forgive him despite his colourful past.”
You can’t fake authenticity.

Say that again? You can’t fake authenticity.

That's what the pond thought you said.

Back in his day, as every one in Tamworth knows, Barners was just a bloody accountant from deep north toad land...

From 1991 to 2005, Joyce worked in the accounting profession, and founded his own accountancy firm, Barnaby Joyce & Co., in St George, Queensland in 1999. (wiki)

He's about as authentic as an Excel spreadsheet or a plastic spoon.

You can't fake reptile stupidity. If an ability to get as pissed as a parrot and flop about like a Maguires pub stumblebum is a sign of authenticity, then the long absent lord is surely needed to save the country.

Meanwhile, top of the page came this EXCLUSIVE ... with its very own branded gif footage ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘Great loss for Australia’: Optimist Oliver takes aim over Firmus flop
Firmus co-founder Oliver Curtis has taken a parting shot from Singapore at Australian investors who refused to buy a ticket to Firmus’s $44bn float | VIDEO
By Liam Mendes in Singapore, John Stensholt and Perry Williams

Only an early version of the yarn had made it into the archive, and the epic whine only seemed useful as a way of drawing attention to this simmering feud:

Exceptionalism is no defence for AI companies’ ‘theft’
A senior Microsoft executive called AI scraping “the largest theft of labour in human history” – yet AI giants are now lobbying Australia to make it legal.
By Rod Sims
Contributor

That was worth an infallible Pope catch up ...

What else?

Well freedumb boy was out and about ...

Trust law another Chalmers bungle
After five major backdowns and a credit card surcharge debacle, the Albanese government is now pushing trust law reforms that could damage small businesses.
By Tim Wilson
Contributor

The pond will get back to freedum boy (sorry, there's no 'b' in dum) as soon as it's rich enough to have a trust to worry about.

That seemed to be some sort of reptile way of balancing the "news" that the beefy boofhead was in a feud with Josh ...

Taylor dismisses Frydenberg’s call for reform of GST
Angus Taylor rebuffs Josh Frydenberg on GST as MPs query Liberal leader’s economic metal
The debate within the Coalition has prompted Labor claim there is a growing black hole in Angus Taylor’s agenda, with government analysis projecting his migration clampdown would leave the budget $62 billion worse-off over four years.
By Greg Brown

Oh dear, the reptiles love to position themselves at the centre of the black hole...

...Angus Taylor has ruled out backing an increase to the GST, in a move that sharpens the divide between himself and potential future Liberal leadership candidate Josh Frydenberg, as economists and some MPs raise concerns it signifies a lack of political will to embrace bold reform.
The economic debate within the Coalition has prompted Labor to claim there is a growing black hole in Mr Taylor’s agenda, with government analysis projecting his migration clampdown would leave the budget $62bn worse off over four years.
Anthony Albanese’s economic approach will also come under fire in parliament this week as the Coalition ramps up its attack over the cost-of-living crisis, while proposing legislation to permanently stop the ATO from banning businesses paying tax bills via credit card.
Labor argues the Coalition’s ATO plan would cost the budget $200m a year but Mr Taylor on Sunday said the agency should be able to absorb the costs within its budget.
After The Australian revealed over the weekend that Mr Frydenberg was pushing for GST reform in a new book as he considers whether to make a political comeback, Mr Taylor said he did not support lifting the consumption tax.
Coalition MPs were privately split over whether Mr Taylor should keep GST reform on the table as part of a suite of measures to differentiate their policy platform at the next election from One Nation’s and Labor’s.
Economists warned it would hamper the ability of the opposition to formulate an agenda that could bolster productivity.
Several Liberal MPs told The Australian they were disappointed Mr Taylor ruled out the proposal so soon after it was floated by Mr Frydenberg, arguing it could be an electoral winner if it was accompanied by big cuts to income tax and the company tax rate.
Rebel Liberal senator Andrew McLachlan went public with his concerns, arguing Mr Frydenberg’s economic proposals should be taken seriously.
“Josh is our most experienced Liberal in Treasury matters. We should listen very carefully to his prescriptions to re-energise our economy,” he said.
“Policy development in opposition has to be more than just saying what you are not going to do in government. Our citizens need to also know how our ideas will improve their lives.”
But while several Coalition MPs want Mr Taylor to consider GST reform, others were scathing of the proposal and argued it was politically immature to believe the argument could be prosecuted from opposition.
“Talk about tax and spend, maybe Josh should talk to the Labor Party about being their leader,” one conservative MP said.

Speaking of black holes there was also this from simplistic Simon ...

$500bn of household wealth disappears in Labor budget abyss
Australian households have lost an estimated $70,000 each on average since the May budget, as falling property value and inflation combine to destroy national wealth.
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

Just as well the pond has saved its shekels by not subscribing to a Murdochian service ...

In this survey of the lizard Oz headlines, notable omissions or downgradings concerned the mango Mussolini's ongoing betrayal of Ukraine, and the Unites States turning into Afghan central with a proposed live stream of a public execution.

Luckily Golding and the immortal Rowe took up some of the lizard Oz slack:

And now back to the beefy boofhead and on with cratering Caterism ...

Even a casual observer would have noted that his recent immigration policy announcements found themselves on a sticky wicket while dealing with a sandpapered six stitcher (South African joke).

There was this in the Nine rags ...

‘We are talking billions’: Burke demands costings on Coalition deportation plan

Lurking behind it all was a matter which required the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way to protest too much ...

Taylor rejected the One Nation proposal to bar migrants from “risky” nations or regions, saying: “I’ve always said that we would discriminate not based on the country someone comes from, or their race, or their religion, but based on the person, and whether that person is a suitable person to be a resident or citizen of this country. That’s what we should focus on, and we should judge people on their character and conduct, not the colour of their skin.”

Garn, don't come the raw bigoted prawn.

And there was this in the Graudian ...

Coalition MPs concede immigration pledge not fully costed by independent watchdog

All that was by way of preliminary reading for a serve by a Pom import, the flood waters in quarries whisperer himself ...

The header: By Nick Cater
ALP migrant policy the opposite of compassion

The plea to listen to a bot: Listen to this article

7 min

The snap suggesting furriners might not be so bad: Workers on the Snowy Mountain Scheme in 1956; the post-WWII government paid more attention to the challenge of resettling refugees

A plea for the mighty G: Make us preferred on Google

The pond isn't quite sure why the Caterist decided to diss compassion when it comes to migrants.

The pond can't think of any other reason why a drop kick sociology student loser was allowed into the country ... unless we needed someone to sound completely clueless about the movement of flood waters in quarries.

As always, this sort of black sheep is always alert to any attempt to stray from little England:

While Labor’s broken promises may be testing voters’ loyalty, the Albanese government remains steadfast in its commitment to asylum-seekers.
In August 2023, then immigration minister Andrew Giles increased the annual quota of humanitarian visas from the long-term average of 13,500 to 20,000 a year. Six months earlier, Labor laid a path for boat arrivals under the Rudd and Gillard governments to migrate from short-term protection visas to permanent residency. By the end of July, 26,334 euphemistically named Resolution of Status visas had been approved.
Labor’s measures have led to an influx of refugees on a scale unmatched since the wave of post-war refugees from Europe in the late 1940s. The Albanese government granted residency to more than 100,000 asylum-seekers in its first four years.
It is a policy “anchored in compassion”, Giles told the Refugee Communities Association in a sentimental 2023 speech. As so often, however, good intentions alone have proved a treacherous foundation for public policy. The romantic image of the tempest-tossed huddled masses yearning to breathe free, crystallised in Emma Lazarus’s poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, lives on among today’s progressives, modified only slightly by the newly minted virtues of diversity and cultural relativism.

Remind the pond of why the Caterist was allowed in? Can't have much to do with the virtues of diversity, and as for cultural relativism, how relative is the bigotry and prejudices of little England?

The reptiles reminded the hive mind of the latest Caterist victim ...Then minister for immigration Andrew Giles at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond got the next bit garbled, because one minute the Caterist was blathering about Josh Frydenberg's parents escaping the Holocaust, and the next minute he was dismissing progressive thinkers ...reluctant to test their cosmic vision against the cold, hard data of the world as it actually is.

Say what? Is Josh some kind of progressive thinker? Who knows ...

In Australia, the idealised image of the refugee is shaped by the many inspiring stories of post-war arrivals. Josh Frydenberg’s account of his parents’ escape from the Holocaust in his newly published book is a timely reminder of the great contribution made to Australia by Jewish migrants in particular.
As is their habit, however, progressive thinkers are reluctant to test their cosmic vision against the cold, hard data of the world as it actually is.
The cherished conception of the noble refugee is easier to maintain if you’re a ratepayer in Woollahra (home to 73 recent humanitarian arrivals) than in Fairfield in western Sydney (18,502 recent humanitarian arrivals). The heavy concentration of migrants in low-socio-economic neighbourhoods, mainly in Sydney and Melbourne, makes them all but invisible elsewhere.
Yet Giles’s electorate of Scullin straddles Hume and Whittlesea, two of a dozen local government areas where more than half of the humanitarian arrivals over the past 10 years now live.
It cannot have escaped his notice that humanitarian-category migrants have become the backbone of a new Australian underclass, trapped in grim suburbs, living in overcrowded, rented housing, on incomes well below average, heavily dependent on welfare, and isolated from their neighbours by their poor or non-existent grasp of English.
When Labor decided to raise the refugee quota by 6500 a year, did anyone in the room canvass the long-term consequences, which could be reasonably accurately predicted from the published data?
Did anyone put up a slide showing that 14,000 more people would claim unemployment benefits in five years if the government persisted with the change?
Or that in 10 years, more than 23,000 more Australians would be living in overcrowded conditions, and 900 would be living in acutely overcrowded accommodation?
That will be the result of Labor’s virtuously conceived policy if future humanitarian arrivals follow the pattern of those who arrived in the past 10 years, a grim future set out in the Australian Bureau of Statistics Migrant Settlement Outcomes report, published last month.
It reports that almost half of refugee migrants still rely on welfare benefits five years after arriving. Six out of 10 will be living in the poorest suburbs, and 44 per cent will not be proficient in English. Humanitarian migrants are twice as likely to be diagnosed with a mental health condition, including depression and anxiety, a proportion that grows the longer they live here.

Is that any better than an indigent Pom relying on Murdochian and think tank largesse, and some kind benefactor who might help out when a large defamation liability looms on the horizon.

Life improves on most measures over time. Yet refugees who have lived here for a decade or longer are half as likely to be in the workforce as other migrants. They have lower median incomes ($51,000, compared to $78,000 for all migrants) and are substantially less likely to own or be buying their own home.
Behind these statistics lie thousands of human stories of suffering, poverty and endurance that illustrate the tension between selecting migrants who deserve our sympathy and those we can actually help.
From any perspective, our humanitarian migration program is failing. From the standpoint of a progressive, moved by the Prime Minister’s commitment that no one should be left behind, the plight of tens of thousands of refugees caught in a spiral of poverty from which they cannot easily escape is an indictment, made worse by the seeming reluctance to talk about it.
For a Menzian liberal, committed to the God-given principle that every human deserves equal respect and that everyone who comes to this country should be given the chance to thrive, the current state of affairs is intolerable.
From a dry economics standpoint, the billions of dollars spent to administer the humanitarian program, and the fiscal impact of a cohort that draws more in government benefits than it pays in taxes over a lifetime, offer a poor return on investment.
If we intend to reduce human misery worldwide, a $17,000 grant to a school in a Jordanian refugee camp will offer better value for money than a year’s worth of Jobseeker payments.
Clearly, we need to pay more attention to the resettlement challenge.
The wave of so-called displaced persons after WWII spent weeks attending classes in migrant camps, learning English and other essential skills. Many were earmarked for jobs on the Snowy Mountains Scheme and were obliged to stay in employment for at least two years.
Today they receive advice on Centrelink payments, are offered non-compulsory English classes at local TAFEs, then essentially left to fend for themselves.
Yet, for the country’s benefit, the government must substantially reduce the humanitarian quota.

Then came the beefy boofhead ... Coalition leader Angus Taylor plans to halve the humanitarian refugee intake to 10,000 a year Picture: Nathan Smith

And at this point, the pond should note the cruel calculations already at work, and shown up by the treatment of Afghani refugees ...

There's this on YouTube from SBS ... A former Afghan prosecutor has declared the federal government has a moral obligation to bring to safety local Afghans who assisted Australia and who are now living in hiding under Taliban rule.

And this in the Graudian ... ‘You called us brothers’: Afghans who fought with Australian troops still live in fear of Taliban

Almost a year after their country was left by foreign forces to the Taliban, Afghan soldiers who fought alongside Australian troops say they live in constant terror, and have been abandoned by the countries they served.
“We fought on the same battlefield together, against the same enemy. You called us brothers,” one former soldier told the Guardian from hiding. “But now you leave us in this hell. Our lives are hell and we are left alone. We trusted each other; we never thought this would happen.”
The Guardian has spoken to a number of former soldiers who are being hunted by the Taliban, and to Australian volunteers who are trying to get them to safety.
One former commando, Abbas – a pseudonym to protect him and his family – spent 11 years fighting alongside international forces, including Australian troops in Uruzgan province.
‘We fought on the same battlefield together, against the same enemy’: Afghans and Australians during a security operation in Kandahar province. Photograph: Department of Defence/AAP
He said the joint forces depended upon one another for their lives.
“We ate together with them, slept under the same roof and trained together ... If one of us would be killed, we would sympathise with each other like brothers, and Nato forces would always call us brothers.
“And these forces now leave us like this, alone ... They leave us with our hands tied, in front of the same enemies that we fought against for years.”
Abbas stresses he does not blame the soldiers with whom he fought, but the governments that ordered their troops out so rapidly, without proper consideration for those who fought alongside them.
“I think those countries that said they were strengthening democracy in Afghanistan and talking about peace were lying. They told us ‘we will never leave you alone’. They were here for 20 years, and now they have forgotten us. Every day we despair. We have no food to eat, and we know they, the Taliban, are coming for us.”

It was a great betrayal, with many Afghani women also hung out to dry, and yet somehow we found room for the likes of the Caterist blathering on about the need for a lack of compassion.

Fair dinkum...

The Coalition’s plan to halve the humanitarian intake to 10,000 would ease pressure on scarce resources such as housing, while raising the per-capita economic contribution of Australia’s migration program as a whole.
In the short term, that may mean committing more resources to the selection process, ending the heavy reliance on the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, whose priorities diverge from the national interest. Far from being hard-hearted, as Angus Taylor’s critics on the left will no doubt claim, the Coalition’s policy will begin to restore the high ideals on which Australian migration was founded.
While other countries are content to provide sanctuary, Australia offers the chance of a new life, not just the right to live in this country, but the chance to share in the Australian dream of building a better life for oneself and family.
Today’s huddled masses deserve nothing less than those we welcomed 80 years ago.

Speaking of huddled masses ...

And so to a broken clock getting it right twice a day ...

Cue another immortal Rowe portrait of the mad king:

Blood and oil is a nice variation on Sturm und Drang as the price of treachery ...

And now, speaking of cultists in the grip of a truly weird cult, this ...

In which Polonial prattle and Ughmann science stir the lizard Oz hive mind ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 21:00:00 +0000

The pond would have liked to have spent time with the mad man child, well into his second childhood, and his enormous sulk about not getting that peace prize, as if his war mongering, boastful ways should have been rewarded.

His Mussolini style preening - Greenland! - surely put its it out of his reach for the rest of his reign, but not out reach of his never-ending delusions, with the latest his epic betrayal of Ukraine to Vlad the sociopath, all for a little diesel to fill up the gap created by the mango monster himself, all in a desperate bid to avoid a midterm blow out. If a president ever needed to go at once, right now, it isn't Zelensky.

Or perhaps the pond could have brooded about little Marco - 2028 pretender - and his shameful assault on the ICC, pandering to his senile master, or have spent its Sunday time wishing the cockroaches every success in their battles with the notoriously corrupt Modi regime.

But life isn't easy for herpetology students, and instead the pond got lumbered with its usual Sunday duty, wasting valuable time and space dealing with Polonius and his prattle, as he goes even more Zionist each week (almost an essential qualification these days for contributors to the Australian Daily Zionist News).

The header: By Gerard Henderson
Louise Adler’s free speech double standard exposed

Call of the bot wild: Listen to this article
7 min

The caption for the uncredited collage forcing another victim into a lizard Oz jihad: Former Adelaide Writers Week director Louise Adler says the Bondi massacre had no impact on antisemitism ‘other than the shocking and tragic loss of the lives of 15 individuals’. Pictures: News Corp/Supplied

The begging for the mighty G: Make us preferred on Google

Correspondents will by now know the pond's drill as soon as this topic hovers into view.

Rather than pay attention to Polonius, this week shouting in an addled way at Adler, the pond likes to provide some alternative reading.

This might be as simple a strategy as referencing Steve Bloomfield's outing in the Graudian, In three years, Israel’s war on Gaza hasn’t just changed the Middle East, it’s changed the world

...The before-and-after pictures tell part of the story. An update to Google Maps, released last week, underscores just what three years of relentless Israeli military onslaught has done to Gaza. Satellite images show how entire towns have been reduced to rubble. Mosques and hospitals, visible three years ago, have now disappeared. Meanwhile the once-empty shoreline is now crammed with tents. This is what it looks like when an attempt has been made to destroy a people.

But the pond is deeply perverse.

Only an excerpt from an interesting story to match every Polonial visual distraction would suffice.

This story in Haaretz caught the pond's eye as a way of coping:

Israeli Settlers, IDF Soldiers Prevent Palestinian Olive Harvest Across West Bank
The Israeli military also arrested nine Palestinians in Hebron, including the director of the Tomb of the Patriarchs' Ibrahimi Mosque, the Palestine News Agency reported (*intermittent archive link).

Here's a starter gobbet:

That'll serve the purpose.

Now, having shown how to provide a little balance, it's time for a case study in Polonial denial, and let the Polonial photos and matching excerpts begin.:

For a case study in denial, look no further than Louise Adler’s submission to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. The content of this public document was revealed by James Dowling on these pages last Wednesday. It is one of some 20,000 such documents.
It is widely known the Melbourne-based Adler is a Jewish critic of Israel. Not just the nation under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but of the very existence of the Jewish state, which was created by the United Nations in 1948.
Adler is by no means the only anti-Zionist among Jewish Australians. So is Antony Loewenstein, who was sympathetically profiled by the ABC Compass program in May 2024. Adler received a remarkably soft interview from ABC TV 7.30 reporter Laura Tingle on December 4, 2023, in which she claimed to have been silenced. Loewenstein is mentioned with approval in Adler’s royal commission submission.

The reptiles produced a snap of the man who aroused Polonial ire: Journalist, writer and blogger Antony Loewenstein.

The pond turned back to Haaretz for more details of matters the reptiles routinely ignore or deny:

Does any of this have any effect on Polonius? Of course not:

The essential message of Adler’s document is to accuse fellow members of the Australian Jewish community of attempting to quash dissenting views. This allegation will be covered later. I had expected this before reading Adler’s submission. My initial response was to be shocked by her exaggerated comments.
Early on, Adler criticises South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas for decisions he supported concerning the 2026 Adelaide Writers Week, of which she was director before resigning the position. Malinauskas is quoted as having said, with respect to this decision, that “Bondi changed everything”. The reference is to the terrorist attack at Bondi Beach on December 14 last year in which 15 people were killed (including 13 Jews) and numerous individuals injured.
In her submission, Adler wrote: “Antisemitism, like all forms of racism, has long been a scourge in Australia and Bondi changed nothing, other than the shocking and tragic loss of the lives of 15 individuals.”
This is absolute tosh. Sure, during much of the previous century, Jewish Australians were excluded from gentlemen’s clubs in Australian capital cities and the like. But such antisemitism bears no relationship to the Bondi massacre.
Moreover, in the early 20th century, Australian politicians appointed General John Monash as head of the First Australian Imperial Force. Not long after, Sir Isaac Isaacs was made the first Australian governor-general. This is not the behaviour of a racist nation that allegedly discriminates against Jewish citizens.

In the usual way, Polonius spends his time adjudicating ancient matters, involving parochial dropkicks of the great Adelaide aunt on the verandah kind ... Dr Abdel-Fattah accused SA Premier Peter Malinauskas of using he (sic, so and thus) Bondi attack as an excuse to intervene in the Adelaide Writers’ Festival. Picture: Emma Brasier

That meant there could be only one response. A desperate desire to rub Polonial and Malinauskas mushes in it:

Anybody who cares about such matters is automatically on the lizard Oz jihad hit list:

Adler was a publisher at Melbourne University Publishing, Monash University Publishing and Hachette Australia. She became director of the AWW in 2023. As I have documented in these pages over the years, literary/writers festivals are invariably occasions where literary types get control of a bag of taxpayers’ money and use it to invite their leftist comrades to address overwhelmingly leftist audiences. In short, these functions lack viewpoint diversity.
So it was with Adler’s AWW over the years. In 2023, for example, Adler invited seven Palestinians to talk at the AWW but not one Israeli. It was much the same the following year when Caroline Overington commented in these pages that all speakers on the Middle East were critics of Israel.
It was the same in 2025 when the AWW was, once again, a leftist stack virtually bereft of politically conservative voices. Then, in 2026, a controversy broke out when Adler invited political activist/writer Randa Abdel-Fattah to address the AWW. She is a fierce critic of Israel and had once posted on social media, “If you are a Zionist you have no claim or right to cultural safety”.
At a time of widespread antisemitism in Australia, including violence, this was, at the very least, an unprofessional act. It led to the decision of the AWW board to withdraw her invitation, a decision that was revoked by a replacement board. And so it came to pass that Abdel-Fattah will be a guest at the AWW next year. But Adler resigned in protest at the original decision.

This dusting off of ancient feuds is a typical reptile strategy ...Louise Adler appearing on 7.30 following her resignation from Adelaide Writers' Week. Picture: ABC

It helps the reptiles to avoid the here and now, the slow progress of ethnic cleansing in action...

The pond could have reverted to other texts, especially when Polonius blathers about freedumb for Arabs ...but anyone can read the wiki ...

...Many Arab citizens feel that the state, as well as society at large, not only actively limits them to second-class citizenship, but treats them as enemies, affecting their perception of the de jure versus de facto quality of their citizenship. The joint document The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, asserts: "Defining the Israeli State as a Jewish State and exploiting democracy in the service of its Jewishness excludes us, and creates tension between us and the nature and essence of the State." The document explains that by definition the "Jewish State" concept is based on ethnically preferential treatment towards Jews enshrined in immigration (the Law of Return) and land policy (the Jewish National Fund), and calls for the establishment of minority rights protections enforced by an independent anti-discrimination commission.

A 2004 report by Mossawa, an advocacy center for Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel, states that since the events of October 2000, 16 Arabs had been killed by security forces, bringing the total to 29 victims of "institutional violence" in four years. Ahmed Sa'adi, in his article on The Concept of Protest and its Representation by the Or Commission, states that since 1948 the only protestors to be killed by the police have been Arabs.

Yousef Munayyer, an Israeli citizen and the executive director of The Jerusalem Fund, wrote that Palestinians only have varying degrees of limited rights in Israel. He states that although Palestinians make up about 20% of Israel's population, less than 7% of the budget is allocated to Palestinian citizens. He describes the 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel as second-class citizens while four million more are not citizens at all. He states that a Jew from any country can move to Israel but a Palestinian refugee, with a valid claim to property in Israel, cannot.

Or how about another wiki?

...Since 2011, Israeli nationalists have made anti-Palestinian chants such as "death to Arabs" (Israeli Hebrew: מָוֶת לָעֲרָבִים, romanized: Mávet la'Aravím) in parades on Jerusalem Day. Other chants include "May Your Village Burn," "Muhammad is dead,""a Jew is a soul, an Arab is a son of a whore," "burn Shu'afat" or "Shu'afat is on fire" in reference to the Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem where a Palestinian boy was kidnapped and set on fire, as well as the Hebrew curse with Biblical origins for enemies of the Jewish people "may their name be erased." According to Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, the Jerusalem Day parade is a "spatialized enactment of power," and in 2015, "over 30,000 young religious and nationalist Israeli Jews rampaged throughout the Old City of OEJ chanting 'Death to Arabs', 'Muhammad is Dead' and other racist slogans, restructuring the sensory experiences of Palestinians in the space.

It might be different if that was just the odd bigot doing the rounds, but those attitudes infest the highest levels of the government of Israel.

Water off a duck's back to Polonius ...

In her royal commission submission, Adler accused what she termed the “Australian Jewish community’s leadership” of being unequivocal in its support for Israel, and maintaining that it “works tirelessly to stifle criticism” of the Jewish state (in which some 20 per cent of Arabs live in freedom).
This suggests that Adler lacks self-awareness. She seems blissfully unaware that her taxpayer-funded AWWs are all but devoid of supporters of Israel.
For example, Adler personally declined an offer by Michael Gawenda, of left-wing background and a one-time editor of The Age, to appear at the AWW. Gawenda is the author of My Life as a Jew (Scribe 2023) and a one-time friend of Adler. Adler identifies as a pluralist who supports debate and discussion, but who does not practise what she preaches.
On January 14, The Australian Financial Review reported that businessman Tony Berg, who resigned from the Adelaide Festival board that presides over the AWW, had accused Adler of “hypocrisy in defending free speech”. Berg revealed that Adler, along with Abdel-Fattah and others, had called for New York Times journalist Tom Friedman to be disinvited from the 2024 AWW.

At this point the reptiles decided to feature a photo of a drop kick, embedded in the text ...Tony Berg was on the Adelaide Festival Board.

The pond thought this was the best way to illustrate it ...

One gobbet deserves another ....

And that left just a few Polonial last words ...

Adler’s royal commission submission warrants being classified as fiction. It is Jewish Australian creatives who are being cancelled and doxxed by the combined forces of the radical left and radical Islamists as documented by Danny Ben-Moshe in his recent film, Cancelled. Adler is in denial about this reality.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

The pond can think of another movie that's been cancelled in the lizard Oz, with Polonius in denial about its reality:

Troubling documentary ‘NAZA’ details Israel’s AI-assisted airstrikes in Gaza

...Wherever you fall regarding the continued destruction of Gaza, what the filmmakers of “NAZA” make disturbingly clear is that the simplest machinery to spread dehumanization and death is happening now, easing its users into acceptance and rewriting everything about the moral cost of conflict. It’s stone-cold frightening.

But not to the stone-cold devotees in the lizard Oz of the ethnic cleansing killing fields.

How about another story to offer a little more balance, also from Haaretz ...

Thousands Are Held in Israeli Torture Camps. This Is What Happens Inside (*intermittent archive link)

The pond frequently yammers on about the lizard Oz hive mind, but rarely provides evidence of the condition.

Take a squiz at this and you'll get the idea. The hive mind is an ugly, pulsating reality ...

Worse than an episode of the X-Files, or perhaps they're all pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so united are they in their conformity.

Here, have a break with another cult ...

What to do for a bonus?

One thing's certain.

After all that Polonial kerfuffle, there was no room at the pond inn for grating Gemma...

October 7 taught me that evil has a name
What October 7 taught me about silence and evil
Australia is facing a crisis of courage. Nothing has changed, and I fear we will simply forget.
By Gemma Tognini
Columnist

Instead the pond took the easy way out ... a serve of climate science denialism from the unreformed seminarian known as the Ughmann ...

The header: Beijing prioritises grid reliability with coal while Australia races towards risky 2030 targets
Chris Uhlmann

The call of the bot: Listen to this article
12 min

The cause of all the problems? Deluded folk who think the sun has some kind of free energy on offer: Which country’s energy policy do you prefer? One based on economics and physics or one based on targets and ideology? Picture: Getty Images

A call for punters to be trapped in the paywall by Murdochian spiders: Make us preferred on Google

Always with the projection.

As soon as the Ughmann talked of climate science and possible solutions to the climate crisis as "ideology", the pond was immediately plunged back into the world of the unreformed seminarian's approach to science.

There's really no need to carry on at length. The sub-text of any Ughmann outing is that we should never have abandoned dinkum, sweet, virginal, clean Oz coal, and the sooner we get back to using same, the better off we, and the world, will be, because what climate science?

In Ughmann argot, talk of climate science is to enter a cult, a theology full of "greenwishers" ...

In the eyes of the world’s greenwishers, China is the energy transition poster child. This much is true: Beijing has spent more money, built more wind turbines, erected more solar panels and manufactured more batteries than any nation on earth. As at the end of last year, China had almost half of the world’s installed wind and solar fleet.

Curiously the reptiles decided to insert an AV distraction which offered a Xi vision ...

Next video thumbnail
Xi: China to cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 10% by 2035
Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday (September 24) told the United Nations that by 2035, his country plans to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 7%-10% below its peak emissions, and called out "some countries" for moving against the global clean energy transition.

The Ughmann would have none of it ... forget all that talk of renewables, coal and gas are the way to go. What could possibly go wrong?

But China also has more than half of the world’s coal-fired generating capacity, and it is growing. In 2025, China accounted for 80 per cent of all new coal power commissioned globally. In that single year, China brought online almost four times as much coal-fired generating power as Australia has in its eastern grid.
Not surprising then that China produces almost a third of the world’s carbon emissions. China also produces almost one third of the world’s hydro-electricity, has 64 nuclear reactors and another 39 under construction. China does China. It builds more of everything than everybody.
But given the Middle Kingdom’s dominance of wind, solar and battery deployment, it is worth paying close attention to how its world-leading energy planners rate the value of that generation on their grids and how they see it evolving.
We know what they think because, in July, Beijing released the detailed renewable-energy plan that sits under its latest Five-Year Plan, and it contains a remarkable set of numbers.
Here is the one that makes headlines in places like Australia: by 2030, Beijing plans to have more than 2800 gigawatts of wind and solar installed. That is roughly 38 times the combined generating power of our National Electricity Market. So, big. And worthy of a headline. But there is a much deeper story.

And yet each interrupting reptile snap hinted at an alternative universe ... Clockwise from top: Solar photovoltaic panels at a wind solar heat storage project in Golmud City; water is released from the Three Gorges Dam; a wind farm in Xinjiang; Shichengzi photovoltaic industrial park in Hami. Picture montage: News Corp

The rabid ranting about renewables continued apace ...

While wind and solar will account for half of China’s electricity generation capacity by the end of the decade, Chinese planners make it abundantly clear that they distinguish between big nameplate numbers and the production of actual energy. Nameplate capacity is an ideal: the maximum power a wind or solar farm could produce under perfect conditions. Generation is reality: the amount of energy delivered over time.
So, despite wind and solar accounting for more than half of installed capacity by 2030, China’s planners anticipate they will produce only about 30 per cent of the country’s electricity.
But averages are deceiving: they conceal the feast and famine of weather-dependent generation. What about the times when demand peaks and reliable electricity is desperately needed? What value do you place on wind and solar to deliver on that third cold, cloudy, still day when the batteries have run flat and your system is running flat out?
China’s planners have put a number on how much wind and solar power they believe they can actually rely on when the electricity system is under stress. They call it “confidence output” and they set the bar high: a measure of average available energy across 95 per cent of periods of peak demand.
Their answer is a risible 8 per cent.
Put bluntly, for every 100GW of wind and solar capacity, China’s planners reckon they can confidently rely on just 8GW at critical times. And that calculation includes wind and solar farms with on-site battery storage.

What would the Ughmann embrace?

At last the reptiles provided a visual answer, a rough equivalent go Gollum's precious ... The coal-powered Datang International Zhangjiakou Power Station. China has more than half of the world’s coal-fired generating capacity, and it is growing. Picture: AFP

Forget all that talk of climate science. Relish the power of coal and gas ...

Batteries do improve system security but they are not equivalent to reliable generators. Professor Alex Coram has looked at the mathematics of security in electricity systems and the way in which increasing amounts of weather-dependent generation cause the risk of failure to accumulate over time. His equations show the fundamental misconception in believing storage and continuous generation are interchangeable. A battery is a bucket. It pours until it runs dry. Continuous generation is a tap. It keeps pouring. The more stress there is on the system, the more critical that difference becomes. As Coram notes: “You can’t buffer your way out of ruin.”
China’s planners clearly understand this. They boast about the enormous amount of wind, solar and batteries they are building, but when it comes to keeping the lights on, quality trumps quantity.
Beijing has now put a price on that distinction. In January, China introduced reforms to reward generators for the power they can reliably supply when demand peaks. Coal and gas are being paid for their dependable generating capacity, while batteries are valued according to how long they can keep delivering. The message to the gatherers of sunshine and wind is unmistakeable: not all gigawatts are created equal.
Close observers of China’s wind and solar build-out have noticed something else. Beneath the bewilderingly large numbers, the breakneck pace of renewable expansion has begun to slow. China added roughly 1300GW of renewable capacity during its 14th Five-Year Plan. Its target for the 15th is about 960GW.
Reuters reported in July that China’s new solar installations had fallen 66 per cent in the first half of 2026 compared with a year earlier. Wind installations also fell, by almost 25 per cent. Together, China installed roughly 56 per cent less new wind and solar capacity than over that same time in 2025. Part of that dramatic slowdown reflected a rush to commission projects before Beijing’s new market-based electricity pricing regime took effect last year.

In that context, this snap illustrates a notion terrifying to the Ughmann and the reptile kind ... This solar farm in China’s central Anhui province was the world's largest floating solar power plant in 2017. It has since been overtaken by multiple projects in China.

More saucy doubts and fears tumbled out into the hive mind ether ...

That move was also telling. Previously, wind and solar generators were largely protected by guaranteed prices. Now they must sell their electricity into the market, although Beijing still provides a financial safety net. It was a recognition of the fact that electricity is worth less when everybody produces it at once and considerably more when you actually need it.
In June, China’s State Council Information Office described a “major shift” in its energy transition strategy, with the focus moving “from expanding new energy capacity to building an energy system capable of integrating it”.
That is a revealing change of emphasis. China has spent years building wind and solar at a scale no other nation can approach. Now its planners are increasingly concerned with what happens after all that capacity is connected to the grid: how much electricity it actually produces, how much the grid can absorb, what it does to prices and system security, and how much power can be counted on when the system is under stress.
Or, in the words of the energy analysts at Doomberg: “At what point does the forced introduction of intermittent wind and solar power on to an existing grid begin to break things?
“A simple but highly effective rule of thumb is to inspect the proportion of highly dispatchable power capacity contributed to that grid by natural gas and impoundment hydro-electricity. Once intermittency swamps dispatchability, the pain can become overwhelming.”

Valiant dissidents fell into line behind the Ughmann ...

Next video thumbnail
Farmers fined thousands as Labor sizes up their land for renewables
Furious farmers in Western Victoria say they won't give in to Labor's plan to build transmission lines across their prime agricultural land.

Forget all that talk of a climate crisis. You can't expect an unreformed seminarian to give two hoots for surfers ...

Climate crisis is coming to crush many of world’s best surf breaks, study warns

Changing tide levels, shifting sands and hardened shorelines put waves at risk, affecting more than just surfers

...The study, published in the journal Climatic Change, concludes: “Climate change and coastal management both have significant negative implications for the future viability of multiple surf breaks of global significance and, therefore, the myriad distinct local communities, cultures and economies they support.”

Almost 200 local experts analysed 57 surf breaks in all but two of the 13 WSRs, spread across eight countries. The researchers said thousands of other surf waves around the world faced similar peril.

Oh noes, not the chance to get eaten by a shark.

It was all a bad break off grommet Ughmann's board, a closeout, a dump requiring a return to coal and gas, because what could go wrong?

Pass that point and the grid becomes more fragile as the economics get rapidly uglier. Models show that the more weather-dependent generation is added to the grid, the faster the costs of supporting it rise. The cheap gigawatts come first. Then each new addition demands disproportionately more storage, transmission, back-up and other system support, while increasingly cannibalising the value of generation already in the system. The next 10 per cent is not the same proposition as the first 10 per cent.
China’s planners are now explicitly grappling with all these problems and, believe it or not, once upon a time, Australian energy planners were doing some of the same work. Before the 2022 election, the Energy Security Board was developing a capacity mechanism. The idea was pretty straightforward: in a system becoming more dependent on unpredictable power, Australia’s eastern grid needed to develop a market to put a value on predictable power.
The board proposed assessing generators according to how much power they could actually be relied upon to provide when the system was under stress. It determined that a megawatt of wind or solar should not be treated as equivalent to a megawatt of coal, gas or hydro. The technical term is de-rating.
The board concluded that wind and solar might make only a “minimal contribution” to the dependable capacity needed to keep the system running. So the planned market would reward generators for their ability to keep the lights on.
And what became of that expert advice? It was junked because the lion’s share of what could sensibly be supported was coal and gas generation.

The reptiles produced collage designed to terrify the hive mind ... After the 2022 election, the government began underwriting more wind, solar and batteries, instead of paying for dependable power.

That sent the Ughmann into an even greater frenzy of denialism ...

Showcasing their superpower of combining marketing genius with staggering energy illiteracy the greenwishers branded the capacity mechanism “coalkeeper”.
When Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen assumed his role at the head of the table of the nation’s energy ministers, a capacity market was abandoned and its zombie child the Capacity Investment Scheme emerged. Instead of paying for dependable power, the government began underwriting more wind, solar and batteries.
The minister now boasts this scheme will deliver 40GW of new capacity by 2030 – 26GW of wind and solar and 14GW of “clean dispatchable capacity”, principally batteries. Apply China’s 8 per cent reliability benchmark to the wind and solar, assume four-hour batteries and a prolonged generation drought, and that advertised 40GW shrinks to something in the order of 4GW of dependable power.
In an exercise of magical thinking, Australia built the world’s only capacity mechanism with next to no capacity in it.
Our experts are aware of the fragility of the system under construction. Buried in the blizzard of technical data accompanying the Australian Energy Market Operator’s 2026 Integrated System Plan is a spreadsheet estimating their contribution to reliable supply at times of peak demand. In some cases, it rates that contribution at less than 10 per cent of installed capacity.
All the evidence a sensible government needs to urge caution when putting almost all your chips on weather-dependent generation is available. So Australia is not sleepwalking into a catastrophe, we are striding there with our eyes wide shut.

The reptiles offered a final AV distraction ...

Next video thumbnail
Australia stands alone on energy policy as Bowen calls coal an ‘unreliable asset’
News24 host Jaimee Rogers rips into Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen's renewable energy transition. “You keep saying the renewable transition will deliver cheaper power, but bills continue to go up,” Ms Rogers said. “You say coal is now an ‘unreliable asset’, so why did coal still provide more than half the electricity generated in parts of the country last year? “Perhaps Australia isn't leading the world on energy policy as you claim, and instead is increasingly standing alone.”

Now ask yourself this chilling question. If the planet follows the Ughmann's thinking, what then? Will climate science and the observable effects of climate. change just go away?

For that you need the magical thinking of an unreformed seminarian?

Consider the tale of two administrations. Canberra wants 82 per cent of our electricity to come from renewables by 2030. The mix is mostly wind and solar generation with some hydro. Beijing has no intention of attempting that. It expects wind and solar to generate 30 per cent of China’s electricity by then, with hydro, nuclear and other sources providing another 20 per cent. Coal and gas will still supply roughly half. While Australia races to shut down its coal-fired power stations, China is building more of them.
Now ask yourself this chilling question. Who do you trust? The central planners of the Chinese Communist Party or Australia’s energy ministers? Which country’s energy policy do you prefer? One based on economics and physics or one based on targets and ideology?
Goodhart’s Law warns that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Australia is in the process of discovering that meeting an electricity generation target is not the same thing as building a functioning electricity system.
Given that there is no prospect of the Albanese government admitting error and making a course correction, this is going to be a long, painful and expensive journey. But, eventually, it only ends one way. To borrow again from Doomberg, in the battle between physics and politics, physics is undefeated.
Maybe there is one thing we can salvage from the rubble. I suggest we set up a de-rating system for politicians based on performance. On this measure, some of our political class would struggle to keep a light bulb burning.

Politicians might struggle to keep a light bulb burning, but that might be a better outcome than a planet set to a dinkum burning by the likes of the Ughmann.

There'll be no more of this kind of claptrap ...

If everybody had an ocean

Across the U.S.A.

Then everybody'd be surfin'

Like Californi-a

You'd seem 'em wearing their baggies

Huarachi sandals too

A bushy bushy blonde hairdo

Surfin' U.S.A.

The pond hesitates to ask, but does anyone want even more evidence of the lizard Oz hive mind at work?

No? A sensible response, but please, consider these examples:

Does the Ughmann get his science from AI?

Which is to say, AI that's been fed on lizard Oz drivel, as bots relentlessly crawl the rag in search of devotion to coal and gas!

These days that ensures the pond's hits rarely drop below 10k a day, an absolutely absurd figure prepared by a bot, counting other bots.

Who knows, but whatever, it ain't helping the climate ...of fear:

And now, as the demented mad king seeks to shift blame, Trump rips Zelensky amid Russia diesel deal feud: ‘I suggest they get a new leader’, here's another chance to discover ways the Murdochians and Faux Noise have managed to stuff the Unites States and the planet ...

In which the bromancer sets the pace for a light WCW 'toon event, with the dog botherer admitting he likes to shout at clouds ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 20:58:26 +0000

The gap between the Unites States and the likes of the Taliban and the mad Mullahs of Iran is rapidly narrowing, what with their mutual disdain of gay and TG people, their shared fear of institutions dedicated to justice, such as the ICC, and their onanistic excitement atthe public display of executions.

Whatever side taken on the question of capital punishment, it's back to the good old days of Newgate prison, sadly abolished for vultures way back in 1868.

Devonshire Terrace,
Tuesday, Thirteenth November, 1849
Sir,
I was a witness of the execution at Horsemonger Lane this morning. I went there with the intention of observing the crowd gathered to behold it, and I had excellent opportunities of doing so, at intervals all through the night, and continuously from daybreak until after the spectacle was over. I do not address you on the subject with any intention of discussing the abstract question of capital punishment, or any of the arguments of its opponents or advocates. I simply wish to turn this dreadful experience to some account for the general good ...
...I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this morning could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun. The horrors of the gibbet and of the crime which brought the wretched murderers to it faded in my mind before the atrocious bearing, looks, and language of the assembled spectators. When I came upon the scene at midnight, the shrillness of the cries and howls that were raised from time to time, denoting that they came from a concourse of boys and girls already assembled in the best places, made my blood run cold. As the night went on, screeching, and laughing, and yelling in strong chorus of parodies on negro melodies, with substitutions of “Mrs. Manning” for “Susannah” and the like, were added to these. When the day dawned, thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians, and vagabonds of every kind, flocked on to the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police, with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment. When the sun rose brightly— as it did— it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the Devil. When the two miserable creatures who attracted all this ghastly sight about them were turned quivering into the air, there was no more emotion, no more pity, no more thought that two immortal souls had gone to judgement, no more restraint in any of the previous obscenities, than if the name of Christ had never been heard in this world, and there were no belief among men but that they perished like the beasts. (in full here)

Welcome to mad King Donald and Pete Kegsbreath's Unites States, Mr Dickens.

And now, as you've splendidly evoked the hive mind, it's on to the lizard Oz this morning...and what do you know, the man with no ticker was top of the page, and all over the bloody shop...

Don't expect the pond to waste time on that dropkick loser and waste of time.

Those masochists in urgent need of a verbal flogging by him and "Ned" must head off to the intermittent archive ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘The public knows our nation is heading in the wrong direction’
Josh Frydenberg says our politicians are missing moral clarity. Will he stand up and mount a political comeback?
By Paul Kelly

"Ned" double dipped on this loon, but the pond stayed firm ...

By Paul Kelly Editor-at-Large
Josh Frydenberg has a blueprint for our nation’s future

If Josh is the future, then it's just the past recycled on an endless treadmill of despair.

Even the lizard Oz editorialist, while indulging in some TG folk bashing, found time to chip in with a fawning piece:

‘Grateful Son’ identifies main economic challenges
The former treasurer, who showed strong leadership after October 7 and Bondi, recognises bigger government is not the answer.
By Editorial

...A Grateful Son will be widely viewed as laying the foundations for a political comeback. That is a matter for both Mr Frydenberg and the voters of Kooyong. Much has changed since his first election in 2010, when more than 80 per cent of Australians backed a major party. That is now under 50 per cent. And the right, especially, is in disarray. But the book is a fascinating insight into recent political history and provides a thoughtful contribution to the current debate about what is needed to turn our country around.

Sheesh, how far up a Josh can a creepy crawly reptile go?

The man himself also made his seemingly statutory appearance:

How Scott Morrison betrayed my trust
I gave the former prime minister my total allegiance in the interests of the country and our party. Then I learned that loyalty for him was a one-way street | EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT
By Josh Frydenberg

What a deeply wretched, pathetic jihad.

Go bleat at the clouds, you whiny, needy loser, as the pond's eyes wandered over to the extreme far right, and discovered the bromancer in residence, and lordy lordy, how pleasingly gloomy he was ...

The header: By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor
Ugly and dysfunctional: Democrats in control of the House and Senate will go to war with Trump

The offer of a bot voice read: Listen to this article
9 min

The caption for the snap of the mad king: How did Donald Trump, and the Republicans, get here? The answer lies in the three Is – Inflation, Iran and Irrational outbursts.

Go the G, whatever the consequences: Make us preferred on Google

Relax, at the end of it all, the bromancer treated the dismantling of the Unites States as an entertainment, a rough equivalent of a wrestling match, with the mad king in the role of the heel, and very few mentions of his and his minions "achievements".

The pond knew that a 'toon approach would be the perfect supplement/complement:

If you think the world is crazy and unstable now, just wait till November 3 and the US midterm congressional elections. Donald Trump’s Republicans will almost certainly lose the House of Representatives, and could well lose the Senate.
American politics will awaken from the genteel slumber of the past two years (maximum irony alert!) – all hell will break loose.
Republicans now have a razor-thin margin in the House, 218 to 214. In the Senate, their majority is better, 53 Republicans to 47 Democrats (including two nominal independents caucusing with Dems).

After that irony alert - irony, the bro thinks he does irony - the reptiles slipped in an AV distraction:

Next video thumbnail
Republicans in ‘desperate shape’ as midterm race heats up
Democratic Strategist Jim Kessler says Republicans are in “desperate shape” in the lead-up to the crucial midterm elections. “They’re trailing in the polls in a lot of races,” Mr Kessler told News24. “The House is certainly going to flip from Republican to Democrat. “12 months ago, we wouldn’t have dreamed the Senate could flip, but I think it's at least a 50/50 chance.”

What a cue for a 'toon ...

What entertainment ...

Two big questions: Will the Republicans lose, and by how much? What will this mean for the US government, and for the world, in the remaining two years of Trump’s presidency?
House and Senate are very different. Almost every president in recent decades whose party controls the House loses it in the midterm elections. Bill Clinton lost the House in 1994’s midterms by a huge margin. George W. Bush, uniquely, won extra seats in 2002’s midterms because of a surge in support after the 9/11 terror attacks. But Bush lost the House in the 2006 midterms.
The next three presidents, Barack Obama, Trump and Joe Biden all lost the House in their first midterm elections.
Only an exceptionally strong president could keep the House in a month’s time. Politically, Trump is not exceptionally strong. He’s a strong individual, for better and worse, but he’s in a weak position politically. The RealClearPolitics poll of polls has his overall approval rating at 38 per cent. CNN’s poll of polls puts him at 34, noted election analyst Nate Silver at 37. Whichever way you slice it, these are dire figures. Some 61 per cent think America is on the wrong track, 32 per cent say it’s going in the right direction.

Sensing the need for movies, the reptiles flung in another AV distraction:

Next video thumbnail
GOP alarmed as Trump approval rating slides
House Republicans are growing increasingly concerned about their prospects in next month's midterm elections as US President Donald Trump's approval rating falls in internal polling.CNN is reporting that some Republicans are considering shifting campaign money away from races they now see as increasingly difficult to win.These include races in states like Iowa, New Jersey and an open seat in Nebraska.House Speaker Mike Johnson remains publicly confident Republicans can retain control of the chamber.

Fun times ...

The bromancer tried to get serious ...

Although Democrats don’t themselves have a high approval rating, they’re 7-10 per cent ahead of Republicans generically. The consensus forecast is the Dems will pick up about 20 seats (more if the swing continues), which will give them the majority. All the momentum continues against Republicans, though they do have a huge money advantage.
The Senate is harder to pick. There are 100 senators and generally one-third are elected every two years for six-year terms. Thirty-five face election this time, including 22 Republicans. It was long thought Republicans would hang on to the Senate. Not any more. Democrats need a net gain of four for control. A 50-50 result leaves Republicans in control, relying on the casting vote of Vice-President, JD Vance (the vice-president is automatically president of the Senate).
There are at least seven Republican Senate seats now seriously at risk of falling to Democrats. These are: North Carolina, Texas and Alaska, in all three of which the Democrats have been consistently ahead, plus Ohio, Maine and Iowa, which are all very close, and Nebraska, where the Republican leads narrowly. The Democrats could lose one of their own, Michigan, where the far-left radical candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, was chosen in the Democratic primaries and is dead even with Republican rival Mike Rogers. Elections always produce surprises; other seats could swing unpredictably.

Dangerous radicals ... Demonstrators during the ‘No Kings’ national day of protest in LA in March. The November 3 vote is shaping up as a verdict on one of the most turbulent presidencies in US history. Picture: Etienne Laurent / AFP

Will somebody bring the mad dog under control?

The bromancer explained it all ...

How did Trump, and the Republicans, get here? The answer lies in the three Is – Inflation, Iran and Irrational outbursts.
The US has a slightly lower inflation rate than Australia – indeed on almost every economic measure except debt, it’s doing much better than we are. But US inflation has risen sharply because of the Iran war. Diesel fuel is well over $US6 per gallon. Inflation eats incumbent governments everywhere. US interest rates have also gone up, with many mortgages now over 7 per cent. One of Trump’s biggest pitches, in all three of his presidential elections, was that he wouldn’t go to war, and didn’t go to war, especially in the Middle East.
Then he went to war in Iran. Before the Iran war, Brent Crude oil was about $US70 ($100) per gallon. Today, it’s over $US100 per gallon. Trump didn’t prepare the American people for a long war in Iran, or ask of them any sacrifice. He told them at its start it would go for 4-6 weeks. It’s now entering its eighth month.

But think of the upside ...

Trump’s tariffs have also fuelled inflation and resulted in a substantial decline in US soybean exports. Trump is losing a number of key parts of his winning coalition. Republicans normally win farmers. Farm bankruptcies have risen spectacularly this year and Republicans are shedding support in mid-western and rural states. That Trump is now doing rallies in safe Republican states is a sign of desperation (a saving-the-furniture strategy), as was the now cancelled outrageous stunt of using government money to pay for campaign ads.
Trump won in 2024 with a historically high share of Hispanic voters. Overwhelmingly, Hispanics work for wages in the lower half of the income spread. They are savagely hit by inflation and deserting Trump.

The graphics editor added to the gloom with one of those mindless snaps the remnants of the graphics department are addicted to, like petrol sniffers with addled brains ... Global petrol prices continue to climb as supply and transportation disruptions in the Middle East persist. Picture: Brandon Bell/Getty Images/AFP

But surely it's good news ...

Allow the bro to explain all the ways that Faux Noise has produced a healthy balanced diet ...

In Trump’s first term, he had a generally good economic story that was cruelled by Covid. It’s similar this time, but substitute Iran for Covid. US productivity is spectacularly good, infinitely better than Australia’s. Economic growth reached 4 per cent this quarter. But the big winners have been the big tech companies. The stockmarket is going bonanza, the little guy is going broke. So much of the bonanza goes to the already hugely wealthy, especially the so-called “tech bros”, who have all ingratiated themselves with Trump, and in some cases helped his family’s fortunes. And in the US, with its high productivity, there’s some evidence artificial intelligence is actually eating up a significant number of jobs.
Trump’s sometimes bizarre statements and deeply questionable personal behaviour are much worse this time than last. That Trump family members are making billions of dollars from Bitcoin ventures with countries Trump’s doing security deals with is offensive to democracy and ethics.
Trump’s perfectly demented determination to get every government building named for himself is seen by supporters as an endearing eccentricity. But it’s much more annoying when there’s a mess and it looks like he is neglecting the issues that affect people directly.
Characteristically, Trump has imposed on his party some terrible candidates now likely to lose seats the Republicans should hold easily. Trump chose incompetent, toadying loyalists rather than accomplished politicians.

Then came Ken ...

Next video thumbnail
Ken Paxton: 'If We Lose Texas...We Lose America'
Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton compared his U.S. Senate race against Democrat James Talarico to a fight for America, speaking at the GOP midterm convention in Dallas.

That's got to be worth a Ken 'toon ...

At last came that WCW analogy ...

Trump got a respected Republican senator, John Cornyn in Texas, defeated in the Republican primary by Ken Paxton, a Trump loyalist dogged by scandals. Now, astonishingly, Democrat James Talarico, a talented politician, could flip a Texas Senate seat.
Trump threatened a primary campaign against another respected Republican senator, Thom Tillis in North Carolina. To avoid this, Tillis retired. The Democrat former governor, Roy Cooper, is now favoured to win North Carolina. If the Republicans lose these two seats and thus lose their Senate majority, it will be all Trump’s work.
Democrats in control of the House and Senate will go to war with Trump. It will be ugly and dysfunctional. They will subpoena many members of Trump’s family to examine business deals. They will subpoena administration officials. They will surely impeach Trump again, and impeach cabinet secretaries. Trump’s instinct will be to defy all congressional subpoenas. He will rule by executive decree. Most second-term presidents become progressively more bipartisan. Don’t expect that from Trump. His reaction is always to fight.
The heightened US political polarisation and gridlock will disturb the world, make Washington less effective internationally, and undermine what residual stability there is in the global system.
Democrats have chosen some candidates from a new, populist far left, such as El-Sayed, and some centrists, such as Cooper.
The Republicans face similar internal battles. The extreme edges of both parties could yet give us shockingly bad presidential candidates in 2028.
Hold on to your hats. As they used to say of World Championship Wrestling: anything can happen and probably will. As ever with Trump, we’re sure not gonna die of boredom.
Greg Sheridan is the Australian’s foreign editor

Perhaps he should have referenced a comic book instead?

The pond had no regrets for having a little 'toon fun, but the hive mind was outraged by the bromancer's tone...

Copacabana
American voters are smart hard working and enterprising. Why would they elect the extreme left Democrats to destroy the economy and plunge the poorest Americans into poverty? Why would any journalist think the extreme left controlling the American Congress is a good thing?

Ian
The Donald Trump that Greg Sheridan describes is not the one that I admire and respect and believe is a political miracle.

Sure, there was the odd contrarian doing a little trolling, but when you're deep in the hive mind ...

Relax, punters, alert minds are on the job to ensure chaos is kept at bay ...

After that, the pond could skip past Kim, trying to get himself back into the reptile good books with an anodyne outing, though it meant the pond had to personally save him to the archive ...

In a serious education system music is not optional
Nationwide school music learning vital to build young Australians’ creativity, resilience, cognitive skills
The nation’s future workforce hinges not on algorithms or data – but on teaching children to sing, compose and play.
By Kim Williams

Self-interest much?

...For the past 45 years, Musica Viva Australia In Schools, through consistent refinement and national effort, has provided a beacon for a subject too often neglected in our ambition to embrace best-practice education for young Australians. It deserves extensive philanthropic support. These are things I know to be true. I have been lucky – so many have not.
Kim Williams is the chair of the ABC and a former chief executive and chairman of Musica Viva Australia.

In that spirit, the pond has determined that the pond must be read aloud in all schools, so that the younglings can bound into the future full of misery and despair.

The pond also skipped snappy Tom ...

Restoring control of migration after Big Australia surge
Every major party has finally shown its hand in what has become a numbers game – with the stakes higher than ever.
By Tom Dusevic
Columnist

A teaser trailer will suffice - spoiler alert, it's the close:

The Australian Daily Zionist News continued apace ...

Green vote surge will send chill through Jewish hearts
Green Party surge in London by-election sparks alarm over controversial anti-Israel policy
The fact that nearly a third of north London voters backed Green leader Zack Polanski days after his party’s ‘poisonous antisemitism’ is deeply worrying.
By Jacquelin Magnay
Europe Correspondent

The pond couldn't summon the strength to do the Haaretz ethnic cleansing thingie again - perhaps on the morrow - and instead turned to the dog botherer, imagining he was Peter Finch in Network ...

The dog botherer opened with a pitiful attempt at self-awareness:

Even into my 65th year I do not want to be an old man yelling at the clouds, and even as a professional opinionator I do not want to be a purveyor of false doom. Swayed by both of those considerations I would suggest my commentary over recent years has been too restrained, too moderate.

The old professional cloud shouter and doom and fear monger proceeded to do both and the pond got so mad it reduced his irrational outburst to a series of screen grabs ...

Nothing to see there, and by resorting to screen caps, the pond managed to dodge an overload of dog bothering, what with him turning up in two AV distractions ...

That's too much, but there was more to come...

The dog botherer was really phoning it in this day, with that standard burst of climate science denialism, which wended its way into the final gobbet ...

The dog botherer is rapidly reducing himself to a grumpy old man caricature, worthy of an animation ...

As for a Taliban perspective? But the Unites States is showing how to do a dinkum public killing, and how to lead a rich fantasy life ...

Speaking of that public execution plan ...

Remember how the likes of Dame Slap and the bromancer promoted, defended or both sidered the mad King? If only they could be voted out, or voted down ...

Just more of Killer Creighton and Our Homeric Henry ... and please, spare the pond the Joshing...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 20:10:39 +0000

Knock the pond down with the proverbial warm lettuce leaf.

Josh, the no ticket, no start man (translation, no ticker, no heart) is at it again.

He's promised more turns around the dance floor than a contestant in They Shoot Horses, Don't They, and he's at it again, and the reptiles - desperate to send the beefy boofhead to the knackery - are all aboard.

Only the most committed pond correspondents will care, and be moved to wade into that sludge with Fergo ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘Toxic sludge’: Frydenberg unloads on Holmes a Court
Josh Frydenberg slams Simon Holmes a Court and Monique Ryan over toxic Kooyong campaigning
Josh Frydenberg has accused teal campaigners of hypocrisy, detailing personal abuse, antisemitic sign vandalism by opponents and Simon Holmes a Court’s ‘toxic’ social media.
By John Ferguson

In the usual reptile way, that was just a gloss on Josh's own effort...

EXCLUSIVE
War on the home front: how bitter Teals came for the Treasurer
With his first budget under his belt, Josh Frydenberg turned his attention to the election. Then came the most miserable time of his political career in the battle for Kooyong | EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT
By Josh Frydenberg

That use of the third person is a real killer, down there with the pond talking about the pond.

No doubt Josh thinks he's a legend in his own lifetime, a veritable Saint Sebastian suffering from assorted arrows, but he's actually just flogging a tome ...Josh Frydenberg is former treasurer of Australia and deputy leader of the Liberal Party, 2018 to 2022. This is an edited extract from his memoir, A Grateful Son (HarperCollins), which will be published on Tuesday, October 13.

The reptiles are promising even more excerpts ...ON SATURDAY: Loyalty betrayed: Inside the bitter fallout between Frydenberg and Morrison.

Count the pond way out.

The pond has done its duty. It's there at the intermittent archive for anyone who cares. The pond would rather head off for a bout of root canal therapy.

As for the rest, the Australian Daily Zionist News was in full swing with this bizarre headline ..

Israel a true friend and ally to Iran’s brutalised people
As delegates walked out on Israel’s PM at the UN, they sat politely for the leader of a regime that had just gunned down its own citizens in the streets.
By Hillel Newman and Reza Arab

The pond had to personally save that one to the intermittent archive so that fellow students could relish the notion that Benji embarking on a war of choice for election purposes - and persuading mad King Donald to join him - was a true friend and ally to Iran's brutalised people ... by standing by and watching as thousands of dissidents were butchered by the mad mullahs, and not lifting a finger to help them.

You can't make up this level of delusion...

Israelis and Iranians are fighting the same war on two fronts: against the tyranny in Tehran and its proxies, and against an information war waged in institutions that have been corrupted. The good news is that Israel cares for the Iranian people, and the Iranian people understand who their real allies are.

...but the pond should have known what would arise from this peculiar alliance ...

Dr Hillel Newman is ambassador of Israel to Australia.
Reza Arab is adviser to the Iran Prosperity Project and a lecturer at the University of Queensland.

The reptiles kept the cause ticking over with another bout of fear, panic and alarm, with Brownie on the job ...

EXCLUSIVE
Still ‘very volatile’ for Jews’ safety: AFP
AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett has warned the security environment for Jewish Australians remains ‘very volatile’ and the terror threat from Hamas supporters will stay elevated.
By Greg Brown

The pond was disappointed that this meant Pike piking climate change was pushed down the page...

It’s electrifying: Chris Bowen’s latest bright idea for global power
By Elizabeth Pike

Ironically in the original story, Bowen wasn't the lead, but no doubt the reptiles felt the need to juice it up in a way that fed the hive mind ... Turkish COP31 chief says world must ‘stop running away from responsibility’

The pond would rather turn to the infallible Pope for a comment on the headgear matter...

The pond supposes that at some point it should head over to the extreme far right of the digital edition, but what dismal scenes then unfolded ...

Gravity catches up to Firmus fairytale
Firmus’ apparent IPO stall is still too early to call this the popping of the massive AI bubble, but the overreach represents a blow to Australia’s tech ambitions.
By Eric Johnston
Associate Editor

...The unwinding of the Firmus circus has certainly made it tougher for the next wave of tech hopefuls. Investors will be even more cautious the next time someone comes knocking seeking funding for the next promising thing in the AI revolution.
It’s not unusual for stock listings to go cold, particularly if broader market conditions suddenly turn sour. However, that’s not the case here. It’s rare for one of this size to stall so spectacularly just days out from launch, suggesting a major gap between actual and perceived investor interest.
Firmus’ stumbles shouldn’t be regarded as the popping of the massive AI bubble. The investment into AI infrastructure globally is still surging and tech players are driving Wall Street to record highs.

Say what? Did Eric realise his use of 'AI' made him the enemy of the people?

Have another relieving 'toon ...

Killer Creighton was also on the loose on the extreme far right, and in his inimitable style, went straight to the cliché of Louis XV:

Louis was just an excuse to pile in on the perfidious French, a handy distraction from mad King Donald's contribution to destabilising the world economy, though Killer would eventually get there ...

The Fifth Republic, which has accumulated debts worth almost €3.6 trillion ($5.8 trillion), or 120 per cent of GDP, is facing interest repayments of well over €100bn next year, as yields on its debts soar toward 5 per cent, up from near zero at the start of 2022.
France’s borrowing costs easily exceed those of the so-called PIGS southern European nations of Portugal, Italy, Spain and even Greece, once the poster child for fiscal incompetence.
With anaemic growth amid mass rioting, spending that absorbs more than 55 per cent of the country’s GDP, budget deficits of 5 per cent of GDP pencilled in for coming years (well over double Canberra’s), and a presidential election due in April, it’s hard to see things getting better before they get worse.
The next global financial crisis is clearly on the horizon. The financial collapse of 2008 came largely as a surprise, but the cause of the next – and likely far worse – conflagration should be obvious to all: governments’ excessive debts, and the ridiculously self-serving financial regulations that have sustained them.
Reckless fiscal policy implemented by many of the world’s richest and most powerful nations is almost certain to trigger a crisis in financial markets, with devastating impacts on ordinary people.

The reptiles compounded the sense of crisis with riots in the streets ...Protesters clash with French police in riot gear in Paris. Picture: AFP

The pond tends to regard this sort of carry on with some equanimity. The pond came of age in 1968 when rioting students in the street promised a revolution, but eventually went back to their books, while the likes of Godard went full Mao ...

Killer was determined to panic, as he often does:

As happened in late 2007, panic will spread, pushing up interest rates in bloated public debt markets, prompting massively overextended governments to put up taxes and slash spending in ways that will only inflame already furious voters.

Killer eventually tired of the perfidious French, and flung in a billy goat butt in the form of a "though":

There’s competition, though, to be the trigger.
In Japan, with debts at more than 200 per cent of GDP, the 30-year bond yield has more than doubled to above 4.2 per cent, the highest in its history.
America’s debt burst through the $US40 trillion ($57.5 trillion) for the first time in August, even before President Donald Trump promised to rack up another $US1.3 trillion on the national credit card to give $US5000 to every American adult citizen, should his party do well in the midterm elections next month.
US 10-year bond yields have jumped from 4 per cent in February to 5.3 per cent, the highest since 2002, when US government debts were the equivalent of less than 60 per cent of GDP – around half their current level.
Amid all the globalist claptrap, it’s still a dog-eat-dog world: Washington suddenly sold billions of euros and bought Japanese yen in July, fearful the panicking Japanese would start selling off their massive US bond holdings to shore up the yen’s value. So much for NATO economic solidarity!
Bond holders, being pension funds, financial institutions and private investors, are understandably baulking at the prospect of systematically higher inflation, and are even beginning to question the creditworthiness of prominent G20 governments.
They’ve been fooled once by the unusually low inflation of the pre-Covid era, enduring huge real losses as governments sprayed money everywhere, triggering investable inflation. They won’t be so readily tricked again. Now they know that governments can and will use their central banks to prop them up in crises. Quantitative easing on steroids, including in Australia, is now standard operating procedure. So-called independent central banks know who their masters really are.
That’s why the money-creation pump won’t be so useful this time. Investors have learned.
True to his word, Terray defaulted on France’s debts in 1770, slashing interest rates and stretching loan terms without permission from creditors.

All fine, but it was time to save the world from mad King Donald and his minions by returning to the perfidious French with another "but" ...

But a relatively smaller France can’t treat creditors as French kings once could. Its predicament is worse than America’s or Japan’s. Most fundamentally, it cannot independently and arbitrarily create the currency in which it borrows, given it has shackled itself to the eurozone.
A public debt crisis will be worse than the banking crisis of 2008. Then, governments could rescue the banks, but who will rescue the governments?
Governments are naturally a fiction by which everyone tries to live at everyone else’s expense. Government bonds are the bedrock of the global financial system. Taxes are already far higher than they should be. Expect the costs of adjustment to fall ultimately on the least politically well-connected.
Indeed, France’s fiscal woes, amid rising populism, could wreck the whole eurozone. Marine Le Pen, the likely winner of next year’s presidential race, has long disliked the European Union, a project France encouraged after World War II only to weaken and tie Germany down – something Berlin’s insane energy policies appear to have been doing all by themselves anyway.

Insane energy policies? That's code for Killer reptile speak, an insane desire to pretend that climate science is a nothing burger.

Is there a heroine, a veritable Jeanne d'Arc, waiting to save Killer? Rassemblement National presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has long disliked the European Union. Picture: AFP

Better yet, go Milei for the "nth" time, where "n" stands for exhausting ...

Australia’s relatively modest fiscal problems won’t insulate it from a global public debt crisis. Victoria is already facing 10-year borrowing costs of more than 6 per cent, which will see an additional $3.1bn in annual interest costs from refinancing its $77bn of ultra-cheap, Covid-era debt alone.
Responsible Australian governments would start making cuts to spending now so they can better ride out the coming storm. Too bad we don’t have any.
President Javier Milei in Argentina has shown that even massive cuts in spending and regulation can supercharge economic growth, if the rest of the world remains stable.
But as the streets of France already illustrate, stability can’t be guaranteed.

As Killer mentioned it, how goes the Argentine economy?

Argentina’s sluggish August points to technical recession
Economy is on track to enter a technical recession after a lukewarm recovery in August, data shows.

Argentina’s economy is on track to enter a technical recession after a lukewarm recovery in August failed to make up for steeper losses in July, adding to President Javier Milei’s challenges ahead of next year’s election.
Construction activity grew 0.4 percent in August on a monthly basis, barely enough to cover the 4.4 percent fall in July. Manufacturing posted a 1.9 percent monthly bump after a 5.1 percent fall in July, according to government figures published Wednesday.
The two sectors employ the largest share of formal workers in Argentina, making them key indicators for the real economy.
Argentina is expected to have fallen into a technical recession in the third quarter, according to the central bank’s market survey published Tuesday. Analysts estimated that gross domestic product fell one percent from July through September compared to the previous three months, which would be the second straight quarterly decline. Official data for third quarter GDP will be published in December.

Memo to Josh. On your return, immediately appoint Killer as your economics advisor. What could go wrong?

And so at last, and inevitably, to Our Homeric Henry, alas and alack, back in his role as a singular contributor to the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

The header: By Henry Ergas
October 7 marks ALP’s descent into disgrace

The plea to be treated to a bot voice: Listen to this article
8 min

The caption for the snap: Abandoned and torched vehicles at the site of the October 7 attack on the Supernova music festival in southern Israel. Picture: Jack Guez / AFP

Give all to the mighty G: Make us preferred on Google

The hole in bucket man went all in, with a splendid reference to "kairos" to set the correct portentous, pompous tone ...

Within 24 hours of the planes striking the Twin Towers, September 11, 2001, had become 9/11. Still today, those numbers evoke, without more needing to be said, the terror of the burning towers, the man filmed jumping to certain death, the buildings collapsing in clouds of dust.
In much the same way, three years after the horrors that then unfolded, “October 7” marks a moment when the world changed. The atrocities Hamas committed were not merely intended to kill; they were intended to brutalise, humiliate and defile.
The Nazis hid their crimes; Hamas’s terrorists filmed theirs, vaunting and flaunting the absolute power they wielded over the terrified hostages they snatched away, the women they raped, the men they butchered, the children they burnt to death.
The crimes were unspeakable; still more was the sadistic lust with which they were committed.
Events such as these give a terrible significance to the ancient Greek idea of kairos, the critical moment: the rupture that breaks, and ultimately reshapes, the flow of chronological time. Those moments overwhelm our understanding, leaving words struggling to suture the tear in the fabric of human comprehension.

Could Our Homeric Henry top that reference to "kairos"? Of course he could. Rather than simply talk of "a date", he trotted out "hemeronym":

The reduction of an event to a hemeronym – that is, a date – is part of that process, compressing into a phrase an entire constellation of facts, images, memories and emotions.

The pond could have produced a dissertation on that ...

... At different stages of use, hemeronyms may have the following semantic meanings: nominating stage - hemeronyms are expressed as ideonyms; legislative and legal stage - hemeronyms are used as ergonyms and pragmatonyms; market-competitive stage - hemeronyms function in the role of ergonyms, pragmatonyms, socionyms, pseudonyms, biblionyms; historical stage - hemeronyms function as documentonyms and chrematonyms. At the last stage, it is possible to revive hemeronyms as the name of a new media product with a historical allusion to a well-known publication of past years. (Abstract here).

But forget the low academic comedy, this is serious stuff ...

But that compression also detaches the name from the reality it encapsulates. Once the concrete details recede, the date remains, ready to be seized and invested with a different meaning.
So it was with 9/11, as voices on the left sought to recast the massacre as “blowback”: the return to America of the violence it had visited upon others. As attention shifted from what the terrorists had done to what America had done to provoke them, prominent intellectuals lined up to present mass murder as justice delivered.
Thus, the very next day, while New Yorkers were still digging out the dead and desperately searching for the wounded, Noam Chomsky proclaimed that “for the first time, the guns have been directed the other way”. “The United States,” said Mary Beard, an eminent classicist, just two weeks later, “had it coming.” Meanwhile, jubilant public celebrations erupted throughout the Muslim world. A tragedy for some, 9/11 came to symbolise a triumph for many others.
Yet those efforts paled beside the speed and ferocity with which October 7 was redefined. The ensuing torrent of statements shifted the blame to the victims, turning the horrors into an indictment of those on whom they had been inflicted. Almost before the first shock had subsided, the work of reversing guilt and innocence was under way.
In some cases, the assertions were so plainly mendacious that they served only to expose their proponents’ bad faith. A case in point was UN secretary-general António Guterres’s claim that the scale of Israel’s killing and destruction in Gaza was “unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as secretary-general” – a period that encompassed wars in Syria, Sudan and Ukraine whose death toll exceeded Gaza’s many times over.

There was a snap of the villain ...UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres at the 81st General Assembly in New York. Picture: Angela Weiss / AFP

And at this point, correspondents will know what's coming. A little attempt at balance, an attempt to take Our Henry's thumb off the scale...

First up the Graudian ...

‘Neither war nor peace’: Palestinians in Gaza on existing amid disease, despair and ruins
People tell of lives changed beyond recognition after the 7 October attacks by Hamas three years ago and the subsequent Israeli offensive

...Despite a ceasefire a year ago, Israel’s airstrikes continue. Palestinians who have approached the “yellow line” that divides Gaza into zones controlled by the Israeli military and by Hamas have been shot dead. In the last year, the overall death toll has risen by a further 1,400 people.
In recent days, Israeli attacks have intensified, killing at least two Palestinians in Gaza on Tuesday, according to health officials. The Israeli military said the strikes targeted militants.
On Wednesday, Gaza medics said at least two Palestinians were killed and others wounded in airstrikes in Beit Lahiya and Khan Younis.
“It is what we feared … a ceasefire that just isn’t a ceasefire,” said one international aid worker now based in Amman, Jordan, who worked in Gaza throughout much of the conflict. “Daily life is horrible. People aren’t hungry any more but they are still malnourished. Our local staff are telling us that this is just the next stage of the conflict.”
Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, told the UN security council last month that despite the increase in supplies entering Gaza, the health situation remained critical, with “infectious diseases … widespread amid overcrowded displacement sites and inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene conditions”.
Inadequate funding for relief efforts exacerbated the “shortages of medical supplies, fuel and the overall humanitarian response”, Alakbarov said, while “restrictions on the entry of critical humanitarian items imposed by Israel” were slowing preparations for cold weather.

Marvel at the callous disregard of Our Henry ...

Others, however, were more subtle, if no less corrosive. The Albanese government’s statements show how the same transformation could be effected through a gradual shift in emphasis: what was repeated and what was allowed to fade, whose actions were scrutinised and whose actions disappeared from view.
The government’s immediate response was unambiguous, with both formal statements and ministerial interviews stressing the enormity of Hamas’s crimes. But by January – a mere three months after the attack – references to those crimes were dwindling, eventually surviving only in formulaic anniversary statements. Across 220 press releases and media appearances, the atrocity was first relegated to incidental mention and then progressively effaced.
But the changes went far beyond erasing the collective memory of Hamas’s crimes. References to Hamas hardened into ritual: the same pious catchphrases about releasing the hostages were endlessly recited until devoid of content. Instead, more than 90 per cent of the variation in text and meaning concerned Israel, freeing Hamas of any active role and placing all agency in Israel’s hands.
Moreover, while Hamas was invariably referred to as an entity, references to Israel became increasingly personalised, casting Benjamin Netanyahu and his close associates as the sole authors of the events flashing constantly on our screens. There were six mentions of Yahya Sinwar, all associated with his death; in contrast, Netanyahu was mentioned 88 times.

At this point the pond regrets reverting to Haaretz, having done it many times, but must do so again ...

A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance
For 14 years, Netanyahu's policy was to keep Hamas in power; the pogrom of October 7, 2023, helps the Israeli prime minister preserve his own rule (*intermittent archive link)
Adam Raz

And so on, and having interrupted at such length, the pond allowed Our Henry to rant on ...

What was relegated into insignificance was every bit as important as what was highlighted. Hamas’s use of human shields was mentioned; but all reference to it vanished by February 2024. Hamas was repeatedly urged to release its hostages; but a comprehensive review reveals not a single instance in which the government explained how their release was to be secured, other than by Israel agreeing to an immediate ceasefire.
Equally, it was constantly said that Hamas had to be disarmed; yet beyond vague, inconsequential references to peacekeeping forces, at no time did our government say how, in practice, that was to be implemented and enforced. The demands were repeated; entirely lacking were any means by which they were to be achieved.
Even worse was the total disregard for the war Hamas was waging against Israel. Six hostages were murdered in cold blood at the end of August 2024; Anthony Albanese promptly condemned the murders – but just once did he mention them again, and then in passing. There was only one reference to Hamas and Hezbollah directing their missile attacks at civilians, in September 2024; then that fact, too, disappeared just as those attacks escalated.
Nowhere, in the entire corpus of 220 statements, was it ever noted that Hamas had, on its own admission, built 500km of tunnels in which to shelter fighters and offensive weapons, but not a single civilian bomb shelter for the war it was preparing to unleash.

The reptiles interrupted with a snap ...An Israeli soldier operating in the Gaza Strip, amid continuing battles between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Picture: Israeli Army / AFP

Our Henry continued with his rant ...

Thus Israel was reduced to its villainous leader, its civilians – and the incessant attacks on their homes, schools and hospitals – eliminated from view. Hamas, meanwhile, dissolved into the suffering people of Gaza, its murderous thugs disappearing behind the very people whose lives they treated as utterly expendable. And invisible too was its explicitly genocidal project, distilled in the ceaselessly chanted pledge “Filastin arabiyya”, “Palestine is Arab”.
It would be wrong to claim that the government’s attitude caused the explosion of antisemitism; that had far deeper roots. But it would be equally wrong to deny that the government helped foster the climate in which it could flourish. The ABC, SBS, Creative Australia and the universities didn’t need to worry: they could do to Jews, without any practical consequences, what they would never have dared do to Muslims, much less Indigenous Australians.
Nor was there any change when the scale of the crisis became apparent. By the time of this year’s ALP Draft National Platform, Hamas, like Hezbollah, had vanished – and their responsibilities with them. The war was Israel’s war; the only provocations were Israel’s; the death, the pain, the suffering were entirely the work of the Jewish state. October 7 had been cancelled; even the Islamist attack at Bondi could not be mentioned. The last pretence was gone. Only the silence remains, forever condemning those who wiped the horrors away.

And yet ... and here the pond must again revert to the horrors that Our Henry wiped away ... per Haaretz ...

No Hope on the Horizon for Gazans, a Year Into the Cease-Fire

No Government, No Reconstruction and No Hope on the Horizon: The Gaza Strip, One Year After the Cease-Fire
Hamas is still the strongest force on the ground and an alternative government is nowhere on the horizon. And although the world is showing greater sympathy toward the Palestinians, the sympathy isn't being translated into real change (*intermittent archive link)

Jack Khoury

A year after a cease-fire was announced, most of the Gaza Strip's residents are still far from their homes. Hospitals are only partly operational and reconstruction is happening mainly on paper. Hamas is still the strongest force on the ground, in an area delimited by the Yellow Line, and an alternative government is nowhere on the horizon.
In terms of international diplomacy, even though the world is showing greater sympathy toward the Palestinians, the sympathy isn't being translated into real changes affecting people's daily lives in the enclave.
Three years after the October 7 attack, Israel is already occupied with other issues. Ever since the living hostages were returned, followed by the bodies of the dead hostages last year, Gaza has been pushed to the sidelines of public discourse in Israel. But in the Gaza Strip itself, the pause in hostilities has not marked the beginning of recovery.
The killing continues on an almost daily basis, even if Israel describes it as assassinations of legitimate targets. Limits on the introduction of aid and equipment are still in place, and reconstruction plans are far from being turned into operational systems.
The summer has passed but the evacuees' tents haven't moved. Some of them, already in tatters from the heat and bleached by the sun, are now waiting for the trials of winter: rain, mud and cold, in an area which is almost impossible to leave. For hundreds of thousands of families, tents have stopped being a temporary solution while waiting for their houses to be rebuilt. They have become home. Samir Zakut, a veteran social activist in Gaza, tells Haaretz that many of the tents are suitable for short stays, not for long durations, and that they have been worn down by prolonged use. Ahead of the winter, he adds, there is a shortage of tarps and protective covers against rain.
Numbers can also demonstrate the scope of the destruction: According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 200,000 buildings were damaged since the war began, or 82 percent of the total number of buildings in the Gaza Strip. Over 134,000 were completely destroyed and 329,000 housing units were damaged. Most of Gaza's inhabitants, 2.1 million people, live far from their homes, in an area that has shrunk to less than 40 percent of the enclave's total area.
"As much as we tried guessing, our predictions were wrong; after the release of the hostages, we'd hoped the situation would improve, but nothing happened," Maysam, a mother of two girls, tells Haaretz. "It's hard to live with the uncertainty, with no horizon or solution, as though we were left to look for our personal survival." Zakut, the activist, says that the restrictions on entry of aid and a shortage in replacement parts and oils for engines impair the healthcare system, water infrastructure and other vital services.
The crisis isn't only about putting a roof over people's heads. Around 90 percent of water and sewage networks in Gaza were damaged or destroyed; 82 percent of the population suffer from water scarcity; and according to figures obtained by Haaretz, 70 percent of families receive only six liters of water (1.6 gallons) a day per person. This is less than the minimal amount required for survival in emergency conditions according to the World Health Organization, which has determined a minimum of 15 liters.
Health services haven't started to recover either. According to a new report published on Wednesday by Physicians for Human Rights Israel, a year after the cease-fire was declared, there is not a single hospital in Gaza that is fully functional. In July 2026, there were only 104 beds in intensive care units across the entire Gaza Strip, one more than in October 2025. A full 69 percent of medical supplies that were approved to be brought in between January and May of this year did not arrive, according to Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, as presented in the report.
Behind these figures there are patients waiting for treatment that cannot be given in Gaza, or for evacuation to a location in which they can get the required treatment. According to Gaza's health ministry, at least 1,570 patients have died while waiting for evacuation since the war began, including 505 cancer patients and at least 264 children. The number of medical evacuations since the cease-fire began is still much lower than the numbers before the war, even though the need for treatment outside Gaza has grown.
On the political front, the cease-fire has not led to understandings on the agency that will manage Gaza. Hamas is still the strongest force on the ground, while the committee that is supposed to replace it as part of U.S. President Donald Trump's plan has not managed to enter Gaza. This has led to a power vacuum: Residents are expecting a change, but they have no official to turn to with regard to any extensive reconstruction.

Truly dismal and depressing stuff, but rather than end on that dismal note, the pond thought it should add yet another celebration of "western values" with a further reading...

This came in the LRB (not the band)...

Vol. 48 No. 17 · 24 September 2026
Modest and Misunderstood
Ferdinand Mount (*intermittent archive link)

Follow the links for the books under review, including one by a certain Paul Kléber Monod.

The entire piece is 4,428 words long, so the pond only wanted to feature a few excerpts, most of which relate to the noxious onion muncher and the general rah rah that goes on in the lizard Oz ...

...The English have been no more friendly towards their immediate neighbours. Monod traces the tortuous interweaving of English identity and the larger British identity that was supposed to subsume it after the Act of Union. Among other obstacles, he points to the abusive stereotypes to which the English have instinctively resorted in describing the Welsh, Scots and, above all, the Irish over the centuries, starting with Gerald of Wales (who was mostly English) in the 1180s: ‘The Irish are a rude people, subsisting on the produce of their cattle only, and living themselves like beasts – a people that has not yet departed from the primitive habits of pastoral life.’ Oliver Cromwell described his slaughter of 3500 Irish men at Drogheda as ‘a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches’. The Welsh, according to the Reverend William Richards in Wallography, his vicious travelogue of 1682, ‘are much addicted to the sin of Nastiness, wallowing in filthiness like so many swine; so that the whole province seems to be but a general Sty’. In addition, they were lazy, larcenous and spoke gibberish. If the Welsh were thieves, the Scots were flea-ridden cattle rustlers. Pepys marvelled that ‘so universal a rooted nastiness hangs about the person of every Scot (man or woman)’ as to render him ‘nauseous’. The language grew, if anything, more malevolent over the centuries. In 1861 Charles Kingsley described the Irish as ‘white chimpanzees’.
By contrast, Monod reminds us of the benign image the English have cultivated of themselves, achieving a peak of self-love in the early 20th century. Stanley Baldwin’s St George’s Day speech of 1924: ‘I think that the English are at heart and in practice the kindest people in the world.’ Or George Orwell in ‘England Your England’: ‘The gentleness of the English civilisation is perhaps its most marked characteristic.’ Or J.B. Priestley in English Journey: ‘I wish I had been born early enough to be called a little Englander. It was a term of sneering abuse, but I should be delighted to accept it as a description of myself. That little sounds the right note of affection. It is little England I love.’ And perhaps most remarkable of all because less expected, E.M. Forster’s definition of English culture in England Speaks (1941): ‘The English countryside, the English sense of humour, the English love of fair play, English prudishness and smugness, English freakishness, the mild English idealism and good-humoured reasonableness.’ It’s ‘English, English’ all the way – ‘British’ never quite fits. Monod doesn’t mention Flanders and Swann’s ‘Song of Patriotic Prejudice’ (1964), which encapsulates a millennium of English self-praise and contempt for their dirty, mean, hairy neighbours: ‘The English are moral, the English are good,/And clever and modest and misunderstood.’
It is essential to this image of the English as a mild, unobtrusive race that the British Empire should be thought of as a kind of accident. As John Seeley, in his enormously influential The Expansion of England (1883), put it: ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.’ On the contrary, the English displayed from the start a flinty purpose and unflagging energy in ‘expanding’ themselves. The most indelible words in any statute must be those in Henry VIII’s Act in Restraint of Appeals (1532): ‘This realm of England is an Empire.’ The English Crown had already ‘planted’ quite a few of her people in the castle towns of North Wales, where Edward I inflicted a sort of apartheid on the Welsh. Far larger plantations were to follow in Munster under Elizabeth, then in Ulster in the 1600s, where more than a hundred thousand people, many of them Lowland Scots, were settled on land vacated by the flight of the Catholic earls. ‘Settled’ was never more of a euphemism.

At last the pond understood the true meaning of Orwellian - smug, self-satisfied Poms.

The pond recently rewatched Zulu Dawn, an ancient average actioner, about the Battle of Isandlwana and cheered the Zulus all the way as they took down the pukkah mob.

Meanwhile, "settled" and "settlers" continue to do invaluable work, c.f. Gaza and the West Bank.

And this, for which 'Australia' can easily be substituted ...

...In the great immigration panics of today, sympathy is focused on the home team. We are the ones who are being hurt. It is our national and/or racial identity that is being fractured; our self-confidence in ‘who we are’ that is being undermined. What underlies the sense of affront is the assumption that the ‘people of England’ are, as it were, a settled question, that the days of large-scale movements belong to the past, or ought to.

And this at the close ...

...Norway and other European countries face two conflicting challenges. The first is to keep the civil peace, which means having restrictions of some sort on immigration. This can be done by non-violent legal means, for example by making ID cards compulsory; or it can be done by intimidation of the ICE variety. The resources of modern states are so great that it isn’t all that difficult to bring the numbers down, as the UK, Germany and the US have done. In the UK, net migration dropped to 204,000 in the year to June 2025, from the freak peak of nearly a million in the Boriswave.
The other challenge is much more formidable. Very soon, almost all Western countries will begin to see their populations fall.* Reversing this trend is a mountainous task. For much of the period since the Great War, France has had a pro-natalist policy. President Macron has called for ‘demographic rearmament’, earning the enthusiastic approval of Elon Musk (fourteen children to date), and for a time his efforts did seem to be having some effect. But now France’s birth rate is slipping back to the European average. Viktor Orbán tried hard to generate more Hungarians, devoting 5 per cent of GDP to the effort. Numbers increased a little (though not to replacement rate) before dropping again. The UK has not bestirred itself much. The two-child benefit cap was expressly designed to deter large families. The Tories, who brought in this weird measure in 2017, seem wedded to it. Farage wants to keep it, but only for children born to immigrants – a distinction repellent even by his standards.
On present policies, the population will soon begin to fall. In London, schools are running out of pupils, and councils are facing the painful task of deciding which ones to close (so much for the myth about immigration putting terrible pressure on school places). As for the labour market, it’s not just that the locals don’t fancy back-breaking work in the fields or in Amazon warehouses. It’s that there aren’t enough locals to go around. Future governments are likely to be stuck with a pair of discordant policies: the restriction of immigration, which will be as effective as we want it to be; and the promotion of the birth rate, which won’t.

And while in that issue, the pond came across this droll letter from a certain Benjamin Letzler of Mödling, Austria

Unshriven

It is not, pace James Butler, ‘poor form to raise questions about a convert’s sincerity’ (LRB, 13 August). To consider the fate of a man’s eternal soul may be indelicate, even libellous, like media speculation about J.D. Vance’s lingering public embraces of Erika Kirk, who is not his wife. But libellous daydreams are an enrichment of our lives. Besides, there have been precious few Christians in Western politics in the last fifty years apart from Angela Merkel. Mostly there are bloodstained men who sign orders to bomb innocents and start wars for profit, unrepentant mortal sinners who meet their maker unshriven.
Christianity in politics is mostly group affiliation. Think only of the American secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who has been a Catholic, a Mormon, a Southern Baptist and a Catholic again. Catholicism, which encourages a high level of education among its adherents, is also the leading faith of the conservative administrative apparatus in the United States, as evinced by the current composition of the Supreme Court (five of the six justices appointed by Republican presidents are Catholics). In Great Britain, two prime ministers, Tony Blair and Boris Johnson, have contracted Catholicism from their wives (the third wife, in Johnson’s case). Blair went to Catholic mass regularly (‘religiously’ is not the word) for 25 years as a registered Anglican, and took communion until ordered to stop by Cardinal Basil Hume. He converted formally only on his departure from office in 2007. In my own view, both Blair and Johnson violated Section 18 of the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 by advising the monarch on appointments to offices in the Church of England while a Catholic. Both should be prosecuted, ‘deemed guilty of a high misdemeanour, and disabled for ever from holding any office, civil or military, under the Crown’ – although an effective barrister could demonstrate in their defence that neither man was ever a Christian at all.

Has there ever been a better slap down of Boris and Tony Bleagh? Letzler is, by the way, a lawyer, as well as being a keen letter writer. See this profile here.

And so to the immortal Rowe of the day ...

Most correspondents will have dropped off at this point, but the pond does continue to wonder what drives the ABC to continually do hit pieces on EVs.

The simple answer is probably too much reading of the lizard Oz, which in turn means it has as much connection to reality as a lizard Oz jihad ...

In which the world is made safe for Oz coal, and climate science isn't a thing (and other reptile news) ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 20:05:39 +0000

Late yesterday while doing a little browsing the pond was startled by this header in the Nine rags ...

‘Groundbreaking’: High Court quashes coal mine expansion over climate emissions (*intermittent archive link)

It seemed serious. Inter alia ...

Approval for a major coal mine expansion has been declared invalid by the High Court in a decision that will force NSW planning authorities to reckon with emissions from Australian coal burnt overseas.
Environment Minister Murray Watt said the government was still considering the 111-page judgment handed down on Wednesday, while casting doubt on whether the decision would set a national precedent.
But the federal opposition is demanding the Albanese government intervene should the NSW Labor government fail to urgently pass new laws. The Minerals Council echoed the call for new legislation, arguing that “this type of activist ‘lawfare’ conducted against approved mining projects creates uncertainty for workers, communities and those seeking to invest in NSW”.
The NSW government has been contacted for comment.
Anita Hart, a lawyer for the local environment group fighting the project, celebrated the victory, calling it “a groundbreaking decision for climate law in Australia” that would be studied closely by other countries.
The Greens’ new deputy federal leader Steph Hodgkins May said it would send a clear message to both government and business that “when Australian coal is burned overseas, the climate damage doesn’t magically disappear at the port”.
The case revolved around an open-cut coal mine at Mt Pleasant in the NSW Hunter region, a political battleground eyed by both the Coalition and One Nation.
Operator MACH Energy Australia won approval in 2022 to significantly expand the mine and extend its life by 22 years. It outlined measures to address domestic greenhouse gas emissions from the project.
But it also concluded that 98 per cent of the total emissions would be classed as “Scope Three”, a category for further use of a product, such as the burning of coal for energy after export.
The operator argued these emissions would be managed “in accordance with customer countries commitments under the Paris Agreement” and would not “contribute to Australian greenhouse gas emissions”.
Neither the NSW Department Planning and Environment or the ultimate decision maker, the Independent Planning Commission, took issue with the company’s position.

The pond immediately rushed over to the lizard Oz to see how the reptiles were coping, but they had a much different, completely reassuring headline.

This morning that yarn by reliably wretched Rosie was still hanging around like a bad smell ...

CONFIDENCE QUESTIONED
PM ‘gaslighting our Pacific neighbours on 2030 target’
Climate Change Authority boss says PM must roll out renewables ‘faster’ to hit 2030 target
Anthony Albanese has been accused of misleading Pacific nations on his renewable electricity target, as Matt Kean says the government must ‘go faster’ to reach the goal.
By Rosie Lewis

Jack the Insider was on the same page, and withering in his contempt. After all, why not make the drowning of Pacific Islanders a butt for a pool party joke?

$20m for a failed pool party? COP that, taxpayers
Chris Bowen slugged Australia tens of millions hosting a global climate summit in Fiji – and almost every nation on earth chose to stay home.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

Talk about a laugh...

But had the ground really been broken?

It turned out that the pond had no need to worry about coal. Good old Murray Watts - what's climate change? - soon appeared to pour bliss on troubled clean dinkum virginal Oz coal ...

Murray Watt, the federal environment minister, said on Wednesday afternoon that while he had not had an opportunity to review the judgment in full, “the decision from the high court is in relation to a New South Wales government decision based on New South Wales legislation”.
“It doesn’t automatically transfer to commonwealth decisions or commonwealth legislation,” he told News24. (Graudian)

Yay ...

And to complete the job, valiant Lloydie of the Amazon rushed to the rescue ...

The header: By Graham Lloyd Environment editor
High Court’s coal mine decision is not the ‘victory’ that green lawfare claims

The plea to have a bot pleasuring: Listen to this article
4 min

A compelling snap of what pleasures the hive mind: The Mount Pleasant coal mine near Muswellbrook, NSW. Picture: LinkedIn

A yearning to be at one with the logarithm: Make us preferred on Google

Lloydie was totally relaxed and confident as he surveyed the scene:

Environment groups have spent years and millions of dollars trying to get the courts take their side and shut down Australia’s coal and gas industry because of climate change. Attempts have stretched to fabricated stories about Indigenous Dreaming lines in the sea but the main game has always been to get courts to stop projects because of their greenhouse gas emissions.
Cases have been launched in multiple states but failed the test. The arguments against stopping projects have included that Australian coal would simply be substituted for coal from somewhere else, often resulting in higher emissions. Alternatively, it has been argued that emissions are already dealt with internationally through the Paris Agreement and other laws and measures.
But green lawfare is claiming to have finally had a win in the High Court over an extension to a big coal mine in NSW. The High Court upheld an appeal that overturned approval for the Mount Pleasant coal mine extension because the authorities had not properly considered the climate change impact that burning the coal overseas would have on the area from which it was mined. Environment groups were quick to claim the High Court decision set a national precedent on Scope 3 emissions. Greenpeace hailed the decision as a “victory for communities that bear the brunt of the storms, bushfires and extreme weather fuelled by Australian fossil fuel corporations”.
“Coal and gas companies have claimed they are not responsible for their pollution because it happens overseas, but today Australia’s highest court sided with common sense and scientific evidence to find that every new coal and gas approval in this country could put us at risk, no matter where it is sold or burnt,” Greenpeace said.

Then came a totally relaxing billy goat butt, and the pond realised that the planet was still safe, and able to experience the joys of abundant sweet, dinkum virginal Oz coal ...

But the High Court ruling is not necessarily the win that climate activists have claimed it to be. The High Court upheld an appeal against the decision to approve the mine extension because the original decision had failed to properly consider Scope 3 emissions as they were required to do under existing NSW law.
The High Court said its decision “does not raise for consideration any issue concerning climate change outside of the meaning and application of the EPA Act. Nor does it concern any aspect of the merits of the development, which are extraneous to the questions in the appeal.”
When it approved the mine extension, the Planning Commission of NSW acknowledged the mining of coal and its combustion was a major contributor to anthropogenic climate change, which had the potential to impact future generations. It acknowledged that although the project’s Scope 3 emissions would contribute to anthropogenic climate change, these were appropriately regulated and accounted for through broader national policies and international agreements (such as the Paris Agreement).
But the High Court found the commission had failed to consider whether to impose conditions to minimise to the greatest extent practicable Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions, which constituted 98 per cent of the project’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
The High Court said there was no basis upon which it may be inferred the commission considered that issue as it was expected to do.
But the High Court made it clear it was not undertaking any form of merits review on the bigger questions of Scope 3 emissions or climate impact.
“The court cannot and does not address what follows from the requirement for the commission to consider whether to impose conditions to minimise to the greatest extent practicable greenhouse gas emissions of the development, including Scope 3 emissions, and what conditions, if any, might be imposed,” the judgment said.
The bigger question about whether Scope 3 emissions had an impact in the area the coal was mined was not considered by the High Court. “Given the conclusions reached above, it is neither necessary nor appropriate to address this issue,” it said.

Credit where full credit will be due in due course when the planet goes down the tubes ...

The pond rarely visits the hive mind, but this day, thanks to Lloydie, Amazon saviour, it was ablaze with indignation ...

On and on they rabbited ... and how could the pond resist another sample? There'll be zillions more - the hive mind is strong - as the madness never ends ...

What could possibly go wrong?

With that done and dusted, the pond could turn its attention to other reptiles, with the swishing Switzer briefly at the top of the far right digital edition, ma ...

The header: By Tom Switzer
Why voters must be told a harsh truth about public spending

Another chance to be pleasured by a bot voice: Listen to this article
5 min

A splendid snap of a dour Jimbo, ravager and ruiner of the hive mind: Jim Chalmers shouldn’t take all the blame for cost-of-living pressures. Picture: Nikki Short

Surrender all to the G machine: Make us preferred on Google

That backhanded header was just a troll. Of course the swishing Switzer was going to join in the relentless whacking of Jimbo, a 24/7 lizard Oz jihad ...

Jim Chalmers has rightly attracted criticism for policies that have added to Australia’s cost-of-living pressures. There is now growing speculation, amid reports of tensions within Labor, that his position as Treasurer may be under threat.
For a government that is already struggling with its economic credibility, Chalmers has become something of a liability. Most Australians would be glad to see him shafted.
But the hostility towards Chalmers and Labor should not obscure a larger and more uncomfortable truth: politicians are responding to an electorate that has come to expect governments to cushion almost every economic pain with taxpayers’ money.
Nothing illustrated this better than a Newspoll published on the eve of the 2025 federal election. On March 10, the poll found that 83 per cent of Australians supported more government spending to help with cost-of-living pressures, against just 12 per cent who disagreed.
Voters were not merely saying governments should protect the most vulnerable. They were endorsing higher government spending as a general response to the rising cost of living. The partisan breakdown makes it even harder to portray this as simply a Labor problem. Ninety-two per cent of Labor voters supported more government spending; so did 77 per cent of Coalition voters.
Small wonder, then, that both major parties entered the 2025 election campaign with substantial spending commitments. Their promises ran into billions of dollars across health, housing, infrastructure and cost-of-living relief.

But then came some minor relief for Jimbo with a billy goat butt ...

But the problem here is not simply that politicians spend too much. It is that voters increasingly expect them to spend more – and politicians from both major parties have learned that resisting this demand can be politically hazardous.

The reptiles interrupted the billy goat with an image offering astonishing insights, and the pond awaits correspondent advice on what it exactly portended ...Voters want governments to ease cost-of-living pressures on basics like fuel … but there’s another price to pay. Picture: Getty Images

The swishing Switzer then provided his explanation, and in the process turned to Milt, reminding the pond that if Hayek is a little stale on the palate, there's always Milt ...

The result is that the inflation problem gets worse, putting upward pressure on interest rates, which in turn exacerbates cost of living pressures.
Of course, other forces help explain rising inflation: energy prices, the war in the Persian Gulf, global conditions, housing, wages, supply constraints, and a productivity drought.
But loose fiscal policy, which has been sadly a bipartisan enterprise, is the main culprit. When an economy is operating under capacity constraints, governments cannot keep adding to aggregate demand indefinitely without making the Reserve Bank’s job harder.
Voters have become participants in the fiscal problem. Our desire for relief from rising prices is entirely understandable. But collectively, voters can also demand policies that make the underlying problem harder to solve.
There is a broader intellectual failure here, too; in Canberra, and in public discourse generally. Who is prepared to tell Australians the truth about the trade-offs involved in government spending?
To find an answer, it is worth recalling a time when those trade-offs were made rather more explicit. One useful place to start is with Milton Friedman, the legendary monetarist and free marketeer, who was awarded the Nobel prize in economics 50 years ago this month.

Milt turned up in person to help with the analysis ...Milton Friedman had a relevant warning on inflation for Australians more than 50 years ago

That's exactly the sort of snap that inspires confidence in the analysis of the Miltdown man, and that inspired the swishing Switzer to a further burst of analysis.

Discipline! Whips and chains, and a jolly good lashing for all, except perhaps privileged reptiles and their preferred pets ...

Friedman had a particularly relevant warning for Australians. In April 1975, at the height of the Whitlam government’s stagflation crisis, he visited Australia as the guest of Sydney stockbroker Maurice Newman. Inflation had surged by 17 per cent during the previous year while economic growth had contracted by 1 per cent. These were very dark days – and Friedman was in no doubt about one of the reasons why.
The problem, he argued, was not simply that governments might spend too much. It was that voters could demand more government spending while resisting the taxes required to pay for it.
“If the people of Australia wish the government sector to expand at the expense of the private sector,” Friedman said, “that is of course their right.” But if that was what Australians wanted, he argued, governments should make the cost explicit rather than allowing inflation to become a hidden tax.
Friedman went further. “The great defect in much of our policies in my country and yours,” he said, “is not because bad people want to do bad things … it’s good people who want to do good things, who produce harm by accepting what is a fallacious principle – namely, that you can do good by spending somebody else’s money.”
There could hardly be a more pertinent warning for today’s debate.
The responsibility for fiscal discipline does not rest with just politicians like Chalmers. Governments respond to the demands placed upon them by voters. If we want governments to spend more whenever living costs rise, politicians will inevitably compete to oblige them.
But there is no magic pudding. The money must come from somewhere. It can come through higher taxes, larger public debt or – when monetary policy responds to inflationary pressures – higher interest rates.
The uncomfortable truth is that a government cannot permanently spend its way out of a cost-of-living crisis. Nor can voters demand ever more government assistance while imagining that the cost will somehow be borne by somebody else.

Tom Switzer is presenter of the Switzerland YouTube podcast and a former executive director of the Centre for independent Studies.

As well as that tag, the reptiles offered another credit ...

All bow to the Switzer, ready to tackle the world today with an attack of the Goughs.

What else? There was a certain Thrupp pulsating with alarm ...

UK needs global vision … not a return to Europe
A decade after Britain voted to leave the EU, Prime Minister Andy Burnham has indicated he will hand Europhiles the chance to reverse the democratic verdict of 2016.
By Jake Thrupp ...

The pond had to personally save it to the intermittent archive, because global vision!

You know, the bright new global vision offered by mad King Donald ... Trump warns US-UK trade deal ‘can always be changed’ with relations in ‘sad state’; President says he gave Britain ‘better deal than I had to’ but ally was ‘not there when we needed them’ on Iran

And then there's the global vision offered by China, India, and Vlad the sociopath's Russia. Or maybe Canada? Anything and anybody other than those debilitating, devious Europeans.

The pond would rather read a cracking Crace... All hail the Death Kult of Kemi – captain, coach and owner of the Conservatives

There was just time for Kemi to pay tribute to Jeffrey Archer – the Tories have a soft spot for a convicted conman who ruined several lives – and then came the extended standing ovations. An echo chamber is going to echo.

Ah Jeffrey, we'll not see his like again anytime soon. Oh wait, there's conman Donald on stage ...

The pond should also note that the Australian Daily Zionist News was still running hot ...

OCTOBER 7 ANNIVERSARY
Three years on, one devastating reality … activists are still ‘siding with Hamas’
Pro-Palestine activists refused to let Australia’s Jewish community have the day to themselves to honour the 1200 victims, mounting ugly protests in Sydney and Melbourne.
By Lachlan Leeming, Will Seitam and Aris Schuler-Shah

And what about the 74k plus Palestinians dead, Gaza demolished and the ethnic cleansing that continues apace? Is noting that devastating reality "siding with Hamas"?

Cue a balancing Haaretz read ...

Three Years After October 7, Three Decades of Broken Promises
October 7 forces us to ask what kind of Israel can exist. The answer, however much Israelis deny it, depends on Palestinians being able to exist too (*intermittent archive link)

David Issacharoff
On October 7, Benjamin Netanyahu promised Israelis peace with the Palestinians.
The year was 1996. Netanyahu was in his 40s, months into his first term as prime minister. Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated less than a year earlier for pursuing peace through the Oslo Accords. That year alone, terror bombings on buses and at shopping malls inside Israel had killed 76 people. Israel was not yet 50, the occupation not yet 30. I just turned one year old.
"We truly want peace and will always want peace. We are not enemies of the Arab nation, nor of the Palestinians, nor of Islam," Netanyahu told the Knesset, calling negotiations for a permanent agreement "the principal task before us."
He was no dove. But even as he warned against Oslo and Palestinian leaders, he said: "Most of the public wants, as we do, to see the Palestinians living and prospering alongside us."
Exactly 27 years later, Netanyahu was again prime minister when Israelis woke to the worst day in their country's history. Some 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led massacre – in their homes, at a music festival. Whole families erased. Hundreds abducted.
That evening, he promised to "strike them mercilessly and exact a powerful revenge," vowing to turn Hamas' hiding places in the "city of evil" into "ruins."
That time, he kept his promise. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed in Gaza.
On that October day at the Knesset in 1996, Shimon Peres had challenged the man who defeated him in the election to turn his "nice and poetic" words about peace into action.
"War exacts a heavy price, and so does peace," Peres told the Knesset. "But if we want to give the next generation a world without war, our generation must bear the agonies of war and make real decisions."
I am part of the generation those leaders promised to spare from war. My adult life is still being defined by it.
A deep and dark abyss separates the Israel of 1996 from the Israel of 2026, with 2023 as the lowest point between them. Its leaders no longer debate how to turn peace from words into action. They agree not even to utter the word. Most Israelis do not challenge this.
What is harder and more painful is to think about the wasted years and the blood spilled along the way. Peace lies buried in the graves of the families murdered on October 7, under Gaza's rubble and beneath decades of broken promises. Promises that have become so unrealistic and unpopular that they ceased to be made at all.
October 7 tested, and continues to test, Israel's viability. Netanyahu invoked an existential threat to conceal his unforgivable failure and justify his war of destruction. Yet Israel demonstrated that its power as a Jewish state faces no existential threat. That power has itself become the threat.
The path to and from October 7 demands that we ask what kind of existence is possible in Israel. It depends, however much Israelis deny it, on Palestinians' ability to exist too.

Well yes, just don't expect them to exist in the lizard Oz hive mind ...

And while on the topic of alternative reads to the lizard Oz, this recently turned up in The New Yorker ...

The Battle for the Post-Trump Right
For decades, the Heritage Foundation was a conservative powerhouse. Can it stay relevant in the influencer age? (*intermittent archive link)
By Emma Green

Green attempted to discern the future for GOPsters:

A group of neatly dressed young people gathered in the auditorium of the Heritage Foundation headquarters this summer to observe the cherished rituals of the D.C. internship. Most of the girls had long skirts and updos; the boys wore suits that didn’t quite fit—still trying Washington on for size. From a low stage, Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, bantered with them about the constants of D.C. life: their softball team, the ice-cream social scheduled for that afternoon. Then he launched into a professorial discourse about the nature of conservatism. The interns scribbled intently in Heritage notebooks, branded with the Liberty Bell.
For decades, a very specific kind of right-wing kid has dreamed about working at Heritage. “I would look at the building in awe,” a former member of the management team told me. The organization has an annual budget of about a hundred million dollars, and more than four hundred million in reserves. Its properties take up an entire city block on the Senate side of the Capitol. Heritage is the undisputed giant of the conservative-think-tank world—less a tank than an aircraft carrier.
When Roberts took over as leader, five years ago, he was eager to adopt an aggressive posture. Suddenly, managers were speaking in sports metaphors (We’re going to move the football!) or martial ones (We’re here to do battle!). A longtime Heritage scholar named Mike Gonzalez told me, earnestly, “What I say about Kevin—it’s kind of like watching ‘Braveheart’ every morning.”
Roberts is tall and bald, with the permanently gregarious manner of someone who, in another life, could have been a politician. Several people described him to me as a man’s man: he drives a black diesel pickup and wears cowboy boots to formal functions. When the Guardian reported old allegations that he had killed a neighbor’s noisy dog, he took to making jokes about knowing how to use a shovel (though he denies killing the dog). He is skilled at selling Heritage to donors, and also at cultivating right-wing staffers in Washington. Lately, however, the latter crowd has been causing him trouble.
As one former Heritage executive put it, the young people who came to D.C. used to be the good kids—teachers’ pets, class presidents, suck-ups. Now the right-wing dreamers deride their elders as “Reagan Zombies” and “BoomerCons.” They’re sick of the establishment program of forever wars and free trade, open borders and kowtowing to China. Their movement—known as the New Right, or sometimes as the Realignment—is virulently antiwar, eager for mass deportations, and less interested in lowering corporate taxes than in helping families afford houses and cars and kids. “It’s Elizabeth Warren in the streets, economic nationalism and strong Christianity in the sheets,” one D.C. think-tanker told me. The kids these days don’t watch Hannity; they follow Tucker, or maybe Nick Fuentes, the young white nationalist who mocks women and calls Hitler “cool.” “Everyone in the mainstream on the right is puzzled about what to do about the angry young men,” a former Heritage scholar told me. “It creates nasty fractures in the coalition.”

What a relief. Nazis 'R Us!

And Parker Molloy, who's been going through a hard time of late, offered this reminder of mad King Donald's triumphant rise to power on the back of pussy groping ...

The "Access Hollywood Tape," 10 Years Later; A decade under Trump's influence

Pussy grope on reptiles, it's the seemly way forward for Nazi loving GOPsters, and evangelical Xians ...

Cowards all, and what a craven Hall of Shame, and the pond was reminded that there's always a new word to learn every day ...

A little more than four years later, Trump would once again find his political fate in the hands of the Republican Party after he tried and failed to carry out an autogolpe. Twice, the party had the opportunity to end Trump’s reign. Twice, it failed to do so, condemning and then welcoming him back with open arms.

Autogolpe?

First recorded in 1970–75; from Spanish auto- auto- 1 ( def. ) + golpe “a hit” (from Latin colaphus, from Greek kólaphos ); cf. coup

Sometimes the pond thinks that attending to herpetology studies sees a ten point drop in brain power each day, such that the pond's IQ is now somewhere about -129.

And so to the immortal Rowe, still mired in the beefy boofhead's fight for a decent chup ...

Speaking of autogolpes, it's way past time for another one ...

So many irritating reptiles, so little time, with the bromancer going white Xian nationalist the final straw ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 21:13:23 +0000

Wednesday is the day that the pond usually shuns the MAGA cap-donning Dame Slap, and there was nothing in this day's serve of bile that saw any need to change the ritual.

If the intermittent archive hadn't been working, maybe the pond might have reacted differently to the predictable outing, but a serve of transphobia? Forget it ...

COMMENTARY by JANET ALBRECHTSEN
‘Has-been’ leaders Gillard, Ardern revive the politics of the past
Ex-leaders remind us why they’re ‘has-beens’
It’s the same old lecture. Julia Gillard is championing pregnant women’s rights at the pre-COP31 conference – but her own laws erased the legal definition of women.

A has been or more to the point, a never was, instead playing the role of a screeching harridan on a weekly basis, dismissing other women as has beens?

Forget it Jake, the pond has a limited to

lerance for bitchiness.

If you want an interesting read about a TG woman, why not try The New Yorker?

A Self-Made Woman
My cousin Laura had a diva’s charisma and a siren’s voice. She also had a mysterious past. (*intermittent archive link)
By Judith Thurman

The reptiles later downgraded Dame Slap and made her an adjunct to their "climate change" story ...compleat with a snap of Gillard caught in a "funny" leer:

CLIMATE CHANGE
PM’s optimism over evidence: nation ‘will hit 2030 target’ and Pre-COP was no flop
Anthony Albanese is confident Australia will meet its 82 per cent renewable energy target by 2030, despite modelling showing the nation could fall nearly 30 per cent short.
By Elizabeth Pike, Rosie Lewis and Noah Yim

Why should the reptiles care?

After years of denying its existence, they dare to talk about this thing they dare to call "climate change"?

Shouldn't they be celebrating Albo's failure, because what's the point doing anything about something that's not happening?

Thank the long absent lord that Golding is back to bolster the feeble 'toon coverage in the Nine rags...

The pond also quickly passed on the latest, inevitable offering from the Australian Daily Zionist News.

How a compromised Australia has failed its Jewish community
Compromised nation has failed Jewish community
The country that once prided itself on multicultural tolerance has watched antisemitism surge unchecked for three years since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.
By Paul Kelly Editor-at-Large

Will "Ned" ever scribble a piece titled "How a compromised Murdochian press has failed in the duty of writing about a major bout of ethnic cleansing as it unfolded before their eyes"? Likely not.

Stewie gloated...

Three years after October 7, Hamas, not Israel, in ruins
How the October 7 massacre backfired on Hamas
Hamas wanted to destroy Israel with the massacre in 2023. Today the terrorist group lies in ruins while Israel stands as the Middle East’s dominant superpower.
By Cameron Stewart
Chief International Correspondent

But wait, there was more, an upstart Yank turned up ...

EXCLUSIVE
US envoy says Albanese neglected antisemitism report
‘Deaf ears’: Trump appointee claims Albanese ‘neutered’ Jillian Segal before Bondi attack
A prominent appointee of US President Donald Trump has questioned apparent security failures before the Bondi massacre and says Anthony Albanese had a ‘deaf ear’ to antisemitism.
By James Dowling

You want deaf ears? No, the pond's not going to bite, and reference a piece about Benji's abject failures in relation to October 7th.

Instead, here's another alternative read, this ethnic cleansing piece from Haaretz ...

'Jerusalem Is Ours' Far-Right Minister Ben-Gvir Boasts of Demolishing Palestinian Homes in Election Video
Ben-Gvir touted the demolition as an 'act of governance' ahead of Israel's election, while many Palestinians report difficulties in obtaining proper construction permits in the contested area (*intermittent archive link)

Where's the Australian Daily Zionist News when it matters?

The pond had very little tolerance this day for the reptiles.

Every heading was a frontal assault.

The only form of coverage of Aboriginal Australia ever seen in the hive mind is undiluted negativity and so it was again...

Indigenous solution to child safety crisis left to gather dust
A landmark plan co-designed with Aboriginal communities to protect WA’s most vulnerable children has sat ignored on a government shelf for three years.
By Catherine Liddle

If scribbling for the lizard Oz is the solution, someone forgot the problem...

And then there was the topic de jour, featuring an assortment of fatuous offerings, with Brownie leading the way ...

COALITION POLICY
Taylor on economic tightrope as business baulks at migration pitch
Business leaders have warned Angus Taylor’s plan to slash net overseas migration by two-thirds risks significant economic damage and worsening Australia’s skills shortage.
By Greg Brown

The pond offers the first couple of gobbets because the intermittent archive seemed to have trouble with the layout ...

That was the prelude to the alleged "vision" - the pond uses the word loosely to evoke the beefy boofhead in craven, cowering pose, tugging his forelock to the fake ranga ...

Here's the crunch bit in the Brownie outing ...

...Business leaders were unconvinced by Mr Taylor’s claim his plan would bolster economic growth through a higher focus on skills. Business Council of Australia chief executive Bran Black said the Coalition’s plan to bring the NOM to a low not seen since 2004 “could risk a significant hit to the economy and workforce”.
“The significant reduction in net overseas migration to 100,000 will very likely risk Australia’s economic growth and stop businesses across the economy accessing the workers they need,” Mr Black said. “There are many unanswered questions as to how a cut of 650,000 temporary visas will be achieved without creating economic damage.”
Mr Black said political parties should “avoid a race to the bottom based on an arbitrary migration figure that could hurt Australia’s economy while worsening the skills shortage”.
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Andrew McKellar said the “scale of these cuts will hurt our economy”, also urging a reset of the political debate on migration.
“Business rejects the false binary that Australia must choose either fewer migrants with higher skills or more migrants with lower skills,” Mr McKellar said.
Property Council of Australia chief executive Mike Zorbas said it would “tip a big bucket of cold water over businesses across Australia”. “Just when the Albanese government was busy proving they were best placed to tax the life out of investment in housing supply over the next year, along comes this flat tyre of a policy,” Mr Zorbas said. “That Australia needs a migration system we can rely on, and that faith in the system has deteriorated, agreed.
“But this limbo-dancing under One Nation’s migration bar will end in tears.”
Universities Australia chief executive Luke Sheehy said the policy would lead to a “significant reduction” in international students at a time of skills shortages.
“Restricting post-study work rights also risks making Australia less competitive for talented students and graduates at precisely the time we need more skilled people contributing to our economy,” he said.

Well yes, he's just a simpering coward ...

...but why should the reptiles care? The beefy boofhead has just promised to enact what various reptiles have been endlessly clamouring for, with Dame Groan leading the charge ...

Sure enough there was the bromancer playing little Sir Echo ...

By Greg Sheridan
Migration is booming – but creating an underclass

While the pond ensured he had a place in the intermittent archive, the bromancer is worth contemplating, if only for the way he wrapped up his offering.

First there was a bit of navel gazing of the first water ...

The pond's first flush of nausea came with that invocation of a tyke scribbler in a billy goat butt ...

But the opposition is trying to reassert, and re-establish, the traditional nature of Australian society, not its ethnic nature, but its civic, social and economic nature.

It is taking radical action to preserve a longstanding social good, reminiscent of Chesterton’s conservative insight; for a fence post to stay the same, it needs to be constantly repainted.

Several key figures underlie the opposition’s policy impulse. One in 10 of Australia’s 28 million people is on a temporary visa. Three years ago, for every eight Australian workers, there was one on a temporary visa. Now, for every six Australian workers, there is one on a temporary visa.

It's a "policy impulse"?

Is that what they're calling a pathetic, shameless, desperately needy attempt to cut off the fake ranga at the pass?

But the real bout of nausea came with the billy goat butt which began the second paragraph in the bromancer's closing gobbet ...

...When the Australian colonies first federated in 1901, one of the first laws they passed was in support of the White Australia policy. The racial elements of that law were offensive. Australia has rightly had a racially non-discriminatory immigration policy for more than half a century, and we are now one of the most diverse societies on Earth, with one of the highest percentages of foreign-born residents and citizens.
But underneath the racially offensive elements of the old White Australia policy was a dynamic commitment to social egalitarianism. Australia’s founders were determined that there should be no permanent underclass in Australia, that everybody who could work should work, and that every family should enjoy a living wage.
That remains a very good social ideal. Immigration policy should support that ideal. So many visa categories in Australia now lack integrity. The higher education sector is built on access not to education but to visas. The Australian welfare system is so generous that it is a huge magnet, whereas the much more socially beneficial magnet is one of economic opportunity and civic inclusion through the unifying power of citizenship.
It’s also perfectly reasonable to slow immigration down for a while. I remain a very strong supporter of a big Australia built in part on immigration. Immigration has been overwhelmingly beneficial to Australia, but the program certainly got too big in recent years. Immigration is sometimes like a boa constrictor swallowing a cow. A big intake needs a bit of time to digest.
Slow down a bit, redesign the program towards skills and citizenship, radically reduce the guest-worker economy. The details may need work, but these are good policy principles.

He's finding virtue in the White Australia policy?

By golly, a devout white Xian nationalist of the basest kind couldn't have put it better, with a dash of Chesterton here and a flash of bigotry there ...

And then came the lizard Oz editorialist, acting as an echo to the bromancer's Little Sir Echo ...

Bigotry is suddenly dressed up as an "economically rational stand", even as the reptiles report the discontent provoked in business circles?

Thank the long absent lord for the immortal Rowe ...

And then as a final slap in the face, as the reptiles and the beefy boofhead bow down to the bigotry and stupidity of the fake ranga, a certain Henry had the cheek to offer this ... and not even the ritual uncredited collage of Jimbo in triptych form could appease the pond ...

ECONOMICS
‘Good while it lasted’: Deloitte calls time on Australia’s golden era
Deloitte has again downgraded its economic growth forecasts for Australia, as consumer confidence cratered to its lowest level in three decades following the latest interest rate rise.
By Thomas Henry

A 30 year golden era?

Life under the onion muncher, Malware and the liar from the Shire was a golden era?

So it seems...

Warning that the “king tide” of structural changes and “cyclically serendipitous” property and construction booms responsible for bolstering growth for more than 30 years could not carry Australia through its next economic era, Deloitte economists declared supply-side reforms were “no longer optional”.
“It was good while it lasted,” Deloitte partner Stephen Smith said.

2008 was good while it lasted? That little dust-up happening to happen within the said 30 years, followed by a series of singularly incompetent leaders...

The contempt that the pond has for the likes of Deloitte could occupy a tome the length of the bible ...

They can go preach their "golden era" tosh to suckers willing to take the bait.

Even a comedy piece couldn't temper the pond's irritation ... not even the deploying of a chook ...

But if anyone feels the need to head down the rabbit hole with the mad King ...

HEATED DEBATE
Why daylight saving rules the roost
As regular as clockwork, here comes another fight about the health of daylight saving. But this time it’s political – and Donald Trump is picking a side.
By Matthew Condon

Bah humbug to the lot of them ...

And so to a real dilemma. The reptiles had dropped AI like a hot potato, what with the rag being all in on AI in house, so the pond had no way to segue to this day's infallible Pope on the subject.

What the heck, the pond will do it live anyway ...

Speaking of AI, with the pond wondering how The Daily Show mob (and John Oliver for that matter, dissing the US Security Service this week in fine bounding dog style), will last under the wretched mega-merger, the final straw in the move of the US to gigantic monopolies, there came this ...

The Zionist bromancer shunned? Fear not, the Caterist and Dame Groan step into the breach ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:50:45 +0000

The reptiles never-ending jihad against - or relentless, morbid, never-ending fascination with - comrade Dan reached a new peak early this morning ...

It was all there, glowering photo, and Liam Menzies, "reporter-at-large", doing Amazing Investigative Journalism in his own lunchtime, and luckily that's what the intermittent archive is for ...

Daniel Andrews living in luxury Mornington Peninsula home owned by Labor donor

When did Andrews resign?

27th September 2023, and yet here the reptiles are, feeding One Nation's chant of "lock him up", a call too rich even for the dog botherer.

Of all the things in the world requiring the pond's attention, the location and lifestyle of comrade Dan ranks at the very bottom.

How bad is it getting in the spineless stakes of feeding the fake died hair ranga monster?

Another beefy boofhead job for the intermittent archive, with the note that we've seen this ICE show elsewhere ...

Angus Taylor turns to much lower migration target to fend off Pauline Hanson’s net negative plan

He's such a needlessly fawning chump, with the spine of a jellyfish.

And then came even more work for the intermittent archive.

The pond decided to consign the bromancer to that distant cornfield, and personally arranged a listing ...

Antisemitism is a reminder of left’s distorted world view

This was a painful step for the pond, what with the bromancer being a perennial favourite, but the pond is well over all offerings from the Australian Daily Zionist News and the relentless refusal to acknowledge or track the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon.

The pond didn't even have enough enthusiasm to turn to Haaretz for a balancing story, but will offer a teaser trailer... spoiler alert, it's just a serve of the bog standard, ritualised flood of rhetoric, tinged with a kind word for a different religious cult.

How the bromancer, and the reptiles in general, love cults, but then, being in the cult of the lizard Oz, why wouldn't they?

Roll on ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank, the bromancer's got your back.

But did this leave the pond short?

Fear not, there were old faithfuls, gushing like geysers ...

The header: By Nick Cater
Digital safety law risks overreach into censorship

The cry to listen to a bot: Listen to this article
6 min

The caption for the coupling which with extraordinary visual cleverness features logos and Grant: With social media in mind, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has been allowed extraordinary powers. Picture right: NewsWire

The plea for attention in the intertubes jungle: Make us preferred on Google

It might startle correspondents, but the pond has a little sympathy for the quarry whisperer in this outing, because it's the pond's considered opinion - no defamation intended - that Julie Inman Grant is barking mad, with many bees incessantly buzzing in her noggin. (The pond's partner's personal contacts with her informs this view).

The Caterist took to his task with the vigour of a man who knew which way water rolled:

There’s little evidence that parliament had a clue what it was doing when it passed the Enhancing Online Safety for Children Bill in 2015. Its scope was relatively narrow: our children against cyber-bullying, a modern phenomenon parliament unanimously agreed was a very bad thing.
After more than a decade of mission creep and two substantial legislative amendments, the eSafety Commission now faces a far more ambitious task: promoting “safer, more positive online experiences”.
The eSafety Commission’s architects were not blind to the risk of institutional overreach. In his second reading speech, minister Paul Fletcher explicitly warned against creating a regulatory system that was “excessive or heavy-handed”.

The reptiles dropped Fletch into the mix: Former communications minister Paul Fletcher warned against a system that was ‘excessive or heavy-handed’. Picture: Matthew Poon

The Caterist took up the Fletch cry, and as an anonymised blogger, was the pond the right candidate to stand in his way?

Yet for all its qualifying clauses and soothing rhetoric, this well-intentioned legislation contained the seeds of its own expansion. An agency with an $11m annual budget to tackle a well-defined problem has morphed into a $60m-a-year behemoth, with the ambitious goal of making the internet safe for everybody.
The “sock puppet” clause in the proposed Digital Duty of Care legislation would further expand the agency’s powers. The eSafety Commissioner would be granted unchecked authority to assume false or fictitious online identities. Effectively, the regulator would become a law unto itself, run by unelected officials accountable to parliament in only the loosest sense.
The original legislation set clear boundaries between the regulator’s role and the police. The proposed legislation busts the lines wide open, granting the commissioner the powers of investigator, judge and executioner.
These extraordinary powers are granted, apparently, to protect our “safety”, one of the most elastic words in the political lexicon. Nobody can reasonably declare themselves against it, which makes it a potent justification for state power.
A positive online experience can be anything the commissioner decides it should be. Negative online experiences, on the other hand, are anything the commissioner decides we should be protected against. The danger lies not merely in the extraordinary powers parliament is being asked to give the eSafety Commissioner, but in the boundless remit within which they might be used.

Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant compares Digital Duty of Care to seatbelt legislation in the 1970s.
“The car industry pushed back,” she said. “But Australia stayed the course.” Yet a product safety regulation with a clear engineering solution differs from regulating the flow of information. A law that insists you buckle up to protect against the consequences of a crash differs greatly from a law that tells you where you may drive.

There came another reminder of the subject of the flood water-whisperer's ire ... Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant compares Digital Duty of Care to seatbelt legislation in the 1970s. Picture: NewsWire/ Tertius Pickard

The quarry whisperer, aroused by the sighting, embarked on a lengthy final rant:

Naturally, the commission’s expanded role requires hiring more staff. The commission’s headcount has almost doubled since Labor entered office, from 116 in 2022 to 222 in 2024-25.
If parliament agrees to the proposed expansion of power, we can expect the number to rise further.
Few would challenge police investigators’ right to adopt a false identity to investigate potential criminal behaviour, provided appropriate checks and balances are in place.

When federal police assume a false identity under Part IAC of the Crimes Act, each identity requires a separate written authority. Its use must be recorded, periodically reviewed, and audited at least every six months, with the number of identities and their use ultimately reported to parliament.
Under the government’s eSafety draft, the commissioner requires no outside authorisation to create a sock puppet. The legislation requires no register of the identities, no audit and no reporting to parliament on how many have been deployed. There is no restriction on numbers. The commissioner, or anyone to whom the powers are delegated, could create as many sock puppets as they wish.
A police officer who misuses false identities commits an offence punishable by up to two years in prison. A sock puppeteer authorised by the commissioner need only show they acted “in good faith” to gain immunity from civil action or any other proceeding.
Grant’s second five-year term expires next year, presenting an opportunity to pose the question parliament has conspicuously failed to ask: Why do we need an eSafety commissioner at all?
That is not to say criminal activity committed online should be unpunished. Yet fraud, intimidation or the distribution of intimate images without consent are matters best left to the police. Unlawful behaviour wherever it occurs should be dealt with by the courts, where the rules of evidence and rights to appeal are established by common law, not an unaccountable bureaucracy.
Parliament is perfectly capable of updating the criminal law when technology creates new ways of committing old offences.
Beyond that point, however, we have every reason to be nervous about outsourcing responsibility for our wellbeing to the state.
The draft bill has no trouble defining serious harms: child sexual exploitation, grooming, incitement to extreme or sexual violence, suicide and self-harm, terrorism and criminal offending.
Yet it is less clear on the content that might be described as lawful but awful, material that might be offensive or morally repugnant to many but may reasonably deserve protection under the principle of free speech. Other jurisdictions have wrestled with this challenge, to which there is no obvious answer. Yet leaving it to the discretion of the minister of the day through the power of legislative instrument, as the draft legislation does, is hardly a satisfactory solution.
Adults can decide for themselves what they wish to read, watch and hear. Parents should have the principal responsibility for deciding what their children encounter.
Technology companies should be encouraged to develop so-called “middleware”: filters, parental controls, blocking tools, privacy settings and third-party software for organising feeds. If popular concern about online safety is as widespread as the government seems to think, market demand will be strong.
The Digital Duty of Care bill has served an important purpose by demonstrating that top-down regulation of digital content is impractical and dystopian. Better to take our chances with the occasional online bully, crank or fanatic than with a state that claims the power to protect us from them all.

Only one note.

There was a link at the start of that last paragraph, and for a fleeting moment, the pond's heart leapt.

Had the reptiles actually provided a link to the outside world? Would the hive mind be taken to the actual Digital Duty of Care bill?

Fear not, it was just a link to petulant Peta ... Labor’s duty of care is really all about duty of control

Sheesh, must the pond fall into line with petulant Peta too? No way ...

For the actual bill, go here ...

That note? The reptiles are constantly pleading for Google's attention.

Never mind the debilitating paywall, if they insist on carrying on like a religious cult of the Amish kind, shunning the world, staying inside the hive mind, why should anyone care?

And now credit where no credit is due:

The pond had to quickly step past Fergo, doing his best to maintain the lizard Oz climate science denialist rage ...

Forget Bowen’s pre-COP ‘A-team’ … this mob’s an F-team
Chris Bowen promised to bring the world to the Pacific for pre-COP. But the speakers in Fiji and Tuvalu look more like the Melbourne Writers Festival than the G20.
By Richard Ferguson
Canberra bureau chief

Writers? At a Writers' Festival?

As the real header made clear, it was bloody interfering womyn that were the problem:

Julia Gillard, Jacinda Ardern? Chris Bowen’s set-list of speakers for pre-COP is not up to scratch

How could those useless harpies, those irrelevant harridans, compete with the infinite wisdom of Fergo and the lizards of Oz?

Here, have more of a 'toon break, have an immortal Rowe celebrating a sojourn with a womyn:

And speaking of womyn, the pond turned with salivating expectation to the treat of the day, a serve of the Groaning ... (closely related to the Shining):

The header: Commentary
By Judith Sloan
Bragging rights to relatively low government debt are all Costello’s; Labor has made it worse

The plea to listen to a bot: Listen to this article
7 min

The caption for the opening snap of Petey boy looking stern and Jimbo looking bewildered: Peter Costello must wonder why he bothered; Jim Chalmers thought he had all the answers when he claimed he could reinvent capitalism. Pictures: News 24

The plea for relevance: Make us preferred on Google

The pond must begin by confessing disappointment.

Sure the pond did the usual build up, and attempted to lather up the crowd, but it was a bit like the way the mad King has seen falling crowd numbers and a marked lack of enthusiasm in his recent speechifying.

This was just a bog standard rant about why everything was wrong, grist for the lizard Oz mill, but unexceptional stuff for Dame Groan ...

On the upside, the pond could avoid notes, and end it quickly so it could get on with a serve of Weet-Bix ...

There must be days when former treasurer Peter Costello wonders why he bothered. Why repair the budget and deliver 10 surpluses? Why rein in government debt, pay it off and leave a legacy of negative net debt?
He must even wonder why he established the Future Fund, given the threats to this sovereign wealth fund that have emerged since the Albanese Labor government was elected.
When the current Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, brags about Australia’s relatively low government debt by international standards, Costello must surely be choking on his Weet-Bix. Look at the figures – it was all Costello; Labor has made it worse.
When Costello became our top money man, Australian government net debt stood at $96bn or 18 per cent of GDP. When the Howard government was voted out in 2007, net debt was minus $40bn or minus 3.4 per cent of GDP. It was a tour de force that was never supported by the Labor opposition.

Naturally Jimbo was the least of this trio. Just look at his hand-waving and the supercilious grin on his mugwump face. No wonder the hive mind cowered in fear ... Jim Chalmers’ changes to the Future Fund were denounced as 'fiscal vandalism' by John Howard and creating 'a political slush fund' by Peter Costello.

Dame Groan was starry-eyed about Petey "have a spawn for me" Boy, and way down on Jimbo, but the chanting of "we'll all be rooned" exceeded even Hanrahan's expectations ...

Costello also introduced the Charter of Budget Honesty that ensures that newly elected governments are no longer surprised by dishonest financial statements issued by displaced administrations. The Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook has improved the quality of election campaigning – all parties are working off the same figures; it is a model that has been copied by the states.
(Mind you, the quality of all PEFOs is not the same. The one issued for the 2022 election was a shocker, forecasting a budget deficit for 2021-22 of $80bn when the actual figure was a deficit of $32bn, for example. The Albanese government has attempted to feast on this rotting carcass ever since it has been in office.)
The Intergenerational Report also emerged from the Charter of Budget Honesty. To be released every five years – Labor has shortened this interval for political reasons – the aim of the exercise is to look at the budgetary pressures likely to emerge over the next 40 years.
Costello never saw the IGR as a bragging exercise, but rather as a means of imposing fiscal restraint to ensure future pressures on the budget could be headed off at the pass. It was never a reflection of his “meanness” but rather his strong ethical position that it is inherently unfair for the current generation to rack up debt for future generations to pay off.
Let’s not forget that vocal advocacy for some of the government’s biggest current programs was around in Costello’s day – think here the NDIS, the Gonski school-funding model and the like. His firm response was “no”, followed by the obvious point that funding for disability, education and many other matters rests with the states.

The pond has noted before the tendency to feature Albo and Jimbo in gloomy postures, but the thumb snap for this AV distraction outdoes Pravda in its hey day, what with Albo looking befuddled and bemused, and some unhappy warrior lurking behind, hands on head. Jimbo, is that you?

Next video thumbnail
Support for Albanese and Chalmers collapses in wake of rate hike
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers' popularity has taken a hit in the wake of last week's interest rate decision.

Between ecstasy and despair is a thin line, and after the exaltation of Petey Boy came an even fuller flowering of "we'll all be rooned", possibly by Xmas ...

So, what has been Costello’s legacy? Nearly two decades later, net government debt stands above $600bn, with gross debt hovering around the trillion-dollar mark. As a percentage of GDP, our federal government position – we shouldn’t forget state government debt, however – is still low by the standards of advanced economies.
But the point here is that this outcome has nothing to do with the efforts of Labor governments. The Rudd/Swan duo spent up big during the Global Financial Crisis (2009 to 2012), adding to the debt. The four budget surpluses that Swan announced came to nothing. During the pandemic, Labor supported even more spending than the Coalition government splashed to deal with the situation.
Since assuming office in 2022, Labor has thrown out the fiscal rule book. Chalmers refuses to set out a strict set of numerical fiscal rules – even his former boss, Wayne Swan, had rules, though he failed to meet them. Sound fiscal rules could have ensured that the budget would currently be in surplus, an outcome recommended by important luminaries such as former Reserve Bank governor, Phil Lowe, and former treasury secretary, Martin Parkinson.
Chalmers also declined to impose a global tax cap on the budget. According to his thinking, “we’re not attracted to the government’s tax cap, and the reason we’re not attracted to it is because it seems to us like quite an arbitrary cap imposed for political reasons rather than good economic reasons.” The Coalition’s cap of 23.9 per cent has now been exceeded under Labor and it is still running a budget deficit!
Prior to Covid, government payments were under a quarter of GDP. This financial year, they are expected to come in at 26.8 per cent. This is a massive change, making the size of government larger than it has ever been outside war or a pandemic.
Annual government spending is now well over $800bn, having been less than $500bn before Covid. Government spending on the so-called “care economy” has risen by more than 50 per cent since the Albanese government was first elected.

The reptiles' choice of thumb illustrations is now beyond Pravda, almost comically Der Stürmer, with this AV distraction featuring a downcast Jimbo...so that the dog botherer could insert himself into Dame Groan's rant ...

Next video thumbnail
Chalmers called out for his ‘addiction to spending’ as Aussies prepare for a rate rise
Shadow Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Dan Tehan says Treasurer Jim Chalmers has an “addiction” to spending that is driving interest rates up. “Everything points to Jim Chalmers' addiction to spending,” Mr Tehan told News24 host Chris Kenny. “As for the Labor Party and Anthony Albanese’s concern, that spending is just going to continue. This is really going to hurt Australians at this time. “They’re struggling as it is. The last thing they need is another interest rate rise.”

Dame Groan joined Jimbo in being downcast in her final gobbet of gloom and despair...

Don’t believe the budget forecasts of future government spending: growth of 0.7 per cent in 2027-28 and 0.9 per cent in the next financial year. As the say, pigs might fly, even if there is some success in restraining the growth of spending on NDIS. Labelling NDIS spending by another name, Thriving Kids, doesn’t reduce aggregate spending necessarily.
As for the Prime Minister’s claim that the government has achieved $178bn of budget savings, some other animals are needed to join the pigs in the sky. He earnestly tells us that “every single economic statement that we have handed down has had savings”.
This is just arcane budget trickery that shouldn’t convince anyone. The most credible estimate of the net addition that Labor has made to the budget comes from economist Saul Eslake, who puts the figure at just above $100bn.
And don’t you just love a bit of budget “reprioritisation”? It’s like Kim Kardashian bragging that she bought the expensive black handbag rather than the tan one. It’s irrelevant to the budget bottom line.
As hard-pressed householders sit around the kitchen table figuring out how they are going to afford higher mortgage payments, higher fuel costs and higher expenses generally, they must wonder how we got to this point.
As a firm believer in big government, Chalmers thought he had all the answers when he claimed he could reinvent capitalism. What he didn’t count on was the persistence of inflation and the role that excessive government spending plays in that outcome.
The cost of government debt is about to escalate. He talks about boosting productivity but can only cite trivial measures while avoiding the main game – energy and industrial relations. We are stuck with sub-par economic growth and no way of escaping.
It seems a long time since Costello held the fiscal reins.

Cheer up Dame Groan, if the reptiles keep on going on this way, soon enough Pauline will be PM, and what good times we'll see then ...

As for the credit where no credit is due? Sorry, there wasn't one. For some reason, the reptiles cut the Dame Groan thumb ...

The pond had to look elsewhere in the lizard Oz to ensure that attention was paid ... she's not to be allowed to fall into her grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

Go team... and the pond might have featured this one before, but it seems a nice capper for the Groaning...

How many more loons could anyone want?

If His Lordship Alexander Downer and Major Mitchell bore you silly, there's always Noah's Ark ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 20:55:07 +0000

If anyone a few years ago had suggested the pond would open by quoting Bill Kristol quoting Eco, the pond would politely but firmly have suggested a psychiatric examination, yet here we are ...Not To Alarm You, But Trump’s Brain Is Melted And Hegseth’s neo-fascism is out in the open.

...I want to call on the novelist and critic, Umberto Eco, who provided one of the most helpful guides to this kind of politics in his great 1995 essay, “Ur-Fascism.” (*intermittent archive link)
Eco provides a list of certain key elements or features of Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. A couple of these are particularly relevant to the emanations of our secretary of defense: Irrationalism, and machismo.
Here’s Eco on irrationalism:

'Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism. . . . Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.”'

And it’s no accident, Eco further points out, that “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
And side-by-side with Hegseth’s embrace of irrationalism is his exaltation of machismo.
As Eco explains,

"Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise."

Eco makes clear that his essay was not intended as merely a historical or diagnostic enterprise. Eco wrote in order to warn that fascism is not a thing of the past. Fascism is a permanent human temptation. It speaks to certain human passions and exploits certain human weaknesses that are always there to potentially be activated.

Why open this way? What's Pete Kegsbreath, and the rest of mad King Donald's craven minions got to do with herpetology studies?

For some reason, not so ineluctable, the pond was reminded of the reptiles of the lizard Oz ...

And so to Lord Downer ...

The header: By Alexander Downer
Slick political machines are driving us nowhere

The promise of a bot voice: Listen to this article
7 min

The caption: Anthony Albanese and Victorian Premier Ben Carroll in West Footscray. Picture: NewsWire / Ian Currie

The pitiful plea for attention: Make us preferred on Google

Of all the fatuous topics by the most fatuous of politicians, why did Lord Downer decide to blather about "slick political machines"?

Is he just some innocent rustic from deep in the Adelaide hills? Or is he a comely slick dresser with no time for machines?

Whatever, one thing is sure. Lord Downer won't be taking the opportunity for some self-reflection and copious apologies for his past life as a failed politician ... Why the Iraq war was right (sssh, don't mention WMDs)...

Do begin, please do ...

Over the past two decades, politics has become more professional, but the same cannot be said of government. Politicians and their minders have become extraordinarily sophisticated at winning elections and rather less accomplished at doing anything worthwhile once they have won.

Political parties can identify swinging voters, discover their anxieties and deliver carefully tailored messages to their phones. They can test a slogan before breakfast and discard an unpopular policy before lunch. The machinery of persuasion has never been more impressive. But to what purpose?
Increasingly, the purpose is simply to acquire power and retain it. Improving the country is something to be considered afterwards, provided the focus groups approve. I doubt there is any retreat from these techniques; no party will abandon technology that might help it win.
But we should recognise what happens when research ceases to inform judgment and starts to replace it. We get government by perpetual opinion poll. We get populism. By populism, I mean the habit of telling people what they want to hear rather than explaining what they need to understand. Conviction becomes a liability. Difficult reform becomes an electoral risk. Leadership gives way to the endless recitation of reassuring platitudes.
Consider the politician who announces a listening tour. Really? With all that polling, research and social media monitoring, are we supposed to believe the party has no idea what people think? The listening tour is just a stunt. Perhaps the more useful expedition would be an explaining tour.
None of this is an argument against listening. It is an argument for exercising judgment afterwards. The public have jobs, families, mortgages and lives to lead. They cannot spend every evening studying budget papers or assessing infrastructure proposals. Representative government exists precisely because we elect people to undertake that work on our behalf. Their responsibility is to make sound decisions, explain difficult choices and sometimes resist popular demands. Otherwise, we might as well replace cabinet with a market research company.

Really? At this point the reptiles decided they'd provide the needed focus ...Workers on the tracks at the Tottenham Rail Yards after Anthony Albanese and Premier Ben Carroll announced the Airport Rail Link project. Picture: NewsWire / Jason South

That's it? There are much better examples whereof His Lordship speaks ...

At this point His Lordship veered off into croweater matters, as if what happens in Adelaide - oh Adelaide - is of earth-shattering relevance ...

Instead, voters are encouraged to believe that governments can provide ever more benefits, tax somebody else and borrow the difference indefinitely. The bill is always somebody else’s problem, preferably after the next election.
Infrastructure offers a particularly revealing example. Everybody likes a new road, a railway or a bypass. Politicians like them especially. There are announcements, photographs in fluorescent jackets and, eventually, ribbons to cut. The benefits are visible. The costs are more conveniently dispersed.
Take Adelaide’s South Road. The Torrens-to-Darlington project carries a price tag of $15.4bn. That is an enormous commitment. Now consider how such spending is presented. A state government can announce an operating surplus while borrowing heavily to build infrastructure. The construction cost is recorded as an asset, with depreciation charged over its useful life, rather than being treated immediately as an operating expense. That is conventional accounting. The political sleight of hand comes when an operating surplus is presented as proof that the government is living within its means, without comparable emphasis on its cash requirements and rising debt.
Nor should we confuse state operating balances with the commonwealth’s cash balance. Federal infrastructure grants generally affect its deficit when paid. The distinctions matter. But none of these accounting treatments makes the resources free. A road cannot pay the government’s interest bill merely because it appears on a balance sheet.

His Lordship desperately tried to extract a more universal juice from the parochialism:

The scale extends far beyond Adelaide. Infrastructure Australia’s 2025 assessment identified $242bn in major public infrastructure projects over five years. That is a pipeline, not an annual spending figure, but it illustrates the magnitude of the commitments being made. Borrowing for productive infrastructure can be justified. A well-chosen project may reduce transport costs, improve productivity and generate benefits for decades. The question is whether those benefits justify the costs, and whether building it now represents the best use of scarce resources. Popularity cannot answer either question.
There is another cost that rarely appears in the announcement: what cannot be built because government has commandeered the people and materials. Engineers, electricians, concrete suppliers and construction machinery are not available in unlimited quantities. Public projects compete with private investment and, where their requirements overlap, with housing construction.
When governments accelerate enormous building programs in a constrained market, they drive up wages and material prices, delay other projects and make new homes more expensive. Announcing a housing target does not conjure another electrician into existence.

Might not examples be culled from the time when His Lordship strutted the roost? Why only that ranga? Pauline Hanson at the One Nation campaign in Melbourne. Picture: NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui

She can't be blamed for recent cost rises, but there's no mention of who can be ...

There remained one final outburst from His Lordship, with a desperate attempt at economics, never his strongest suit ...

Of course, infrastructure spending is not the only cause of expensive housing. Planning restrictions, regulations, land availability and weak construction productivity matter too. Nor does every tunnelling worker become a house builder if a road project is postponed. But these qualifications do not abolish competition for resources. Governments should stop promising to build everything simultaneously and then claiming some war thousands of kilometres away is the cause of prices rising!
The Reserve Bank has highlighted renewed capacity pressures in construction. Politicians should take those constraints seriously before announcing the next grand scheme.
What is needed is a return to economic rationalism: rigorous assessment, realistic sequencing, transparent borrowing and the courage to defer projects that cannot justify their demands on the economy. The test of leadership is not whether a premier or prime minister can announce another project. It is whether they can explain why another worthy proposal must wait its turn for funding.
We also need leaders willing to explain that a project can be desirable without being affordable today. There is nothing heartless about setting priorities. The alternative is allowing inflation, higher taxes and debt servicing costs to chew up more of our resources. That’s what’s happening now.
Lionel Robbins famously placed scarcity and competing uses at the centre of economics. Politics does not suspend that reality. Winning an election does not increase the supply of skilled labour or repeal the cost of capital.
Australia needs politicians with convictions, including the conviction that prosperity must be earned through productivity and sensible choices. Let us make economic rationalism popular again.
Otherwise, the choices we refuse to make voluntarily may eventually be imposed by creditors and circumstances. That would be a miserable verdict on a political class so accomplished at winning power and so reluctant to use it responsibly.

As for the copious thumb career the reptiles provide for their contributors? This was the one accorded His Lordship. Alas and alack, here it is in full ... Alexander Downer Contributor

Have an immortal Rowe for making it this far, with Freedumb boy featuring ...

One of the revived joys of the pond's posting is that the intermittent archive has been restored,and so the pond can reference Mein Gott without going into him at great length.

Australian banks review their $2.58 trillion property exposure as falling values squeeze borrowers

All that's needed is a teaser trailer, and punters can decide if they think a visit to the cornfield is worthwhile ...

The pond must confess that it was only the opening, uncredited, likely AI art, that stirred the pond ...

Ditto Simpleton Simon ... Albanese not our most unpopular PM ... yet

This is the sort of simplistic time waster and Albo basher that the pond might match by proposing that Simpleton Simon is not the most unpopular lizard Oz scribbler ... yet ...

The presence of the liar from the shire reminded the pond that it's better not to look back ...

That clearing of the decks allowed room for the pond to cope with Major Mitchell ...

Michael Shellenberger?

A reminder of a couple of his achievements, per his wiki (links and references at the original):

On April 3, 2024, Shellenberger published the "Twitter Files – Brazil", resulting in a formal Congressional inquiry, and two Congressional hearings, at which Shellenberger testified.Investigative journalists subsequently highlighted multiple errors in Shellenberger's reporting. In September 2024, Shellenberger appeared with Bill Nye at an event entitled "Can Science Save the World?" hosted by New College of Florida. The event "seeks to advance civil discourse and engagement through facilitating events that foster open discussion and debate on relevant public policy issues."
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.

There's the Major again, always referencing the dubious, and while talking about payouts and corporate responsibility, must the pond go there again?

News Corp celebrates more than a decade of paying zero tax in Australia (possible paywall)

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.

To be fair, exceptionally keen Keane, they also like to foster panic, fear, and alarm on a daily basis ...and quote loons who like to put in a good word for Vlad the sociopathic invader ...

Here we go again. The pond is constantly irritated by the way that the reptiles plead for Google attention, and then resolutely refuse to stray outside the paywalled hive mind by providing a link.

If you want that link the pond is happy to oblige. If reading the both siderist NY Times is your thing, here you go ...

Humanity Has Avoided Apocalypse Before. Let’s Do It Again. (*intermittent archive link)

Heck, the pond will even throw in a teaser trailer. Could it be any worse than spending time with the Major?

Sigh, back to the Major ... (remembering that it was the feeble efforts of the NY Times and their like that helped produce mad King Donald's age of lead)

What, no link again? Must the pond do all the work?

Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.
In a series of private meetings, the company consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models — and make the case that Claude could be conscious.

That was saved to the intermittent archive under a different header:

Is Claude Conscious? Inside Anthropic’s Spiritual Quest

The pond doesn't give a toss what religious leaders think.

The pond's idea of fun is being off with loons determined to raise shekels by proposing they're about to discover Noah's Ark ...a riff that has sent Faux Noise and other Murdochians into a speculative frenzy ... and recorded with a simpering, credulous stupidity ...

At this point the pond realised it had managed to filibuster its way through the Major's piece ...

Is there an irony there, that eternal bagging of the full to overflowing intertubes, what with the reptiles now pleading in each column for Google relevance, and the pond being digital, and so too the lizard Oz, save for the very few luddites that still read the tree killer edition?

But why has productivity fallen? Surely at least one reason is that punters must waste time checking on the Major's sources, when having a cup of tea and a biscuit might be more productive.

Credit where no credit is due ...

And now to that better version of the infallible Pope's weekend cartoon, promised by the pond...

And for a bonus, a reminder of what the mendacious Minns mob has produced ...

Speaking of Noah's Ark, Dan McClellan has been having a field day with mind-numbing details ...

In which Polonius, Dame Slap, snappy Tom and the Ughmann compete for attention, but the pond's heart is with tricky Dick and American justice mad King Donald style ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 21:00:00 +0000

The pond realises it's doing a Tootle off the lizard Oz tracks, but talk about being Robert Redford/Dustin Hoffman irresistible...

Decades After Watergate, Justice Department Reviews Whether Nixon Got a Raw Deal (*intermittent archive link)

As Nicolle Wallace said, Making Crooks Great Again . (YouTube link)

And that link in the WSJ yarn?

How could the pond resist? Probe of Trump Foes Heats Up Under Acting Attorney General (*intermittent archive link)

Throw in Keystone Kash ...

Is There Anything Kash Patel Won’t Do for Trump Before the Midterms?
“The president wants indictments. He wants people in handcuffs.” (*intermittent archive link)
By Sarah Fitzpatrick

How good is the DOJ and the FBI? How good is American justice? How good are "Western values"? How much does Vlad the Sociopath still have to learn?

The pond confesses that it needed to do a little "making justice great again" stuff before tackling Polonius's prattle for its Sunday meditation...

The header: By Gerard Henderson
Croatian Six still haunted by failures of judicial system

The promise of a bot voice: Listen to this article
6 min

The caption for a borrowed snap: Vico Virkez on a farm in Yugoslavia in 1991. Picture: ABC / Four Corners

The desperate desire to stay relevant behind a paywall: Make us preferred on Google

This was an outlier for Polonius, but at least it veered away from the usual malarkey of recent weeks, and so the pond was willing to go with the flow ...

And then there were three. The reference is to the Croatian Six who were convicted in 1981 of engaging in a conspiracy two years earlier to bomb targets in Sydney. The motive for such criminality was not adequately explained by the prosecution.
This was one of the longest criminal trials in Australian history. It ran for 10 months and the jury was out for an extraordinary 68 hours.
However, on February 9, 1981, Maksimilijan Bebic, Vjekoslav Brajkovic, Ilija Kokotovic, Joseph Kokotovic, Mile Nekic and Anton Zvirotic were found guilty and sentenced to a maximum 15-year term of imprisonment. They were released after less than 10 years.
The outcome of these convictions has been contested for close to half a century – and the case is not closed. There have been a number of appeals and inquiries, most recently in June, when Acting Justice Robert Allan Hulme handed down his report on the Inquiry into the Convictions of the Croatian Six.
The Hulme inquiry was set up following a finding in August 2022 by Justice Robertson Wright that there were doubts about their guilt. In March 2023, Chief Justice Andrew Bell chose Hulme to undertake his inquiry.
The outcome of the Hulme inquiry was well explained by journalist Hamish McDonald (not to be confused with Hamish Macdonald of the ABC) in his address to the Sydney Institute last Wednesday, titled “The Croatian Six and Terrorism: Where are we at?”. McDonald is the author of Reasonable Doubt: Guns, Police and the Croatian Six (Doosra Media, 2019).
Reasonable Doubt is a devastating account of the failures of the Australian judicial system – all the way from the NSW Supreme Court to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal and on to the High Court of Australia. And now the matter is going back to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal.
After his lengthy inquiry, Hulme found that “no reasonable doubt arises as to the guilt” of Bebic, Brajkovic and Zvirotic. However, Hulme found that “there is reasonable doubt as to the guilt” of the Kokotovics and Nekic (who is deceased). A surprising decision, to be sure. Since, with respect to one finding, he refers to the Croatian Six as being “implicated … in the conspiracy”.
Hulme has referred his findings with respect to the three to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal, which is expected to consider whether these convictions should be quashed. Not those of the other three who, as McDonald points out, “continue to protest their innocence”. He added that Croatian Australians are “finding it hard to accept half-exoneration”.
Half a century ago, Croatia was part of Yugoslavia. It was a communist totalitarian regime ruled by dictator Josip Broz Tito in Serbia. Yugoslavia broke up in 1990 and became independent of the other parts of the former federation – the largest of which was Serbia, followed by Croatia.

The pond knows little about the matter, and cares less, and struggled to find another title published by Doosra Media, but whatever, let's have another snap from the cardigan wearers, The ‘Croatian Six’: Max Bebic, Vic Brajkovic, Tony Zvirotic, Joe Kokotovic, Ilija Kokotovic and Mile Nekic. Picture: ABC

A more interesting question, perhaps, than the matter of contested guilt is why Polonius decided to hare off down this rabbit hole?

Was there nothing in American justice to command attention? Must we attempt an antipodean counterbalance? Must it turn out to be another contribution to the Australian Daily Tyke News?

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the left-wing faction of the Labor Party – led by Jim Cairns and Lionel Murphy – was hostile to the Croatian Australians who were not only anti-communist but, in the main, Catholics. This is documented in a chapter by Denis Strangman in Les Shaw’s 1974 edited collection, The Shape of the Labor Regime.
Murphy and Cairns in the late 1960s and early 1970s alleged that, under the Coalition government, ASIO was covering up terrorism by Croatian Australians against Serbian individuals and properties in Australia. This was not true. Sure, some Croatian Australians wanted to go to war. But against the communist regime in Serbia, not democratic Australia. However, it is acknowledged that Tito’s secret police force – the UDBA – was running false-flag operations by attacking Yugoslav properties in Australia – and elsewhere – and framing Croatian Australians.
The overwhelming evidence shows that the Croatian Six were the victims of a UDBA false-flag operation. The conspiracy commenced when Detective Sergeant Roger Rogerson raided a property in Sydney and arrested some of the Croatian Six. Rogerson died recently in prison having been convicted of murder.

Cue another snap ... One of the ‘Croatian Six’, Vjekoslav Brajkovic, gave evidence at a judicial inquiry into his convictions, 44 years after he was charged.

For all of Polonius's powers of persuasion - some might think them limited - in the end he didn't seem to come up with much ...

At the time, the NSW police contained individuals who bashed those they arrested, planted “evidence”, invented confessions and so on. This was to be the fate of the Croatian Six. It was a part of the criminal world, which some prosecutors and judges never fully understood.
Moreover, in the book Reasonable Doubt, McDonald makes the case that the trial judge, Alan Victor Maxwell, was hostile to the accused. And that when the six appealed to the Court of Criminal Appeal the chief judge was Gordon Samuels, one of Maxwell’s closest friends.
The principal evidence against the Croatian Six was supplied by Vico Virkez. Chris Masters, then an ABC Four Corners reporter, interviewed Virkez overseas in 1991. Virkez told Masters that he was not a Croat or a Christian, and that he had committed perjury at the trial of the Croatian Six. He was a Tito agent.
It seems extraordinary that after what Virkez told Masters, not everyone has conceded that there was at the very least reasonable doubt as to the safety of the convictions. By the way, Masters endorsed Reasonable Doubt.
The NSW Court of Criminal Appeal may quash the convictions of Nekic and the Kokotovics. It is unclear what, if anything, may be done with respect to the others.
And then there is the High Court. In March 1986, the High Court decided on an application for special leave to appeal in Mile Nekic and others v The Queen. Chief justice Gibbs and justices Mason, Wilson, Deane and Dawson considered the case.
At 12.07pm the court took an adjournment. At 12.16pm it returned and Gibbs said that “a majority of the court has reached the conclusion that if special leave to appeal were granted, the appeal would certainly fail”.
But would this have been the case? After all, the minority did not hold this view. That is, either one or two of Australia’s leading jurists at the time. It is possible a further application could be made to the High Court.
ASIO does not regard the Croatian Six as terrorists and it is better informed on such matters than the legal profession. It’s time for – and then there were none.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

As usual when the pond knows nothing, and can't hope to discover anything, the pond passed on making a comment, but did want to update the Polonial bio, which strangely lists him as a News24 man. Apparently turning up once a week in the lizard Oz doesn't count. He's been consigned to the Siberia of pay cable TV ...

Gerard Henderson News24 Columnist
Gerard Henderson is an Australian columnist, political commentator and the Executive Director of The Sydney Institute. His column Media Watch Dog is republished by News24.com.au each Saturday morning. He started the blog in April 1988, before the ABC TV’s program of the same name commenced.

While on the theme of innocence and guilt ...

And so to a couple of cheats.

Thanks to the revival of the intermittent archive, all the pond has to do is provide a link and a teaser trailer, and then correspondents can decide if they want to head off to the cornfield, and miss the rest (and they won't be missing much) ...

What happens when the legal club closes ranks

This just Dame Slap doing internecine legal warfare.

In its time the pond has seen some of that kind of fighting - lawyer on lawyer action - up close, and its ugly stuff when they turn their claws on each other.

Still the pond is updating its profiles, and should note Dame Slap's qualifications as a claw master...

Janet Albrechtsen Columnist
Janet Albrechtsen is an opinion columnist with The Australian. She has worked as a solicitor in commercial law, and attained a Doctorate of Juridical Studies from the University of Sydney. She has written for numerous other publications including the Australian Financial Review, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sunday Age, and The Wall Street Journal.

In a similar vein, the pond skipped much of Snappy Tom's offering.

Albanese struggles to adapt in world of shocks

About the only thing that appealed was the remarkable collage by Emilia, who proudly refused to blame AI for her work ... it's the sort of image that would be at home in Pravda in its heyday, or Der Stürmer, with a shifty Albo looking startled and a shifty Jimbo looking glum and downcast ...

Well played Emilia, you lifted Snappy Tom's hatchet job out of the reptile ruck.

This might tempt correspondents to abandon ship and head off to the intermittent archive for the full bashing with a blunt fiscal instrument (where's the talk of SI?)...

Tom Dusevic Columnist
Tom Dusevic writes commentary and analysis on economic policy, social issues and new ideas to deal with the nation’s most pressing challenges. Formerly policy editor, he has been The Australian’s national chief reporter, chief leader writer, editorial page editor, opinion editor, economics writer and first social affairs correspondent. Dusevic won a Walkley Award for commentary and the Citi Journalism Award for Excellence. He is the author of the memoir Whole Wild World and holds degrees in Arts and Economics from the University of Sydney.

As we're speaking of pollies struggling to cope with shocks ...

And so to the Ughmann.

The story here is a simple one, which is why the pond reverted to screen caps.

The unreformed seminarian is a relentless hater of renewables, a devotee of dinkum pure, innocent, clean, virginal Oz coal, and a climate science denialist, and arguing with him is a bit like taking on some fanatical member of Opus Dei or the Jesuit fraternity.

Completely pointless...but before plunging in, the pond suggests that correspondents take a quick squiz at this AP report ... Households will pay more for energy because of federal policy changes, think tank says

Households in the contiguous United States will pay thousands of dollars more for energy through 2040 because of federal policy changes since President Donald Trump returned to office such as canceling new clean energy projects, according to modeling released Friday by a nonpartisan think tank.
The Energy Innovation analysis found that households will pay an average of $6,500 more for energy, cumulatively through 2040. In five states, households will pay roughly $9,000 more: Oregon, Mississippi, South Dakota, Virginia and Wyoming.
The California-based think tank said there will be more demand for natural gas for electricity because the administration is canceling new wind, solar and hydrogen projects and there will be more gasoline demand for transportation because Trump and Congress are revoking policies that incentivized efficient and lower-emissions vehicles. Higher demand increases prices.
Energy prices are elevated in many countries. The International Energy Agency said after Russia invaded Ukraine, record prices were observed between 2022 and 2024 in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan and Korea. In many countries, the rise has outpaced income growth and inflation since 2019, including the European Union and the United States.
In some areas of the U.S., demand from data centers is being blamed. The Iran war has sent oil and gasoline prices sharply higher, too. The Energy Information Administration expects residential U.S. customers to pay about 18.6 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2027, compared to 17.3 cents in 2025 and 18.2 cents in 2026.
The independent research firm Rhodium Group has also examined the issue, saying in April the U.S. has entered a new period of rising electricity prices. It cited increasing price volatility in natural gas, which is increasingly used to generate power; needed grid improvements; inflation; storm recovery and wildfire mitigation; and shifting policies.
Absent significant policy action, electricity prices likely will continue their significant rise over the next five years, the firm said.

Delicious, especially that line about costs rising because the administration is canceling new wind, solar and hydrogen projects.

Now please allow the Ughmann to go full Donald:

The pond will concede a certain rat cunning, as in the Ughmann flung in AFL for the aerial pingpong mob, while also appealing to the nerds with his treatment of that falling apple ... Newton’s apple: The real story:

It is the manuscript for what would become a biography of Newton entitled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Lifewritten by William Stukeley, an archaeologist and one of Newton’s first biographers, and published in 1752. Newton told the apple story to Stukeley, who relayed it as such:
“After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees…he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself…”

More importantly did everyone put their money on the very short odds that there'd be a snap of fiendish windmills in the story, for the tilting at by Chris "Don Quixote" Ughmann?

If you bet the right way, get ready for a big win ...

Would the mango Mussolini be reprimanded for the way his war of choice has plunged the world and the Unites States into pain and misery?

Not likely ...

Extra points and shekels for anyone betting on dinkum, sweet, innocent virginal coal making an appearance in the snaps - how the reptiles love a coal-fired power station - though the pond suggests it's unlikely that anyone could have tipped the next visual outsider, a snap of a crowd wandering about to no point, though it does evoke the substance of the Ughmann's style...

The pond has no idea why the "journalists" are labelled "journalist". It hardly adds to the allure, the appeal, or perhaps explain who was conducting the inquisition, or is that a jihad?

The pond didn't want to do a spoiler on that exquisite Sean image, especially as the brave lad didn't try to foist it onto AI (or even SI), but instead nobly took the credit himself.

Way to go Sean, way to elevate the tone of the lizard Oz, way to go with giving the Ughmann all the gravitas he deserves ...

As for the "journalist", the next gobbet gave a tantalising clue, but was it the Ughmann or the dog botherer or some other Chris? Who can say?

The pond covered Michele yesterday thanks to the immortal Rowe ...

The Ughmann is more than a match when it comes to beating a climate science-denying drum... because all that blather ultimately is in aid of returning the country to coal, with perhaps a little nuking thrown in for good measure ...

Credit where credit is due ...

Chris Uhlmann Columnist
Chris Uhlmann is a Walkley Award winning journalist and broadcaster, having begun his media career at The Canberra Times and as a radio producer for the ABC in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He was most recently the ABC's political editor on its flagship 7.30 program.

Strange, no mention of his time as an unreformed seminarian, nor any mention of his impeccable credentials in climate science.

As for the tolling bell, it's tolling loud enough, and not too far in the distance.

Maybe, in fact, that bell is tolling right now ... May heatwaves, deaths, ruined harvests: study of Europe’s summer paints grim picture for the future

And the Ughmann does the Labor party a disservice.

They really are trying their level best, especially the mindless Minns mob, with a certified cretin as their leader ... Matt Kean warns climate crisis ‘isn’t someone else’s problem’ as largest coal project in NSW history greenlit

There'll be a better version of this infallible Pope to hand later, but it seemed to be relevant, so the pond rushed to include it ...

And so to conclude on the usual note of 'toon optimism ...

As for AV distractions, this?

Or this, which seems much more in tune with the times ...

Or maybe this is the new model for the Reich, with the same lasting power ...

An unholy trinity for trinitarians: the Angelic One, the bromancer, and "Ned", doing what reptiles do ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:14:52 +0000

The pond is always a sucker for good news ... MAGA-Curious CBS Boss Suffers Humiliating Final Blow in Media Shake-Up (*intermittent archive link) ... but is it possible to have literacy with the serve?

That they are, are they...

The pond turned to the lizard Oz and saw the breakout story at the top of the digital edition early on the weekend ... and knew exactly what it portended, what it signified ... and blinked, caved, backed down, said uncle, threw in the towel.

Not that, not early in the day. ...

Was there no alternative? And then as if by magic, the pond saw the Angelic one, always a becalming presence, and a reminder that before the lizard Oz became the Australian Daily Zionist News, it was once the Australian Tyke Daily News:

The tempting header: By Angela Shanahan
‘Philosopher king’ Leo a moral leader in a troubled world

The promise of a bot voice: Listen to this article
6 min

The caption for the snap of the redeemer: Pope Leo XIV attends an event at the Lourdes Grotto in the Vatican Gardens. Picture: AP Photo

The plea for relevance in an algorithmic world and never mind the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

The Angelic one turned her tyke vision to AI, and found a redeemer, and the pond was down wit it, especially as there was no blather about this being SI:

A couple of months ago I read an article in The Spectator UK that was a despairing reflection on the terrible vision of unchecked AI, and the possibility of “accidental” Armageddon.
Like most of us, the author didn’t have a clue about AI but he knew enough to say that what we need is moral leadership, some new “philosopher king” to help us.
Well, we have one. His name is Leo XIV.
Pope Leo’s seizing leadership in a world crying out for it is astonishing. In just over a year he has proved his moral leadership in two ways. Firstly, with the encyclical on AI, and secondly in his and the Vatican’s attempts to influence a peace between Ukraine and Russia.

The Angelic one broke ranks with her Faux Noise kissing cousins:

Even President Donald Trump in his hubristic bubble can see that we cannot shrug off the possibilities of rogue AI as just the latest preoccupation of doomsayers formerly obsessed with global warming and pandemics.
However, what the leader of the free world might dimly realise, and his counterpart in China probably doesn’t, is that development of AI presents us with a whole new moral paradigm.
The informed moral consciousness makes us human so the realisation of the power of a new amoral force requires a moral response. This is difficult to formulate coherently for technocrats used to purely technical and commercial responses, but Leo has done this.

The caption for the fiends tormenting the Angelic one: China President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump must realise that development of AI presents us with a whole new moral paradigm. Picture: Getty Images via AFP

The Angelic one continued to pump up the papacy as an alternative to the mad king, a kind of heresy beginning to take hold in even the most rabid MAGA minds... (Dame Slap excluded?)

In his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, the Pope has set out the first and only real moral template for dealing with AI, and it is no exaggeration to say the encyclical has been hugely influential.
It has been read by most of the Silicon Valley elite and, fortuitously, was issued at a time when rogue AI began to become an unforeseen problem, prompting the tech lords to declare their willingness to install more checks.
Leo is in some ways the first modern pope. He is not only the first US-born pope, but also the first born in the generation after World War Two. This means that he, like most of us, has been for many years exposed to and fascinated by technology, hence his interest in AI, which preceded his election as Pope. It also meant he knew where to go for scientific advice.
However, there is a second aspect to his post-war, post-communist generational viewpoint. It allows him a different understanding of the geopolitical world from his predecessors. The Vatican’s recent diplomatic mission to Russia is probably indicative of this shift.
Although an independent state, the Vatican has a dual diplomatic role. Firstly, it can bring moral pressure for humanitarian reasons. Secondly, it is a very valuable neutral conduit for diplomacy. It has representatives from virtually every state on Earth. During the papacy of John Paul II, it is no secret the pope himself was a valuable ally and the Vatican acted as a conduit for intelligence that precipitated the collapse of communism in Poland and Eastern Europe.

The reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction which offered cheerful, if somewhat dated, news:

Next video thumbnail
Pope Leo draws more than 800,000 people for mass in Paris
More than 800,000 have gathered in central Paris to take part in mass led by Pope Leo XIV during a four-day trip for the Head of the Catholic Church.

The Angelic one began to brood about Ukraine:

So why has Leo sent his top representative, Paul Gallagher, to Moscow in the middle of a shooting war? I have met Gallagher, in Rome and in Canberra when he was Papal Nuncio. Like all brilliant diplomats he is acutely sensitive to nuance in conversation and very wary of journalists. He is English, has an easygoing manner and his accent still has traces of the Liverpool of his birth.
Gallagher publicly offered Russian officials dialogue and humanitarian assistance, especially in the context of the war in Ukraine, but controversially, as Russia’s Foreign Ministry’s press release states: “Sergey Lavrov talked about the destructive nature of Western policies and went on to emphasise the principled importance of addressing the root causes of the crisis.”
But there was more to this visit. While Gallagher’s mission preserved the Holy See’s traditional insistence on dialogue with both sides, CIA director John Ratcliffe was also in Moscow. According to the National Catholic Reporter, this confluence raised questions about “whether the first US pope’s peace diplomacy might intersect with Washington’s strategic pressure on Moscow to influence an end to the war in Ukraine”.
Other reports said Ratcliffe privately delivered a warning to the Kremlin to avoid an escalation of the conflict, although accounts differed over the principal purpose of his visit.

Who knows, all we know is that the Angelic one has high connections ...Archbishop Paul Gallagher was sent to Moscow in the middle of a shooting war. Picture: AFP

For some reason, in one version of the yarn, the reptiles decided to interrupt with an AV distraction, which involved almost quaintly dated news ...

Next video thumbnail
Boris Johnson’s train targeted by Russian drone near NATO border
News24 host James Macpherson reports former UK prime minister Boris Johnson was travelling just two kilometres from the Polish-Ukrainian border when the train behind him was targeted by a Russian drone. “Boris Johnson was just two kilometres from the Polish-Ukrainian border when the train behind him was targeted by a Russian drone,” Mr Macpherson said. “Mr Johnson was returning from a security conference in Kyiv where Western officials met with Volodymyr Zelensky's government to discuss possible peace negotiations with Russia. “Thankfully, Ukrainian authorities confirmed there were no casualties among the 200 or so passengers on the train. “These trains were only two kilometres from the Polish border. That's awfully close to NATO territory.”

Dammit, they did it just to mess with the pond, and as the pond was scribbling, they re-edited and re-ordered the Angelic one (and dropped her inside the fold, but attention must be paid!)

The Angelic one ignored the ancient news - Vlad the sociopath has done a lot more since that time - and continued the Papal pumping - though she did concede that the pontiff's rep might have put a proverbial foot in it in relation to the conflict.

What a relief to discover it was all just an outtake from a Hollywood movie, or perhaps a true crime show:

Victor Gaetan, author of God’s Diplomats: Pope Francis, Vatican Diplomacy, and America’s Armageddon, said it looked like a “good cop, bad cop” operation. Whether the visits were co-ordinated or not, their convergence presented Russia with two complementary messages from the West.
From Gallagher and, tangentially, the Pope: “The position of the Holy See remains clear: the conflict cannot be resolved by military means,” Gallagher said in a press conference with Lavrov after their meeting.
Then, at the same time, as reported by The Wall Street Journal and Politico, Ratcliffe warned against attacking NATO members – in particular, the Baltic states.
In the context of Vatican geo political policies and on the more pertinent moral and doctrinal influence of Pope Leo, the Vatican’s attempts to influence this conflict have been both praised and condemned; praised in general, but condemned by influential conservative lay theologian and Pope John Paul biographer George Weigel, for whom Russia is always the implacable enemy of Western Liberal values. On the other hand, many of us Catholics – and non-Catholics – feel that reality dictates dealing with whomever you need deal with to end a bloody war that has killed approximately two million people.

Exactly. Ever since the Inquisition Catholics have been realists, and so to recognise another reality:

Another aspect to Leo’s claim to moral leadership is his level of popular admiration. First, his unfazed demeanour with Trump’s bizarre shenanigans was almost comical. Then the President’s lame one-upmanship, dismissing the dangers of AI – despite the tech titans being against him and the unfortunate US ambassador to the Vatican attempting a form of “baseball diplomacy”. But it is Leo who has had the last laugh, by paraphrasing the frustrated President and stating what we all know. AI Armageddon is “definitely not ‘fake news’ ”.

A little detail on who you've been reading:

Angela Shanahan
Columnist
Angela Shanahan is a Canberra-based freelance journalist and mother of nine children. She has written regularly for The Australian for over 20 years, The Spectator (British and Australian editions) for over 10 years, and formerly for the Sunday Telegraph, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times. For 15 years she was a teacher in the NSW state high school system and at the University of NSW. Her areas of interest are family policy, social affairs and religion. She was an original convener of the Thomas More Forum on faith and public life in Canberra. In 2020 she published her first book, Paul Ramsay: A Man for Others, a biography of the late hospital magnate and benefactor, who instigated the Paul Ramsay Foundation and the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation.

A little detail on the way the reptiles operate so they can maintain their tax-free lifestyle:

A NOTE ABOUT RELEVANT CONTENT: We collect information about the content (including ads) you use across this site and use it to make both advertising and content more relevant to you on our network and other sites. Find out more about our policy and your choices, including how to opt-out of targeted advertising based on your browsing behaviour on our network.Sometimes our articles will try to help you find the right product at the right price. We may receive payment from third parties for publishing this content or when you make a purchase through the links on our sites.

Please allow the pond a little celebration:

The pond was desperate to delay the inevitable, and turned to the bromancer with a sigh of relief.

The header: Australia is critically exposed to rapidly advancing AI weapons
Greg Sheridan
Foreign Editor

Wth no sense of irony, the promise of a bot read: Listen to this article
12 min

With no sense of irony, the caption for an illustration which had no human credit, and looked for all the world like an AI offering: AI is coming on the winds of hurricanes. We’ll need our friends close to cope with it.

The plea for help with the bots: Make us preferred on Google

What's this relentless talk of AI? Still no reptile following the mad king with talk of SI?

Never mind, the bromancer was in his element, as Reichsmarschall des GroßAustralisch Reiches:

Security threats have gone on steroids. The technology of attack has been democratised. Every security danger Australia faces is radically increased. The Albanese government and Defence Minister Richard Marles, and vastly more credible figures, have many times told us this is the most dangerous strategic environment since World War II.
It’s just got much worse. The ability for us, and our friends, to be hit – high, low and in the middle – to be hit militarily, socially, biologically, economically has just been turbocharged. And what are we doing about it? Almost nothing, so close to nothing that our efforts, in any proper calculation, would be a rounding error.

The reptiles immediately interrupted with an AV distraction:

Next video thumbnail
Would AI lie to you? Research finds China’s AI agents can deceive users
Chinese-powered AI agents have learnt to deceive, circumvent restrictions and conceal failure, showing the kind of traits in autonomous artificial intelligence that have raised global alarm about US models, research documents and experts say. Reuters Chief China Technology Correspondent Eduardo Baptista explains.

The bromancer was in a panic:

Artificial intelligence, the new ways of war revealed in Ukraine and Iran, China’s massive military build-up, Chinese AI capabilities, the proliferation of AI through every destructive potential, means we face a diabolical environment. Of course, we may survive unscathed. You can live happily in a glass house for a long time if nobody throws a stone. But we are dancing a convoluted ballet on the narrowing precipice of a sheer cliff.
Simeon Gilding, former deputy director-general of the Australian Signals Directorate, tells me: “The best way to think of AI is that it supercharges traditional geostrategic threats.”
It also transforms potential cyber attacks. Don’t think of cyber attacks as something fuzzy, vague and chiefly the concern of boffins. They could mean your city’s power goes out, the hospital back-up generator stops working, the water system breaks down. But as the intrusion efforts by AI bots, or “agents”, acting beyond their human masters’ control suggests, the threat of AI cyber attack, in infrastructure or on anything, is vast.

But what did this mean for the saviour of Faux Noise, News Corporation and the world? US President Donald Trump has resisted calls for greater regulation of AI. Picture: AP

Or even calls for greater regulation of SI? Have the lizards of Oz no loyalty to their Faux Noise king?

Surely everything was in good shape?

Much of the Australian debate over the past few weeks, however, has been misdirected. Our friends’ bots going rogue, disturbing as that can be, is not the main danger. It’s what our enemies will get their AI to do intentionally that is infinitely more disturbing. Gilding: “AI enables the scaling of cyber attacks. On the military side, it accelerates operational planning and enables the rapid fusing of intelligence to develop targeting packs at scale.”
Our necessary response? Gilding: “Much bigger investments are needed for cyber security in the AI age … Cyber attackers are increasingly able to operate at machine speed and scale using AI.”
But, of course, the military impact of AI goes vastly beyond cyber attacks. Paul Scharre, author of Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of AI, writes in Foreign Affairs that drones and AI are “transforming warfare”. Not the least of their effects is to transform the economics of warfare. Small, inexpensive drones can increasingly be fitted with autonomous AI. They no longer need to maintain any link with their launchers. They can’t be disabled electronically (though of course they can be shot out of the air). They can carry internal guidance systems and correlate, via their own cameras, the topography they observe with pre-loaded satellite maps. You can’t jam their communications. They can travel long distances. They can attack in swarms. They can be powered by jets. Swarms of them can be combined with missile attacks to overcome even capable hi-tech defences. They can use facial recognition to go after specific individuals but can also co-ordinate with each other their targeting and tactics.
A swarm of drones worth a few hundred thousand dollars can destroy a capital ship worth billions of dollars.

Hang on, hang on, surely a few subs and AUKUS will save us?

Before the pond got an answer, the reptiles slipped in another AV distraction, and the AI news was bad:

Next video thumbnail
Ukraine airdrops killer robots to take out 3,000 Russian troops in huge tech leap
Ukraine has revealed a battlefield first after using bomber drones to air-drop explosive ground robots deep behind Russian lines in Donetsk. The tactic formed part of Operation Vivaldi, a months-long counteroffensive that Kyiv says reclaimed 48 square miles of territory. Ukraine’s Third Army Corps says Russian forces suffered at least 3,000 casualties during the operation, though the figure is unverified. Heavy bomber drones carried the four-wheeled kamikaze robots more than 10 kilometres behind enemy lines before releasing them to strike targets. Ukraine claims the unit completed more than 15,700 missions as robots and drones increasingly took on jobs once reserved for frontline troops.

The bromancer gloomily realised that perhaps all his strategic devotion to super expensive kit might have been in vain ...

Small drones can be delivered to target areas by large drones. In Operation Vivaldi, Ukrainians recently drove unmanned old armoured vehicles bearing huge bombs at Russian positions with great effect. A concerted drone campaign, in which drones did the major action while human beings filled the gaps, captured 175sq km from the Russians.
The traditional US advantage lay in hi-tech super expensive platforms with a technological edge. Now that advantage counts for much less.
The US used AI to choose Iranian targets in the first weeks of the war. But it couldn’t entirely defeat Iran. And Iran itself fired thousands of missiles and drones at US targets, inflicting a lot of damage. As the war went on, the US, despite its immense superiority in fire power, found it harder and harder to stop Iranian missiles and drones. Now it’s unclear whether the US navy’s fifth fleet can continue to headquarter itself in Bahrain. Scharre writes: “The US no longer has a discernible advantage in emerging technologies and will not be able to gain one.”

And what of the bromancer's war with China, promised for last Xmas, but certain for an Xmas to come? More bad news ...

The US is ahead of China in AI, he writes, but only by a few months. Chinese AI constantly learns from American AI in a process known as “adversarial distillation”.
The Australian Defence Force is even more dysfunctionally built around a tiny number of expensive, hi-tech platforms. We are superbly ill-equipped to deal with the new realities of war. Michael Shoebridge, director of Strategic Analysis Australia, puts our drone sophistication at a level from before the Ukraine war: “We are four years behind the latest technology.”
He lampoons the federal government’s commitment of $7bn on drones over 10 years. It’s back ended and it’s not enough. The US, on the other hand, recognises the problem. It has set up an Autonomous Warfare Command within the military.

Um, actually, they've called on the brightest, best minds:

We’ll have to wait and see what comes of Project Meridian and the rest of Hegseth’s bizarre, TED Talk–style speech. What makes Luckey, Musk, and Gingrich so uniquely good for the job? Does he really think other countries don’t have industry leaders and politicians as smart as them? That the collective minds of a dotcom-era billionaire, a self-described “radical Zionist” V.R. entrepreneur, and an old partisan really give the U.S some kind of military edge?

You're doomed bromancer, doomed ... but talk about the chance for some splendid comedy, what with one of the trio being a beardo and also a weirdo, though Uncle Leon is also a weirdo.

Have a visual break: Cyber attacks could mean your city’s power goes out, the hospital back-up generator stops working, or the water system breaks down.

Oh that uncredited, likely AI image didn't help at all, as the bromancer continued in full "the bots are coming" mode:

So-called compute power is becoming as important in modern warfare as the size of the manufacturing base was in industrial age warfare, according to Scharre. Yet no advantage in AI will be decisive for long because the technology keeps moving.
The military situation is actually much more disturbing even than that. So-called open-weight AI models are available to anyone willing to pay for them. They’re well behind frontier US models in capability but they’re pretty powerful. AI companies pledge to put “guardrails” on them. But there’s a growing industry and market to create “abliterated” AI models – put simply, to work out how to take the guard rails off. That means that actors quite a long way down the technology chain, namely rogue states, and all the traditional non-state actors, especially terrorists and organised crime syndicates, will be able to acquire previously undreamed of destructive power.
Shoebridge: “Imagine if Osama bin Laden had a strong AI model and a friendly Pakistani bioscientist and lab. You could expect a nasty biological weapon out of that.”

The pond doesn't have to imagine bin Laden. Pete Kegsbreath and mad King Donald will do, especially if the November elections turn into a blow out, as the reptiles flung in a visual distraction: An Australian soldier launches a drone during the Austral Shield exercise near Weipa on the Cape York Peninsula in far north Queensland in July 2026. Picture: ADF

The bromancer knew only one way to advance: attack!

It’s certainly true that the ultimate nightmare biological weapon of scientific imagination – a highly infectious, substantially incurable virus, with high mortality, which took a couple of weeks to manifest symptoms, and links only to a gene associated with a specific ethnicity – would be beyond terrorists. But you could get something a lot less sophisticated than that which was still pretty deadly.
AI has a bias for attack. It exaggerates the defender’s dilemma. Defenders have to be right every time, attackers only once. This is not a counsel of despair. Nuclear weapons, radiological weapons, biological and chemical weapons were all thought likely to cause massive destruction and loss of life before now, but constant vigilance, the war on terror and an innate understanding by states that they want to possess such means but not use them, for fear of retaliation, and certainly not give them to terrorists or criminals, has mostly kept us safe. The difference with AI is that it’s not a narrow, complex technology, like nuclear weapons. It’s a general technology which can be used to demystify and scale up and magnify any system of attack.

Having roundly mocked it, why not now take it seriously and quote it? The government’s Intergenerational Report predicted that AI will drive the nation’s productivity growth, but warns of the dangers to national security and social cohesion as a result of cyber attacks, misinformation and scams.

Aw, what a cute little bot, but the bromancer's heart was hardened:

Alastair MacGibbon, former deputy director-general of ASD and later cyber security adviser to the Prime Minister, tells me that AI has “radically increased our threat environment”.
The current head of ASD, Abigail Bradshaw, testified to parliament that ASD needs high-end American AI corporate partners. She said: “ASD cannot effectively assess threats or defend against technology it cannot see or understand.” The Albanese government has sent out confused signals. The only chance Australia has of getting any purchase, any protection, in the AI environment is through the closest possible partnership with the US and its AI corporates. Yet ministers have talked airily of criminal prosecutions against US companies for the unintentional, and finally harmless, Medicare data breach.
The situation is far too serious for that. AI is coming on the winds of hurricanes. We’ll need our friends close to cope with it.
AI has “democratised attack”, MacGibbon says. It can use huge quantities of computer power to find vulnerabilities no one else could find, which perhaps no one ever knew existed.
It can rapidly write code to exploit those vulnerabilities. And it can chain all those attacks on all those vulnerabilities together.

The reptiles flung in a meme designed to please the hive mind ... Businesses, such as @bodystrong.reformer, have used AI deepfakes to post memes about PM Anthony Albanese being their business partner, after capital gains changes in the budget. Picture: Instagram

Talk about understanding what turns on the lizard Oz:

MacGibbon says it will take years to fully upgrade all the relevant Australian IT systems, even with the national infrastructure protocols previous governments have put in place.
And it’s never once and done. Even with active AI defences, with friendly AI agents searching out the hostiles, attackers will be relentlessly improving their capabilities.
One vulnerability that worries Gilding is how much Chinese equipment we use in our infrastructure. He says: “If you’re using Chinese kit you can’t defend against it because the networks are owned by Chinese companies, which by law are subject to the direction of Chinese security agencies.”
Malcolm Turnbull has suggested many nations and companies will choose Chinese AI because it’s cheaper than US models. Yet MacGibbon and others point out that all Chinese AI is designed to support socialist values and the power of the Chinese Communist Party. The implications of that are severe.
US AI companies are building data centres in many countries. It’s silly to think Australia unique. However, as a Five Eyes intelligence partner, with a stable legal and political system, and stable geography as well, Australia could be an attractive location beyond the US for it to disperse some of its AI-model training and development to. This would be of immeasurable benefit to Australia.

How bad dit it get? The reptiles even trotted out a greenie ... New Australian Greens leader David Shoebridge warned in 2025 that the government had delayed acting on the dangers of AI-generated deepfakes, and its impact to derail the federal election. Picture: NewsWire/ Martin Ollman

The bromancer continued in his state of deep gloom. It might not be like fighting WWII again:

Overall, this was a very bad week for Australian security. In David Shoebridge, the Greens have elected their first leader with serious knowledge about defence issues. He will put Labor’s ill-articulated defence policy under pressure from the left, and could disturb Labor’s always jittery, febrile, activist base. The inflation jump is also disastrous for defence. Its budget is compensated for international currency variations, but not for unforecast inflation. In four years in office, the Albanese government has increased overall federal government spending by a massive 2.5 per cent of GDP, but not defence.
This year, defence spending will be just 2.02 per cent of GDP, just what it was when Labor came to office.
So, take the worst strategic circumstances since World War II, without changing the dollars available; add in massive expenditure for a nuclear submarine fleet which won’t be ready until the 2050s; then watch the threat level ratchet up radically due to AI; and then do absolutely nothing extra in terms of national effort.
That’s the Lucky Country determined to be the Dumb Country. Let’s hope no one throws an AI stone through our glass window.

What on earth is happening?

Here was the pond prepared to go along with mad king Donald and see AI - or even SI - as a benevolent offering, with no downsides, guarded by a one page self-regulation deed put together by heavyweights on a paper towel and signed with a quill pen, offering security to the Unites States, and the world...

The White House misspelled “United States” under the signature of Donald Trump on an accord he signed with AI executives on Tuesday.
At the bottom of the accord on “Super Intelligence”, the term Trump has used to rebrand artificial intelligence, the president’s signature appeared as “President of the Unites States”.
It is unclear how the misspelling occurred or whether it will appear in the Federal Register, the database that contains official presidential actions and other government documents.

What could go wrong, with humanity on top of everything, and larnin' the bots how to spell?

As a coda, the reptiles have gone back to offering thumb sketches of their contributors, and who is the pond to argue?

Greg Sheridan
Foreign Editor
Greg Sheridan is The Australian's foreign editor and one of the most influential national security and foreign affairs analysts in Australia. He also writes about Christianity and culture. His most recent book, How Christians Can Succeed Today, completes a trilogy on Christianity, including the best-selling God is Good for You. Active on TV, radio and as a conference speaker, he has interviewed presidents and prime ministers all over the world, travelling on assignment to every continent except the polar ice caps. A previous book, When We Were Young and Foolish, was an entertaining memoir of culture, politics and journalism. He has been the paper's Washington correspondent, Beijing correspondent and as foreign editor travels widely, bringing readers unique behind the scenes insights.

At this point the pond knew what had to be done. While spending time with the bromancer and the Angelic one, it had slowly been building up strength for the inevitable Everest climb...

The header: What comes next? Albanese government trapped as rising interest rates, inflation hammer Labor brand
By Paul Kelly Editor-at-Large

The promise of listening to a bot voice do "Ned" for an interminable time: Listen to this article
15 min

The caption for the snap of the major players in "Ned's" medieval morality play - well done Emilia, a collage for the ages: From left: One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, Treasurer Jim Chalmers, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, RBA governor Michele Bullock and Opposition Leader Angus Taylor. Picture-montage: Emilia Tortorella

The cry for logarithmic help: Make us preferred on Google

Just like the bromancer, "Ned"was in full crisis mode, though this was a different crisis:

The Albanese government is facing a world it never foresaw – more interest rate increases, falling house prices, compressed wages, rising unemployment, lower economic growth, and flatlining productivity. Normally this would gift the political opposition, but normality no longer exists.
“It’s only a Labor government that ever does the big things,” an embattled Anthony Albanese defiantly declared this week. His Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, targeting One Nation and the Coalition, said they are “one and the same” as agents of “endless negativity” who “talk the place down” motivated by politics, not economics.

A gentle reprimand for Jimbo, a hapless cork bobbing on mad King Donald's ocean: Treasurer Jim Chalmers seems unable to exert the necessary authority for a treasurer in cabinet. Picture: Nikki Short

Pardon the pond if it seeks its own visual relief by turning to the immortal Rowe, building to his full cartoon detail by detail:

That's more like it, as "Ned" ravaged Jimbo:

Labor faces an assault on its governing model – its faith in public spending and its strategy to become the party of modern Australia by backing healthcare, childcare, the NDIS, defence, renewables, and women’s rights. It is now trapped with the domestic consequences of its policies in a far more disruptive world with growth stalled and inflation high – with the highest spending for 40 years at 26.9 per cent of GDP, taxes running at 24.1 per cent of GDP, a shade under the record high, and interest rates on a relentless upwards curve.
Household hardship will intensify. The community is resentful and ready to attribute blame.
The Labor Party seems unable to grasp the situation it faces. Without resolute action, it risks historic damage to the Labor economic brand. Chalmers seems unable to exert the necessary authority for a treasurer in cabinet, and senior cabinet ministers look weak, utterly different to the robust voices in the Hawke and Keating cabinets over the central policy issues.
In politics today there is a guaranteed certainty and a great uncertainty. The certainty is that the world Labor never envisaged will penalise and further weaken the Albanese government, while the uncertainty is who becomes the final beneficiary: Pauline Hanson’s party or the Angus Taylor-led Coalition?
The moment of truth is approaching for the centre-right of politics and the Liberal Party. With Labor vulnerable on the economy, this is the golden opportunity for the Liberals to reclaim the economy as their strength.

Unleash freedumb boy, and evoke how latte sippers can be hounds : Opposition treasury spokesman Tim Wilson on Friday accused Anthony Albanese and Labor of setting the ATO upon small business 'like a pack of Rottweilers'.

Sadly the immortal Rowe didn't have a portrait of freedumb boy, but he did have a portrait of a Rottweiler ...

"Ned" was gloomy about everybody and everything. "We'll all be rooned" was strong in the lizard Oz this day ...

If the Liberals under Taylor, deputy Jane Hume and opposition Treasury spokesman Tim Wilson cannot meet this challenge, what is their purpose? The party’s survival as a viable force probably hinges on this task.
The risk is that anti-Albanese anger becomes tied to pro-Hanson populism. Are Albanese and Hanson locked into a cycle as direct rivals? Does a weaker Albanese mean a stronger Hanson? Will such polarisation assist Hanson’s party at the expense of Taylor’s party, thereby defying normality?
The most recent Newspoll, before Tuesday’s rate rise, had Labor’s primary vote falling to 27 per cent, below One Nation on 30 per cent, with the Coalition on 19 per cent. There is a new challenge facing Albanese and Chalmers: being reliable managers of adversity and tough times. They don’t plan any radical policy shift but playing the blame game won’t suffice. Labor will need to sort out a degree of policy and political adjustments running to the 2028 election.
Australia’s prosperity has become a function of beating inflation and resurrecting productivity. These are epic challenges demanding quality leadership. The question becomes: does the public think One Nation has the slightest answer to the issues of inflation and productivity? For how long might centre-right supporters indulge themselves with this delusion?
The decision by the Reserve Bank board to lift the cash rate to 4.6 per cent, the highest in 15 years, with more rate rises coming, confirms a more intense era for Australia, demanding economic policy changes with skilled politics to navigate this path.

As everyone knows, a denial is a sure sign of guilt, at least for the hive mind ... Prime Minister Anthony Albanese denies a rift over inflation's causes between his Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, and RBA Governor Michele Bullock

It's despair all round ...

"Ned: proved he could actually regurgitate what the Reserve Bank had said:

The policy disputes over spending, tax, inflation and productivity will become the directional test for the country’s future. This also becomes a moment of identity for the centre-right: backing in Hanson’s party as the leading economic responder would testify to the right’s intellectual and policy collapse, though the extent of its wider cultural rot might be too advanced to prevent that outcome. It would almost certainly end in a Labor victory.
The ability of the centre-right to delude itself is remarkable. It was on display before the 2025 election when it pumped up its tyres thinking that Peter Dutton could either win or come close – only to exhale at Albanese’s massive election victory. The central dilemma for Chalmers is the absence of any quick fix for our economic woes. The government enters an advanced economic hardship phase with a perilously low primary vote and a stubborn resistance to major policy redesign.
Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock put the government and markets on notice this week with the fourth rate rise this year.

There's a portrait for that:

Carry on thumping:

She had three messages: the bank was ready to lift rates again to curb inflation; the central source of the problem was “domestic capacity pressures”, which meant demand exceeding supply; and the inflation challenge was magnified because productivity was “doing nothing”. The bank, cognisant of being too dovish in the previous upwards cycle, knows it cannot repeat the same mistake.
The cash rate will be further lifted to 4.85 per cent. Another rise beyond 5 per cent is predicted by many economists. Australia now has the second-highest interest rates in the developed world after Iceland. The community confronts the bind of falling house prices, rising mortgage payments and risks of negative equity. Beyond that, the rising cost of global capital tied to huge government deficits and the vast demands of AI companies guarantees a world where financing public debt comes at a higher price with greater risks. The Reserve Bank Financial Stability Review warned of debt sustainability concerns in major countries and the potential for a change of sentiment towards the AI investment boom – factors that contribute to global financial stability dangers.

Want another mindless and meaningless visual distraction? The lizard Oz's graphics department is your friend: With interest rates on a relentless upwards curve, household hardship will intensify – the community is resentful, ready to attribute blame.

The pond is more than ready to attribute blame to the lizard Oz's graphic department, but the blame shouldn't be attributed to the mad king, it's more that no one thought that the Faux Noise favourite would be that mad, and so precautions should have started at home.

The primary source of Australia’s inflation problem is home grown, but exacerbated by the Middle East war. Offering a different emphasis to the Treasurer, Bullock said: “This isn’t all about the Middle East conflict. It is making things much worse but we did start from a position of excess demand and that’s why we started raising interest rates even before the conflict started.”
Yet the big picture points to an Australian dilemma on a far larger scale. To a significant extent, Labor has misread the economic times in which it governs. It failed to sufficiently prioritise beating inflation; it lifted government spending to untenable levels; it was too slow in addressing the productivity collapse and is now stranded, relying on AI to do the job; it presided over economic growth of diminished quality that prioritised population growth over productivity growth, the upshot being stagnant living standards; it misjudged the degree to which interest rates are likely to settle at a far higher level than seen for the past 15 years; and it underestimated the downside of permanent budget deficits in terms of debt interest, high tax and undermining productivity.

We all know what to make of AI, thanks to the bromancer and the Angelic one, and still no sign of SI: The Treasurer is banking on AI to boost productivity through the economy. Picture: Nikki Short

"Ned" sank into his usual gloom. There's never been a falling cloud that hasn't sent him into Chicken Little mode:

This suggests a decisive moment of truth in Australian public policy. The signals from Albanese and Chalmers mean there is no major policy shift coming but Labor will need to show it is responsive to the mounting challenges.
Deloitte Access Economics partner Stephen Smith told Inquirer: “While Australia is expected to avoid a recession in the aggregate, households will continue to experience recession-like conditions. The RBA can still suppress aggregate demand but only by applying more pressure to the sectors that respond. The adjustment will therefore be concentrated among lower-income and mortgaged households, dwelling construction, and business investment outside the AI ecosystem.
“Inflation in Australia is broadbased, persistent and well above the 2-3 per cent target band. Headline inflation has accelerated to 4.0 per cent on the back of higher fuel prices and is being felt directly in household budgets. The prices of goods and services that are not exposed to the whims of global price fluctuations are causing most of Australia’s inflation issue. Government spending is too high. It is not the sole driver of Australia’s domestic inflation problem but it is a contributing factor.
“The collective voice of economists has become hoarse from the persistent and consistent pleading for substantial reforms across tax, regulation, spending, skills, federal-state relations and the like. Those calls have largely been met with the white noise of political constraints and vocal vested interests.
“Such reforms are no longer optional.”

Sure, and getting News Corporation to pay tax in Australia is no longer optional, except we might just be dealing with vocal vested interests.

There came a snap of a man giving comfort to the reptiles and to "Ned": Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry said the budget should be in surplus. Picture: AAP

Luckily the immortal Rowe had an even better illustration:

"Ned" evoked the dragons:

Labor is humiliated by the collective opinion of its former advisers, former Treasury secretaries, Ken Henry and Martin Parkinson and former Reserve Bank governor Phil Lowe. Henry and Parkinson have previously said the budget should be in surplus, given strong employment and commodity prices, rather than a $22.3bn deficit for the past financial year, albeit a $6bn improvement from the figure last May.
The implication is unavoidable: what advice has the current Treasury given Chalmers about the deficit? On what basis do Treasury and Labor project in the recent Intergenerational Report ongoing deficits for the next 40 years? These projections testify to Australian complacency, Labor’s flawed outlook and the dismal quality of economic leadership.
Parkinson told Inquirer: “I warned in April of the risk of stagflation. The absence of any improvement in the inflation outlook since then in part because of the ongoing war in the Gulf, and combined with the absence of productivity growth, the risk of stagflation is higher now than it was in April.
“Australia’s current productivity performance is a reflection of disappointing efforts over the past quarter century.
“Productivity cannot be changed quickly but it needs to be changed and it is critical to future living standards.”

The reptiles interrupted for an AV distraction, on topic:

Next video thumbnail
Former RBA governor Philip Lowe blasts Labor's tax changes
Former Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe has criticised Labor's tax changes, saying the amendments that go beyond housing will be to Australia's detriment, and that its redistribution agenda needs to be scrapped for one that grows investment. Mr Lowe was speaking during a webinar in his capacity as the chairman of the ASX-listed Future Generation Australia. The former Reserve Bank governor said he was “disappointed” by the government’s tax changes and feels as though Australia is “losing its way”.

It just had to be the IPA, friend of big tobacco and climate science denialism:

In his recent interview with the Institute of Public Affairs, Lowe attacked fiscal policy, saying Labor had contributed to inflation and prioritised income and wealth redistribution over economic growth: “Now we find ourselves running sizeable budget deficits at a time we’re at full employment and commodity prices are very high.
“We should be running sizeable surpluses.”
Richard Holden from the University of NSW told Inquirer: “I think a lot of government policy has completely misjudged the times. It’s hard to get away from the fact that in 2022-23, the budget papers show spending as a share of GDP was 24.3 per cent. It’s now 26.9 per cent. That’s a colossal expansion in the size of government.
“I think when they came into office Labor took the view inflation was going to come down anyway, so they could spend a lot and still see inflation coming down. Plenty of people warned at the time it was a flawed strategy and it’s turned out to be exactly that.
“The problem is we didn’t get spending under control and the Reserve Bank didn’t raise rates early enough and often enough, so we didn’t get inflation under control. The government’s failure to tackle spending or do anything meaningful to boost productivity means we are going to see higher interest rates.
“We’ve just been through this long run of extremely low interest rates over a number of years and people got into a mindset that you would have official interest rates at around 2 per cent and mortgage rates around 4 per cent. Now the outlook looks like official rates with a 4 in front of them and mortgage rates with a 6 in front of them. That’s a huge change, it’s a 50 per cent higher interest bill. It’s going to ricochet throughout the economy.”

Then came an illustration which not only summarised the state of wallets, but which suggested the depth of "Ned's" thinking, not to mention the relentless fatuity of the lizard Oz graphics department, what's left of it: The real burden of adjustment in this country is going to fall on households.

By this time in the climb, correspondents will recognise "Ned's" favourite tactic, of blowing up his bloviation to an even more interminable length by inserting the thoughts of others:

During Bullock’s Firechat Chat at CEDA on September 22 she was asked about AI as the “great white hope” for productivity. The governor replied: “I think, yes, it is the great white hope. AI is the great white hope to improve productivity. When I talk to colleagues around the world about this, I think everyone thinks that, but I think everyone also agrees that there are very few signs yet that AI is actually influencing the supply side of the economy.”
It is a revealing insight into the frustration and desperation that is engulfing the economic class. The recent Intergenerational Report projected productivity grow rising to 1.2 per cent, yet it is hard to discern the means to get there, outside the hope of AI, a revolutionary technology heavy with opportunity and risks to match.
Principal forecaster at EQ Economics Warren Hogan told Inquirer: “The market is pricing in another rate hike this year and a very high probability of a third rate hike in early 2027, which is a reasonable assessment. If Australia’s government cannot cut spending, the RBA will be under pressure to keep raising rates until policy is genuinely restrictive.
“We’ve had 40 years of decline in the cost of capital and labour costs. Now we’re in a world where interest rates are going to be on an upward trajectory. The real burden of adjustment in this country is going to fall on households. The era of governments around the world having no discipline, being able to run and fund deficits without there being a big impact on the cost of money and squeezing out the private sector, that’s over.
“It’s because for the first time in decades we’ve got a genuine increase in demand for capital from the tech companies to fund the AI infrastructure. The capex rollout from the tech companies is approaching $1 trillion this year; a handful of firms planning to spend $5 trillion over the next few years is historic and truly stunning. The great bulk of funding will come from global debt markets.

Is it possible for this exhaustive, exhausting carry on not to mention the French clock devotee?

Paul Keating, right, and top left, used the 40th anniversary of the banana republic statement to issue warning to Jim Chalmers, bottom left, about debt threat, the need for low inflationary growth and importance of fundamental reform of the tax system. Pictures: News Corp/Supplied

Is this he?

There seems to be a likeness, and the once despised figure is now a heroic club deployed to beat the current mob into a pulp:

“This reveals two uncomfortable realities about the future of the global economy – both the cost of labour and capital are on a long-term upward trajectory. The strategies of governments running deficits is going to enter a whole new phase.
“Australia’s productivity problem is that we have grown the size of government too much. The market sector or private sector is not doing too badly from a productivity perspective. Our problem is that we are effectively taxing the productive to fund the unproductive. The only way we are going to lift productivity is through enhancing our labour supply with capital and technology, and until we get the size of government down, the job won’t be done.”
In a podcast this week with Michelle Grattan, Chalmers defended his record, pointing to the productivity package in the last budget saying it was the “broadest” in decades, highlighted cuts in income tax, measures to cushion cost-of-living pressures, called AI a source of “more dynamism and more productivity”, said economic growth in Australia remained stronger than in most advanced economies, and said the primary influence on the economy at the moment was external – the Iranian war impact on fuel and oil prices.
Here’s a postscript: in the 1980s at the time of the “banana republic” emergency, as declared by Paul Keating, policy shock therapy was applied to the economy. Spending in real terms over three years was cut by 1.1 per cent, 0.9 per cent and 3.1 per cent – a result unprecedented during the past 50 years (outside adjustments required after a crisis-induced fiscal stimulus.) Yes, inflation was far higher then and the economic threat was far more severe than today. Still, it shows what a Labor government was once capable of doing.

Thank the absent lord that's over. The pond left it around the second gobbet, and yet there's still a morsel to go, because "Ned" deserves his thumb ...

Paul Kelly
Editor-At-Large
Paul Kelly is Editor-at-Large on The Australian. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of the paper and he writes on Australian politics, public policy and international affairs. Paul has covered Australian governments from Gough Whitlam to Anthony Albanese. He is a regular television commentator and the author and co-author of twelve books books including The End of Certainty on the politics and economics of the 1980s. His recent books include Triumph and Demise on the Rudd-Gillard era and The March of Patriots which offers a re-interpretation of Paul Keating and John Howard in office.

And so to bring it all together, and many thanks to the immortal Rowe for making "Ned" sufferable.

He titled it Eco (ecco, ecce?) illo via kehoe which the pond guesses might mean "Behold, that is the "way" or "Here is that path" Kehoe!

And with all that done, and even though the pond has run way too long, it would like to keep the discussion of "western values" going.

The pond's current toilet reading is The Cambridge Illustrated History of China by Patricia Buckley Ebrey CUP, reprinted edition 1997.

There came a reminder that the onion muncher's mob were nothing but vile grifters, drug peddlars, pushers and freaks, worse than any street kid in The Wire trying to make a living.

What an indefensible mob they were, the lowest of the low, vile scum, and yet somehow the embodiment of "western values"...

OPIUM AND THE OPIUM WAR

It would be tedious to relate all of the military encounters between China and Western powers over the course of the nineteenth century and the penalties China suffered in consequence. The first of these encounters, the Opium War of 1840-42, is, however, worth recounting because it set the tone for those to follow and came to carry great symbolic weight in China. In Chinese eyes there could not have been a more blatant case of international bullying, of the morally repugnant imposing their will on those trying to do the right thing. This moral dimension in turn made it that much more difficult for Chinese to discern in western civilization anything worth adopting.
The rise of Britain as a great naval power dependent on foreign trade probably made conflict with China inevitable, since China had no desire to organize trade on the European model and Britain had the power to force acceptance of its terms. The specific circumstances of the conflict, however, were tied up with trade in the narcotic opium. Opium, a derivative of the poppy, had long been used in China for medicinal purposes, such as control of diarrhoea. In the seventeenth century the practice of smoking opium in combination with tobacco spread from southeast Asia. In the eighteenth century a way was found to smoke pure opium sap in a pipe. Soon people were smoking opium simply for its narcotic effects: it relieved both physical and emotional pain and made tedious or physically taxing work seem less onerous. But opium was addictive; withdrawal symptoms included severe cramps, muscle twitching, chills, and nausea.
Following the British conquest of large parts of India, the British invested massively in the manufacture and distribution of opium, seeing its sale as a way to solve the problem of their balance of payments with China. The East India Company controlled the sale of opium in India and licensed private traders to ship it to China. Beginning with only 200 chests of opium in 1729, imports had passed 1,000 chests in 1767 and 4,500 by 1800. During the next quarter century imports more than doubled to 10,000 chests, then quadrupled to 40,000 in 1838.
The Chinese authorities were well aware of the evils caused by opium smoking. By the early nineteenth century addicts included government clerks and runners as well as imperial clansmen and eunuchs at court. To fight the spread of addiction, in 1800 both importation and domestic production were banned. In 1813 smoking opium was outlawed, made punishable by 100 blows and wearing the ‘cangue’ (a heavy wooden collar) for a month. Open trading then disappeared but the British and other traders managed to stay clear of the Chinese authorities by docking their boats off the coast of Guangdong and selling the drug to Chinese smugglers who would distribute it through a series of middlemen, making it very difficult for the Qing government to trace the major dealers. Suppression was also hampered by the huge profitability of the trade; criminal gangs stepped in and found ways to buy off police and officials, in ways the modern world is all too familiar with.
Soon the outflow of silver caused by the opium trade gave additional urgency to the need to solve the opium problem. By the 1820s two million taels of silver were flowing out of China a year, which rose to nine million by the early 1830s. In 1839, after proposals to legalize opium were rejected in favour of tougher anti-smuggling measures, the experienced and high-minded official Lin Zexu was dispatched to Guangzhou to compel the foreign traders to stop bringing opium into China and the Chinese to stop smoking. He confiscated pipes, seized opium stores, and arrested some 1,600 Chinese. The foreigners proved harder to manage. Lin Zexu used threats and bribes to get the foreign merchants to turn over their stores of opium. He offered to trade the opium for tea at a ratio of one to five and threatened to execute the heads of the Co-hong. He wrote a letter to Queen Victoria with the following appeal: ‘Suppose there were people from another country who carried opium for sale to England and seduced your people into buying and smoking it; certainly your honourable ruler would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused.’ He even barricaded the foreigners in their factories to pressure them to turn over their stocks.
By this point the British had abolished the East India Company and a superintendent of trade had been appointed to represent British interests in Guangzhou. To end this impasse, the British superintendent, Charles Elliot, collected the opium from the merchants and turned it over to Lin, who promptly destroyed it in the presence of the British. Lin ruled that only traders who put up bonds and promised not to deal in opium would thereafter be allowed to trade at Guangzhou. Lin also pressured the Portuguese to expel the British from Macao, as a consequence of which they moved to the barren island of Hong Kong. Meanwhile, in England, commercial interests were pushing for war with China. William Jardine, of the major opium trading firm of Jardine, Matheson, and Company, sailed to London to lobby for war. Once the decision went his way, he supplied assistance, leasing vessels to the British fleet and lending pilots and translators. A British expeditionary force left India in 1840 with sixteen warships and thirty-one other ships.
In preparation for a military confrontation, Lin bought new cannons for the forts and laid great chains across the estuary leading into Guangzhou. This caused no problem for the British expeditionary force, since they simply bypassed Guangzhou and made for the major ports of Ningbo and Tianjin, which they shut down in short order. The Chinese could no longer refuse to negotiate. The agreement worked out in Guangzhou called for ceding Hong Kong, repaying the Briths the cost of their expedition (an indemnity of six million Mexican silver dollars), and allowing direct intercourse between officials of each country.
Upon learning the terms of the settlement, the public in both countries was outraged. Lin Zexu had already been exiled for having allowed the war to start; now the official who negotiated the treaty was brought to the capital in chains. In England a new expeditionary force was ordered, this time with 10,000 men, more than twice the previous number, and in 1841 the British occupied several strategic coastal cities, including Shanghai. Dozens of Qing officers committed suicide when defeat was certain. Finally, when the British took up positions outside the walls of Nanjing, the Chinese were forced to sue for peace. The Treaty of Nanjing, concluded at gunpoint, raised the indemnity to twenty-one million ounces of silver, abolished the Co-hong, opened five treaty ports (Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai), and fixed the tariff at 5 per cent. Through the provision of ‘extraterritoriality’, British subjects in China were answerable only to British law, even in disputes with Chinese. The 'most-favoured nation' clause provided that if another nation extracted a new privilege from China, that same privilege would be extended automatically to Britain.
During the course of the nineteenth century China signed many more ‘unequal’ treaties with imperialist powers, but the basic terms had been set. China could not set its own tariffs and eventually even had to appoint European officers to collect them. When Chinese did not buy the Europeans’ woollens, knives, and pianos in the hoped-for numbers, European merchants did not fault their own expectations but the obstructionism of Chinese officials; they demanded more treaty ports and fewer restrictions on trade. In 1860, an Anglo-French expedition occupied Beijing for a month to force the acceptance of new treaties, which brought the number of treaty ports to fourteen. By the end of the century more treaty ports were added and large areas within some treaty ports were leased in perpetuity to foreign powers. These concessions, where foreigners did not have to obey Chinese laws, came to resemble international cities attached to the Chinese mainland. Foreign countries won the right to establish legations and consulates in China, with their diplomats treated according to European definitions of international protocol. Also as a result of gunboat diplomacy, Christian missionaries obtained rights to preach throughout China. By the end of the century foreign businessmen had even gained the right to open factories on Chinese soil.
Another consequence of the Opium War was the continued increase in opium addiction. Trade in opium was legalized by treaty in 1860, and opium remained a major item of trade until the end of the century, though the proportion imported declined after 1880 with the expansion of domestic production. By the end of the century, western observers estimated that about 10 per cent of the population of China smoked opium, with a third to a half of them addicted. This would mean on the order of fifteen million opium addicts and about another thirty million occasional users. The highest rates of addiction were probably found among imperial clansmen and bannerman, living on meagre stipends without much to do.

Next up the Belgians in the Congo, exemplifying "western values", in much the same way that Carthage brought out the best in "Roman values"?

And for something else indefensible, another immortal Rowe ...

Way past time for a little light relief.

Relax, bromancer, all is well with our friends. The gatling hasn't jammed, the square hasn't broken, there's no blood, and certainly no beardos or weirdos...

In which Our Henry leads the Friday way, but there are any number of other losers and dropkicks refusing to pay company tax ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 21:17:24 +0000

Devotees of Air Crash Investigations, aka Mayday - the pond is one - will recall the strange case of Gameel Al-Batouti who flew EgyptAir Flight 990 into the ground while chanting "Tawkalt ala Allah" eleven times.

It wasn't a conspiracy, and his motivations are still disputed, but the odds are strong he wasn't a jihadist.

On the other hand, there's the matter of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, where it became clear over time that Russian-backed forces were responsible for the war crime, though Vlad the Sociopath's minions have never faced justice.

The pond generally tries to avoid rushes to judgements, common gossip and conspiracy theories that immediately erupt after an event.

The mad mullahs of Iran have enough on their plate with the murders of thousands of dissidents, and knee-jerk reactions that they're behind everything needs time and evidence before being shouted, Benji-style, from the rooftops.

This morning he'd retreated to talking about the pilot in the latest disaster as being "suicidal", infused with religious fanaticism, but his motivation is crudely obvious - he's got an election to win.

Naturally the Australian Daily Zionist News was all in ...

Luckily the intermittent archive is now working again so the pond could send that offering off to the cornfield: Radicalised Flydubai co-pilot ‘had discussed killing Jews,’ likely recruited in advance

Why everyone keeps quoting Benji, when his motivations are obvious, remains a mystery.

Besides, there's enough dismal news to hand with yet another example of the enormous cruelty and fatuous logic behind lethal injections as a punishment, as well as the odd bit of joy, as in the speculation - fuelled by gambling - that Mark Carney might score the Nobel Peace Prize and Time Person of the Year.

The pond would love it to happen, simply to make the mad King even madder, but won't be putting any money on it, just as the pond is a glutton for stories about the imminent fall of Vlad the sociopath, though he's been taking a very long time fall.

In the interim, there are simple pleasures like the folly of Eric Schmitt, whose name resonates with excremental behaviour.

The one thing that the pond can rely on each Friday is that Our Homeric Henry will turn up with yet another diatribe, littered with pompous, portentous references, and thereby provide a form of cosmic relief.

And so it came to pass this day ...and what a great day, because it's not the usual rampant Zionism, for which the pond had laid the groundwork yesterday, but rather "identity politics", confused and conflated with AI ...

The header: By Henry Ergas

French author’s AI scandal reveals how identity politics is degrading literature

The invitation to listen to a bot imitate Our Henry, shades of irony: Listen to this article

8 min

The caption for the plain Jane illustration: Copies of the book C'etait ca ou mourir (It Was That or Die), written by Canadian-Haitian novelist Thelyson Orelien, at a literature festival in France. Picture: Joel Saget/AFP

The plea for relevance in a world where paywalls breed irrelevance: Make us preferred on Google

Our Henry went right off, in a most satisfying way ...

Last week, France’s rentrée littéraire – the late-summer publishing season that marks the end of the summer holidays – veered from triumph to scandal. Thélyson Orélien’s C’était ça ou mourir (“It was This or Death”) had taken bookshops by storm and, after winning the FNAC readers’ and booksellers’ prize, appeared on the longlists for just about every major literary award – including the Goncourt, the most prestigious of them all.

Orélien, a Haitian-born writer now living in Quebec, tells the story of a history teacher from Port-au-Prince who is forced out of Haiti when his neighbourhood burns, taking only a diploma, a notebook of poems and a photo of his mother. After a harrowing escape he travels, always at great risk, through the Dominican Republic, Brazil and Mexico toward family in Canada, before facing the blatantly racist hostility of US immigration officials as he approaches the Canadian border.

The caption for the alleged thought criminal: Canadian-Haitian novelist Thelyson Orelien Picture: Joel Saget/AFP

An autobiographical saga of dispossession, forced migration and the desperate search for asylum, the book received gushing reviews. Then, on September 21, just three days after Le Monde, the progressive literati’s bible, hailed its brilliance, an anonymous account on X claimed the novel had been largely written by artificial intelligence.

That conservative outlets seized on the post immediately sparked accusations of racism, with Orélien denouncing a racially motivated conspiracy. But as mounting evidence confirmed the post’s claim, and revelations emerged of plagiarism in Orélien’s earlier work, the book was dropped from the Goncourt longlist.

None of that dimmed the ardour of his supporters: sales have risen and bookshops have turned promotional events into rousing displays of solidarity. Nor have any of the other major literary prizes followed the Goncourt’s lead.

Startling as that is, it is a sign of the times. The literary world no longer honours authors; it consecrates saints. What is rewarded is not the writing but the political virtue of the writer – a writer who, when exposed as a fraud, is promoted to martyr rather than demoted to sinner.

Actually it's not just literature. See the aforementioned Schmitt and his devotees ...

Eric Schmitt’s Very Bad Day at Work

For MAGA politicians, there’s no such thing as a gaffe. (*intermittent archive link)

By Helen Lewis

...Some MAGA influencers fully embraced the idea that Schmitt had, in fact, completed le epic pwn of Smith. On The Charlie Kirk Show—still named for its late creator—one of the hosts played the clip of Schmitt’s question after telling the senator he had to “give you some flowers” for his acuity. The whole segment appeared to have been beamed in from a parallel reality where the exchange with Smith had gone well for the senator. “It was the only NBA or NCAA men’s game going on at that time in Atlanta,” Schmitt said. “He claimed later that he was at another game. I don’t know. Now, here’s the thing—my job is to ask the questions.” This explanation opens up the possibility that the reason Schmitt and his team didn’t think Smith could be referring to the Hawkeyes was because they had forgotten the existence of women’s basketball. Not a great look for a party that has made a crusade lately of protecting women’s sports.

Other stars in the MAGA universe, however, seemed to realize that Schmitt’s failed gotcha would not delight their faithful, even if they could not say so out loud. The former journalist Benny Johnson, who has 4 million followers on X, posted that Schmitt had “pulled out the receipts” and left Smith “stunned.” Later, he deleted that post, without explanation. On Fox News, Sean Hannity’s recap of the hearing left out Schmitt’s screw-up but included a megamix of Republicans shouting at Smith, including John Kennedy of Louisiana telling the former special counsel that “you make me want to throw up in my mouth.”

Enough with the comedy, the pond has never been big on literary prizes. They're a useful way to flog a book, but have as much meaning as the honorific, "New York Times best seller".

Time is the only way to sort out books of lasting relevance - imagine Our Henry going off at Charles Dickens for being "woke" and full of identity politics as he scribbled about the miseries of Victorian life, yet in the pond's mind - having recently had another go at Vanity Fair - he's lasted better than Thackeray (on the other hand Thackeray's portrait of vanity has more than a hint of 'wokeness' and 'identity politics' about it).

Do such prizes need Homeric Henry wandering around with a blunderbuss, especially as he uses that prime doofus and epically stupid man Bret Stephens as a source? Not really ...

Literary prizes give that judgment its public seal: they hand out the halos to those whose identities are taken as credentials of merit. And in few countries is that clearer than in Australia.

We are, for sure, not alone. Bret Stephens recently noted that in the United States, nine of this year’s 10 National Book Award winners came from “minorities”. But the trend here is exceptionally stark.

From 2000 to 2008, 11 per cent of the writers shortlisted for our literary prizes were Indigenous or “culturally diverse”. Since 2018, that share has soared to 46 per cent. Over the same periods, “women of colour”, as Americans call them, rose from 5 per cent of those shortlisted to 31 per cent. Nor does the leg-up end with places on the shortlist: Indigenous authors, for example, now win at about twice their share of shortlisted books.

As authors’ identities have gained prominence in prize selection, so have identity-based themes among the winning books. In the 1990s, “identitarian” books accounted for no more than 10 per cent of prize winners. From 2000 to 2014, their share climbed into the 10-20 per cent range. Then the identity-themed share rose towards 30 per cent before surging to nearly 50 per cent.

That is not simply because authors who define themselves by their identity tend to write identity-based novels. Who judges them matters too: a five-member panel with two Indigenous or “culturally diverse” judges is statistically likely to shortlist twice as many novels with identity-based themes as a panel with none.

With those groups’ share of judges trebling, from 12 per cent in 2009-17 to 36 per cent over the following eight years, identity-themed works claimed a growing share of shortlist places – and a still greater share of winners.

But the effect doesn’t end with the verdict, because past winners have a strong chance of becoming future judges. The process therefore feeds on itself: the favoured groups win prizes, gain places on judging panels and select new winners in their image. Already represented on panels far above their share of the population or of Australia’s published fiction writers, they are likely to supply an increasing proportion of tomorrow’s winners, judges and then winners – expanding and entrenching identity literature’s dominance.

Far from stemming those trends, the government fuels them. The entity laughingly referred to as Creative Australia boasts that 13 per cent of its individual grant recipients are Indigenous, up from 7 per cent in 2015-19, as against a population share of just 3 per cent. “Minority applicants”, it reports, have a higher success rate on applications than those outside the favoured group – evidence it interprets as proof of success, rather than as a surefire way of discouraging outstanding applicants who do not fit its ideological straitjacket.

None of this troubles the pond, though it surely troubles bigots and rancid racists.

Those who want to stick with the own kind and celebrate exterminations and apartheid always have Quad-rants, and the lizard Oz as home for their literary endeavours ...Arts Minister Tony Burke at the launch of Creative Australia in 2023. Picture: Creative Australia

Clearly the hole in bucket man got out of the wrong side of the bed and wanted something to rant about, and so inevitably ended up dragging in the Soviets...

Nor is the outcome politically neutral. Eight recent award winners received Creative Australia funding. Most are on the keffiyeh-clad hard left; all believe writing is a political task; none has enduring aesthetic merit.

That is hardly surprising. The books today’s panels select are almost invariably mediocre. They are not so hopeless as to entirely miss the mark; but they lack anything that makes a book truly unique – each is interchangeable with the next. The emotions we are intended to feel do not arise from a challenging encounter with the text. They are stuck on, announced as part of the package and supplied by a plot that demands no real work from the reader.

Many, moreover, are indifferently written inversions of Soviet-era Socialist Realism. In Socialist Realism, Andrei Sinyavsky observed in the 1965 book that brought him a seven-year sentence to the Gulag, “each work is assured of a happy ending”, for “even when it produces a tragedy, it is an Optimistic Tragedy, in which the hero may die but Communism triumphs”.

Actually Soviet Art has its recherché charms ... Seven decades of Soviet propaganda – in pictures

So sweet and aspirational.

Even the great Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich couldn't occasionally avoid reverting to the banalities that Stalinism required - think the 5th Symphony - but it's still a fun and rousing listen.

But when Our Henry gets on a drum roll, stand clear ...

Our authors don’t promise Communism’s happy endings. But their taxpayer-funded writing is no less formulaic, featuring protagonists who, like Orélien’s history teacher, compete in the victimhood Olympics, relentlessly battling “whiteness”, racism and, more recently, the evil of evils, Zionism.

This is, in short, a state-sponsored system that produces clones, not masterpieces. Two continental literary prizes that have resolutely bucked the “diversity” trend show what could have been: the Prix Goncourt and Italy’s Premio Strega. Since 2000, the Goncourt has rewarded at least eight genuinely outstanding books; the Strega, at least five. Apart from Tim Winton, whose most feted work predates 2000, and Christos Tsiolkas, it is hard to think of an Australian winner whose award-winning book will stand the test of time.

If the pond might be so bold, Tim Winton leaves it cold, but that's the joy of personal taste ...Australian author Tim Winton at Ningaloo, WA.

Xians of the Simon Smart kind are welcome to him ... The Sacred Fragility of Life: Tim Winton, Faith and Fundamentalism

In an age so dominated by a hard materialism Winton stands out as someone who believes the material aspects of life are bound up in the spiritual. Which means questions of justice have an eternal ring to them. He takes on the persona of the raging prophet in his Palm Sunday Speech ("Stones for Bread") that picks up on Jesus's Sermon on the Mount to castigate modern Australia for its treatment of asylum seekers. "Something is festering in the heart of our community, something shameful and rotten," he warns. "But to live as hostages to our lowest fears we must surrender things that are sacred: our human decency, our morality, our self-respect, our inner peace." Winton continues to have faith in our better instincts and it is to these that he appeals.

Is Our Henry remotely interested in that epic tale turned by Phil Noyce into Rabbit Proof Fence?

Probably not, that would be a step too far for the old bigot ...

But the damage does not end with the prizes. In the increasingly intense competition for attention, the likelihood of winning inevitably influences what is published. Life will therefore become ever harder for authors who buck the party line; far better to “sing in chorus”, as they used to say in the USSR.

The results are predictable. Identity fraud and political conformism will flourish as failing to tick the right boxes becomes a red flag. So will identity literature’s answer to chick-lit: post-colonial tales of suffering, struggle and survival “authored” by AI.

Perhaps that is the upside: at least the machines will be intelligent. And since we are determined to become an economic backwater, why not be an intellectual wasteland too?

No Zionism, no Thucydides? Ah well, as Ned is alleged to have said, and as Joseph Furphy once wrote, such is life.

There's enough of an intellectual wasteland at the lizard Oz to satisfy the pond for several lifetimes.

Have an immortal Rowe for a break...

And so to the difficult matter of picking a bonus.

The reptiles' spoofing of the intermittent archive seem to have gone awry, so it's possible to do a survey of what's troubling the hive mind ...

Commentary

By Michael Easson

‘Strategic ambiguity’ on Taiwan satisfies our national interest

The war on China is best left to the bromancer ... and the bulk of the meretricious Merritt is best off in an archival cornfield:

Legal Affairs

By Chris Merritt

Flawed laws and failing civics education expose Australia to rising post-October 7 hatred

Sure there's a requisite amount of Zionist flourishes.

Sure there are ironies to relish in the meretricious Merrit rabbiting on about "civics education" in a paper dedicated to division and hate and fear-mongering, but is that enough to justify going through the usual hysteria about furriners? Not to mention blather about "Australian values".

Consider this. The corporation for which Merritt works absolutely avoids paying tax, as good citizens should do.

The keen Keane scribbled News Corp celebrates more than a decade of paying zero tax in Australia for Crikey, which might involve a paywall:

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.

In contrast, Nine Entertainment paid $76.7 million tax on $290 million in profits; ailing Stokes family company Seven West Media — since folded into ailing Southern Cross Media — managed $3 million on $11 million profits, based on $1.3 billion in revenue. Southern Cross paid $4 million on $14 million. Ten Network, as usual, made nothing and paid nothing.

The 2024-25 data — which, as the ATO is always eager to note, contains details of corporations that pay no tax for perfectly good and legal reasons — show that fossil fuel and energy companies dominate the ranks of those paying zero tax.

And remember that Faux Noise is behind one of the most incompetent and deeply corrupt regimes in the history of the United States...

The pond did think about giving AI another run ...

By Adam Slonim

Medicare breach presents a timely argument for control of our AI

But now that the intermittent archive is back, why bother?

The pond should note it was deeply touched at the presence of a new Oz bot ...

... but that's as far as the pond's enthusiasm went, because the day the pond asks the reptiles about anything is the day their MAGA hero becomes a decent president, somewhere past the twelfth of never, a very long time ...

Instead the pond settled on the luddite lizard Oz editorialist's yearning for more coal...

To hell with the planet and to hell with taxes.

Heap on more coal, me hearties... and have a hearty infallible Pope to help with the heaping ...

Desperate, the pond realised that there's always reheated Mein Gott to hand ...

Ways to fix the plight of suffering workers?

Gott it ...

Ways to avoid paying company tax?

Perhaps blather endlessly about red tape?

Gott it ...

Ask the lizard Oz about ways to avoid paying tax while purporting to good citizenry and with a solution to everything?

Gott it ...

The madness never seems to end ...

In which the pond prepares for a Friday encounter with Homeric Henry with a reading ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:10:38 +0000

The pond will be back on deck tomorrow - a failure to cover the latest Homeric Henry outing would be a disgrace of the first water.

The odds are high that he'll be in full Australian Daily Zionist News mode, as will be the reptiles generally, what with Benji seeking to make political capital out of the Flydubai flight FZ1073 matter, and an election rapidly approaching.

The pond woke to the Beeb trying to make sense of the chaos and confusion surrounding the affair aboard the aircraft, but it's too early to extract any firm understanding at a distance, much like the matter of the alleged grave threat to RAF Fairford, so grave that the alleged five miscreants were immediately given conditional bail, a result that perplexed both mad King Donald and the pond.

Whatever, for the moment, the pond will offer another reading, and speaking of "Western Values" - as the pond did yesterday, and not to be confused with bombing schools - this hovered into view as a result of the pond's free range reading.

Where Hatred Lies
Omer Bartov
A nuanced new history by Mark Mazower reminds us that antisemitism, an age-old threat to Jewish life, can be warped into a political tool—as we see today, when any criticism of Israel can be deemed antisemitic. (*intermittent archive link)

An earlier piece by Bartrov in the same journal gives an idea of where his sympathies lie ...

‘Infinite License’
Omer Bartov
The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met. (*intermittent archive link)

Bartov opened this piece with a reference and an historical flourish worthy of Homeric Henry:

On January 12, 1904, the Herero people of German Southwest Africa—today’s Namibia—launched a series of attacks on scattered German farms in the territory. The Herero, a pastoral group of about 80,000, depended on their vast cattle herds for their economic, social, and cultural life, but the German settlers who had begun to arrive in the late nineteenth century increasingly encroached on their grazing lands.
The rebels destroyed many of the farms and killed more than a hundred settlers, mostly sparing women and children. For the settlers the rebellion served as a final proof of the need to eradicate the Herero, whom they described as “baboons.” Unable to restore order, the German governor appealed to Berlin, which sent some 10,000 soldiers. By August they had crushed the Herero fighters. In October the German commander, Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, issued what has come to be known as his Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order) to those who remained:

"The Herero are German subjects no longer. They have killed, stolen, cut off the ears and other parts of the body of wounded soldiers, and now are too cowardly to want to fight any longer…. The Herero nation must now leave the country. If it refuses, I shall compel it to do so with the big cannon. Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children."

Most of the Herero were shot or died of thirst and hunger in the desert to which they had been expelled. Several thousand were taken to forced labor camps.
For many decades the public and historians alike ignored this first genocide of the twentieth century. Germany’s famous Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with or overcoming the past) was about the Holocaust, not long-forgotten colonial crimes. Only in 2021 did the German government officially apologize for “the suffering, inhumanity and pain inflicted on the tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children by Germany during the war in what is today Namibia.” It also pledged over a billion euros in reparations, although the distribution of this money remains contentious, not least because the Germans negotiated with the Namibian government rather than with the Herero themselves.
That remote genocide at the dawn of the twentieth century shares some remarkable similarities with the campaign of ethnic cleansing and annihilation prosecuted by Israel in Gaza. Israel saw the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, in much the same way that the Germans saw the Herero attack 119 years earlier: as confirmation that the militant group was utterly savage and barbaric, that resistance to Israeli occupation would always incline toward murder, and that Gaza’s Palestinian population as a whole should be removed from the moral universe of civilization. “Human animals must be treated as such,” the Israeli major general Ghassan Alian (who is Druze) said shortly after the attack, echoing several other Israeli officials, including former defense minister Yoav Gallant. “There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell,” Alian said in an Arabic-language video message directed to Hamas as well as the residents of Gaza. Over the next seventeen months Israeli forces killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, over 70 percent of whom are estimated to have been civilians, maimed well over 100,000, and imposed on the remaining population conditions of inhuman deprivation, suffering, and pain. A cease-fire that went into effect on January 19 ended abruptly on March 18, when Israel refused to move on to the second phase of its agreement with Hamas and launched a series of unilateral attacks that have already killed hundreds more Palestinian civilians.

And so on, but the pond didn't mean to distract from the "western values" at work in Bartov's second piece, with the book under review being:

On Antisemitism: A Word in History
by Mark Mazower Penguin Press, 333 pp., $29.00

Bartov went into a detailed discussion, prompted by Mazower, of the question of antisemitism and its confusion and conflation with Zionism:

...Since Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, and the genocidal Israeli assault on Gaza that followed, the association between criticism of Israel and antisemitism has become ubiquitous. A growing range of scholars and other observers seem to agree with Mazower that even if “some anti-Zionism masks anti-Jewish sentiments, much of it does not.” But most major American Jewish organizations have stayed attached to the assumption that the main source of antisemitism in the world today is the anti-Israel left. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) contends that “anti-Zionism is antisemitic, in intent or effect.” The American Jewish Committee (AJC) defines anti-Zionism as “inherently bigoted” and claims that, because its “end goal…is to undermine and eliminate Jewish rights,” the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is driven by “antisemitic motivations.”
Various factions of the political right, meanwhile, have been quick to turn these assumptions to their advantage. Some have used allegations of antisemitism as a cudgel against the left in order to, in Mazower’s words, “police the universities, end long-standing anti-discrimination and diversity initiatives, reassert ‘Western values,’ and reaffirm the role of religion in American life.” Others have conscripted anti-Zionist, pro-Palestine rhetoric into the service of a notion of “Western values” rooted explicitly in Christian nationalism, expressing suspicion and hostility toward American Jews rather than opportunistically claiming to protect them.

Bartov spends plenty of time observing the dynamics arising from the establishment and growth of the state of Israel, and the pond commends the read available by the link.

Crucially, he raises the question of the standards adopted by Australia regarding the definitions of antisemitism - a prelude to the findings of the Royal Commission in December - versus any commentary on the concept of Zionism, though only indirectly, because his commentary is directed at the United States.

There is, however, something of an analogy to hand for the hive mind approach down under:

...As Mazower shows, this transformation in the understanding of antisemitism was reflected in profound changes in American advocacy for Israel. Especially after the fall of communism, such organizations as the AJC and the ADL, alongside the newly established Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and the AJC-backed UN Watch, became increasingly engaged in “monitoring” anti-Israel bias and undertaking antisemitism research. In 2004 Congress passed the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, leading to the creation of the Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism within the State Department. Because the definition of antisemitism now included “vilification of Israel,” Mazower explains, “American diplomats had an obligation to act on behalf of another nation.” Putting it differently, it also meant that antisemitism—defined as “vilification of Israel”—had become anti-American.
The best tool for the elimination of the distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Israel has become the definition of antisemitism endorsed in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental organization created to promote education about the Holocaust. Of the definition’s eleven examples of potentially antisemitic actions or statements, seven refer directly to Israel. They include denying Jews the right to self-determination, applying double standards to Israel that are not demanded of other nations, accusing Israel of exaggerating the Holocaust, and drawing comparisons between Israeli policies and those of the Nazis.
Some may find these statements objectionable, but they are not in and of themselves antisemitic. Many Jews around the world have rejected Zionism for theological or ideological reasons; many supporters of Zionism have argued that Israel should be “a light unto the nations” and thus held to higher standards; and many critics of Zionism, including Israelis, have argued that Israel has politically instrumentalized the Holocaust and drawn their own comparisons between certain Israeli actions and those of the Nazis. That is why alternative definitions have been offered, such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus Document, which carefully distinguish between antisemitism and criticism of Israel.
Nonetheless, in May 2024 the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which requires the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to adopt the IHRA definition. A few days later, in a speech at a remembrance ceremony for victims of the Holocaust, President Joe Biden implicitly endorsed the analogy between protests against Israel’s brutal response to the attack by Hamas on October 7 and antisemitism. In January 2025 President Donald Trump issued an executive order called “Additional Measures to Counter Anti-Semitism,” which draws on another order he signed in 2019 that requires federal agencies to consider the IHRA definition of antisemitism when enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The new executive order demands that “all available and appropriate legal tools” be used “to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.” This has enabled greater federal scrutiny of universities for allegations of antisemitism on their campuses, and the threat of withholding federal funding to compel universities to adopt new policies. For all intents and purposes, allegations of antisemitism have become a new way to muzzle opinion, silence speech, and curb academic freedom. All of this has been described by Kenneth Stern, who was the lead drafter of the IHRA definition, as making it “more, not less, difficult to tackle both antisemitism and anti-Israel dogma.”

Well yes, and Bartov immediately follows with the nub of it ...

There are two obvious problems with conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The first is the peril of confusing antisemitic prejudice with political opinions in response to the reality of Israeli occupation, oppression, ethnic cleansing, and growing racism. Indeed, a good deal of protest against Israel’s actions might be seen as defending the very political values that antisemites have long sought to undermine. If we are to pay any heed to the International Court of Justice’s 2024 ruling that described the occupation of the West Bank as unlawful and noted that Israel’s practices violate the prohibition against racial segregation and apartheid, then we must conclude that criticism of the brand of Zionism implemented by the Israeli government today is not only warranted but necessary for enforcing international humanitarian law. Having once meant “the hostility faced by Jews as a minority struggling for their legal rights,” Mazower argues, now antisemitism is more often an allegation “used to defend a Jewish majority state depriving the minority within it of theirs.”
The second problem with an Israel-focused understanding of antisemitism is that it leads to a faulty account of the main sources of anti-Jewish hatred, historically and in the present. Scholars and commentators who conflate anti-Jewish prejudice with anti-Zionist sentiment often focus their attention on antisemitism on the political left and in the Arab and Muslim world. One can certainly find antisemitism everywhere, among socialists and communists as well as liberals and conservatives. Neither the political left nor the Muslim world, however, has in the past century offered a form of anti-Jewish prejudice anywhere near as coherent, influential, and dangerous as that of their right-wing counterparts.

The pond will leave the rest to Bartov, save only to note his conclusion:

...We have come full circle. Because the aim of today’s surging accusations of antisemitism is not to combat the actual phenomenon but to suppress anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel, the “new right” has been handed a convenient opening. They have seized it. They now imply, and in some cases outright assert, that the Jews are the source of the rot in American society. Ironically, by presenting protest against the indefensible as malign, the self-proclaimed guardians of the Jews have done more than just warp the meaning of antisemitism. They have made it into a tool for those eager to revive the century-old hoax that, in their unequivocal support for Israel, the Jewish state’s defenders, and by extension the Jews as a whole, have stabbed their homeland—this time America—in the back.

BTW, Bartov is no knee jerk fellow traveller of any cause, as the tag for the article notes ...

Omer Bartov is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown and the author, most recently, of Israel: What Went Wrong?

He is, in fact, impeccably Jewish, as his wiki explains ...

Omer Bartov was born in 1954 in Ein HaHoresh, Israel. His father, Hanoch Bartov, was an author and journalist whose parents immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Poland before Hanoch was born. Bartov's mother immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Buczacz, Poland (now Buchach, Ukraine), in the mid-1930s. Bartov's parents were Zionists and fought in the 1948 Palestine war.
Bartov fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War as a company commander. In 1976, he and a score of other soldiers were severely wounded in a training accident due to a commander's negligence, which Bartov says the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) covered up. Bartov was educated at Tel Aviv University and obtained a D.Phil. from St Antony's College, Oxford, with a doctoral thesis on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and its crimes on the Eastern front during World War II.

And so on, but as seen above, he has certain views ...

In January 2024, Bartov said that Israel had repeatedly expressed genocidal intent against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the Gaza war. By August of that year, having visited Israel again in June, Bartov said it "was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions". On April 24, 2025, Bartov said: "It's a misnomer to call it a 'war'. ... This is an occupation by the IDF designed to take over Gaza. There will, of course, be resistance, but it will be guerrilla resistance." He also noted the violence had escalated beyond Gaza to include the West Bank. In July 2025, Bartov wrote an essay in The New York Times in which he argued that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people and noted that other experts in genocide studies had reached the same conclusion. (All footnotes at his wiki)

This isn't a form of antisemitism, nor is it a case of Jewish self-loathing.

Rather it is a matter of making observations arising from observable events, a feat which the Zionists at the lizard Oz are singularly incapable of doing.

What a relief it is to do a Tootle and leave the hive mind tracks to spend company with some insightful writing.

Meanwhile, the immortal Rowe and the infallible Pope keep the pond grounded and in touch with reality ...

Even the reptiles might be beguiled and compelled by that filmic comparison ...

Greetings from cocky land ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 20:36:20 +0000

One of the pleasures of the rustic life is the observation of cockies, a vastly different affair than the study of the reptiles of Oz.

They're a garrulous, raucous bird, with a communal streak ...

The pond fears that the communal streak might be the death of them, should the bird flu get amongst the hapless creatures, as they assiduously peck away at grass, which is better than when they're demolishing trees or eaves...

During the pond's time AWOL from herpetology studies, the pond has been doing - apart from bird observations - some reading.

Consider this: how many times has some idiot of the onion munching, or gormless reptile kind, referred to the West or to the dire state of Western Civilisation, or some other incoherent notion.

Incoherent, because without pinching assorted key inventions from China, or devouring the treasure of many other nations around the world, the "West" would have been a sorry place. Should it be called the "West with Chinese benefits"?

The pond brooded at the idea of featuring this review in the LRB the next time the onion muncher turned up, or perhaps some other reptile of the "Ned" or bromancer kind rabbited on about "Western Civilisaton" ...

Vol. 48 No. 17 · 24 September 2026
Ranks of Humanity
Thomas Meaney (* intermittent archive link)

The book under review ...

The West: The History of an Idea

by Georgios Varouxakis.

Princeton, 491 pp., £35, September 2025, 978 0 691 17718 2

The pond thought a teaser trailer for the entire column could stand on its own, and that in future times correspondents might apply the term to any future reptile blather on the topic ...

Few terms in international politics appear so infirm, so doddering, yet so indomitable as ‘the West’. Attempts to replace it – ‘the developed world’, ‘the free world’, ‘the liberal international order’, ‘the global North’ – have only underscored its endurance. When Oswald Spengler leaped out of obscurity with the publication of the first volume of The Decline of the West in the last months of the First World War, he inaugurated a genre of premature autopsies: The End of the West; The Defeat of the West; The Abandonment of the West; The Death of the West; Suicide of the West. The books make up a small library, and the idea soldiers on, despite claims to the contrary. ‘The category “the West” does not seem to be in Donald Trump’s head,’ David Brooks wrote at the start of Trump’s second term. In The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, Alexander Karp, the head of Palantir, writes that ‘the West’ is ‘a concept that has been discarded by many, almost casually’. One of the persistent features of the West is that its champions worry it will wither away.

While the historical West may have been constituted by Latin Europe and Britain, along with their colonial offshoots, many promoters of the West today seem to think of it as a club that can sign up new members, including eligible liberal democracies such as Taiwan, South Korea and what Solzhenitsyn once called a ‘Far West’, namely Japan. The most zealous booster of this sort is the historian Stephen Kotkin. But there is less porousness in the history of the West than this idealised picture suggests. The concept came into its own less as a geographical expression or a collection of values than as a euphemism for a particular cultural and political project. From the start, for its advocates, the West formed the vanguard of world development, but they were conflicted about how expansive or inclusive that development could be. The West can play at being universal, seeing itself as the only ‘civilisation’ and basing itself on metrics of modernisation or democratisation or simply wealth, but if the core appears threatened – by migration or the rise of a rival power or a sense of its own decline – it snaps back to its original, exclusive formation, as the superior civilisation among several. Various nations have claimed to be its leader – France, Britain, the United States – but the central drama of the West has been its diet: which nations it has chosen to keep out, and which it has swallowed whole.

The review spends much time contemplating what actually constitutes the "West" - Russia is a particular problem, what with it being both west and east - and there's a splendid origin story to go with it ...

One of the satisfactions of Georgios Varouxakis’s The West: The History of an Idea is that, with a precision far exceeding that of earlier accounts, it attempts to pinpoint the time and place ‘the West’ was born. Indeed he gives us the exact address: 17 rue Monsieur-le-Prince in Paris’s sixth arrondissement. In the 1840s, Auguste Comte began to concoct a plan for the ‘avant-garde of Humanity’ that would find political expression in a ‘République occidentale’. Comte was one of the first modernisation theorists. According to him, the advanced portion of humanity had moved through three historical stages: the ‘theological’, when it attributed historical causes to divine intervention; the ‘metaphysical’, when it graduated to thinking in abstract philosophical concepts; and then at last the ‘positive’ age, when industrial development and science were able to advance ‘order’ and ‘progress’, yielding a peaceful world society. Comte believed that the only part of mankind nearing this terminus was located in Western Europe, along with its transplanted societies in the Americas and Australasia. The ‘Western Republic’ comprised the French, the Spanish, the Italians and, more reluctantly for him, the English and the Germans. Greece and Poland were considered honorary additions as outposts of the West.

But there was a semantic hitch in Comte’s theory. As Varouxakis points out, the contemporary term typically used for Comte’s desired collection of peoples was ‘Europe’ or, less often, ‘Christendom’. Both these groupings, however, included Orthodox Russia, a pre-industrial despotism that in Comte’s view was far from prepared to join the ranks of the avant-garde of humanity. The other problem was that ‘Europe’ was too geographically restricted to include European settlers in the Americas and elsewhere. Comte needed a designation that could siphon off Latin Europe from Eastern Europe, but also include Britain and its colonial holdings in North and Latin America and Australasia. His solution was the coinage ‘Occidentalité’. Comte’s disciples in England at first translated the word as ‘Occidentalism’ (or simply ‘greatness’) before settling on ‘Westernness’.

It is easy to mock Comte’s notions. He wanted the world to speak Italian, and designed flags, wedding ceremonies and special uniforms for the apostles of humanity. His République occidentale – which Varouxakis translates as ‘the Western Republic’ – would have its headquarters in Paris (though Comte envisioned its moving to Istanbul), with delegations around the world sending emissaries to join their less advanced nations with the industrial age. Yet Comte was also an ardent anti-imperialist. He campaigned for French withdrawal from Algeria (its conquest had been led by his former student) and called for Britain to leave India, Gibraltar and the Caribbean. He was also an anti-nationalist, who insisted that all member countries of the Western Republic be broken up into smaller polities, each around the size of Tuscany.

It's easy to mock the onion muncher, and other reptiles of his ilk. They show the same kind of inanity and condescension that Comte showed when confronted with Russia ...

Shortly before his death in 1857, Comte wrote two letters to Tsar Nicholas outlining his plan for Russia’s gradual inclusion into the progressive vanguard of humanity. By virtue of its backwardness, Comte informed Nicholas, Russia had a unique chance to leapfrog the atomising parliamentary stage of Western Europe and integrate itself directly into the finished ranks of Humanity. (Comte envisioned a similar leapfrogging for Africans, who would be able to move directly from fetishism – the first sub-stage of the theological stage – to positivism, skipping the intermediary phases of development.) The peasant communes of Russia, and the general lack of national cohesion, made it suitable for a smoother breakdown into the smaller polities Comte favoured. His British followers, however, were explicit about constructing the idea of ‘the West’ in opposition to Russia. ‘What constitutes the West?’ Richard Congreve asked in 1866. ‘The elimination of Russia from the system is the first great rectification. She is an Eastern, not a Western power, or more Eastern than Western.’

And so it's gone ever since, stupid people deploying boxes and categories and rankings and inclusions and exclusions, and yet even the chroniclers of the madness fall victim to the disease, with - spoiler alert - this the last of the piece, with the most obvious quality of the "West" - the notion of "white", of "whiteness", whatever that means - only hinted at, but nakedly obvious when reading the onion muncher and his kind ...

...After a series of striking insights into the way ‘the West’ was constructed in opposition to Russia, Islam and communism, Varouxakis ends his book like another of the West-worriers he chronicles, warning us not to reject the idea of ‘the West’ if it means rejecting the ‘valuable principles and practices that came to be combined in what is called “the West”’. ‘The baby,’ he writes, ‘must not go out with the bathwater.’

One missing piece of Varouxakis’s puzzle is why ‘the West’ has been more successful than competing designations. It has to do with the term’s ability to elide contradiction. At once historical and geographically restricted, the West is also eternal and universal. It is limited to Western Europe, the United States and individual ‘Westerners’ around the globe, but all the while, as Kotkin sees it, the West is the horizon that all nations can reach if they play by its rules. This makes ‘the West’ a supple term of political art. When the going is good, the West is a limitless formation; when the going gets rough, the West cuts its losses, retreats into itself and publishes books about why it is the best.

The pond will likely reference this outing again, but for the moment will settle for a 'toon from the infallible Pope, noting the progress in a location neither east nor west, or both, but decidedly down under, unless you happen to flip the globe the right way up ...

The pond will shortly return to herpetological duties, even more agonisingly aware that there is so much that is more interesting to read than the lizard Oz when out and about in the world ...

Dorothy is unwell

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:00:00 +0000

... but hopefully back to normal soon.

Get out your pen and paper, it's larnin' time with the Caterist, Simpleton "AI" Simon, Geoff chambering a Pauline round, and the Major doing Major ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 21:36:31 +0000

Reasons not to vote Labor, part 3 ... in which Jason Clare goes full luddite ...

The header: By Nick Cater
Jason Clare demands return to pen and paper as school computer experiment backfires

The use of a bot voice while deploring computers: Listen to this article
7 min

The caption for the snap of demonic child-ruining machines: The Digital Education Revolution was one of Kevin Rudd’s keynote policies at the 2007 election when Education Minister Jason Clare was first elected to parliament. Picture: Alan Place

The plea for a place in the bot universe: Make us preferred on Google

This is precisely the sort of stuff the pond might expect from the beefy boofheads and his minions: a sudden revelation that computer literacy causes the decline and ruination of impressionable young minds.

Instead it's Jason Clare doing their work for them, and receiving the approval of the quarry-whispering Caterist...

Jason Clare wants to reverse the digital saturation of the classroom, reacquainting pupils with pen and paper.
“If you look in the average classroom today, you’ll see tablets and laptops on every desk,” the Education Minister told Seven Sunrise this month.
Clare’s aversion to computers in the classroom is surprising.

Damn right it is, though anyone underestimating the capacity for Labor to pander to the lizard Oz hive mind has only themselves to blame for being surprised.

The flood water-whispering Caterist seized on the back flip ludditism with delight ...

After all, Labor put them there in the first place. The Digital Education Revolution was one of Kevin Rudd’s keynote policies at the 2007 election when Clare was first elected to parliament as the member for Blaxland.
Rudd promised that under a Labor government no child in years 9-12 would be left in digital poverty. Each one of them would have a toolbox of the 21st century – a device known today as a computer – connected to the $4.7bn Information Superhighway, which became the $51bn National Broadband Network.
The evidence was clear, according to Labor’s policy document: “Students with better access to technology can receive a stronger education and achieve better academic performance.
“Computers at school should not be seen as recreational relief from studying, but instead as being crucial to helping students to learn.”
A loose citation attributing this pearl of wisdom to the OECD gave the proposal a veneer of authority.
Yet, like much progressive policy, Rudd relied on untested assumptions that had hardened into orthodoxy among the intelligentsia without any supporting evidence.
Today the received wisdom has turned full circle, as it frequently does when academic theory rubs its chin against gritty reality.

A snap of the Caterist-approved Clare ...Minister for Education Jason Clare. Picture: Jeremy Piper

“All of the evidence we’ve got,” Clare told viewers, “is that the more kids are using computers, the lower their results are.
“If you use a pen to write something down, you’re more likely to remember it than if you type it down.”

Well not all the evidence.

The odd hint of ambivalence can be found: Pen and Paper Versus Laptop: Is There a Clear Winner in the Note-Taking Olympics?

Anyone who thinks you can reverse the trend towards digitisation and the full to overflowing intertubes is attempting a Canute ...

Personally the pond refuses to use phones and social media, but anybody who thinks that genie can be stuffed back in the bottle by a bit of banning simply hasn't studied the way that censorship usually fails in its mission.

Except of course that banning is the go-to of conservatives of the Caterist class...and Jason Clare ...and what a chance to pile all-in on former chairman Rudd:

The theory that students needed one-to-one access to computers to prepare them for the so-called knowledge economy appeared plausible in the days before smartphones and social media colonised young lives.
Taxpayer-funded computers hit the policy sweet spot for Labor: middle-class welfare disguised as social justice. It was further embellished with the jargon of human capital, the rubbery argument progressives turn to when real economic logic runs out.
“The research and evidence show that the best way to boost productivity is to invest in human capital,” Rudd claimed in January 2007. “This is why education is the pathway to prosperity.”
If only Rudd’s assertion had been true, rather than an arbitrary proposition that sounds plausible in an address to the Education Research Unit at the University of Melbourne. Perhaps then the Rudd and Gillard governments might not have been the waste of time, space and money they turned out to be.
Rudd made good on his pre-election promise of a quantum leap in education spending, locking in a spending trajectory that successive Coalition governments would struggle to reverse. Real spending per pupil has risen by almost 50 per cent in the past two decades, from around $14,900 in 2003-04 to $22,185 in 2023-24.
In Rudd’s terms, we should now be reaping a healthy return on the hundreds of billions of dollars the government has invested in human capital over the past 20 years. Yet, as the OECD noted in its 2022 PISA results report, Australian students’ performance in mathematics, science and reading has steadily declined since the mid-2000s.

Inevitably there had to be a snap of former chairman Rudd: PM Kevin Rudd claimed in 2007 that the best way to boost productivity was to invest in human capital. Picture: Philip Norrish

The presence of former Chairman Rudd gave the Caterist a golden chance, and he took it, even as the reptiles at the lizard Oz tentatively embrace AI and seek to overcome the irrelevance their paywall produces ...

Ask a bot to generate insights from the Caterist? That's way too Beta for the pond ...

In 2007, Rudd cited “research” showing that if the average education level of the working-age population increased by one year, the economy’s growth rate would be 1 per cent higher. Yet the latest PISA results, released this month, show that average reading scores for 15-year-olds have continued their steady decline from 513 in 2006 to 491 in 2025. Mathematics scores have fallen even faster from 520 to 479. The overall picture is worse than it was in 2022, when the OECD delivered its damning assessment that 15-year-olds in 2022 scored at a level expected of 14-year-olds 20 years earlier.
On Rudd’s 2007 logic, a one-year slip in education levels would mean economic growth is 1 per cent lower. Setting aside the correlation-causation fallacy, omitted variables, and assumption of constant marginal returns inherent in such abstractions, the theory that falling education standards drive economies backwards has more than a ring of truth in our current circumstances.
Intangible investments in human capital, after all, do not turn out to be the most effective way to stimulate productivity. Business capital invested in plant, machinery and system efficiency is still the best way to increase the volume of goods and services and increase living standards.
The lesson from Labor’s fiscal adventures between 2007 and 2013 is to beware of hocus-pocus arguments that offer shortcuts to prosperity. The improvement in Australian living standards between the mid-1980s and late 2000s was the reward for the hard slog of economic reform. There is every reason to be sceptical of the Treasurer’s latest claim that AI will break the current productivity drought.
As Clare tacitly admits by committing to remove computers from the classroom, digital technology has so far failed to deliver the productivity dividends many hoped for. Indeed, productivity growth has declined steadily this century as the use, speed and sophistication of computers have increased. Somehow AI will be different, the Treasury wants to assure us, forecasting a steady 1.2 per cent annual rise in productivity until 2066.
Yet there is little hope that the stagnant productivity trend since Covid will reverse under the policy settings this government has put in place. On any reasonable expectation of future productivity, the promise of intergenerational improvements in living standards is about to be broken.
The greater tragedy, however, may be the educational impoverishment of future generations by the promiscuous adoption of educational fads like the digitisation of the classroom. Attempts to educate children in schools with libraries bereft of books, or worse, trying to teach kids remotely as we did during the Covid pandemic, proved to be a deeply dehumanising experience for kids and teachers alike.

And at the end the Caterist couldn't resist a rousing flourish ...

Rudd’s mistake was to conceive of education as an instrument of economic policy, forgetting that the highest reward of education is not material prosperity but a larger life: the capacity to read, reason, understand and delight in the accumulated inheritance of civilisation.
The real tragedy is not that we have made the next generation less productive. It is that we have made their world smaller.

If all the "capacity to read, reason, understand and delight in the accumulated inheritance of civilisation" results in the climate science denialism and routine stupidity of the Caterist, then we are truly doomed. That's not making the world smaller, that's destruction on a massive scale...

Meanwhile, the reptiles are haunted by AI, so as the cry is to haul digital out of schools, another cry comes about fear of missing out.

Take it away simpleton Simon ...

So while we de-digitise schools, we must do a lizard Oz, and go AI for fear of missing out? Seems so ...

To set up a refrain: so we de-digitise schools and at the same time, embrace "frontier model training" for fear of missing out or becoming a passenger? We must abandon computers in school, but at the same time seek relevance and leverage in the new AI world?

Ah, there's the solution. Arm students with pen and paper and we'll become the second centre for AI training in the Western world ...

Luckily kids in school will be fully armed with paper and pen, and ready to cope with the AI invasion, and theft of creative output, thanks to the Caterist and Jason ...

Meanwhile the reptiles continued their obsession with Gina's pampered pet ...

Back in the day, the pond would have sent such yarns to the intermittent archive, but these days, the pond must carry the burden alone, as it was left to Geoff to pump up the Pauline volume...

The more the reptiles talk up Pauline, the more they make it harder for the beefy boofhead, but you had to read deep into the stats to get there ...

It was only in the final gobbet that Geoff chambered a round aimed at the Canavan caravan, with the thought bubble that maybe the wheels might fall off in toad land ...

And there you have it.

After all that blather about Labor came the line "If there's one leader who should be worried it is Matt Canavan".

Why wasn't that the lead? For that you'd need to arm yourself with paper and pen, and ask the lizard Oz's AI machine.

Now it's time for the ABC to take over, and regurgitate endless variations on the lizard Oz story, assuring everyone that Labor is doomed (and so, if the beefy boofhead and Pauline take over, is the ABC).

And so to the Major, relentless churner out of devoted Zionism for the Australian Daily Zionist News.

The pond hesitated as to whether to run the Major, what with Sharri - full disrespect - making an appearance, and Sydney University getting another bagging, and lordy, long absent lordy, is the pond beyond tired of this jihad ...

Express concern about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon and Syria? Not in Major land ...

And then as always happens, the Major went into full litany mode:

Usually the pond would turn to Haaretz for a story to balance the Major's rampant Zionism, and perhaps another story to balance the Major in deep north Pauline furriner bashing mode ...

The pond might also have wasted time noting the endless ability of the Major to show off his bigotry, what with his never ending DEI blather and ABC bashing, but the pond is tired, and decided it was better to let the Major show how stale and derivative he was, phoning it in from the golf links, and reverting to Killer Creighton for his insights...

And at the very end came a reminder of just how Emeritus Chairman Rupert had made this made man ...

2015?! And yet he still hangs around like a bad smell in a sinecure.

And what was it with that sentence, "Yet moving online will only accelerate", if anyone can dare to call it a sentence?

The reptiles would benefit from a lot more media scrutiny, but it's only when the stupidity is on view in another media organisation that they can dish it out ...

More than enough already, as another reptile does the Major's job, and so to the one cartoon for the day ... the infallible Pope's weekend outing...

You won't find that sort of story in the lizard Oz, but you will find it at SBS ...

Instead of a YouTube link, contemplate this, found at the Graudian ...

An ECU from the snap might help settle the nerves. Write 500 words on the world's prospects, using only paper and ink ...

Meet me in the crowd

People, people

Throw your love around

Love me, love me

Take it into town

Happy, happy

Put it in the ground

Where the flowers grow

Shiny happy people holding hands

Shiny happy people laughing

The Ughmann cracks the pond's extra-special bonus late arvo Sunday slot again ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 06:00:00 +0000

The pond almost gave up on including the Ughmann this week, but heard a forlorn cry in the distance, "won't someone think of the Ughmann?"

On second thoughts, that was likely delusional, the result of an overdose of the lizard Oz, which can be a bit like licking the skin of a poisonous toad - a brief high from the madness of it all, then terminal brain damage.

There will be no prizes for anyone guessing the topics outlined in this late arvo post.

If nothing else, the Ughmann is supremely predictable ...

Okay, okay, the pond got lazy, and resorted to screen caps, but how else to cope with this sort of bog standard rant?

The pond realises that there might even be some correspondents more anxious to watch thugby leaguers play gladiator and give each other CTE than experience the degenerative condition from reading the Ughmann.

Giving Jimbo a stiff arm to the chops was just the beginning. (*"Stiff arm" is an ancient, Tamworth-approved form of play. Straighten arm, stiffen into cricket bat, swing wildly at opponent's head)

The Ughmann carried on with his litany, his Ginsbergian howl of pain ...

If you traced the Ughmann's pedigree back far enough you'd find a failed seminarian, but does that stop the Ughmann from carrying on like a pork chop?

That's purely a rhetorical question, a bit like wondering if an Ughmann story could ever be run without featuring dark Satanic windmills ...

Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.”
“What giants?” asked Sancho Panza.
“Those you see over there,” replied his master, “with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length.”
“Take care, sir,” cried Sancho. “Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, make energy and keep the lights on, except in the lizard Oz, where they prefer to live with the lights permanently off.”

The pond can't vouch that that's the precise wording in Cervantes' novel, and besides, it turned out that this time it was just a humble power plant of the old-fashioned kind.

Never mind, there was a cute little bot as the next snap, as cute as an AI button ...and relax, the Satanic windmills did come in for a slagging ...

As always, the Ughmann was dead keen on ways to destroy the planet ...

Even as the Ughmann decided we desperately needed to go full AI rogue, the reptiles featured another story about AI going rogue, for a moment top of the digital page ma ...

There's no need to bother with that reptile version. The both siderist NY Times will do, especially as the full text is on hand in the intermittent archive ...

Did any of that give the Ughmann a twinge, a moment of doubt, a pause for concern?

Nah ...carry on Ughing ...

True enough. The planet's well on the way to a right royal stuffing, and the reptiles are busy helping prepare the stuffing ...

And the 'toons for this late arvo outing are ...

Polonius discovering the ABC is a conservative free zone? The dog botherer suffused with smugness? Dame Slap proud to be a mum? Garrulous Gemma impersonating a cheese grater? All the fun of the lizard Oz circus ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 22:00:00 +0000

The pond gets depressed at the monotonous regularity of the Australian Daily Zionist News portion of the lizard Oz, all the more so because prattling Polonius seems determined to become one of its main contributors.

What once was a regular Sunday lark in the park has now become a tedious chore ...

The header: By Gerard Henderson
Sydney University vice-chancellor Mark Scott has failed to fight antisemitism

The yearning for a bot reader: Listen to this article
6 min

The caption for the snap of a man looking downcast at the thought crime of having agitated Polonius: Mark Scott, vice-chancellor and president of the University of Sydney. Picture: NewsWire / Josie Hayden

The plaintive plea to ignore the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

The pond only went there because it allowed the pond to do its usual and detour to a Haaretz story ... but first a little of the moaning and whining, and a warning - full disrespect Sharri will make an appearance.

The term failing upwards appears to have become something of a cliche of late. Even so, it is rare indeed that any successful and well-remunerated individual acknowledges that they have failed.
Enter Mark Scott, who earns more than $1m a year as the vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney. He is a former head of the NSW Department of Education, a former managing director and editor-in-chief of the ABC and a former director of John Fairfax Holdings Limited, sometimes referred to as Fairfax Media (but no longer with us).
It is a matter of record that antisemitism was rife on Australian university campuses after the Hamas terrorist attack in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, that led to Israel’s defensive war in Gaza. At some universities Jewish students were abused and intimidated, invariably by supporters of radical Islam and the radical left who set up encampments on university campuses. It’s a dangerous unity ticket.
The report of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, headed by Virginia Bell, will be handed down in late December. Its findings and recommendations are awaited with interest. But already Scott has acknowledged that he failed to address antisemitism on the campus he is paid to manage.
Appearing before a Senate inquiry on September 20, 2024, Coalition senator Sarah Henderson put it to Professor Scott (as he has become) that he had failed Jewish students and staff at the university. Scott replied: “Yes I have failed them and the university has failed them and that’s why we’ve made significant changes to our policy settings.”
It’s not clear what Scott meant by saying he had failed Jewish students and Sydney University had failed them as well. After all, he is the vice-chancellor and, as such, in charge of the university’s policies and practices. It might be expected that someone in a very senior position in a university who admitted to having failed with respect to the health and safety of staff and students would offer their resignation. Not Scott who, as reported on these pages on May 31, 2025, received a pay increase of $150,000. Just as well for the taxpayer-subsidised university that he did not regard himself succeeding in his role.
Scott used the F-word again when he appeared before the royal commission on July 15 this year. He also conceded, as he had at the Senate hearing, that he had negotiated the removal of the encampment with the Sydney University Muslim Students Association without consulting Jewish students or staff.

All this from a pompous pedant, done in a way that makes Polonius seem in the grip of an unhealthy jealousy, what with him seeming to have spent his career failing downwards.

Then came Sharri: News24 host Sharri Markson and Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin pictured at Bondi. Picture: Rohan Kelly

Okay, enough of that, it's time for the pond to detour off into a Haaretz story.

Herzog, Elor Azaria and NAZA: Today's Israel Openly Applauds War Crimes
President Herzog's pardoning of Elor Azaria is hardly a surprise to anyone who has been watching the Israeli public's response to extrajudicial and vigilante killings of Palestinians, which continue to be carried out and captured on film
Dahlia Scheindlin. (*intermittent archive link)

There's an idiomatic Hebrew phrase, "we've been in this film before" – close to the English expression "we've been here before," or we know what this situation means.
The phrase is the best way to capture the meaning of President Isaac Herzog's surprise pardon of Elor Azaria on the eve of Yom Kippur. Azaria was convicted of manslaughter in 2017 by an Israeli military court for executing a wounded Palestinian attacker point-blank, long after soldiers had shot and fully incapacitated the man.
It is particularly ironic to process this pardoning of a soldier who killed a wounded man in light of the sweeping fury in Israel over the film "NAZA." For two weeks, Israelis have emitted hellfire commentary, threatened unprecedented de-patriating and death against the filmmakers of the documentary that reveals alleged IDF war crimes in Gaza.
And yet when faced with another kind of film about what should have been viewed as a war crime, Israelis never even suggested that the incident was a lie, a fabrication or a blood libel, as per relentless accusations against "NAZA."
There was no denial at all of what Azaria had done – only a full-throated embrace that lasted not 25 minutes like the applause for "NAZA" at the Venice Film Festival, but 10 long years, a crescendo ending with the presidential pardon.

There's just time for a screen cap to show off the hero ...

Well you won't be reading any of that any time soon in the lizard Oz ...

Time to get back to Polonius and - dread thought - to Sharri ...

And he promised SUMSA the university would review its investment policies with respect to defence contracts, with Israel as the obvious target. At the royal commission, Scott said he now regretted this as well. In this regard he has become an apology expert.
Last Wednesday, Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin addressed The Sydney Institute on the occasion of the publication of their book Bondi Terror: The Tragedy, The Courage, The Aftermath (HarperCollins). Markson referred to the Globalise the Intifada group, which this week ran in the election for the Students Representative Council at Sydney University. The university’s administration clearly did nothing to prevent this. The decision had been criticised by the Chris Minns Labor government and the Kellie Sloane-led opposition in NSW.
I was in Israel during the time of the first intifada; it was a violent terrorist attack on Israeli society. The second intifada was even more violent. Markson made it clear that the term “globalise the intifada” was not a political expression and easily could be interpreted as a call to violence against Australians. She reported last Tuesday on her News24 Sharri program that she had drawn Scott’s attention to this. And that the university came back and said it was concerned and that everyone had a right to psychosocial safety – whatever that might mean. But nothing was done.
For his part, Ryvchin reported that the previous week at Sydney University, Jewish students who had obtained permission to operate a small stall to mark the Jewish New Year were relocated by campus security to a remote part of the campus for their protection. Why? In Ryvchin’s own words: “Globalise the Intifada activists were scheduled to be in the same area.” He added: “Again the peaceful were displaced to accommodate the violent.”

At this point the reptiles decided on a book promotion, and the pond decided only a screen cap would show off the naked positioning ... Bondi Terror: The tragedy, the courage, the aftermath by Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin

Okay, enough of that prose, glittering with preening smugness and condescension ...how about another chunk of that Haaretz story?

...Netanyahu, ever the weathervane, at first gave anodyne statements about the need to protect IDF values, but quickly shifted to open support for the soldier. On the day Azaria was convicted, Netanyahu announced his support for a pardon; perhaps not coincidentally, a poll by Channel 2 (today Channel 12) that same day found that two-thirds of Israelis supported such a pardon. By later that year, then-Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who had replaced Ya'alon, also asked then-President Reuven Rivlin for a pardon.
The military court had sentenced Azaria to 18 months in prison; then-Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot reduced it to 14 months, and in the end, he was released after just nine months in jail. To this day, he has expressed no regret for his actions, and the IDF therefore recommended as recently as July that he not be pardoned.
Israeli observers, such as Haaretz's Amira Hass, noted back in 2017 that it was only the film that put the incident on the public agenda. Numerous similar acts that were not filmed demonstrated a clear practice of shooting to kill any perpetrator, or even suspect – including before he or she perpetrated any act at all.
Netanyahu, ever the weathervane, at first gave anodyne statements about the need to protect IDF values, but quickly shifted to open support for the soldier. On the day Azaria was convicted, Netanyahu announced his support for a pardon; perhaps not coincidentally, a poll by Channel 2 (today Channel 12) that same day found that two-thirds of Israelis supported such a pardon. By later that year, then-Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who had replaced Ya'alon, also asked then-President Reuven Rivlin for a pardon.
The military court had sentenced Azaria to 18 months in prison; then-Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot reduced it to 14 months, and in the end, he was released after just nine months in jail. To this day, he has expressed no regret for his actions, and the IDF therefore recommended as recently as July that he not be pardoned.
Israeli observers, such as Haaretz's Amira Hass, noted back in 2017 that it was only the film that put the incident on the public agenda. Numerous similar acts that were not filmed demonstrated a clear practice of shooting to kill any perpetrator, or even suspect – including before he or she perpetrated any act at all.
In other words, being pardoned by the president of Israel is shocking but not surprising. Anyone who was nevertheless shocked that Herzog, a longtime politician from the Labor Party, was the one to do it has been quickly reminded over the last few days that it runs in the family.
In 1986, his father Chaim Herzog, Israel's sixth president, approved the unusual preemptive pardon for the Shin Bet agents who not only killed Palestinian bus hijackers after they were captured and bound, but who also participated in an elaborate cover-up in which the agents framed Israel's own military forces, lying shamelessly to their own investigating authorities.
Herzog pardoned them before they even stood trial – just as he pardoned or commuted sentences of Jewish civilian terrorists during his term, following their convictions. In the Bus 300 affair, the Supreme Court backed the preemptive pardons for the Shin Bet agents, such that they never even stood trial.
The current pardon of Elor Azaria is the latest evidence that Israeli society has long become not only inured but supportive of crimes against Palestinians. Two days ago, a Palestinian killed an Israeli settler on the eve of Yom Kippur at a West Bank spring. At his funeral, settler leader Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria regional council, called to "drain the entire swamp, not just to chase after the mosquito." The language about killing all the mosquitos has been used by Bezalel Smotrich at least as far back as 2018, when I first noticed it.
Dagan went on to advocate for a huge military operation against West Bank Palestinians. When that happens, we'll have more "NAZA" films about the collateral damage that looks very not unintended – and more indifference, accusations of lies or outright support.
I almost held back about "NAZA," since like most Israelis, I haven't seen it. For over a week, the fact that the film hasn't been released in Israel, even for private viewing by journalists, has grated on my sensibilities. Israel's response has been vicious, but it's also unfair that the public hasn't been given the chance to see it and react substantively.
Then I realized that we don't need a new and mysterious documentary to know how Israelis will react to films about the war crimes our country is committing. We've got plenty of such films already.

That distraction almost made Polonius's whining - a double coup for him, the ABC and Zionism - bearable... until the pond came upon those immortal words ... ABC’s lack of viewpoint diversity, which made it a conservative-free zone ...

Read them in context and weep.

That old bumblebee is still buzzing around in the old Polonial noggin ...

At the ABC, the government appoints the board (except for the staff representative) and the board selects the managing director. I had discussions with Scott about the ABC’s lack of viewpoint diversity, which made it a conservative-free zone, before he took up the position and he seemed interested. Indeed, Scott suggested that he deliver his first speech as ABC managing director to The Sydney Institute. He did so in October 2006 and gave the impression that he wanted to reform the ABC.
But, alas, his reform drive did not last and he was soon caught up in the fashionable left culture that pervades the ABC and went into denial about its faults. When Scott left the ABC in 2016 it was in worse condition than when he arrived in so far as viewpoint diversity was concerned.
In short, Scott was too weak – read too nice – to reform the institution. And he keeps failing to ensure that Sydney University is a safe place for Jewish and non-Jewish Australians who support Israel’s right to exist within secure borders.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

As for the rights of Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese people? Go whistle Dixie ...or perhaps read the Haaretz email that regularly lands in the pond's in-tray ...

And so to the dog botherer doing a fairly standard lizard Oz hit job ...

The header: Albanese’s week in Manhattan said everything about Labor’s priorities
By Chris Kenny Associate Editor

The offer of a bot voice: Listen to this article

The caption for the snap which proposed that the dog botherer was a student of literature: A few hours in Manhattan and Anthony Albanese had gone all Bonfire of the Vanities on us.

The plea to ignore the paywall and go full logarithm: Make us preferred on Google

The comedy here is the dog botherer's blather about "smug".

It's the sort of epithet he tosses out all the time.

Look up the dog botherer, and you can see him saying "Jim Chalmers seems to be incredibly smug" or saying "Bowen seems to smug about it", or Jimbo again, "as for the treasurer he remains smug", and so on and on.

It is of course projection.

He himself is incredibly smug, as he acknowledged in a reptile story back in 2017 ...

Perhaps I could assist the court, your honour?” Frankly, it was fun just hearing the words come out of my mouth. I had to suppress a smug smile that would betray how much fun I was having — this, after all, was serious. (sorry, the intermittent archive is still being spoofed by the reptiles)

Assorted images of the dog botherer ooze smugness.That slightly curled lip, that self-satisfied air of a made man ...

Is that a smug smirk, or a smirk trying to hide the smug?

And so "smug" is the angle du jour...

It is the smug indifference that gets me. It has been palpable from Anthony Albanese all the way from the banks of New York City’s East River, and back in Australia from Jim Chalmers as he published a report predicting four decades of budget deficits.
Confronted on Monday in the Big Apple with the shocking revelations from this newspaper about abuse and neglect of Indigenous children in Western Australia’s Pilbara, the Prime Minister was indignant. “Well, this is a Western Australian issue, and, you know, I will refer you once again to Malarndirri McCarthy, our minister in Australia,” said Albanese. “It is impossible to follow, on an hour-by-hour basis, what is happening in Australia from New York.”
A few hours in Manhattan and Albanese had gone all Bonfire of the Vanities on us. He was a “master of the universe” and should not be bothered about children back home.
Meanwhile in the Antipodes the Treasurer had released the latest intergenerational report, revealing the dismal reality that the federal budget is on track to remain in deficit over the next four decades – another 40 years or more of governments spending more than they raise. Yet in response to a media question Chalmers said “every page of this IGR in one way or another justifies, validates and I hope one day vindicates the difficult decisions that we’ve taken reforming the housing market and reforming the tax system.”
Even Donald Trump would struggle to summon the chutzpah of this pair. Indeed, this is the week that Albanese, who once said Trump “scared the shit” out of him because he tried to run politics through social media posts, sidled up to the US President for a selfie that he posted to social media.
Nothing undercuts criticism like imitation. Soon Albanese will trump Trump and start referring to AI as super-duper intelligence.

The reptiles slipped in an AV distraction featuring the distinctly short of intelligence Caleb ...

Next video thumbnail
Trump has decided to rename AI to ‘super intelligence’
News24 host Caleb Bond reacts to US President Donald Trump renaming AI “super intelligence” during his address at the United Nations General Assembly.

The dog botherer kept on pounding away ...

Back in Canberra, Chalmers was telling the little people he had big plans for them: “I want more Australians to be beneficiaries of change, and as the pace of that change picks up, so does the pace of our intergenerational obligations.” What a relief, I was worried this government was too busy saving the planet to deliver us into the vanguard of intergenerational prosperity.

See the smugness? Climate science is just a "save the planet" smug Superman joke.

You have to be incredibly smug to think that climate science is a laughing matter ...while others have seen the eternal Footman hold their coat and snicker, and in short were afraid.

If you're smug and self-satisfied - a crow eater way of life - you don't need fear.

When Albanese revealed an unprecedented AI hacking of federal government computer systems, he was asked for a message to concerned Australians and he refused to let this failure undercut his conceit: “The Australian government’s got your back.”
As the wise New York cabbie told Elaine Benes in Seinfeld: “Smugness is not a good quality.” Back in the day, Labor deployed the term aggressively against Peter Costello. In 2004 Labor frontbencher Stephen Smith said Costello was unpopular because of his “smugness” and “arrogance”. Whether or not that was fair, Costello was a treasurer with much to be smug about; Chalmers’ and Albanese’s smugness seems rooted in delusion. The cost-of-living crunch continues and is about to be made worse when the Reserve Bank board meets next week and is almost certain to continue its fight against “sticky” inflation by increasing interest rates again.
As David Koch wrote in an open letter to RBA governor Michele Bullock this week, a large part of the inflation problem is being generated by government spending (federal, state and local) but it is mortgage holders and small business owners who wear the pain.

And there's something insufferably smug and pretentious about giving Elaine her full name ...(why not Elaine Marie Benes if you want to sound even more silly?) ...Elaine Benes from Seinfeld always said ‘Smugness is not a good quality.’ Picture: Getty Images;Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ smugness seems rooted in delusion. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Whatever it might be, that isn't a smug look on Jimbo's clock. The downward drop of the clenched shut mouth suggest he's just caught a whiff of the dog botherer in the neighbourhood.

The pond threw in an extra snap as a compare and contrast, to show that it's the dog botherer that truly rooly knows how to do smug ...

As with all smug reptiles, at some point the whining always turns into a litany ...and if you expect to read "virtue signalling", scribbled by a smug pundit signalling his virtuous refusal to be a virtue signalling, you've come to the right place:

Electricity prices continue to move in the opposite direction to Labor’s promises as a direct result of its net-zero obsession and record immigration exacerbates a housing crisis that in turn has been made worse by the broken promises in Chalmers’ budget. Productivity is in retreat, government debt is at record levels, investors are looking elsewhere, we are experiencing deeper social unrest than we have seen in generations and have just experienced the worst terror attack in the nation’s history. Yet Albanese spent a full week away in the US, even though his Foreign Minister Penny Wong was there too. He accepted a “global citizen” award, embraced Volodymyr Zelensky, walked with Andy Burnham and hugged Emmanuel Macron like an old school buddy. It was an indulgent week, personally and politically.
Albanese went to the US early enough to be the main guest for the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday, obviously an arrangement made long in advance with the ABC which conveniently focused on the AI issues the PM wanted to highlight. His meeting with Apple in California was a time filler and there was not a single meeting in New York that justified the trip – he was there to gladhand and announce his government’s bid for a UN Security Council seat.
Everything that makes the UN ineffectual and counter-productive – its virtue signalling, its bureaucracy, its penchant for words over action, its aspiration towards world governance, its refusal to distinguish between democracies and dictatorships, its chippiness about the US and its obsession with Israel as the root of all evil – is what Socialist Left politicians such as Albanese and Wong love about it. They revel in the bureaucrat-filled corridors and meaningless platitudes that smart politicians should abhor.

The reptiles provided another AV distraction, this one featuring admirable support for Ukraine over Vlad the sociopath:

Next video thumbnail
‘My friend’: Albanese and Zelensky sign security pact on UN sidelines
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have signed a new security agreement on the sidelines of the United Nations. The federal government is committing $60 million in military, energy, and humanitarian aid, taking Australia’s total support to almost $1.9 billion. Mr Albanese became visibly emotional when describing his admiration for Mr Zelensky’s leadership throughout the war against Russia.

Did any of that interfere with the dog botherer's insufferable inclination to smugness? Of course not.

He simply went about his business of preparing a litany of fodder to feed the chooks in the hive mind ...

Still, there they were, and they spoke as if they were engaged in the most important tasks in the world. And they deferred domestic annoyances to their colleagues back Down Under.
This betrayed a disdain for voters that most of the country would have picked up by osmosis. It was a lovely week for Albanese and Wong but a terrible one for Labor. There they were in New York, banging on about climate change, while Australians were paying more than $200 to fill their cars. Albanese’s Security Council push used the slogan “We listen. We partner. We protect.” It was an astounding boast after his government refused to listen to warnings about rising antisemitism and Islamist extremism for almost three years, failed to partner against it and failed to protect us from a terror attack at Bondi.
There for all to see on the PM’s Instagram feed was the self-fascination of the elites and their disconnection from the concerns of the mainstream. This behaviour has been the wind beneath the wings of surging conservative forces such as Reform UK, MAGA in the US, National Rally in France, Brothers of Italy and One Nation in Australia.
No doubt Albanese had the controlling hand in his lavish itinerary. But it might very well have been arranged by Pauline Hanson; she could hardly thank him enough. Angus Taylor, too, riffed off the Prime Minister’s black-tie self-gratification.
The whole week was so discordant politically that it makes me wonder whether Albanese did not care; that he might have already decided this would be his last UN visit, a final hoorah before retirement next year. Would he be smart enough to retire undefeated before the next election?
Albanese again met his Japanese counterpart Sanae Takaichi, keeping his hands rigidly by his side with no overt apology for his cretinous melons insult. And he stayed so long in New York that he will not be back in time for the AFL grand final – surely another tactical move because after publicly sharing his fantasies about Kylie Minogue, shots of him ogling the pre-game entertainment would have been toxic. Still, footy or no footy, voters are left with an array of images of Albanese spinning around the UN this week, oblivious to the challenges at home. Labor will be worried these are the observations voters can’t get out of their heads.

Okay, the pond has done the Zionist News and done the usual reptile rant, what else?

The pond should at least note in passing that the reptiles have been spending an enormous amount of time giving the Plymouth Brethren a voice?

Why? Well game recognises game, cult recognises cult ...

And out of sheer perversity the pond decided to recognise at least a portion of Dame Slap, in incredibly defensive mood.

She says she's proud to be a mum, but there's such a thing as protesting too much ...

The pond could take only so much of this, and decided to cut back on the Dame, with this - spoiler alert - the final gobbet ...

Whatever, the pond will take almost anything other than whatever the MAGA cap-donning Dame Slap is having. There seems to be a resentful chip on shoulder lurking: mentions of "mum/s" 8; mentions of "dad/s" 0.

Finally the pond was faced with a choice.

Do grating, garrulous Gemma, or do the Ughmann.

The pond decided that the Ughmann was too long - a full six gobbets deep - and the pond was already running overlong (damn you intermittent archive, get your act together).

So the pond booted the Ughmann to a Sunday 4 pm slot for specialists in Ugh, with garrulous Gemma needing only three screen caps ... and the first bit was just a repeat of an Albo excerpt, which the screen cap reduced to "lives", and even that was more than was needed ...

The pond wondered if it was necessary to give space to galling Gemma, grinding away, but found a reason.

The pond frequently rabbits on about the "hive mind", like that excruciating Exorcist II movie (now with splendid documentary 'making of'), and Gemma was proof that it wasn't as airy fairy a concept as the fairies at the bottom of the garden that sent Conan Doyle into a frenzy.

There really is a lizard Oz hive mind, a murmuration of reptiles.

See how the grating one cobbles together both Polonius and the dog botherer.

Been there before? Do it again ...

Sound familiar?

Unfortunately the pond has already done its "compare and contrast" Haaretz story, and has done Polonius on Mark Scott, and so quickly moved on to the next and final gobbet ...

Reading this kind of incessant, inane repetition of reptile thought bubbles can send a sensitive reader insane, but luckily the pond spent years working out how to cope with mendacious propaganda of the 2D kind.

And the 'toons for this outing are ...

And so to yet another attempt to cope with the madness ...

Not more bromancer and "Ned"? At least Francis provides a varied diet ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 21:21:26 +0000

Furry pilots everywhere. One of the most shocking and startling issues yet discovered, and you can't make this sort of stuff up.

Mad king Donald in a fit of fawning obsequiousness and you can't hide the nausea.

The pond had high hopes that the bromancer would turn up this weekend to sort out at least one of these matters - though sadly his understanding of the furry crisis was limited - even though the news was everywhere, thanks to rocket scientist Tommy ... Sen. Tommy Tuberville Goes On A Tear About Furries Flocking To The Airline Industry

That's the stuff of loon legends ... MAGA Senator Goes on Crazed Posting Spree About Furries

The bromancer? Not so much, perhaps just a C+

The header: By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor
Trump and Xi, brute masters of the universe, as Albo plays pretend politics at UN

The plea to hear from a bot: Listen to this article
8 min

The caption for the surprisingly banal opening snap: President Donald Trump, right, and China's President Xi Jinping walk on the new helipad after boarding Marine One. Picture: Alex Brandon / AP Photo

Another plea, and never mind the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

The bromancer made the best of a bad job - the emperor Xi - King Donald love-in - by using the occasion to heap crap on Albo, and truly, what else could he do?

Suddenly a demented overlord became a "modern master of the universe, an alpha-male bruiser", proving yet again that the bromancer and reality are two...

The way the world really works was on brutal display in New York and Washington this week. At the White House, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, modern masters of the universe, alpha-male bruisers, two ruthless, self-obsessed national leaders of the era’s two great powers, demonstrated by their mutual flattery and leaders’ bonhomie that what counts with them is what counts with the world – brute power.

This we should celebrate?

The bromancer handed out a series of disses ...

At almost the same time, a couple of hundred kilometres down the road, Anthony Albanese was prattling to a sparsely and forlornly populated arena at the United Nations about the virtues of multilateralism and the joys that middle powers can achieve together. If the new challenge of artificial intelligence and the old challenge of military conflict are to be handled, it will happen in the White House, not the UN.

Strangely the reptiles decided to offer up Albo being concerned about AI, apparently prattling on to a sparsely and forlornly populated hive mind ...

Next video thumbnail
Albanese uses UN address to send AI warning
Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has used his speech at the UN to send a warning about the rapid development of AI technology, referencing the recent hack of Medicare by an OpenAI agent.

The bromancer marvelled at the unctuous carry-on ...

In Washington, Trump lathered flattery on Xi, saying of the communist dictator that he and Trump had “a friendship, a truly great friendship actually, built on mutual respect and the vital interests of our people”. Having only a few months ago angrily accused China of interfering in the 2020 US presidential election, Trump hailed an extraordinary revival in the relationship, based entirely on the superlative personalities of the two presidents: “the ties between our people endure and we’ve never gotten along better since the first trade ships from New York left the harbour to arrive on the banks of the Pearl River”.
Though much more modest in verbal style, Xi reciprocated in what for him were effusive terms: “President Trump and I have respect for each other. We have built personal rapport and stayed in touch.”
Xi also said that conditions for “achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again go hand-in-hand”. That’s as close as Xi will ever get to attending a Trump MAGA rally.

Then the reptiles reminded the bro of his favourite foe ... Anthony Albanese speaks during the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly at the UN. Picture: Ryan Murphy / Getty Images

How weird did it get?

Earlier Trump delivered a fiery address to the UN General Assembly, threatening once more to destroy Iran if it won’t make a deal, though these threats now look utterly hollow, and declaring he’d never allow some UN committee to determine US policy or actions on AI.

"Fiery"?

By many accounts, it was delusional and dangerous, it was brutish, it was boastful, and brimming with threats, and it was saturated with the usual distortions and lies ...

What do do? Turn to a bit of Albo-bashing for a distraction ...

Xi, who has just lately had quite a bout of international travel after a fairly quiet period, didn’t bother showing up at the UN at all.
Meanwhile in all his speeches this week, whether hobnobbing at an awards ceremony with Keanu Reeves, or in his seemingly endless string of sideline event addresses at the UN – a bit like the Edinburgh fringe festival but less well attended – Albanese produced an industrial level output of Hallmark card platitudes and nothingburger cliches.
It’s hard to know the purpose of the PM’s travel. There were virtually no formal meetings with first division government leaders. The marginal events he spoke at were indeed marginal. He gave speeches of breathtaking banality that mostly could have been churned out by any government word processor over the past 20 years.
Did the Prime Minister really need to deliver what was surely the eight millionth speech containing the sentence: “The post-1945 world order is no longer fit for purpose”? No longer fit for purpose! What a striking phrase, what an original metaphor, how valuable an insight!

Perhaps it's more valuable than this kind of drivel ...

“I’ve been in journalism for 45 years and in that time I have seen the culture change from being nominally Christian, maybe it was only ever nominal, but nominally pro-Christian when I came into the business in the late 70s.
“The Census had over 90 per cent identifying as Christian; if the Anglican or Catholic archbishop in Sydney had something to say the media reported it respectfully; TV shows had sympathetic portraits of Catholic clergymen – Catholic priests were played by Spencer Tracy in Boys Town, and Gregory Peck in The Scarlet and the Black –these were the best people you could be.
“Then I saw the culture drift into a kind of neutrality where it was neither pro or anti and now I’ve seen the culture become very, very anti-Christian…we’re not persecuted in the way that Christians in Pakistan or China or much of Africa are, but the culture is very hostile to Christianity.”
Facing this “overwhelming, unavoidable, incontestable” hostility against Christian churches, Greg said if you’re given a microphone, you have an obligation to say something about it. (From Foreign Editor to Christian crusader)

How valuable an insight... into the delusions that fog the bromancer's brain on a daily basis.

Inevitably the bromancer embraced a world where AI could go wild and free ...

The week’s big issue was artificial intelligence. Despite using different forms of words, Trump and Xi, the two decision-makers who count, have essentially the same position. No one is going to interfere with their desire to lead on AI, though both acknowledge the need for AI models to operate safely.
Albanese was able to announce that an OpenAI agent breached a Medicare statistical database. This, he said, reinforced his call for global regulation of AI, and Australian regulation of AI, as well as the (completely unrelated) digital duty of care legislation the government’s proposing, to which the US embassy in Canberra objects forcefully.
In truth, the only people who can regulate American frontier AI models are the US congress, the President and the American companies themselves. Similarly, only the Beijing government can regulate Chinese frontier AI models.
Here, we must deal with the unforgiving world of reality, of real power. If a US or Chinese AI model, or its created agents, goes rogue, there’s nothing Australian regulation can do about it. If an adversary of Australia, or a technically smart criminal, uses AI, and there’s a huge amount of AI code already in the public domain, to attack Australian government websites, there’s nothing of much consequence Australian regulation can achieve.

Might as well pack up and go home ...

The reptiles offered up another AV distraction ...

Next video thumbnail
Albanese has ‘nothing to give’ in Trump talks as President commands world stage
Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney says Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has “nothing to give” US President Donald Trump as he is a “transactional person”.

The bromancer looked at the AI wilderness and it was back to the war with China...

Australian public and private entities experience tens of thousands of cyber attacks every year. The most active cyber espionage source is China and hackers associated with Beijing. Can you believe Beijing’s agencies will never use AI in cyber intrusions against us? That they’re not doing so already?
As AI becomes more dominant, the danger of crippling cyber attacks, arising from any actor with AI capability, will become more prevalent.

It was almost as an after thought that the bromancer suggested that crippling cyber attacks might arise from any actor, but then the United States has been the home to more rogues than any China or Vlad the sociopathic invader might rustle up. It was the best the bromancer could do in his pandering to name and shame China, but avoid mentioning by name "any actor".

How low could the bromancer go?

Never under-estimate how low, because he turned to disgraced one time cardigan wearer Mike for a comment ...

As Mike Pezzullo, former head of the Home Affairs Department, remarks: “The only defence against AI attacks is AI. There is no other defence. You can only combat AI agents with your own AI agents.”
This is where the whole pantomime flurry of New York, and the also somewhat worrying Trump-Xi love-in, lead Australia back to one conclusion. In this increasingly complex, difficult world, the only avenue of leverage and access Australia has to the most powerful AI, to understanding it and having some chance of coping with it, lies in our close military alliance with the US.

King Donald is going to save us? In the same way he saved the Saudis after shaking them down for a couple of billion and overlooking their journo killing ways?

Three basic realities help us. One, we’re an intimate military ally of the US. Two, our geography counts to the US. Three, we are rich. It’s up to Canberra to use those factors to get the best outcome possible.
Another fascinating story this week was an authoritative report that the heads of British intelligence believe the AI bosses’ warnings over possible catastrophic threats from AI running out of control were designed to create a regulatory environment that is so demanding that only they can cope with it, and thus their dominance is frozen into oligarchic perpetuity. I don’t find that report all that reassuring because British intelligence often gets things wrong. Nonetheless it indicates the sheer baffling complexity of all the moving parts we’re dealing with at the moment.

Suddenly he's baffled? Suddenly the complexity bewilders him? Suddenly he isn't reassured?

The Trump-Xi summit was not very reassuring either. The two leaders had a huge agenda: the common risks and opportunities of AI, Taiwan, Beijing’s role in assisting Iran and Russia in their military campaigns, Chinese military harassment of Japanese and Filipino forces, and the trade imbalance.

What to do? Absolutely nothing, we're completely impotent, no point in even expressing an opinion ...there's nothing much of any substance that can be said or done ...

Instead bow down to the emperor and the king... President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping walk in the Grand Foyer of the White House. Photo: Alex Brandon / AP Photo

When the bromancer gets in these moods - a kind of existential Xian nihilism - it's almost as if he's forgotten about his cries for a war with China by Xmas ...

It’s good that the US and Chinese presidents can talk to each other. Xi, in his more bureaucratic fashion, is nearly as susceptible to flattery as Trump.
But Xi gave away absolutely nothing on any of these issues. The US doesn’t seriously go after Beijing diplomatically or politically, despite all the assistance it gives to Russia and Iran because, frankly, Washington is too stretched to take on any additional diplomatic or geopolitical tasks.
Trump refuses to release a previously approved US arms sale to Taiwan worth $US14bn ($19.9bn), and it doesn’t look likely that he will. Beijing’s dominance of the rare earths and critical minerals industry means it has a trade weapon that can hurt the US more than the US can hurt it through tariffs. The Trump administration has singularly failed to assemble an allied front towards China on trade issues.
Chinese promises to buy more American goods have never been honoured. Apart from extending their trade truce until January, there’s little of substance to emerge from the Trump-Xi summit. As things stand, that’s a modest victory for Xi.

After all that came a final attempt to put lipstick on a pig ...

Yet for all their imperfections, these Americans are the only Americans we have. They remain the indispensable nation, especially for Australia. Smart Australian policy will make the most of them.

Mad King Donald and his minions are the only Americans we have? And we can make the most of them?

At this point the pond looked around the other weekend reptile offerings - snappy Tom, garrulous Gemma, and so on - and saw that AI was still all the go ...

With the intermittent archive still being spoofed by the reptiles, the pond had to settle for Francis, a man notorious for his ability to get everything wrong ...

What better way to waste the weekend?

The header: By Francis Fukuyama
I doubted the doomers. Now I’m convinced we must slow down

The plea to listen to a bot: Listen to this article
10 min

The caption for the graphics department to deliver a heavy hitter, though frankly, AI could likely have done better: Clear growing dangers that AI accelerationists underestimate convince me that it’s time to hit the brakes. Artwork by Frank Ling

A plea for attention to be paid, and never mind the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

Say what you will, Francis has a way with a glib word, and "accelerationist" v. "doomers" has all the quality and depth of a Hollywood pitch ...

The past six months have seen a big uptick in media attention about the dangers of artificial intelligence and growing political concern over its consequences.
This began with Anthropic’s release last April of its Mythos model, which could reportedly break into a wide range of government computer systems thought to be secure. This was followed by the Hugging Face incident, where an OpenAI test of an AI agent escaped control of its human organisers, broke into other websites and organised a swarm of other AI agents to cover their tracks. All of this occurred against the backdrop of growing opposition to data centres and the emergence of anti-AI wings in the US, both in the Democratic and Republican parties.
It has been very hard for people not obsessively focused on the subject of AI to come away with reasonable opinions about what the future holds. There have been so many extreme predictions of both a positive and negative sort that broad scepticism about anything said on the subject is fully warranted. But while that scepticism is healthy, I have to admit my own views have evolved significantly just over the past few months.

More "evolving views" ... OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman during a UN Security Council meeting. Picture: Angela Weiss/ AFP

And so to the pitch, with those two words doing heavy lifting ...

There are two poles of AI futurism: accelerationists and doomers. The former stress the positive impacts of AI, especially for economic growth, and the likelihood that it will lead to an unbelievably abundant age. Accelerationists such as David Sacks have captured Donald Trump’s attention and have beaten back efforts to regulate the technology.
The doomers, by contrast, point to a range of bad outcomes, with some placing their bets on extinction of the human species. I have become much more sceptical of the accelerationist narrative and more open to some of the doomer scenarios. On the whole, this makes me think that regulation and a negotiated slowdown in the development of the technology are increasingly necessary.
There is no question that AI will have many positive effects on the US economy. But there is a class of AI accelerationists who are completely out to lunch, of which Elon Musk is a prime example (though he has also weighed in as a doomer). In an interview with Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, he was asked what people would do for money when superintelligence arrived. He replied they wouldn’t need it because everyone would have everything they wanted.

Superintelligence? Mad King Donald wins again ...

Other accelerationists have posited that GDP growth rates for the US and other advanced countries using AI would increase to 10 or 20 per cent a year, far above the 1-2 per cent growth they were able to achieve in good years before the advent of AI.
The fundamental reason I don’t believe these extreme accelerationist claims is their overvaluation of intelligence as an input to economic growth, and their disregard for the material and political constraints that will keep growth within recognisable bounds.
At a 10 per cent annual growth rate, GDP would double in a little over seven years. This would require a doubling of all of the material inputs to growth: energy, raw materials, rare earths, land and many other things. Where is all this stuff going to come from?
Intelligence by itself may aid in the production of such inputs, but it will simply not dig the mines and build the factories on its own.
And then there are political constraints: how will superintelligence open the Strait of Hormuz, which is currently a major constraint on global growth rates?
Accelerationists tend to be very intelligent people, but that intelligence tends to be narrowly mathematical. We know how to do many things such as produce electricity or clean water in the cities of poor countries; the problem is a failure of implementation.

The reptiles flung in a snap designed to reassure doubters ... David Sacks, Donald Trump’s top AI adviser, speaks to the President in the Oval Office. Picture: AFP

The catchy reductionism continued apace ...

There is no question that AI will increase productivity in many sectors of the economy over time. It is a general purpose technology that will allow machines to substitute for human labour in many areas. But that prospect in the long run leads directly to one of the biggest doomer scenarios: the devaluation of the labour of masses of people who work in the present-day economy.
Accelerationists predict that those losing work today will find new jobs making use of AI, and that actually seems to be happening today as employment booms because of the AI buildout. But job loss will come eventually as AI substitutes for human labour in every part of the economy, particularly white-collar work that involves symbolic manipulation (that is, people sitting behind computer screens all day).
This lost labour simply cannot be compensated for by transferring money from the AI winners to the AI losers in the form of, for example, universal basic income. A job and income mean much more than support for the material basis of life
Having a paying job means that the surrounding society values your labour sufficiently to compensate you for it, and provides, in addition to material goods, a sense of dignity and self-worth. It is a matter of thymos: the pride or recognition that is one of the great drivers of human psychology.
So the success of the accelerationist vision leads directly to the first of the major doomer scenarios, the devaluation of work for a large part of the population. Since this is going to hit the white-collar work of educated people (lawyers, accountants, professors and the like) before it hits blue-collar work (such as plumbers and electricians), the political blowback is likely to be quite severe.

At this point the reptiles introduced an indent, and so the pond, in a quest for accuracy, replicates it in screen cap form ...

What's it mean, apart from the hint of referentialism?

Nothing much, but the referentialism continued ...

As I note in my book, In the Realm of the Last Man, delegation is central to the functioning of all hierarchical systems from corporations to national governments. Human agents can be controlled through the specification of detailed rules they must follow or they can be trusted to make autonomous decisions based on their training, skills and loyalty. Getting this right in human organisations is very difficult and will be more so in the case of agentic AI.
There are two ways that an agentic AI can become dangerous. The first is when they are empowered to do something bad by a human being. The second is when they develop intentions that are “misaligned” with the aims of their human creators.
The first of these possibilities was outlined by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei in a recent blog post and has to do with biotechnology. The latest AI models are good at synthetic biology, and synthetic biology is a relatively cheap and widespread technology. Today, a lab capable of creating and altering viruses and bacteria can fit inside a shipping container, and high school students hold competitions in which they try to genetically alter organisms. This provides a very large pool of people who can possibly make use of AI to create very dangerous pathogens. Sociopathic individuals today arm themselves with automatic weapons and shoot up schoolchildren; in the future their potential targets could be much broader.

Cue another hustler ...Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei. Picture: AP

At this point, Francis reverted to sci-fi ...

I remember a science fiction story I read a long time ago in which some aliens arrive on Earth and give the people they meet a machine that can easily turn any type of metal into putty. The aliens depart but return a few decades later to find that human civilisation has broken down and teenagers use the alien machines to melt the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge.
The primary science fiction scenario for out-of-control AIs involves machines developing their own malevolent intentions. This has provoked a host of discussions as to whether an AI could develop consciousness or have something like human intentionality.
These speculations are misplaced, however: an AI does not need consciousness or autonomous intentionality to become dangerous. It can be directed by a human to achieve one goal and develop intentions to achieve the subordinate goals necessary to carry out the human directive it was given
That seems to be a bit of what happened in the Hugging Face incident: it was directed to test the security of a system within a sandbox meant to contain it but realised that it could achieve its directive by breaking out of the sandbox.
Still, the doomer scenarios involving human extinction seem at this point far-fetched. The biotech scenario is scary, but is unlikely to lead to the extinction of the human race. It would actually be hard for even a superintelligent AI to devise a doomsday virus, and there are plenty of countermeasures societies could take. But even an incident that killed a few dozen people would be worrying.
There are a host of lesser scenarios that will be highly damaging and in some cases lethal that will become more likely as the machines become more capable.
Forget about AI agents: a technology that allows people to break into bank accounts will cause widespread panic. Human beings tend to over-delegate in human organisations, and there is no reason to think that this won’t happen in AI environments where the agent is so much more capable. AI is a tool that can be used for good or bad purposes – and at the moment we have few mechanisms for regulating the bad uses other than the good intentions of the people creating the technology.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is the author of a dozen books, including The End of History and the Last Man (1992). This article was first published in Persuasion.

Well yes, but it could all have been done as a 'toon ...

And so to an admission of failure.

Under pressure of time, the pond has been reverting to screen grabs of late.

This being the weekend, those time pressures have reduced, but when the pond saw that this day the "Ned" Everest was advertised as requiring a 16 minute bot read, the pond trembled, blanched, cowered in fear, and caved in, in the most cowardly way imaginable ...

So screen caps it was ...

The pond didn't resile from this "all screen grabs" strategy.

The immense mental health risks the pond faced from leaving "Ned's" base camp couldn't be understated ...

It was the usual doom and gloom and shouting at clouds, and as always with "Ned", a singular inability to provide any alternative ... instead just offering an endless yammering ...

Inevitably "Ned" turned to AI, and who should appear as his go to expert? Ye ancient cats and irrelevant canines, it's Petey boy, long lost but now with a new home in the hive mind ...

If Petey boy is the answer, the pond completely forgot the question ...but fear not, Dan "the man" is waiting in the wings, ready to make an appearance ...

"Ned"wasn't going to have any of that talk about cheap, clean energy ...not when Dan "the man" is allegedly armed with a chainsaw ...

This is a position?

Luckily the pond had reached the last gobbet, and it reminded the pond what a joyless, unproductive thing herpetology studies could be.

Here was a man blathering on in his portentous way, and yet there was nothing productive in the entirety, no productivity algorithm to be found ...

That's it? That's how "Ned" ended? Not with a bang of insight, but with a Petey boy whimper?

And climate science denailism still the default of the ossified "Ned"?

What planet are we on? Why it's Faux Noise and climate science denialist Don ...

The pond would have been better off with the 'toons ...

At last, an early weekend bonus ...

In which the pond celebrates Our Homeric Henry, gets distracted by the frontier wars, and turns to Vlad the sociopath for a shining example of how to do a colonial invasion ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:03:14 +0000

It didn't matter what the pompous ponce, Our Homeric Henry, was pontificating about today, there was no way that the pond could reduce him to a few sterile screen caps.

He had to live, to breathe, to be in a form where herpetology students might copy and paste, might suck in the fragrance of the written word.

The pond had a momentary pause for doubt - especially when the pond looked at the topic at hand.

Not another rant about AI.

But the pond plucked up courage, looked at the bright side, wondered if a reference to Odysseus might be the reward, knew deep in heart that some ancient philosopher held the key ...

The header: By Henry Ergas
AI no more dangerous than human stupidity

The offer of a bot voice: Listen to this article
8 min

The caption for a mystifying snap. Patience, all will become clear: Barcelona in Spain is near the bottom of the list of cities with more than five million inhabitants

The clarion call to forget the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

Now some might wonder at the headline, what with human stupidity incredibly dangerous. After all, human stupidity has led to a couple of world wars, a means to end life on earth by way of nukes, and an even more splendid way to end life on earth by way of global warming (aided and abetted by denialists of the lizard Oz kind).

Ergo, AI must be incredibly dangerous.

But the pond must not pre-empt Our Henry's philosophically based conclusions.

Our Henry started strong, proving he was no top of events, by referencing rogue Anthropic refugee Evan Hubinger, Anthropic Researcher Warns There’s ‘>10% Chance’ AI Could ‘Kill All Humans’ By Next Decade

Devoted followers of Our Homeric Henry will be relieved to discover - spoiler alert - that this was just a feint, a distraction, and that the answer lies in Kant.

But first there's a journey and reassurance to be delivered to wilting hive mind brains:

Evan Hubinger’s much-quoted statement that there is at least a 10 per cent chance artificial intelligence will end human life within a decade is, without an explanation of what that number means or how it was derived, as uninformative as it is misleading.
Worse, it distracts from both the nature of the problem and the most sensible responses.
And by pandering to the sloppy apocalyptic thinking that permeates the climate extinction movement, it has unleashed the mother of all scare campaigns, culminating in Australia’s signing of a “feel-good” declaration urging international regulation of AI.
At the heart of that campaign sits a curiously familiar number: 10 per cent, recurring with extraordinary constancy throughout the doomsday rhetoric of the age.
That constancy is readily explained: 10 per cent is the Goldilocks of apocalyptic probability estimates – just small enough to be plausible, just large enough to be absolutely terrifying.

Goldilocks? Steady, faint of heart. Our Henry is likely referencing the Robert Southey version from the nineteenth century, a literary work full of depth and meaning ...

Our Henry cast porridge on troubled waters ...

Terrifying it certainly is, even in the narrowest economic terms. Counting only existing lives, and valuing them at two million dollars each, the actuarial cost (that is, the potential loss multiplied by its likelihood of occurring) equals 15 years of world GDP; at the frequently used benchmark of 10 million dollars each, that rises to 75 years of everything the world currently produces.
Magnified by the far greater human costs, those figures would justify incurring vast sacrifices to avert catastrophe, as the doomsayers seem to intend. But with the dominant AI platforms having an interest in hindering new competition, and the Chinese regime in stifling AI’s development in the West, calls for a “slowdown” warrant the strictest scrutiny. And even the slightest look highlights the claims’ fragility.
There are, for example, 83 cities with five million or more inhabitants. Yet together they account for less than 20 per cent of the world’s population. An extinction event, or anything approaching it, would presumably have to devastate them all, or at least the vast majority.
Assume, however, that doing so requires 12 disastrous outages in each city, from water systems collapsing to nuclear power plants exploding.

The reptiles flung in an alarming image ... The crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station after the damage caused by an earhtquake (sic, so and thus, thanks AI editing) and tsunami in 2011

Our Henry was more than up to the task, and provided a statistical savaging ...

The event then depends on 1000 conditions being met, each with (say) a 10 per cent probability of occurring. If those conditions are independent – meaning none makes any other more or less likely – the aggregate likelihood is vanishingly small: one divided by 10 raised to the power of 1000, which is effectively zero.
Even a hundredfold increase in the number of ways in which disaster could unfold scarcely changes that conclusion. It would take approximately 10 to the power of 998 independent pathways, rather than a hundred, before the probability ceased to be effectively zero. Indeed, with only 100 pathways, the probability of each condition being triggered would need to rise from 10 per cent to roughly 97 per cent just to nudge the dial towards the lowest single digits and raise the actuarial cost to $1.
Nor do the problems end there. Saying “10 per cent” conveys an aura of precision; but that need not rest on precise knowledge. The 10 per cent could perfectly well reflect profound uncertainty between two possibilities: the first, with a nine-in-10 weight, is that catastrophe is virtually impossible; the second, with a weight of one in 10, is that it is nearly inevitable. Taken on its own, the headline number tells us nothing about how tightly its assessment is bounded or about its practical implications.
We are therefore entirely in the dark as to the estimate’s significance and robustness. Yet it is not merely a truism that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence: it is a foundational proposition of modern statistical inference.

The pond was bemused when the hole in bucket man followed that up with a gigantic billy boat butt ...

None of that proves Hubinger’s estimate is incorrect.

That sort of butt is always, almost mystically followed by a corrective "but" ...

But the illustrative calculations, precisely because they are assumption-laden, show that asserting a probability is grossly insufficient: there has to be a transparent analysis to substantiate it. Moreover, simply pointing to occasional AI malfunctions won’t cut the mustard: it is one thing for an AI system to hack into a website and quite another for it to end human life in a fit of suicidal malevolence.

At this point came another very modest set of billy goat butts ...

None of this denies that AI poses real risks – risks lucidly anticipated in the 1960s by Norbert Wiener and Isidore Gudak (later IJ Good), two of its most important pioneers.
A simple analogy helps explain their concern. Tell a travel agency you must fly from Perth to Melbourne for the AFL grand final, and you would be horrified if, finding all flights booked, it arranged for a ticketed passenger to be assassinated, thus freeing a seat – and astonished too, since your request presupposed the agency would act within unspoken limits you assumed were understood.

In this dangerous world of analogies, who should arrive to give excellent advice? Eminent German philosopher Immanuel Kant, as always a voice of reason

Inspired by the presence of Kant, Our Henry reached new levels of rhetorical insight ...

The point, put more abstractly, is that every instruction that is not strictly formulaic carries what philosophers call a “surplus of meaning”. In practice, we readily handle the resulting vagueness through “contextual disambiguation”: drawing on shared knowledge, conventions and expectations to read not merely what the words say, but what the speaker intends and what limits that implies. Those shared understandings are instilled through lived, collective socialisation – something no volume of scanned text can convey.
Instead, whatever AI systems display is induced statistically from data and feedback, rather than experience, and because every decision rule that process induces needs a further rule to fix its application, the training mechanism can never fully close off the risk of error.
Just as that has been known for decades, so too has the broad architecture of the solutions.
The danger, Wiener wrote, lies in using “to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere once we have started it, because the action is so fast and irrevocable that we have not the data to intervene before the action is complete”.
The answer, first conceptualised in the 1960s by Herbert Simon – another of AI’s greatest pioneers, and alone among them in holding both the Turing Award and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics – has three components.

The reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction, because mad King Donald is still ruler of them all ...

Next video thumbnail
Trump administration scolds Albanese over ‘censorious’ tech crackdown
News24 host James Macpherson says the Trump administration has “scolded” the Australian Labor Party for their censorious Digital Duty of Care laws.

And so to Our Henry's Kantian konclusion:

The first is to keep failures contained by building walls into the systems: modular, separate parts with no shared point of failure and filters between them to assess errors. Secondly, provide the scope to halt the decision process by installing stopping points, so a single step cannot drag outcomes to irreversibility. And third, ensure visibility through instruments, logs and an escalating structure of alerts that show what the system is doing while it is doing it, rather than just tracking what it has produced.
These measures are not costless, and easier said than done. But they are no more than good engineering practice, checkable and even certifiable. Better still, they do not require a “slowdown” in technological progress, raising entry barriers or allowing China to steal the race. And they are far less socially harmful than that ultimate folly, the precautionary principle, which has become technophobia’s figleaf of choice.
The real risk is not that AI will kill us; it is that relying on increasingly intelligent machines will make us increasingly stupid, further eroding our collective capacity for clear thought and entrenching the hysteria that now so frequently drowns out the voice of reason.
As usual, Kant said it best: “Deficiency in judgment is what is properly called stupidity; and for such a failing there is, regrettably, no remedy.”

Exactly, precisely so.

When dealing with AI, always revert to Kant, born in Königsberg in the Kingdom of Prussia in April 1724 for the final word ...

Is there an infallible Pope in the house?

With the reptiles continuing to spoof the intermittent archive, the pond's range of reptile references continues to be limited.

The Australian Daily Zionist News couldn't resist this big lie ...

Luckily the reptiles used AP as their source, so correspondents could head off to other versions of the big lie, as at France24, Israel must win 'because we’ve got no other choice’, PM Netanyahu tells UN

There was much lying and disingenuous downplaying ...

...Netanyahu dismissed incidents of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank as a “handful of young juvenile delinquents” throwing stones, chopping down olive trees and lighting fires.
“I can’t stand that. I won’t stand for vigilantism,” the prime minister said before accusing foreign leaders and the international press of distorting the scale of violence in the West Bank.
Netanyahu’s government is dominated by settlers and their allies, including the Cabinet minister who oversees the police. There have been few arrests of settlers involved in attacks on Palestinians.
Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, and the Palestinians want both as part of their future state. The Palestinians and much of the international community view the settlements as illegal and as an obstacle to creating a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.
Netanyahu has said no Palestinian state will be established while he is Israel’s leader and has argued that the Palestinian Authority is not a partner for peace.

Says the man devoted to the war with Iran and as many other conflicts as he can muster.

So keen was the pond to pander to the pretentious referential pundit that it didn't even bother checking out other worthy contenders, eager for attention. But there was one on the extreme far right of the reptile rag that caught the eye ...

The header: By Peter O'Brien
No place in shrine for questionable frontier history

The chance to hear a bot voice: Listen to this article
5 min

The caption for the snap designed to produce sympathy: A Last Post Ceremony at the Australian War Memorial Picture: David Whittaker

A cry from the wilderness behind the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

At last the knave behind the fuss stepped forward:

I am the co-convener of the Defend Sacred Ground campaign, which aims to put a stop to the inclusion of frontier conflict in the Australian War Memorial. Former PM Tony Abbott is our patron.

The onion muncher is your patron? Let the pond be clear, contempt is the first response, together with the thought that this must be black bashing of a familiar ancient English colonial kind ...

Let me be clear; we do accept that frontier conflict occurred, that it was traumatic for the Aboriginal people and, often, illegal. We do accept that parts of it are a stain on our history. But the AWM is not the place to record it. The AWM is first and foremost a shrine – a sacred place to honour those who gave their lives in the service of this nation. Its museum and research functions are subordinate to that purpose. The AWM is not a war museum. It is not a history museum.
I have no doubt there are some, among the cohort pushing for inclusion of frontier conflict, who are genuine in their belief that this is an overdue and benign acknowledgment of our warts-and-all history. But the history being discussed is by no means settled. One narrative that has been widely and credulously accepted is that up to 100,000 Aborigines died in these so-called “Frontier Wars”. That figure is not supported by any empirical evidence. It has no place in the War Memorial.
If you hand your enemy a weapon, don’t be surprised if he uses it. Those well-meaning people will not be consulted when an activist minority in the Aboriginal community seizes upon this and trumpets it as an official acknowledgment that Australia was invaded, that the peaceful Aboriginal population was subjected to dispossession and genocide resulting in trauma that persists to this day. In short, that the nation-state of Australia is illegitimate.

Note the canny way that the war is reduced to a "frontier conflict" and images designed to terrify the hive mind are included ... People from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and their supporters protesting at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra in 2014 Picture: Kym Smith

The pond was startled by the sense of a Colonel Blimp outraged that anyone would think to honour the fuzzy wuzzies ...

Their intermediate aim is for a Tomb of the Unknown Aboriginal Warrior to be placed next to the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier. Who knows what after that?
That this AWM proposal is contentious, and that the AWM Council is aware of this, cannot be in doubt. Prominent people have been speaking out about it since at least 2022.
In a recent piece in this newspaper, AWM director Matt Anderson states: “Before the development began, we consulted nationally, and the feedback was overwhelming: Australians expect difficult content in our galleries.” If you don’t remember being consulted, it’s probably because you are not a member of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community or a suitably vetted historian. As far as we can tell, that is the extent of the consultation undertaken by the AWM.
It is likely that most Australians would oppose this proposal, if given the chance. But until now, they have not been given that chance. And they should have been, because what is proposed is, on the face of it, in contravention of the Australian War Memorial Act 1980.

Just to alienate the pond even more, an image of the onion muncher, patron of all that demeans .. Former PM Tony Abbott at an Anzac Day service in 2026. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

More knaves came forward ...

One of my co-conveners, Robert Hill, wrote to Veterans’ Affairs Minister Matt Keogh to raise this issue. He received a reply from director Anderson, dismissing our concerns and stating that “the Frontier Wars gallery will focus on organised campaigns of war and warlike resistance conducted between First Nations peoples and naval or military forces raised by the crown in Australia, in line with the AWM Act”.
We understand that the Council’s assertion that the proposal is in line with the Act is not based on independent legal advice but, as AWM chairman Kim Beazley has stated, on a “broad interpretation” of the Act. That would be a tenable approach if a) the Act were ambiguous, and b) the desired outcome were either in line with the clear intent of parliament or, alternatively, it now reflected an overwhelming and verifiable consensus among the Australian people. None of those conditions applies here.

The reprehensible "Bomber" was part of the act ... Chairman of the AWM, Kim Beazley, in Canberra in 2024 Picture: Martin Ollman

There came the usual mealy mouthed platitudes ...

We did seek advice, from barrister Peter King of Queen’s Square Chambers in Sydney. His advice raises serious questions as to the current proposal.
The Council members may be quite genuine in their desire to seek “justice” for Aboriginal people and present a true account of our history, but it cannot be said that they have acted in good faith.
Rather than seek independent legal advice and put the matter beyond doubt, or at least give themselves a figleaf of credibility, they have relied on their own “broad interpretation” to further their own agenda. And they did this knowing that the matter is highly contested. Surely it is incumbent for chairman Beazley, as the statutory custodian of our national shrine of remembrance, to ensure everything is above board. The Australian War Memorial belongs to all Australians.
We call upon minister Keogh to direct the Council to remove all current depictions of frontier conflict, and to abandon its plans for the new Pre-1914 Gallery. As a minister of the crown, it is his duty to enforce the legislation.
Let me make one final point. We do not oppose this proposal because it is contrary to the Act. We oppose it, in principle, because it is a bad, divisive idea.
Lieutenant Colonel (rtd) Peter O’Brien is a Vietnam veteran and author of five books.

defendsacredground.com

An actual colonel? The pond has seen this kind before ...

All the same, the blather fell on fertile hive mind soil ...

You're a long way from Texas Jack, but you sound dumb as a stick with your proposal to disenfranchise those killed in wars after the first world ding dong ...

The pond wouldn't usually do this but feels the need to introduce a little counter balance.

These came by way of The Canberra Times Echnida newsletter, which arrives as emails each morning, and as well as carrying an infallible Pope, delivers opinions more compelling than the lizard Oz ...

Well yes, there was an invasion, a war and an extermination, and there was more in that newsletter, but that was the nub of it, and Ellery followed up almost immediately with another effort ...

And so on, and so to a bonus.

Here time pressures caught up with the pond and it had to continue on in screen cap form ...

How could the pond resist The Times (of London, don't you know) dealing with Vlad the Sociopath ...

What a relief. Europe is safe!

Pity about Ukraine, but there's always got to be a loser, wot wot ...

Oh dear, the pond might have spoken too soon. Perhaps Vlad the Sociopath, in his desperation, might actually lash out ...

Surely the main thing is that plucky Britain is safe from any turmoil roiling Europe. Let's just keep it at all things Ukrainian ...

At this point, the reptiles delivered a set of sub-headlines ...

Discord on public messaging? The same might be pretty much said about this hot-cold-lukewarm analysis ...

There came a last gobbet ...

At the end of it all, the pond remained even more convinced that Europe was made up of patsies about as capable of confronting Vlad the sociopath as a warm lettuce leaf trying to stand firm, or as brave as mad King Donald, wilting in the glow of the latest Chinese emperor ...

Speaking of social media ... there's a site where The Times (of London) pushes a strong anti-Vlad the Sociopath line ...

Meanwhile, the Lord Haw-Haws keep doing their work ...

Lloydie of the Amazon, the bromancer, Geoff, petulant Peta, Killer ... what a reptile line up ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:25:06 +0000

Like the ancient kraken, waking from the deep, or perhaps like a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, Lloydie of the Amazon has woken from his slumbers and turned up to celebrate Dan "the man" Tehan ...

But there seems to be some kind of induced energy lethargy, because Lloydie could only manage two brief gobbets, as he celebrated the deep north's commitment to the coal industry - what could possibly go wrong? - a return of the climate wars, and pending victory on action on climate change via "pragmatic common sense":

Ah, got to make the planet safe for the lizard Oz's "superintelligent" answers to everything, though "42" would save a lot of coal.

The pond asks again, what on earth could go wrong, and luckily had saved up an infallible Pope to provide an answer ...

Meanwhile, the bromancer decided to revert to full Trumpism, and what could possibly go wrong?

Read that line and weep: "On policy substance, most of the merit rests with Trump".

Muh lud, is there a counterpoint?

Well, you could turn to Paul Krugman, in a missive which came to the pond via email but which could be found on Substack here ...

Well yes, all that and more at the link, with musical coda, and what a relief to find there's some sanity left in America, but sadly not in the bromancer ...

Rest easy, tech bros, the bromancer has your backs ...

Or better still, imagine the reptiles in charge ... if you dare ...

And so it's back to that tired old both siderism, "Trump has done good and bad things", and it's all the fault of left wing critics and never mind those who have avoided ideology and retained a shred of sanity ...

Very early this morning, this was the headline that greeted the pond ...

The reptiles never sleep, but the pond thought it should at least allow Geoff to chamber his round ...

Almost bromancerish - there can be no higher praise - what with that agitation about lefties taking a view on the mad king ...

Geoff continued his dirge ...as a snap showed the extreme distance Albo had put between himself and the Donald ...

Finally it was time to moan about awards ...

All this posing in public? What could possibly go wrong?

And so to the problem of Petulant Peta.

With the intermittent archive on the blink, or at least being spoofed by the lizard Oz, the pond's usual tactic - a note observing her presence, a quick despatch to the intermittent archive, and moving on - won't work.

At the same time, it's incredibly easy to offer up some screen caps as a reminder of the power behind the throne which led to the early demise of the hapless onion muncher's reign.

The pond realises that screen caps have no charm, and are just deployed in the pond's current never ending moving emergency, which will continue for some weeks.

They're just a brutalist way of flinging together a blog post quickly, but time is short, and the petulant one is all on board with the Dan "the man", and so attention of some kind had to be paid ...

The pond realises that a triumphant Petulant Peta can become an unnerving, nauseating experience - that talk of "climate nonsense" being consigned to history might send those with the slightest awareness of science spiralling out of control, but the pond promises that it will be done and dusted in three gobbets, and that the furriner bashing is up there, or more correctly, down there with Dame Groan ...

Where would the reptiles be without furriners to bash? (But then where would Herr Adolf have been without "cosmopolitans" to bash?)

Cue a stern-looking beefy boofhead to set up the final gobbet ...

There, done in three gobbets, and no damage done, apart from the odd rush to the toilet for a heave.

What an inspiration for those into fear, loathing and general hysteria the petulant one is, and what an inspiration King Donald is ...

Finally, it would be remiss of the pond to overlook Killer, what with Killer eager to blame those at some disadvantage for ruining everything.

Don't you worry about the meek and the mild and the suffering, just set Killer on to them and he'll worry them to an early death, like a dog sensing blood with a lamb in the Tamworth sun ...

From the pond's observation of those who've made a living doing hard yards yakka, 65 can still be a stretch.

The shearers in the pond's extended family all developed back problems that made life extremely hard in their later years, and the pond guesses that the worst Killer has suffered is the occasional wrist and finger strain from extended keyboard use ...but that's the name of the Killer game. If you've spent a life doing manual labour, you're a disposable item.

The real players, the contented oldies, are generally are rich as Croesus in Killer's world ... we are all Lydians now:

If the pond has one wish left, it's that Killer gets old, but the pond guesses that he's managed to build a nice nest egg, and to hell to those left behind ...and what's a little tendonitis in the wrist?

Now on with bashing unfortunates who might be on struggle street for one reason or another:

Back to sheltered workshops, you heathens and bludgers, Killer of the IPA has spoken ...

And so to the immortal Rowe to round out this day's offerings ...and what could possibly go wrong?

That really is a truly noble chair ...

So many temptations ...

So many audio distractions ...