loon pond

In which, after celebrating King Chook with the bromancer, the pond does a reptile survey, and somehow ends up with in the spirit of the Dardanelles season ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:58:00 +0000

The pond was surprised to learn, via the Graudian and Graham Readfearn that the war criminal network (7) had joined the lizard Oz war against EVs and renewables, in Channel Seven's Spotlight dug for dirt on renewable energy. Here's what they left out.

The pond was surprised because it suddenly remembered that there were still four FTA networks in Australia, and that the Seven network actually still existed.

The pond can't recall watching a single show or even five minutes of Seven the last couple of decades, helped by not giving a toss about the AFL.

When ever in Melbourne, the pond stares blankly into the distance when asked what team it supports, and ABC news updates (many bulletins are in the grip of that spreader of brain damage and dementia) are enough to be able to mock members of the extended family devoted to losers like Richmond.

As for Ten, it takes the pond fever dream moments to remember decades of drivel of the Number 96 kind, with the pond unable to recall the name of a single show since.

And about Nine the pond says nothing, save to note that they've helped in the ruination of Australian media in multiple ways. Long gone are the days when Paul Sheehan could wax prolix pretending to be a prole while enjoying ten buck sourdough bread in Paddington.

As for that war, Wilcox managed to leave out one important empty box in her 'toon of the day...

Where's the empty "invisible thing" box for "benefits to the planet flowing from addiction to fossil fuels"?

Never mind, the pond appreciates news of what's going down in declining empires, even if there's no real need to care.

After all, the pond has the mother lode of the axis of weevils in the shape of the lizard Oz hive mind, and its nefarious offshoots, with occasional second hand insights turning up to reveal what Sky Noise down under is doing to degrade the hive mind even further.

And so to the latest news, and to the bromancer advising on mad King Donald's mindless middle east folly, set in progress with the aid and encouragement of the bromancer's employer, the Emeritus Chairman, and cheered on by the bromancer's Faux Noise US kissing cousins ...

Poor bromancer ...or should that be poor world?

The header: Is this the ultimate presidential TACO? Donald Trump faces a military stalemate with Iran as his repeated threats lose credibility and Tehran refuses to negotiate under pressure.

The caption for the dire collage celebrating the return of Emilia, at last given a credit for her ongoing demeaning of the graphics department: Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei and President Donald Trump both want the war to end but neither wants to be seen as having come off second best. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

It's a peculiar, perverse pleasure, watching the bromancer showing every sign of being up for a turning.

It only takes three minutes of his time, and anything he talks about might well change in a nanosecond, but he's growing more and more testy with mad King Donald, with the latest his throwing about of that key sign of TDS, talk of King Donald as a weak-willed chook.

The bromancer cunningly poses it a question - he's just asking questions - but the weight falls on signs of chookdom. My chookdom for a Taco sauce:

Is this the ultimate TACO? Donald Trump chickened out from enforcing his umpteenth deadline for Iran to comply with his wishes by reopening the Strait of Hormuz and surrendering its 60 per cent enriched uranium stockpile.
Or is the US President preparing one last, massive military escalation?
The more extravagant Trump’s threats, the less likely he is to carry them out.
Thus, there was no chance that Trump would act to “end the civilisation” of Iran through massive bombing. This language offended Americans, outraged world opinion and drew a rebuke from Pope Leo XIV.

By golly, he's taken to listing mad King Donald's assorted crimes, and speaking of second hand news of that remote Sky Noise down under empire, the bromancer's piece was instantly interrupted by by the reptiles flinging in an AV distraction (how's that rebrand going?):

FDD Iran analyst Janatan Sayeh claims US President Donald Trump sees the next phase in the Iran war as being “even more catastrophic, going beyond just military”. “He sees the next phase as being even more catastrophic, going beyond just military and going after somehow using something from within Iranian territory against the regime,” he told Sky News host James Bolt. “That’s the only way they can meaningfully ensure that in the long term, at least you’re not just dealing with a wounded Islamic Republic and you’re not going back every six months to a year, bombing the regime, treating then bombing them again.”

Slurp down the bromancer's discontent while you can - it seems generations ago that he was hot to trot for a war with China by Xmas; now he's riven by fearsome doubting Thomas insights and billy goat butts:

But Trump has attacked militarily at the least likely times, such as during formal negotiations.
The uneasy balance is that Washington maintains the blockade of Iranian ports, while Iran blockades the Strait of Hormuz to all other shipping.
The President has extended the ceasefire indefinitely, allegedly at the request of the Pakistani government, which brokered US-Iran talks, and to allow what he describes as a “seriously fractured” Iranian government to present a consolidated position.
Iran says it has no intention of resuming talks under a deadline and accuses the US of plotting to launch another surprise attack.
The war has already gone on for eight weeks.
Trump keeps managing to talk the markets into believing it’s just about to end.
But this stage of negotiations has so far favoured Iran. It got a ceasefire, the suspension of the US and Israeli bombing campaign, and it got Trump to order Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to suspend military operations in Lebanon.
Tehran has used the pause to dig out buried missile launchers, missiles and drones. Estimates vary widely but there is significant Western and US briefing that Iran has more than 1000 missiles left, some 40 per cent of its pre-war drones and maybe 60 per cent of its missile launchers.
If these figures are remotely accurate, they show that Trump’s claims of damage to Iran’s war stocks have been seriously exaggerated.
It also means Iran may well be capable of renewed and even sustained attacks on Gulf Arab energy infrastructure, as well as on Israel and other targets.
Iran may have other ways of escalating the conflict, such as getting some of its proxies, Shia militia in Arab nations as well as the Houthis in Yemen, to attack regional energy infrastructure or ships sailing in the Red Sea.

The one indicator that this might not be a TACO moment is that Trump has brought a third aircraft carrier to the region as well as thousands of marines and amphibious troops.

The reptiles again interrupted, and again the pond reduced the distraction to a screen cap: U.S. forces operating in the Arabian Sea enforced naval blockade measures against an Iranian-flagged cargo vessel attempting to sail toward an Iranian port, April 19

Could the bromancer top his usual preferred dismissive "that's nuts"?

Trump plainly wants to avoid this, just as Iran wants to avoid the resumption of US and Israeli bombing of Iranian targets. So the fragile, unstable, temporary balance of the twin embargoes may be the way of things for a while.
The embargo is costing Iran hundreds of millions of dollars a day, in an economy already on its knees.
But Iran has stockpiled supplies, has some oil at sea, can do some trade overland, and has some arrangements with international supporters such as Russia, China and North Korea.
Indeed, the fact Russia and China have blatantly helped Iran, militarily and economically, and yet paid no price for this, has weakened US standing vis a vis the other great powers.
Trump now wants to finish the war quickly. It’s likely that Iran will ultimately offer some kind of fudge/compromise/deal on its nuclear materials.
But it will want massive sanctions relief in return.
It’s very unclear that Iran will allow the free passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
It was for many years a standing risk in all geostrategic calculations that Iran may seek one day to shut off the Strait.
It didn’t do this mainly because it feared massive US retaliation.
Now it has already suffered the massive American retaliation, so it’s going to be very reluctant to give up its colossal new leverage.
If Iran can survive a blockade for six months, and that, like everything else, is very uncertain, Trump surely cannot continue this war, which is so unpopular among ordinary Americans, and so costly and disruptive, for six months.
Trump has so devalued his own word that it now bears almost no relationship to reality, or perhaps an inverse relationship.
For example, in 2018 Trump announced that North Korea would give up all its nuclear weapons. No such thing happened.
After an Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin, Trump announced he’d solved the Ukraine war.
Utter nonsense. None of the peace agreement provisions Trump announced for the Gaza Strip has come to fruition.
And during this war Trump entirely reverses narrative on average twice a day.
The Iranians know Trump now very much wants out of this war, so the US President must do something highly unusual for him – play a weak hand brilliantly.

Well, it ain't talk of "nuts", or even mad King Donald, emperor of bone spurs boasting that he would have won the Vietnam war in a week or two, but the pond will settle for "Utter nonsense" as a sign of the bromancer's ongoing disenchantment with the mad king...

After that it was all down hill.

The pond noted a few days ago that the reptiles seem to live in a distant past populated by long lost figures of the Jim Cairns kind.

This day Geoff chambered another round by reminding the pond of a politician now wreathed in memories like a Network Ten show.

Luckily the intermittent archive is working, so the pond had only to pause to note what appalling snap the reptiles had managed to feature at the head of Geoff's outburst.

Doesn't she look like a demented gesticulating harridan, a mad witch? Is the parrot standing by with a chaff bag to help out Geoff? First the link, then the teaser trailer:

Only Labor can fix up Julia Gillard’s NDIS mess
Labor faces a high-stakes gamble as it prepares to slash $15bn from the disability scheme’s costs by removing participants the scheme was never designed to support.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Enough of that already ...

And it's a ritual of the pond's never to give petulant Peta the time of day, though there was a whimsical desire to return to ancient days in her headline ...

Where are adults to save us? Howard and Costello took our debt to zero
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

This government has fostered the growth of productivity-smashing union power that has made new resource projects almost impossible.

Sheesh, they're still banging on about long lost picket fence days?

They're still dragging Petey boy on to Sky Noise down under to offer useless advice, even though the pond can vaguely remember - it's so long ago - that he never had the ticker?

And just look at the fossils featured in the snap at the top of her piece, and marvel that she didn't tip the nod to the onion muncher, now at a loose end as his authoritarian Hungary holidays come to an end ...

And that's more than enough of that.

Meanwhile, as the pond was speaking only yesterday about the reptiles ongoing devotion to jihads, the pond should note this effort by over boiled rice...

Yep, it's one of their hysterical patented EXCLUSIVES for a world that just doesn't care ...(be a loyal plastic robot, TV dinners by the pool, brown shoes don't make it - oh Frank, Frank, why did you zap the pond with political incorrectness?)

EXCLUSIVE
Medical regulator ‘captured’ by powerful trans lobby
Peak medical regulator ‘compromised’ by partnership with trans lobby group
AHPRA faces explosive claims it has been compromised by its partnership with trans lobby group ACON, with doctors now ‘too scared to dissent’ on gender treatments.
By Stephen Rice

Transphobia is one of the least appealing aspects of the hive mind, and one of the more pathetic jihads the pond always tries to avoid, as it gets the pond's TG friends agitated (has anyone in the hive mind ever met a TG person? There aren't that many out and about, for all the demonising and the hysteria).

It puts the reptiles in the same company as Vlad the sociopath (good news for Ukraine at last with the onion muncher's master no longer able to block), the Taliban and fundamentalist US evangelicals, and so all the pond can do is point to the jihad in the intermittent archive.

Ditto the pond has neither the time nor the space for women writing about men in heartfelt tones ...

Carving out space for men and boys beyond the shed
There’s been an erosion of the spaces where men gather. Traditional sites of male sociability are in long-term decline.
By Suzana Hardy

So few had cared that the pond had to personally supervise the piece's appearance in the intermittent archive.

Speaking of tradition, whatever happened to traditional spellings of Shoshan or Shoshannah, or if you will Susan, Susanna, or Susannah? The pond has been unnerved ever since Sussssan lost out in her battle with the lettuce.

The pond will also merely note the Thursday presence of Jack the Insider ...

Starmer flailing in a mire of his own making
Rather than seizing the opportunities, the British PM has spent his time stumbling around in a room full of upturned rakes.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

Again the pond had to do the hard intermittent archive yards, and the pond does appreciate Jack's ongoing attempts to present as one of the more sensible reptiles, interested in life outside the hive mind, but why on earth would the pond want to waste time with him when the pond could revert to Marina delivering a jolly good Hydeing a few days ago in It’s a nightmare on Downing Street: Starmer has no one left to blame for this Mandelson horror show?

Phew, even doing a reptile survey is thirsty work, and the pond is in need of a break.

Actually that Luckovich is in the spirit of the proceedings, because as a final offering, the pond should note that the season is now in full swing, with the latest dire attempt to invoke the spirit of Gallipoli coming in this form ...

The pond settled for a couple of screen caps because it's such a pitiful and wretched searching for relevance, an attempt to use current events to fit into the spirit of the Dardanelles season that's so naked that it has no shame.

If wanting to talk of US military fiascos, any number of more recent examples spring to mind ... from 'Nam through the Iraq folly to the Afghanistan debacle, with that resulting in a never ending horror for the women of Afghanistan, while the latest reward for those Afghanis who supported and helped US troops is to be deported to the Congo. (Oh the mad King and his minions are so cruel in so many appalling ways).

Forget all that - somehow it's the spirit of the season to drag the Dardanelles back into the picture ...

Really? The spirit of a Dardanelles inquiry might assist the United States in sorting out its seemingly endless appetite for military excursions and adventures, even as the mad King campaigned for his re-election on the basis of no more wars and no more adventures and an isolationist America first?

Sigh, best whip up a batch of original Tamworth recipe Anzac biscuits in the spirit of the season.

Oh wait, the pond still has a spare pack of Aldi Pfeffernüsse cookies left over from the Xmas season!

Is that in the spirit of the current season, or like peppermints, will it give a dire hint of an appetite for Blut und Boden?

Best turn to the immortal Rowe to close with a reminder of Geoff chambering that round ...

And here's an echo of the bromancer ... because while Sir Keir might just be skidmarks on the tar after the next round of UK local council elections, the hapless Poms still have the pleasure of noting the real multiple car freeway pile up ...

In which a number of honourable mentions are capped by Dame Slap carrying on jihading ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 21:18:00 +0000

With mad King Donald's ongoing war in the middle east a spectacular mess, and with too many convolutions to track on an hourly basis, the lizard Oz editorialist felt the need to emit a squawk this day ...

Oh dear, so much for the war with China, and as for mad King Donald, put it another way ...

Shades of Sideshow Bob...

And now, thanks to the intermittent archive currently working, the pond decided to make a series of honourable mentions, on a thanks but no thanks basis ...

New tax on gas could backfire spectacularly
Australia’s proposed gas tax threatens to break our word with key trading partners
Australia’s gas belongs to Australians and we have the right to tax it any way we like, but it comes at a cost.
By Saul Kavonic

As a heads up, Saul is credited by the reptiles as: Saul Kavonic is head of energy research MST Marquee

Head off to the company website, and you'll see this in Saul's CV... He has worked in commercial and strategy roles at Woodside Energy, Australia's largest oil and gas company ...

Thanks but no thanks, but the pond is happy to put it another way ...

Also deserving of intermittent archive honourable mentions ...

Butler’s NDIS plan lets kids down
Mark Butler is walking away from children who have serious needs
For many without supports, their autism or development delay is a barrier to participate in everyday life.
By Amanda Camm

Amanda's credit ran ... Amanda Camm is the Queensland Families Minister.

The reptile trick here is to run countless numbers of articles and stories bashing the NDIS as out of control, a disaster for the economy, even worse than renewables, and then just as the hapless government attempts to do something about it, drag in a deep north ministerial toad to deplore said attempts.

In a similar vein ...

Our ‘lifeboat’ for those most in need is sinking
‘Lifeboat’ for those most in need is sinking with rorting, inefficiency and buck-passing
Parliament unanimously backed a national scheme built around fairness, dignity and choice – with significant ambition.
By John Della Bosca

This was an even more cunning reptile ploy, as the reptile credit explains, John Della Bosca is a former Labor politician who led the campaign for the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

It's the old reptile ploy of getting 'em coming and getting 'em going. Don't do anything, and its a disaster; do try to do something, and it's a disaster.

Moving along, the pond would have liked a reptile excuse to segue to the Wilcox of the day, but whatever ...

And so to the first sign of the season, a bit like listening to the Delius tone poem, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring.

Come on down Jason ...

Let’s recommit to the nation our Diggers defended
We must never abandon the Australia our soldiers defended
Our political class have treated freedom as a limitless resource that can be extended to its enemies without consequence.
By Jason Thomas

Um, actually Jason, the Australia early diggers defended was inclined to racism, misogyny, bigotry, and a full on war between tykes and proddies, together with assorted other malfunctions and mistreatments of minorities (fancy being a gay in the the war years in Tamworth?).

Some of those aspects of "freedumb" needed to be abandoned ...though it has to be said that the reptiles at the lizard Oz still valiantly attempt to defend those ancient times, what with the war on China by Xmas a daily torment ...

For the record ... Jason Thomas is director of Frontier Assessments.

And if you head off to Jason's website, you're served a word salad which begins this way ...

Dr Jason Thomas specialises in geo-political, field-based assessments in complex operating environments to assist with due-diligence, capital raising, feasibility studies and early works of major projects and humanitarian operations.
Jason has a specific interest in complexities of cross-border projects or those located near porous international boundaries. He develops locally tailored approaches to establishing stable community and political relationships to protect a project’s commercial value.

A teaser trailer will explain why the pond gave the Jason game away early ...

There you go ... all that blather about a cohesive Judaeo-Xian democracy, and talk of Islamist-influenced utopias and so on and so forth.

On the other hand, Jason did mention George Orwell, for which the pond is profoundly grateful, because the pond had promised to itself that the first time it came across a George reference, it would run T. S. Eliot's rejection letter for Animal Farm (click on to enlarge):

(The story at the Graudian: It needs more public-spirited pigs': TS Eliot's rejection of Orwell's Animal Farm)

Does it have anything to do with Jason bleating about Judaeo-Xians and kicking atheists and secularists to the kerb?

Nah, but it's really funny to read the words of a conservative English ponce who simply didn't get a classic bit of writing ...

And so to the reptile treat of the day, courtesy Dame Slap ...

The header: You can teach people to count ... but you cannot make them think; Critics who tally story numbers to attack this newspaper have missed the point entirely.

The pathetically defensive caption for an uncredited, truly pathetic collage: The truth matters. And we said so. When did the left get so timid about challenging those who wield power over us?

Dame Slap is one of the sturdiest (and some would say silliest) reptile jihadists of them all.

She was conducting jihads on climate science long before she donned a MAGA cap and stepped into the New York night life to celebrate the arrival of a mad king, thereby giving free rein to a whole new world of jihads.

The Dame particularly dislikes uppity women, especially if they have an Islamic hue, but today she spent a bigly five minutes being curiously defensive about the jihadist lizard Oz ...

There is a new fad among critics of this newspaper. They count how many stories we run on a particular topic and claim the final sum as a scoop of proven wrongdoing. Some have gone even more granular, counting words. Lost in the bloomless fields of accounting, their exercise is misguided. Perhaps purposely so.
The best one can say is they can count – though that’s up for debate. But they sure can’t think.
Famous for being unfairly sacked by the ABC, Antoinette Lattouf claimed a journalistic coup recently by counting how many stories this newspaper has run about Israel-hating extremist academic Randa Abdel-Fattah.
Working with a data analyst and mathematician, Dr Robert Bean, Lattouf thinks she struck journalistic gold: their counting exercise found this newspaper ran 412 unique articles mentioning Abdel-Fattah – which apparently was “more than Nine Newspapers, ABC News Online, The Guardian and Australian Community Media’s Canberra Times, Newcastle Herald and Bendigo Advertiser COMBINED”.
With a Trumpian flourish like that, Lattouf and Dr Bean might be in the running for the Walkley’s new award for bean counters of the year. Except on our count Abdel-Fattah was mentioned only 268 times during the relevant period.
Double counting by the intrepid counters aside, the bigger point is: so what? Thinkers will notice why our coverage differs from other media outlets. Unlike most other media organisations, we take antisemitism seriously. If you’re at a loose end, Antoinette, count the number of stories we ran from Australians calling for a royal commission into antisemitism.
As an aside, before it folded in early 2025, the group co-chaired by Malcolm Turnbull – Australians for a Murdoch Royal Commission – caught the counting bug too just weeks before the voice referendum. When it was clear the Yes side would not prevail, the group released research about how many pieces News Corp outlets ran supporting the No case to suggest wicked bias. As it turned out, the more interesting number was the 9,452,792 Australians (or 60.06 per cent) who voted against the constitutional change. They did so for sound reasons that The Australian and other News Corp outlets explored in far greater detail than all other news outlets combined. (No caps needed for emphasis.) We call this public interest journalism.

What's funny about this? You don't need to count numbers to realise that the lizard Oz routinely conducts jihads and one of their leading jihadists is Dame Slap.

Why bother disputing it? Why not wear it as a badge of honour? If you're going to carry on like a Taliban extremist or a ratbag mad mullah, why not just own it?

The problem with the counters is they don’t understand what really counts. Lattouf’s maths scoop failed to expose inaccuracies in our coverage or make a case that reporting about Abdel-Fattah was not in the public interest.
Instead, Lattouf regurgitated Abdel Fattah’s belief that “being a woman who is Palestinian and Muslim makes her a prime target for The Australian”. That sort of fatuous argument finds friends in the knee-jerk world of identity politics.
In the serious world of public interest journalism, being a woman who is Palestinian and a Muslim does not warrant any more scrutiny and – importantly – any less scrutiny than any other ethnic or religious background.

She squawks and bleats and protests too much, though that is the jihadist way.

The reptiles once again reminded the hive mind of the subject of one of their never-ending jihads - a jihad which incidentally the pond has largely ignored because it's been so angry and over the top: Coverage of academic Randa Abdel-Fattah has become a focal point in media criticism debates. Picture: AAP

Dame Slap used this chance to carry on with the jihad, regurgitating all the reptiles standard jihad talking points...

This newspaper reported on Abdel-Fattah’s behaviour – which included leading children’s chants of “intifada” hate speech at a protest at Sydney University, and updating her Facebook profile with the image of a parachutist in the colours of the Palestinian flag a day after Hamas terrorists parachuted into Israel to murder and kidnap hundreds of civilians.
The paper ran news stories on her circa $900,000 taxpayer-funded grant from the Australian Research Council, on her bragging about how she “bends the rules” on her grant and on her exclusion – then inclusion – at Adelaide Writers Week. All this was most certainly in the public interest.
The fact that Macquarie University took no action against Abdel-Fattah, that the ARC decided her grant was in order and the Adelaide Festival board decided to cave to pressure and re-invite her to speak at the 2027 Adelaide Writers Week, all of which we faithfully reported, invites more questions about our educational and cultural institutions. It turns out that readers were very interested to learn about how tax dollars are spent and the laughably hypocritical culture of writers festivals.
The only thing the counters have revealed is that Abdel Fattah owes The Australian a note of thanks. She is no longer an obscure academic. After all, what’s the point of all that bleating about Israel if no one hears you?
Amanda Meade at The Guardian likes to count too. After the Australian Press Council decided against this newspaper concerning a complaint by former ACT chief prosecutor Shane Drumgold, Meade counted how many words – apparently 4000 – we wrote putting our case that the press council got it woefully wrong.

The pond was exceptionally pleased to see the venerable Meade get a mention.

She must really have stuck in Dame Slap's craw, and what a chance to provide a link to The Australian throws 4,000-word tantrum at press council ruling as Drumgold waits for just one" sorry.

Of course another Dame Slap jihad was at the heart of it ...

When the press watchdog ruled that Murdoch’s broadsheet published three misleading, unfair and inaccurate articles about the former ACT prosecutor Shane Drumgold, The Australian responded by having a tantrum.
We say tantrum because the newspaper published on Thursday an extraordinary 4,000-word riposte, including a front-page story, a timeline, two comment pieces and a thundering editorial questioning the Australian Press Council’s competence and integrity.
This railing against the umpire is all the more bizarre, given News Corp effectively controls the APC as a majority member which pays up to 70% of its annual $1.7m budget.
The columnist Janet Albrechtsen wrote all three pieces that were criticised, although the Sydney bureau chief, Stephen Rice, shares a byline on one. Of Albrechtsen’s role, the council said it was “a significant omission” not to disclose the writer’s role in the inquiry into the Bruce Lehrmann trial for which Drumgold was the prosecutor.
In 2024, the ACT supreme court ruled Walter Sofronoff’s extensive communications with Albrechtsen gave rise to an impression of bias against him during the inquiry into the Lehrmann trial. The judge found Sofronoff’s 273 interactions with Albrechtsen gave the impression he “might have been influenced by the views held and publicly expressed” by her.
Drumgold complained to the council that three pieces written by Albrechtsen after the ruling misrepresented the findings. The APC ruled in Drumgold’s favour despite a last-ditch attempt by the Oz to change its mind.
When The Australian received the preliminary adverse finding it responded by commissioning two independent legal opinions. The council said the legal opinions were not relevant and it was only judging whether the publication had breached its editorial standards.
Drumgold responded to The Australian’s dummy spit with a post on LinkedIn: “Who needs the truth, when you have a whole newspaper … Sorry seems to be the hardest word.”

So when Dame Slap wrote the words "we wrote putting our case", she's deflecting from the real problem. It was she that wrote all three pieces judged to misrepresent the findings.

That's what happens when you're a jihadist intent more on ideology and theology than on giving someone a fair go, or admitting an error.

The reptiles decided this would be a good point to fling in a snap of the victim, Shane Drumgold. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Jihadist Dame Slap carried on bleating ...

It was telling that a journalist chose to count our words rather than read them. The substance of the matter was simple – should journalists and newspapers meekly kneel before the press council when they know a council ruling is wrong?
The truth matters. And we said so. When did the left get so timid about challenging those who wield power over us?
Of course, at the heart of this counting-as-journalism fetish is a discomfort with the nature of our news, analysis and opinion pieces. If Lattouf or Meade agreed with the stories, they wouldn’t have their calculators out. Most important, if these critics could find something genuinely wrong with our reporting – inaccuracies, for example, are always a good place to start – they would surely go hell for leather on that front. Instead, to borrow a phrase from Paul Keating, each has reduced themselves to a human abacus.
The most recent number-counting exercise to try to justify a claim this newspaper has done something dreadfully wrong concerns our reporting on the serious allegations about white art gallery workers intervening in the artworks of Indigenous artists and concealing that intervention.
The Australian’s “white hands on black art” investigation into the APY Art Centre Collective was high-quality journalism. Based on numerous sources, the 2023 investigation included a disturbing video showing a white staff member from APYACC-affiliated art centre Tjala Arts painting on the canvas of award-winning Indigenous artist Yaritji Young.
It’s understandable that groundbreaking investigations that question the status quo will raise the ire of vested interests. But these were matters of profound public interest for everyone involved in the Indigenous art world and beyond.
The reporting has proven deeply inconvenient for many at the centre of the allegations, and for institutions that carried out their own reviews.

It was a relief when the reptiles decided this would be a good time to con hive mind suckers out of a few shekels to keep the Murdochian clan in their accustomed US citizen lifestyle ...

PREMIUM
Yaritji Young paints Tjala Arts centre
Become a member to access our premium video content

That provided Dame Slap with a chance to regurgitate another favourite reptile jihad.

The Dame has always been up for a little bashing of uppity blacks, so why not indulge in her favourite pastime?

The APYACC was expelled from the Indigenous Art Code in 2023. Its state funding was suspended. An independent investigation by the National Gallery of Australia, into 28 paintings that were going to be shown at the APYACC exhibition at the NGA, excluded the video from its investigation because the relevant artwork was not part of the exhibition, before deciding all the paintings met its provenance standards. The SA government has still not released the findings of a tri-government inquiry. However, APYACC’s state funding has been restored.
Those who are deeply uncomfortable with The Australian’s investigation have failed to show concern for the truth. A partisan website launched last week to coincide with the APYACC exhibition makes wild claims about the white hands investigation, focusing on the volume of stories. The APYACC’s catalogue, on sale in the NGA’s gallery, carries an essay claiming, in effect, that the white hands on black art investigation might have been timed to defeat the voice referendum. This is a crazy conflation of two very serious matters.
In the end, readers will decide what matters. They read The Australian because we run important stories, not comfortable ones. They focus on substance, not numbers. For the record – to save our critics some time – this piece is 1253 words.

Oh that must have hurt, there's a lot of smarting and cheek-burning going on in that epic bout of defensiveness.

How tough it is to be a jihadist and cop all those slings and arrows and word counts.

That noted, by the pond's count, Dame Slap's piece was 1249 words too long.

Just a few words would have sufficed: The reptile jihad continues ...

And so to the Rowe of the day ...

And speaking of Orwellian ...

In which the bromancer resorts to prayer and Dame Groan goes back to ancient times in search of Dr. Jimbo ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:32:00 +0000

After the bliss of a walk down Smith Street and a Vietnamese style pancake in Richmond, the pond decided it was well over mad King Donald and his lunatic ways, but how could the pond sweep aside the bromancer, sent in by the reptiles to contemplate and deal with the mess?

The header: What next in Iran? It’s a good time to pray; With a fragile ceasefire nearing its end, stark choices face the US and Iran — and missteps now could reshape global security and trade.

The caption for the mad king looking bemused, or possibly bewildered, or contemplating a heaven he'll always be denied: Donald Trump’s decisions in the coming days could determine the war’s trajectory. Picture: Getty Images

Prayer? That's the bromancer's answer to it all? It's a good time to pray?

The reptiles were so astonished that they didn't attempt any visual distractions, and instead allowed the bromancer to let loose a four minute existential spray, beavering away at a mad King Donald dilemma which apparently could only be resolved by divine intervention:

We are now in the most dangerous and perhaps the most promising few days of the Iran war. This is evident in the US Navy boarding and seizing Iranian cargo ships and the supposedly non-existent Iranian navy firing on international tankers that tried to transit the Strait of Hormuz, some even apparently with what they thought was Iranian permission.
The ceasefire ends on Wednesday. Several outcomes are possible. Donald Trump could announce a grand bargain in principle that opens the strait while negotiations are finalised. The US would suspend its blockade of Iranian ports. Alternatively, Trump could announce he thinks a deal is close and so the ceasefire continues, but so does the US blockade and Iranian actions keeping the strait closed. Third, the Iranians could capitulate, giving up their 60 per cent enriched uranium and agreeing never to block the strait again. That’s total US victory. Fourth, Trump could end the ceasefire and resume bombing, with Iran resuming attacks on Gulf Arab oil infrastructure. Then it’s a question of who can endure pain longer, Trump or Tehran.
Finally, the US could accept some crippling concession, such as Iran down-mixing its enriched plutonium to make it less dangerous and allowing Iran, perhaps in partnership with the US, to charge tolls on ships navigating the strait.
Trump has often raised this last possibility, suggesting the US could charge international ships a fee to escort them militarily through the strait. That would be devastatingly bad because it would commit the US, for the first time in its history, to a policy of international piracy. It would irretrievably repudiate the doctrine of freedom of navigation that the US Navy, more than any other institution in the world, upholds. This benefits the US and the entire globe. It’s the most basic of security “commons” that the US has underwritten with the support of all its allies and most other nations as well. The precedent for other nations then to charge fees for what was previously innocent passage through straits or even international waters that simply abut their territories would be colossally damaging.
Such an outcome is just possible, however, because it’s one of the few formulations that would allow both Trump (albeit fraudulently) and the Iranians to claim victory.All outcomes are possible and all, except total US victory, are very troublesome for the world.

Total US victory? Perhaps by wiping Iran off the map entirely? Nothing like a genocide to warm the cockles of the hive mind.

At this point, the bromancer dared to be so bold as to roll his trousers up, walk upon a beach and perhaps devour a peach.

You see, gasp, he's been highly critical:

I’ve been highly critical of the way Trump has waged this conflict. His often grotesque language and social media posts have the whole world worried about his stability, have destroyed public support for the military campaign and made it impossible for allies to actively engage with his campaign because it has been at the political level so incoherent, changing and abusive of allies and innocent third parties (such as the Pope).

Um, no mention of the role that the Emeritus Chairman played in setting this folly in motion?

Perhaps that's a little too close to the bromancer bone. Do carry on:

Trump also declined to task the US national system to take all manner of preparatory actions that would have strengthened its position in the war, from elementary moves such as filling up the US oil reserve before the war began, to retaining in service the last US de-mining ships, to rapidly developing cheaper counter-drone capabilities instead of so wantonly using up scarce supplies of missiles and interceptors. Most important, perhaps, because he wrongly thought the war would be quick and easy, Trump didn’t convince the American people of its importance or win even a smidgin of bipartisan support, or secure social licence for a period of sacrifice and difficulty. This is where Trump’s personal performance is so important and so destructive.
Nonetheless, and here is the most important consideration of all, it’s overwhelmingly in the interests of humanity that the US and Israel triumph in this war against Iran. The Iranian threat through nuclear, missiles, proxy forces and terrorists, combined with its savage killings of its own people, mean the campaign was not disproportionate.
Indeed, so far the US and Israeli bombings, aimed carefully at military targets, have killed far fewer Iranians than the Iranian government has done this year alone in suppressing protests.
More troubling is the question of whether Iran represented an imminent threat. Iran has consistently attacked Israel, the US, Western societies such as Australia, its Arab enemies and its own citizens, but it has done so mostly using proxies and clandestine agents in a way that often falls just below the level that would provoke an immediate military response.

It wouldn't be the bromancer without a little tyke blather about a just war, though truth to tell, there's not the slightest indication that the mad king is interested in justice for the Iranian people:

This reality goes a long way towards meeting the criterion that a threat must be imminent before military action is morally defensible. On balance therefore, and although it’s not absolutely clear, you can make a good case that the war was justified, which is one reason the Albanese government and the federal opposition both supported US actions initially. However, Trump’s wild and self-contradictory statements and the lack of obvious and necessary preparatory actions have clouded the moral case.

Clouded the moral case? Oh dear, the bromancer couldn't even come at the just war carry-on that Our Henry and Polonius peddled to the hive mind with their prattle.

But wait, don't despair, the bromancer still has it in him to celebrate the deeds of Kegsbreath:

The US blockade of Iranian ports, in a war in which Iran itself is blockading the whole strait except for vessels linked to its commercial gain, is morally, militarily and strategically sound. In fact the US should have done this weeks ago because, with minimum violence, it cuts off the revenue Iran needs to pay its soldiers and to keep its government going.
There is obviously now deep division within the Iranian government, though the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps clearly still has the upper hand. Regime collapse is just possible and would be the best outcome. Blockading the ports seems to put Tehran under more pressure than the bombing campaign did. But for most of the war so far the US tolerated Iran closing the strait but simply allowed Iran to let its own oil go to market on various ships.
This was one of many US misjudgments. However, the US embargo nonetheless has big risks. Would the US board and take custody of a Chinese ship trying to transport oil through the strait? Not only that, despite all the happy talk about opening the strait by force, even the US Navy won’t sail in the strait itself. So the blockade has to be conducted from outside the southern entrance to the Persian Gulf. It is resource-intensive and unsustainable in the long term.
What next? If you believe in the power of prayer, now’s a good time.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

Prayer? That's the best the bromancer's got?

But what if the Islamics got the right god? What if it's the Jews' main non-trinitarian man? What if Christ is indeed just a minor prophet and a naughty boy? What about the Hindus or the Buddhists?

Who to pray to, and what sign prayers have been any use in the past, with prayers not having noticeably shorted a couple of world wars and lots of minor ones?

Luckily Wilcox had a prayer to hand ...

And so to the rest of the reptile rabble, and with the best will in the world, after all that, the pond simply couldn't summon up the strength to go into simplistic Simon raging at pigs ...

Where are our governments in the fight against the feral pig plague?
Of all the things Australians love to boast about, this probably isn’t one of them— there are now more feral pigs roaming our vast continent than there are humans.
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

Perhaps simpleton Simon could get hold of a gun, and head outback with other shooters determined to tackle the pigs? (YouTube link, warning, rampant night time pig killing. Beware what your logarithms might throw up - and just be aware it's more Tamworth than Tamworth).

It was off to the intermittent archive with him, and ditto away with Geoff chambering another round ...

Grim Jim spinning up a whirlpool in sea of red
The Treasurer has mastered the art of fiscal spin, but behind the budget curtain lies a sea of red ink that threatens to expose the government’s economic management.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

The only reason the pond offers a teaser trailer for Geoff is to draw attention to the photo at the top of the piece ...

You see?

That snap of Jimbo in despair.

It's a classic reptile offering, featuring Jimbo looking downcast, perhaps a tad sullen, a battered and defeated man.

Now guess what snap the reptiles featured at the top of this day's Dame Groan outing, cheek by jowl with Geoff?

The header: ‘Anti-economist’ Treasurer Jim Chalmers fails on spending, inflation and real wages; Jim Chalmers’ approach to looming crises hark back to a failed predecessor from the 1970s. It could be a long road back.

The caption for exactly the same snap, recycled endlessly on a loop of doom: Treasurer Jim Chalmers ‘distrusts markets and thinks government intervention and spending can produce superior outcomes’. Picture: Martin Ollman

Talk about predictable, but that's why the pond didn't bother with Geoff firing off shots.

Why settle for second best, when you can get a classic Dame Groan in peak "we'll all be rooned" form?

These are tricky days for any treasurer. The economic implications of the conflict in the Middle East are unclear and the degree of uncertainty is extremely high.
Even if there is an early resolution to the war, which looks unlikely, there will be a hit to our economic growth rate with headline inflation increasing. Certain sectors of the economy will be particularly hard hit, including agriculture, tourism and potentially parts of mining. Asian refineries will be able to supply Australia only as long as the flow of crude oil keeps up to accommodate overall demand. In the event of any shortfall, expect countries to cater for their own needs well ahead of ours.
It’s not necessary to have studied economics at university to be a good treasurer. Some of our best treasurers never went near a university economics course.
The principle of opportunity cost, that the cost of doing A is the cost of not doing B, just makes sense to them. Similarly, the central role that incentives play in driving behaviour is obvious, as is the scope for government as well as market failure. The need for budget discipline is self-evident lest the cost of excessive spending leads to inflation and imposes a burden on future generations.
Sadly, our current Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is not one of those people who simply gets it. Indeed, he is essentially an anti-economist who, Sisyphus-like, is trying to transform the Australian economy from Canberra. He distrusts markets and thinks government intervention and spending can produce superior outcomes.

And at this point the pond has to ask exactly what is the demographic the reptiles and Dame Groan are aiming at, prompted by this still ... Dr Jim Cairns, also ‘way out of his depth’.

Are there any younglings whatsoever that have the first clue about Dr. Jimbo?

The pond can recall the times when the pond was living in Windsor and would head off to the Prahran markets, and see Dr. Jimbo sitting at a humble table, flogging his books.

But the pond is of an age. Are the reptiles really only interested in ancient times and ancient audiences?

Dame Groan possibly thought this was a killer reference, but she might just as well have referenced Jack Lang feuding with the banks in his Lang plan.

What on earth is the point, save to establish that you have to be old to stay in touch with this ancient chook's ranting.

Even Dame Groan had to admit that she was wandering a long way back ...

We need to go back a long time to identify another anti-economist who held the position of treasurer: another Dr Jim. Jim Cairns was also a politician way out of his depth who took the reins at a critical time – an oil shock, rising unemployment – and made a complete hash of it. We may be about to see history repeat itself.
In many ways, Chalmers has been one of the luckiest treasurers ever. Escaping from the clutches of Covid, commodity prices have soared and the terms of trade have recorded historical high levels. But unanticipated revenue has been quickly spent, often on very low-value ends.
Forget the nonsense that Chalmers spouts about the Labor government saving $112bn; it has saved nothing and has spent even more. The figures tell the story.
On-budget spending is up by $160bn since Labor took office. Payments as a proportion of GDP have gone from 24.3 per cent to 26.9 per cent. Then there is the explosion in off-budget spending. The now more meaningful figure is the headline cash balance, which shows a deficit of around $63bn next financial year. This compares with Chalmers’ preferred measure, the underlying cash balance, of minus $34bn. It also needs to be pointed out that government debt has risen by more than $100bn during Chalmers’ term in office and is now approaching $1 trillion.
When Chalmers left Australia recently to confer with finance ministers around the world, he made the astonishing claim Australia “is better placed and better prepared” than many countries.

If comparing Jimbo to Dr Jimbo is the best Dame Groan can do, then truly these are desperate times for an aged and out of touch hive mind, compounded by a completely meaningless snap which illustrates three fifths of f*ck all (*google bot approved): Asian refineries will be able to supply Australia only as long as the flow of crude oil keeps up to accommodate overall demand. Picture: Eddie Russell

Is Dame Groan's text so bland and boring that a snap of gas guzzlers in a queue to guzzle gas is the best they can do?

Isn't the reptile joke that it's EVs that have to line up for hours to access a charger?

Dame Groan was keen to absolve mad King Donald of any responsibility for the dismal state of the world, the sort of shufty that the reptiles love to perform, a quick peep before moving back to the main blame game ...

Carry on groaning ...

Was this some sort of joke? We have one of the lowest number of days of liquid fuel reserves among advanced economies; he has used up what fiscal headroom we could now have by his constant overspending; and domestically sourced inflation was a clear problem well before Donald Trump pulled the trigger. Chalmers, the anti-economist, had previously demonstrated his muddled thinking when he declared spending hundreds of millions of dollars on cost-of-living measures would miraculously reduce inflation. Higher interest rates have been one of the outcomes.
One of the important roles the treasurer plays is to block the unachievable ambitions of the spending ministers. The most successful treasurers have kept a close watch on the spending ministers as well as examining the policies they propose. On this score Chalmers is a failure, largely going along with the damaging and expensive ambitions of too many other cabinet ministers, including Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen.
The fact Chalmers can even talk about the care economy shows he completely misunderstands this role. In his world, uncapped spending on social welfare will lead to higher living standards. Demand-driven, non-means-tested programs have become almost universal, leading to runaway spending and an inability to forecast future outlays.
It’s not just the National Disability Insurance Scheme that’s out of control; think aged care, childcare and other badly designed programs.

It's as if the long years of Tory rule had nothing to do with the current state of affairs, and then came the bog standard reptile fear of EVs and renewables and all that jazz, with Satan's little demonic helper in the thick of it ... Energy Minister Chris Bowen has seized on the fuel crisis sparked by the conflict in the Middle East to declare the government must keep electrifying the nation and build Australia’s sovereign capability through renewables. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Then it was to the closing Dame Groan gobbet of despair.

How many times can she scribble that we're all rooned, how many ways can she spin her sorry tale of woe?

Sadly by this stage in her anti-economist career, there aren't that many, it's the predictability that's the feature, not a bug ...

The responsible way to look at government spending on social welfare is that budget affordability is the key. A strong economy with solid productivity growth is the means whereby taxpayers can afford to help the more disadvantaged in society.
Another area of profound weakness is Chalmers’ misunderstanding of the labour market. He thinks real wage gains simply can be mandated and workers will enjoy the benefits without any downside. The fact he is part of a government arguing for a “sustainable real wage increase” at the annual wage review at the Fair Work Commission makes the point. Without any increase in productivity, there is no sustainable way real wages can be increased, but Chalmers thinks these things can be imposed. The timing of this intervention couldn’t be worse.
Without a coherent economic framework, Chalmers’ response to war-induced economic difficulties is likely to be ill-advised and ineffective. His instinct will be to ditch any budget plans for real savings – note here the difference with reprioritisation – and to pour money into pump-priming the economy through more handouts. The minor tax reforms in the budget will be piecemeal and designed to shift attention away from the loose fiscal settings.
Chalmers may have the gift of the gab but the fact per capita income has gone backwards during his term is really all you need to know. He has abandoned the lessons of the Hawke-Keating era where a limited government role was accompanied by market forces largely determining the allocation of resources.
It will be a long road back from the ill-effects of having an anti-economist at the helm.

It reminded the pond of the sort of litany you get in a Catholic mass, with the high priestess blathering about productivity and pump-priming and handouts and so on and so forth, and then expecting a response from the hive mind. Et cum spiritu tuo ...

The immortal Rowe preferred to take to the high seas, and he at least gave mad King Donald a commanding role ...

And as EVs and renewables and all that jazz have been mentioned, the pond realises that it didn't provide an update on the EV running time for the return trip between Melbourne and Sydney.

Unfortunately, the timing was skewed because the pond stopped not just for charging but at other places it likes - the sweet little town of Euroa for coffee, the submariner town of Holbrook for a visit to the IGA, a genuinely odd rustic barn of a supermarket, and Gundagai, just because it's there, a dinkum reminder of Jack O'Hagan.

Boosted by listening to a four part podcast about the arrival of the Samurai and the Shōgun in medieval Japan, the pond was looking to an eleven and a half hour trip, a bit longer than usual but not so bad.

There was NIL competition for chargers, save for one bunch fairly close to Sydney that was full. All the pond did was drive on to the next set of chargers, where there was no competition whatsoever.

It was looking good. And then the pond hit Sydney.

First the motorway was clogged to the brim, full of cop and ambulance party hats attending multiple gas guzzler collisions. No way through there ...

Then the pond followed navigator Google's suggestion to get off the main road - never a good idea - and took a back way through Canterbury Road.

You guessed it, two more gas guzzlers had decided to collide and clog the road.

At this point the pond's schedule was shot, but it wasn't the fault of the EV. It was the fault of the gas guzzlers, wanting to live out J. G. Ballard's Crash. What they needed was a little of the accident avoidance tech that comes standard in EVs.

In short, EVs are fine for distance travel. If you want to ease range anxieties, pay more for a fast charging vehicle with good range (these days the speeds and the ranges on offer are remarkable, but there's a premium involved).

If you want to save money for local city stuff, get a little suburban EV runabout.

These days you can get one cheaply, with the pricing on a par with gas guzzlers. If your interest in cars has gone, stick to public transport - trains and light rail and trams and even some buses are electric, and it's all good.

Forget the reptiles. There's a reason this is in the news ...

Along the way, the pond did score one visual souvenir, from Euroa, a town better known for its magnificent magpie statue.

This one seemed to summarise what the pond would experience as soon as it plunged back into the hive mind...

Yes, it was a sense of impending ...r,r,r,rage ...

Of course it isn't what it seems on the surface ...

In 2026, RAGE will proudly present its inaugural Recycled Art Exhibition - a major celebration on the war on waste tapping into the creativity, innovation, and talent thriving in our communities. (Here)

Judging by their limited range of illustrations, the reptiles are also in to recycling, and that's why it seems worth reviving this immortal Rowe ... go electric younglings, you only have the hive mind to lose...

In which the pond goes Latin mass before turning to Lord Downer, the onion muncher and Major Mitchell ..

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:24:00 +0000

The pond isn't going to go into the funeral it attended, which was a private affair in the form of a Catholic communion mass, but did want to note one aspect of the service.

But first an anecdote. A long, long time ago, in a Tamworth far away, wreathed in the mists of time, the pond attended St Dominic's Catholic school, run by Dominican nuns in what was then obligatory full penguin gear. (Later the site was sold, the building demolished and the space turned into a car park).

After lying about sins in confession to get a quick 'all clear' from a mysterious priest tucked away behind a screen ("disobedience" was always handy, as was in later times "impure thoughts") and saying the odd cleansing Hail Mary, students were obliged to attend mass at the next door St Nick's.

One time after the priest had stuck a wafer on the pond's tongue (a feat involving some dexterity) a wafer fragment got stuck in the pond's teeth.

Wandering back to the pew, the pond began to poke at this disagreeable bit of wafer with a finger in an attempt to dislodge it... when whack, a nun's hand delivered a sharp blow to the pond's cheek, the sound reverberating through the church.

Then she she leaned in, face contorted in anger, hissing words to the effect: "Don't you ever dare touch the body of Christ".

At that cheek-reddening, flesh-bruising moment, the pond was enlightened.

This wafer was no symbolic token gesture, this wafer was the actual body of Christ.

The pond was committing an act of flesh-eating cannibalism, of the same genus as all those cannibal stories that littered children's adventure fiction.

It was ... transubstantiation. (The official word for the concept came later to the pond. If you've never been there, you'll probably never get it.)

Let no filthy, grubby paw, or digit, get in the way of the magical moment when a priest put Christ's flesh on tongue, and the recipient gobbles down actual human flesh with pious relish.

Fast forward, and in the funeral service the pond was aghast, shocked and disturbed to see the priest passing out wafers to the grubby, grasping paws of the congregation. Then they could stuff the wafers in their mouths by themselves.

It was still flesh eating, but it was somehow prosaic and sordid, entirely without magic.

The last funeral communion mass the pond attended had been in pre-Covid days, and apparently this variation was introduced as a way to help deal with Covid.

The pond urgently wanted the opinion of Robert Kennedy on this, but he was too busy attending to a raccoon penis. Still the pond wondered whether mixing a little Ivermectin into the holy water might not have been a better solution, thereby allowing the priest to still deliver magical wafer direct to tongue.

The pond thought of that Dominican nun, now probably long dead, and wondered how she might have coped with this new age of heresy.

Eventually a sullen pond began to mutter the responses under breath in best Mel Gibson style - "Et cum spiritu tuo", "Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccáta mundi, miserére nobis", and so on, proving that years of indoctrination can survive a long time, and that while you can take an ex-Catholic out of the church, you can't take the church out of the ex-Catholic. (You are with Mel, JD, in a love of the Latin mass, aren't you?)

And speaking of heretics, it's time for reptiles filling the hive mind of the lizard Oz with odious, grubby thoughts...

Today it's all about the war and mad King Donald and the bumbling incompetence of him and his minions, and naturally the reptiles were out and about looking for excuses and people to blame.

Lord Downer led the way ...

The header: Progressive left backs our enemies, kills our economy; The policies of the left are driven by its ideology. They’re driven by the vibe.

The caption for an image designed to terrify the hive mind: Iranian women part in a rally to pay tribute to women killed during the Middle East war, in Tehran. Picture: AFP

Progressives kill the economy? Be fair, no progressive could manage the amount of damage inflicted on the world economy by mad King Donald and his minions, by way of tariff wars and meaningless wars of choice.

But Lord Downer is never inclined to be fair, he's more inclined to be relentlessly stupid ...

If ever you wanted evidence that the progressive left has taken over most of the key institutions of the Western world in recent years, have a look at how the West has reacted to the Iran war. First, much of the progressive left in the liberal democratic world clearly hopes that a brutal autocracy such as Iran’s wins the war against America and Israel.
The progressive left hates Donald Trump more than it loathes the Iranian theocracy. The left doesn’t care that Iran, especially through its proxies, has been at war with Israel since 1979. When the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps massacred 40,000 people at the end of last year and early this year, the progressive left didn’t care, just as it doesn’t care about the estimated 150,000 people who have been killed in the Sudan civil war and the 12 million displaced. It doesn’t care about rockets being fired on behalf of Iran into Israel daily. All it cares about is the horror of Israel defending itself. As is said of the ABC’s international reporting, “no Jews, no news”.
Secondly, the Iran war has demonstrated how utterly self-defeating Western energy policies – driven by the intense advocacy of the progressive left – have been over the past two decades.
Nowhere has this fecklessness been truer than in our own country. Instead of urging the Iranians to agree to American demands to end arming and directing proxies in the Middle East, desist from developing ballistic missiles and other weapons to threaten their neighbours, and to abandon their nuclear program, what does the Australian government do? It urges de-escalation. That’s it. Not consistent condemnation of Iran, but implicit neutrality. We all know why. It’s about domestic politics.

And what would crusader Lord Downer have us do? Hie off to the strait to join the crusade in all its folly? Quick, another snap designed to terrify the hive mind into fear and submission ... Supporters of the Iran-backed Houthi movement brandish their weapons as they rally in solidarity with Iran and Lebanon in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on April 17. Picture: AFP

Terrifying, but warrior Lord Downer is made of stern stuff, and didn't wilt ...

President Trump isn’t popular, so the war is not popular. What is more, there are all those left-wing voters in parts of Sydney and Melbourne who hope Iran will be able to see off the Americans and the Israelis. So the Prime Minister and his ministers are very careful not to be too supportive of our ally, who is the guarantor of the security of the Western world and way of life.
The Iran war has also laid bare the absurdity of the energy policies Australia has been pursuing for the past 20 years. Despite the tens of billions of dollars poured into renewables, still 92 per cent of Australia’s energy consumption comes from fossil fuels. But the progressive left – in particular, the Labor Party and the Greens – has spent two decades railing against fossil fuel exploitation in Australia. It has given an impression that Australia is enjoying an energy transition of great rapidity, and this is going to generate cheaper energy. We will also reduce global temperatures.

Ah, the old fossil fuel routine, but the pond has done enough celebrating of the joys of EVs.

Quick, instead produce another image designed to terrify the hive mind ... Iranian women brandish their rifles as they take part in a rally to pay tribute to women killed during the Middle East war. Picture: AFP

It would take more than a few women to deter His Lordship, but what with the war being a bit of a mess, he soon had to veer off into all sorts of thickets and weeds ...

Anybody with a practical bent of mind will be interested in the results. Not only have we contributed precisely nothing to abating global temperature but, alarmingly, the level of productivity in the Australian energy sector has declined by about 30 per cent over the past 20 years. That means we require substantially more capital investment for the same level of output. No wonder Australia’s electricity prices have increased by about 60 per cent in that period.
Well, as soon as the Strait of Hormuz was closed, reality struck home. We’re still hugely dependent on fossil fuels, and the energy transition has made energy more expensive, and we have had literally no impact whatsoever on the climate over the past 20 years.
Not surprisingly, corporates have been reluctant to invest in searching for and developing oilfields in and off Australia, as well as being restricted in their capacity to drill for gas.
What is extraordinary is that our governments, dominated by the progressive left, have discouraged the development of known exploitable onshore and offshore oilfields.
Let’s take two examples. Recently, the Queensland government announced it would give approval for the development of the Taroom Trough oil and gas field. This is the first development of an oilfield in Australia in 50 years. Yet for years the progressive left has wanted to leave it untouched. Secondly, and more dramatically, Santos has discovered a vast oil and gas field known as Dorado off the coast of Western Australia. Santos estimates this contains about 150 million barrels of oil, so it’s a sizeable deposit. It’s roughly the equivalent of Australia’s current total annual production of oil. If the Dorado deposit were exploited, it would give Australia significantly greater self-sufficiency in oil.
So why hasn’t Santos gone ahead and invested in the exploitation of Dorado?
The answer is illustrative of everything that’s wrong with the progressive left approach to energy policies. Santos have just weathered years of litigation to get the Barossa gas field off the coast of the Northern Territory up and running. It has been bogged down in litigation, driven by the Environmental Defenders Office, which gets $2m a year in funding from the federal Labor government.
Ultimately, Santos held off these challenges, but at substantial cost to the company. More than that, this litigation damaged Australia’s reputation as a country to invest in.
At the same time as discovering the Dorado oilfield, Santos also discovered an oil deposit in Alaska. The company decided it was far less risky and therefore far more profitable for its shareholders to proceed with the Alaska project.
There you have it. As a result of the policies of the progressive left, we failed to develop millions of barrels of oil offshore in Australia, oil, which would have given us genuine energy security.
So for the past four years, we’ve had a federal government opposed to fossil fuels, and suddenly it’s crying crocodile tears about a shortage of oil supplies because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Prime Minister is burning up fossil fuels flying to Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia, begging them not to withdraw their supply of fossil fuels to Australia.
By the way, it’s not as if they would. The trips are just a political stunt.
That’s the progressive left for you. Policies are driven by its ideology. They’re driven by the vibe, not Australia’s tradition of practical policymaking.

Driven by the vibe? This hapless old antique is as ancient as The Castle, but without the first clue as to how to do comedy ...

The pond's mission this day is simply to line up a few reptiles for the pleasure of correspondents.

Sadly the pond couldn't spot the Caterist early in the morning and so had to settle for the onion muncher, a truly wretched and depressing thought ...

The header: PM’s begging tour exposes fuel security ignorance; As prime minister, I reluctantly accepted the official advice that efficient global markets meant that maintaining 90 days’ supply of liquid fuels onshore was no longer necessary. But now it’s critical.

The caption: Brunei's Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah (left), Crown Prince Al-Muhtadee Billah (centre) and Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese walk after their official luncheon at Istana Nurul Iman in Bandar Seri Begawan on April 15. Picture: AFP

The pond hopes such onion muncher appearances aren't going to become a regular feature of the lizard Oz.

With his time as lickspittle sycophantic stooge in service to Viktor Mihály Orbán now over, the suck might now think he's out of a job, and in his narcissist way, turn to the lizard Oz to maintain his feeble attempt at relevance ...

Is he going to keep turning up in the lizard Oz to rabbit on in ways that will please other authoritarians? Is that the sort of punishment the reptiles are lining up for the hive mind?

The on-again, off-again reopening of the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t mean that Australia can take fuel security for granted. This is actually our second wake-up call about over-reliance on global supply chains and we can’t afford to go back to sleep once more, as we did after the first.
As prime minister, I reluctantly accepted the official advice that efficient global markets meant that maintaining 90 days’ supply of liquid fuels onshore was no longer necessary. The global scramble for masks, surgical gowns and vaccines during the pandemic made it obvious that, in an emergency, it would be every country for itself.
In its wake, the Morrison government asked the Productivity Commission to consider our supply chain vulnerability but – remarkably – its report hardly mentioned fuel security, even though no country on Earth is as dependent on fuel imports.
The Prime Minister’s begging tour around Asia, shows just how exposed we are to any disruption in global fuel supply. The month’s supply of petrol, diesel, avgas and jet fuel that we supposedly had at the start of the Iran war included only about three weeks’ worth that was actually onshore. The rest was cargoes at sea that, in extremis, could be sunk, or possibly diverted to other destinations in the event of a major threat to shipping.

Of course the joke is ...

Never gets old that one, but of course the narcissist is more interested in posing as relevant by having a snap of himself, preening into the void ... Tony Abbott. Picture: John Feder/The Australian.

Why is the lizard Oz filled to the brim with deadbeat ancient politicians who proved completely useless when in power?

Who knows, it's just a matter of getting through it ...

Iran’s denial of freedom of navigation through the Strait did not interfere with the actual delivery of refined products to Australia so much as the delivery of crude oil to the Asian refineries we buy from. Even so, the pump price of diesel in Australia almost doubled, about 10 per cent of our servos ran out of some or all stock due to panic buying, airlines started to cancel flights, and ports, mines and farms suddenly had to reconsider their operations.
While the Albanese government gave assurances that supplies were guaranteed until May, there could be no assurances beyond that because friendly countries (such as Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia) could not be sure of their own stock, and unfriendly ones (such as China) had already suspended deliveries.
The Prime Minister’s “fuel diplomacy coup” in securing two extra deliveries, each of 100 million litres, sounded impressive but actually constituted less than two days’ total Australian consumption. What’s more, it bordered on deranged for the government to insist that further electrification was the long-term solution to the fuel crisis, even while the PM was pleading for extra petrol and diesel.
Here’s the key point: a conflict in East Asia – such as Beijing attempting to coerce Taiwan – would not just close down deliveries of crude oil; it would close down the deliveries of refined products too.

Naturally there's a snap of the deviant to blame - not mad King Donald, but another miscreant, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

And then it's on to the usual blather about oils and whatever you do don't mention renewables or alternative sources of energy, because this is a bear with little by way of brains, having always been a few knights short of a BBQ ...

There would be no question of being able to trade security of gas supplies from Australia for security of fuel supplies from Southeast Asia because the moment hostilities in East Asia were imminent, the shipping lanes carrying 50 per cent of the world’s trade would shut down.
It would take months for protected convoys to be arranged, even if the tankers and container ships could be procured to sail in them; and that’s assuming Australia and its allies had the requisite naval strength.
It’s worth noting that the US did not even try to counter the closure of the Strait of Hormuz either by landing troops at key choke points or by escorting ships through. It was the US’s counter-blockade of Iran’s ports, doing to Iran what it was doing to others’ shipping, that might have created a breakthrough.
Countries such as Britain and France, that might once have considered forcing the Strait, were adamant they could only secure the passage of shipping once hostilities had ceased. In other words, the task of protecting shipping seems to have become much harder in the era of smart mines and drone swarms. Which makes it more important than ever not to be dependent on just-in-time deliveries for the essentials of daily life.
It’s crystal clear what Australia now needs to do to avoid massive domestic upheaval when the next supply crisis comes, as it almost inevitably will.
First, we need to build the 90 days of fuel reserves onshore that the International Energy Agency mandates. Much of this could be done by assisting large fuel users to expand their private storages.
Second, we need to resume exploration, extraction and refining of crude oil here. The development of new fields, such as Queensland’s Taroom Trough, needs to become an urgent national priority rather than being bogged down endlessly, as would normally now be the case, in environmental assessments and activist lawfare.
Third, we need to expand our capacity to defend and maintain sea lanes via a more capable navy, a recreated Australian National Line, and detailed contingency planning with our military partners.
While it’s quite likely that the US made no formal request for Australian military assistance, given the last-minute nature of its decision-making, once it became clear that hostilities were likely, Australia should have volunteered to help. There’s no doubt the RAAF could have made a significant contribution to the US and Israeli air campaign to destroy the Iranian war machine, had the Albanese government been able to overcome its visceral antipathy to President Donald Trump, tilt against Israel, attachment to the fantasy of “international law”, and fondness for military announcements that make no appreciable difference to our near-term military capability.
Resuming our strategic intimacy with America and accepting that our ongoing need for fossil fuels should trump climate concerns will almost certainly be too much for the ideologues in the current government. Immediate crisis averted, the PM will insist nothing really needs to change – even though almost everything does.

The pond almost regrets that Orbán went down.

What a relief it was to have the onion muncher abroad, doing his authoritarian suck, rather than being at home doing his mad King Donald suck ...

Here the pond should pause to note that not all the reptiles were sounding triumphant.

The lizard Oz editorialist was sounding quite glum and uncertain ...

Oh dear, King Donald should stop complimenting himself and claiming victory for the umpteenth time?

That surely can't stand. Quick, wheel in Major Mitchell, Zionist in chief for the Australian Daily Zionist News, to compliment King Donald and claim victory for the umpteenth time ...

The header: Iran’s media cheer squad can’t stomach Trump’s success; Donald Trump’s language is erratic, and the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is not without risk. But the truth is that in the first six weeks of the war, Iran has sustained heavy setbacks.

The caption for a snap of the deeply weird, possibly demented, certainly barking mad king: President Donald Trump dances at a roundtable event last week. Picture: AP

Trump's success?

Only in the richly perverse world of Major Mitchell would a reptile try on that sort of clowning.

So much winning, the pond doesn't know where to begin, but the Major does ...because it's all the fault of weevils and white ants, and if you believe that, you qualify for the Major's "paranoid delusion" award of the week ...

Yes, just like Lord Downer, when in doubt, blame the meejia ...

Reporting about the Iran war is so coloured by media hostility toward US President Donald Trump that almost none of it reflects the truth about Iran’s military frailty, economic malaise or currency collapse.
When Trump responded to Iran’s decision to block the Strait of Hormuz and charge a toll on boats seeking safe passage by deciding that the US could do that too, few journalists thought that it was fair enough, or would even work.
The ABC regularly gives equal airtime to US claims and Iranian denials, even though Iran has lied about its weapons ambitions for decades.
Old leftie reporters on social media who claim the Iranian nuclear program is an Israeli lie should wonder why at last week’s talks in Islamabad the Iranians refused to delay their nuclear program for more than five years. And why possess uranium enriched to 60 per cent if not for weapons?
Trump was wrong not to anticipate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps would try to cause maximum global economic damage by shutting the Strait of Hormuz.
National Review reported on March 14 that General Dan Caine, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, had warned Trump about Hormuz before the war started on February 28.
Journalists have a duty to hold Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to account for failures. But journalists also have a duty to report the truth, and the truth is Iran and its Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi proxies are either on their knees or completely defeated, as is the case in Syria.
The New York Times pretends Trump did not have specific war aims. That’s rubbish. Trump has been saying publicly for more than a decade that Iran’s mullahs should never be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the timing of the attack was influenced by intelligence suggesting Iran was both rebuilding its weapons stockpiles after the 12-day war the previous June, and was in the process of acquiring hypersonic anti-ship missiles from China.

Liddle Marco? Didn't his contribution amount to a trip to the UFC? US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Picture: AFP

Not that one ... this one, trading on stolen valour, ersatz toughness and boofhead glory ...

The Major wasn't worried about any of that.

As usual, he'd managed to rope in assorted weird sources, what with his speciality offering insights via whatever the cat had dragged in ...

Rubio told a press conference on March 2 that Iran was building 100 missiles a month.
“Compare that to the six or seven interceptors that can be built in a month,” he said.
If the US did not attack when it did, Iran would soon have had enough weapons to swamp Israel’s defences and American bases in the region.
In such circumstances, any fair-minded reading of the first six weeks of the war would conclude that Iran had sustained heavy setbacks.
New York Times’ star columnist Thomas Friedman, a supporter of Israel but not of Netanyahu, summed up the approach of much of the media. Speaking on a CNN podcast on April 11, he said he wanted to see the regime in Tehran destroyed but added: “I really don’t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war because they are two awful human beings”.
Michael Doran, director of the Centre for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Husdon Institute and a former senior director at the US National Security Council, nailed his assessment of the media and the war in Tablet Magazine on April 14: “Trump has inflicted heavy punishment in return for relatively light consequences, but pundits insist that a masterful Iran is dictating events,” he writes.
Serious journalists in Australia run the line that Iran has Trump on the run.

After that the Major came up with a doozy:

Trump leads a democracy.

Whatever the status of the banana republic known as the United States is these days, a democracy isn't the first thought that springs to mind.

Kleptocracy, maybe? Has there ever been rule by a bigger bunch of thieves since the days of the robber barons?

Facing midterm elections later this year, he must have an eye on prices Americans face at the petrol pump and in supermarkets. In Iran and Gaza, politicians do not have to care what their people think. Indeed, the survival of their regimes is far more important to them than the wellbeing of their people.
Unlike Western media surrender urgers, expat Iranian analysts thought Trump’s first big mistake was agreeing to a truce and peace talks, which they say gave the Iranians the idea Trump was contemplating backing down on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.
Now the US media’s Iranian cheerleaders can’t see how a US blockade can succeed, but it is.
Doran’s piece outlines how most of the left media criticism of the war is driven by former Barack Obama and Joe Biden Democrats who were involved in attempts to broker better relations between the US and Iran in 2013 during Obama’s presidency. Doran says the political forces opposing Trump and Netanyahu inside the US are an unlikely amalgam of the globalist left with the isolationist right, including people such as Tucker Carlson.

Again if that's success, the pond would hate to see chaos and losing when it comes to actually achieving the strange conglomerate of aims announced at the start of proceedings, including the freeing of the Iranian people, and the end of the mad Mullahs.

Best drag in ancient politicians of the Obama, Biden kind ot take the blame ... Former president Barack Obama. Picture: AFP

So much easier to look back, rather than focus on the mad King and his delusional minions ...

“Along with a common set of enemies in Trump and Netanyahu, the Progressives and America Firsters share a dislike of American global leadership and the use of military force, and therefore they both excuse the behaviour of America’s enemies while blaming it for any conflict,” Doran writes.
Traditional conservatives see Iran as a revolutionary theocracy “committed to the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of the US from the Middle East”. Conservatives believe Iran, China, Russia and North Korea want to “overturn the American led global order’’.
Former Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan argues Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action stabilised Iranian relations until Trump pulled out in his first term in May 2018. Yet Tehran did not start enriching uranium to 60 per cent until April 2021.
“In other words, Iran made this crucial leap towards weaponisation under Biden, not Trump,” Doran writes.
Biden responded with sanctions relief which “funded missiles, drones and proxies”.
Doran says the Biden administration framed Hamas’s October 7 attack in southern Israel as a Palestinian issue.
“This framing advanced the fiction that America was not involved in the war. It also absolved Iran of any responsibility for the mass atrocities and hostage-taking of its proxy, Hamas, thus allowing the (Biden) administration to preserve its diplomatic outreach to Tehran.”
Iran immediately mobilised its entire proxy axis “in an assymetric war against the American Alliance system”.
Iranian-backed forces launched strikes on US bases in Iraq, Syria and Jordan as well as on US naval vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
“In any previous era … (this) would have been called open war. The Biden administration called it historic peace.”

As often happens with the reptiles, the Major tried to introduce a few billy goat butts, to hint that he wasn't entirely mad ...

They took the form of "of courses":

Of course Trump’s language is erratic. And of course the US blockade of Hormuz does not come without risks, including a possible Chinese response to US attempts to turn back tankers bound for China.

But these billy goat butts are just window dressing, and so the Major immediately reversed them with another "butt":

But Trump is correct that the world cannot afford to allow a bunch of medieval fanatics to control a major global sea lane and hold the world economy to ransom.

The pond can't quite see the Major's problem. After all a bunch of medieval - actually old testament biblical - are currently in charge of the government of Israel, and holding King Donald to ransom, in pursuit of ethnic cleansing and a greater Israel, but never mind ... we must just hope it'll all work out, in due course ...

What if the IRGC sees the financial logic of Trump’s move and comes back to the negotiating table? By Wednesday, the UN and Trump thought this imminent.
And by Thursday the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were reporting the US blockade seemed to be working. The Jerusalem Post reported intelligence sources believed Iran could survive without oil sales for less than three months.
The Jerusalem Post reported an unnamed Iranian spokesperson suggesting Iran might let all ships pass the Strait of Hormuz if they stuck to the southern Oman side and the US lifted its blockade. Imagine that. A siege – one of the world’s oldest military strategies – might actually work. How will The New York Times frame that as a Trump negative?

Perhaps first see that it works? And then worry about the framing?

Ain't been that much knockdown glory yet.

The Major should hope it isn't just another mad ploy by a desperate King and minions of the Kegsbreath and Kash kind.

And now, as the pond began with a religious service, time to end with a serve of supper (watch out for the wafers) ...

But there is still hope, because surely we can all agree...

In which the pond takes a road trip, but has time to catch up with Our Henry and prattling Polonius, dissing the Pope in mad King Donald war monger mode ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 21:37:00 +0000

The pond set out for Melbourne last Thursday, desperate to prove the reptiles wrong, determined to show that an EV could make the trip in a reasonable time.

Alas, things went wrong from the start. There was a five hour queue at Yass, and a slow charger, so add another two hours. The pond had so much time on its hands it attended a double bill at the restored Liberty theatre, and took in a service with Pastor Dave.

At Woodonga, things were so slow, an Islamic family got out the prayer mat and did their thing. Imagine the pond's terror - fancy proposing any reptile witness such proceedings in the fenced off exit to an expired burger store.

Then it was off to the mighty Wang for a top up, but everything was closed. The pond limped into Melbourne in the wee hours with all sense of time lost and a sense that the reptiles would be gloating for years at a nightmare 24 hour folly in a vehicle that cost somewhere north of the family home.

Hang on, hang on, for a real account of what happened, please see below.

In the interim, the pond must earn its keep and offer a message from the reptiles.

It being a disjointed weekend, the best the pond could do when near a computer was make an offering of ancient Henry, taken from the lizard Oz back on Friday.

As a blog of record, the pond doesn't like to miss the hole in bucket man, and this was a Zionist doozy, entirely fitting for the Australian Daily Zionist News:

The header: Pope Leo is guilty of repudiating the ‘just war’ doctrine; That our government has urged Israel to stand down confirms its moral evasiveness; that Pope Leo has done likewise is grievous.

The caption for the wayward Pope: Pope Leo XIV presides over the Easter vigil as part of the Holy Week celebrations, at St Peter's basilica in the Vatican. Picture: AFP

It should go without saying that Our Henry is up for the killing fields, especially when it's the current government of Israel doing the killing, and he was at it full bore in this outing ...

“Peace,” said Saint Augustine, “is so great a good that even in relation to the affairs of earth and our mortal state, nothing is desired with greater longing, nor can anything better be found.” Yet Augustine was no pacifist. He knew that in a fallen world, peace cannot be secured by permitting evil to go unchecked.
That hard truth was conspicuously absent from the Easter interventions of Pope Leo XIV on the wider war in the Middle East, and notably in Lebanon. Absent, too, was any serious engagement with one of Christianity’s greatest intellectual legacies: the doctrine of just war.
The doctrine did not emerge in a vacuum. Its roots lie in Hebrew scripture’s insistence that even war stands under judgment, and that those who wage it are accountable to a higher law.
The narrative of Jephthah in the Book of Judges makes the point: before war is joined, grievances are rehearsed, and an appeal is made to justice. War follows only – yet follows legitimately – when those claims fail, despite efforts to secure redress. Within that framework, wars of self-defence are not merely permitted; repelling an unjust attacker, or one who is imminently so, is a duty.
Complementing the biblical inheritance was the Greek tradition, which, finding its highest expression in Cicero, grounded the doctrine in ethics. War, Cicero argued in criticising conflicts “fought for conquest and glory”, is justified only as a last resort, engaged to correct a grievous wrong. Coining a formulation that would endure through the ages, he added that “the sole excuse for going to war is that we may live in peace” – that is, that the war’s aim must be to remove the adversary’s capacity and will to pursue aggression, allowing a measure of tranquillity to prevail.
Steeped in the Hebrew Bible and profoundly influenced by Cicero, Augustine joined these strands in his account of just war. It was on the foundations he laid that Thomas Aquinas later set out the doctrine’s canonical formulation. Aquinas did not pursue the utopian goal of abolishing war. He recognised that aggression has to be deterred and resisted; his aim was to subject that necessity to the discipline of Christian morality.
War, in the doctrine that would dominate Christian political theology for centuries, could only be legitimate if a properly constituted sovereign authority waged it – one capable of entering into credible peace settlements. There had to be a just cause: the enemy must have committed a wrong that warrants redress, whether through the violation of rights or the refusal to make restitution.
And those who wage war must have a right intention: they must aim to advance good or avert evil – that is, to thwart cruelty, criminality or the lust for domination. Where those conditions are met, the use of force is both sanctioned and morally justified.
Measured against those criteria, Pope Leo’s assessment of the conflict in Lebanon – and his scarcely veiled criticism of Israel – is seriously ill-considered. After all, none of the key facts is in dispute. Ever since the ceasefire came into effect on November 27, 2024, Hezbollah has systematically violated its conditions.

And there you have it. Cicero the Greek joining with Augustine and on with the killing fields, with Our Henry armed with a fierce lance of righteous blood lust.

This sort of blather could have put the pond in the awkward position of attempting to defend the Catholic church, but the church is more than capable of looking after itself, especially when placed up against the likes of mad King Donald and the genocidal Benji (though the pond did enjoy the late night show joke about the Pope and King Donald having a shared interest in hiding sex scandals).

The reptiles flung in a snap which in other times would have found favour in the Catholic Boys' Daily, Pope Leo XIV. Picture: AFP

Our Henry kept raging away ...

Now operating illegally – following the Lebanese government’s ban on its military activities – it has refused to comply with repeated instructions to disarm. Knowing the Lebanese armed forces are too weak and divided to act, Hezbollah’s vice-president, Mahmoud Comati, told Le Monde last month that were any attempt made to dismantle its arsenal, it stood ready to trigger – and triumph in – a devastating civil war.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah has sheltered the Iranian ambassador, whom the government had expelled, and – according to Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Nawaf Salam – has issued hundreds of false passports to foreign fighters associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And it has rained missiles and drones on Israel, overwhelmingly directed at purely civilian targets.
Hezbollah’s aim has never been to protect Lebanon – much less the Maronite community. It has instead dismissed the country as “one of the legacies of imperialism”, to be subsumed in the Islamic state it claims will emerge from “the great confrontation with the aggression of Zionists, Crusaders and world arrogance”. As Hassan Nasrallah put it in 2018, the organisation – far from owing loyalty to Lebanon – proudly sees itself as “an arm of the Iranian government and the Lebanese branch of the Guard Corps”.
Nor has it ever shown any interest in peace. Nasrallah repeatedly described Jews in gro-tesquely dehumanising terms as the “descendants of pigs and apes”, and Israelis as “a people of conquerors, occupiers and rapists of the land” who “must be killed”. Just this week, Hezbollah denounced Lebanon’s negotiations with Israel and declared it would not respect any agreement that might be reached.

Uh huh, and then Our Henry really took a sharp turn to the barking paranoid weird:

The moral implications are obvious. It is inconceivable that the Australian government would stand by were Papua New Guinea’s government unable – or unwilling – to act against an armed band launching missiles into Queensland and avowedly intent on exterminating the “settler colonialists” it denounces as “conquerors, occupiers and rapists of the land”. Deploying the ADF to eliminate the threat would be more than a right; it would be an obligation.

Dear sweet long absent lord, that's the best he could do in drumming up support for the outrageous ongoing behaviour of the current government of Israel? Seems so ...

Exactly the same principle applies here. Israel’s intervention is the surest, indeed only, means of forcing the Lebanese state to face the choice it has long evaded: either bring Hezbollah to heel or leave Israel to do so.

That our own government has urged Israel to stand down simply confirms its moral evasiveness and electoral opportunism; that Pope Leo has done likewise amounts to a grievous repudiation of the just war tradition, which has always upheld the right of nations to defend themselves against aggressors, and to prevent them from striking again.
That tradition is no exultation of war. On the contrary, the Book of Isaiah’s great vision of universal peace – “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares … nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” – testifies to an enduring insight: that war, while sometimes necessary, remains a tragedy, to be constrained, justified, and ultimately transcended.
But the just war doctrine recognises that the lions show no intention of lying down with the lambs. Facing up to that reality, it refuses to assert a false moral equivalence between those who murder and those who seek to stop them. And while praying, as does the Pope, for peace, it knows the charnel house of history creates situations in which the only choice is between evils.
Yes, we must attempt to prevent such situations from arising. But when history thrusts them upon us, we cannot merely dismiss all the alternatives as equally bad and believe the gesture washes our hands clean.
The church’s refusal to condemn Hitler’s genocidal war of aggression indelibly stained its reputation. Now, as he addresses a world crying out for moral guidance, the Pope should remember the truth captured in the Midrash, and classically anchored in the story of King Saul: “Those who are merciful to the cruel will, in the end, be cruel to the merciful.” To believe otherwise is not to advance peace. It is to bury it.

Oh dear, he had to play the Hitler card.

So be it.

Our Henry's refusal to condemn the current government of Israel's genocidal war of aggression, its policy of ethnic cleansing, its lust for a greater Israel no matter the human cost, indelibly stains his reputation, but he's not the only Zionist to peddle a pile of righteous tosh in defence of crimes against humanity.

At this point the pond was determined to make a full sermon of it, and turned to that other pompous pedant, Polonius, for a serve of his prattle ...

The header: ‘Our barbarian’: Why Christians back Donald Trump; From a controversial post to a widening rift with Pope Leo XIV, the US President’s rhetoric reignites debate over religion, war and political power.

The caption for a snap which allowed the reptiles to avoid running that infamous shot showing a doctoring King Donald curing Jon Stewart of what ailed him: US President Donald Trump’s social media post depicting himself as a Christ-like figure drew criticism and was later deleted. Picture: AFP

Who knew that Polonius would take up the Xian white nationalist cause, but stranger things have happened in the lizard Oz...and here we are, and what a broad minded chap he is all of a sudden ...

I was brought up a Catholic but I am by no means offended by President Donald J. Trump’s decision to post on Truth Social an image of himself as a Christ-like figure blessing a sick or dead man, while prayers are said in the presence of a Red Cross female nurse and a US serviceman with the Statue of Liberty in the background and a US Air Force jet and eagles in the sky overhead.
To me it was a joke, of the non-funny kind. In time Trump deleted the post, claiming he thought it depicted him as a doctor. A good try perhaps.

A good try perhaps? Oh Polonius, Polonius, is there anything else you can add to your comedy stylings, aka an attempt at justifying the mad King's work?

However, at least the President did not blame a staffer.

Sheesh, but at least there then came a minor billy goat butt ...

The post was extraordinarily unwise since some Christians would view such an image as close to blasphemy. And many Christians voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
Working as a political adviser is difficult enough without having to deal with an erratic president’s late night/early morning posts, which are at times explosive. But there is a bigger picture.
As cardinal George Pell wrote on March 30, 2019, in the first volume of his Prison Journal, “Unfortunately, President Trump is a bit of a barbarian, but in some important ways he is ‘our’ (Christian) barbarian.” Pell added that Trump’s “first two appointments to the Supreme Court will slow down the secular advance because the court there has immense power to shape society”.
Despite the fact, after he avoided assassination during a campaign rally at Butler, Pennsylvania in July 2024, Trump claimed to have been saved by God, he does not present as a devout Christian. But he has been supportive of Christians, in the US and elsewhere. Much more so than his predecessor, president Joe Biden, who presented as a Catholic.

Ah, of course the Pellists had to turn up. They always do when Polonius is in the room.

Naturally the reptiles lined up a Sky Noise after dark clown to add a MAGA message to Polonius beclowning himself (still no rebranding of the name?)...

Sky News Washington Analyst Annelise Nielsen believes if US President Donald Trump is strategic after public feud with Pope Leo, it will not have a large impact on votes. “I think it was a bit of a distraction tactic. I think he might have been doing this on purpose,” Ms Nielsen told Sky News Australia. “This isn’t the first time he’s had fights with the Pope. “He’s definitely got to manage the evangelical community.”

Naturally Polonius seized the opportunity to take a walk down Catholic memory lane ...

The current President Trump v Pope Leo XIV controversy would not come as a surprise to Australians who lived through, or are aware about, the first half of the 20th century.
When the Labor Party split in the mid-1950s, Daniel Mannix, the Catholic archbishop of Melbourne, was criticised for supporting those who split from/were expelled by the Labor Party and formed the Democratic Labor Party. However, little criticism was made by Norman Gilroy, the Catholic archbishop of Sydney, who urged Catholics to remain in the ALP. Both were involved in politics.
The fact is that Christian clergy have always been engaged in politics, to a greater or lesser extent, in a democratic society.
As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was born a Muslim and converted to Christianity, pointed out in a perceptive article in the Daily Mail on April 16, on April 9 Leo met US Democratic Party operative David Axelrod.

Ah, it's a conspiracy with the Democrats.

And possibly with Marina Hyde, busy explaining Is the pope Catholic? JD Vance thinks he has the answer.

What a hoot of a read that was, and here the pond should note that it's spent some recent time with a Catholic priest who exudes some fair content for King Donald, as did many of the Catholics who attended the funeral which took the pond to Melbourne.

Polonius decided on a contrarian strategy, doing his best to take the side of mad King Donald, by explaining it was all just a "defensive" war:

A few day earlier, Leo issued his Easter message, which declared: “Let those who have weapons lay them down! Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace! Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue! Not with the desire to dominate others, but to encounter them!”
Not surprisingly, those words were interpreted as a criticism of the defensive war waged by the US and Israel against the brutal theocracy Iran intent on crushing what the mullahs call “the Great Satan”, that is the United States, along with Israel.
On April 7, Leo spoke against Trump’s threat to destroy Iran. Again, the President used inappropriate language. It was yet more Trump hyperbole. Leo was reported as describing Trump’s threat as “truly unacceptable”.

Um, it happened to be a statement of genocidal intent, the wiping out of an entire tribe, a war crime of the first water, up there with the genocidal Xian god's eradication of all life on earth, but whatever:

On April 13, Trump fired back – even if he managed only two exclamation marks to Leo’s four. He declared “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy”, going on to state that the Pope “thinks it’s ok for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon”. Trump also referred to Leo’s meeting with Axelrod and advised the Pope to “stop catering to the Radical Left”.
This is the familiar argument that the church should stay out of politics. However, Trump has a point. The Catholic Church is not a pacifist society. It has not always stood for peace as in unilateral disarmament.

Oh dear, here we go, here we go ...

For example, the Catholic Church has always accepted a “just war”.

You've endured Our Henry explaining Catholic theology, you might even have endured the couch molesting JD, now stand by for Polonius...

As Gerald O’Collins SJ and Edward G. Farrugia SJ point out in A Concise Dictionary of Theology (Paulist Press), the just war teaching can be traced back to Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Namely, that war must be defensive and in response to unjust aggression, there must be a reasonable chance of success and deliberate attacks on civilians must be avoided and so on. Pope Pius XII never opposed the Allied forces’ war against Nazi Germany.

Hang on, hang on, shouldn't have Our Henry and Polonius compared notes on the matter of the second world war?

It is known that Leo is critical of the Trump administration’s response to unlawful immigration. However, Benedict XVI in October 2012 declared that “every state has the right to regulate migration”. Sure, the current Pope has his political left-of-centre beliefs. But that does not bind Catholics in what the church depicts as ex cathedra pronouncements.
On April 16, Leo called for an unarmed peace. To some, myself included, that sounds a bit like surrender to the likes of Iran, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, North Korea and so on. And then there is Leo’s silence. As Melanie Phillips pointed out in these pages on April 14, Leo “has chosen to ignore totally the deliberate and mass shedding of innocent blood by the Iranian regime, which earlier this year murdered around 40,000 innocent protesters and has spent the last 47 years waging war on America and the West through murderous terrorist atrocities”.
For her part, Ali made the point that “Pope Leo has been conspicuously silent about the systematic persecution of Christians at the hands of Muslims in majority-Muslim countries”. And added that Pope Francis did not explicitly condemn Hamas for its murderous attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023.
Jesus Christ declared that his kingdom was not of this world. But Christian leaders have rarely followed such a teaching. So, when a pope declares that a president has initiated an unjust war, it stands to reason that there is likely to be a secular response. From the White House and elsewhere.

But he did initiate a pointless, farcical, cruel war, from which he's since been desperately trying to escape, and all but the lunatics at News Corp would recognise it and call it out ...

Whatever happened to the notion of liberating the Iranian people? So much festering dung in the minds of these reptiles.

In short, strange days indeed, and strange company for the likes of Our Henry and Polonius to be keeping, but the pond always knew they had a good deal of war mongering and killing fields in them, and so they are just staying true to their nature ...

And so what really happened on that Melbourne EV trip.

Well it took about 11 hours. Left at 6 am and arrived at 5 pm. The pond could have cheated and said it saw the "welcome to Melbourne" sign at 4.30 pm, but the pond added a little time to reach the now long gone Loaded Dog pub building, near where the pond once lived.

Of course you could spend more hours getting to bits of Melbourne, which has now sprawled out everywhere, but current home to old Melbourne home seemed like a reasonable measure.

That compares to the early gas guzzling days when the pond did it in 10 hours, but in later gas guzzling days, what with Goulburn cops, Victorian speed cameras and the need for sensible breaks, the pond took about ... 11 hours.

It so happens that EV breaks and sensible breaks sort of match up, and the time spent waiting to access an EV charger amounted to ... NIL.

Of course charging takes longer than guzzling gas, but it makes for good breaks.

At Yass, there wasn't another EV in sight at the charger. The pond did a tour of the main drag, which is hurting badly because the Woollies/Aldi action is up the road - closed businesses, some for sale, a junk store taking up space, an evangelical church at the river end, and only a small K-hub as a mark of conventional retail.

The pond had a coffee and a treat, and took a look at the restored theatre, which is littered with small shops, and also saw that Pastor Dave still hadn't got rid of his Easter decor.

At Wodonga, there were no EVs until an Islamic family turned up (leaving two other stands still empty) and they did indeed get out a prayer mat and perform their rituals while their indolent son looked on. The pond didn't take a snap - let them pray in peace - but did take a snap of the spot where they prayed.

At the mighty Wang, the pond had time to take in a message from the nearby church, and visit the Wangaratta Arts Centre for a relieving pee, and check out the entertainment on offer.

It was a dull, tedious trip of the kind the Hume always offers - hence the need for breaks - relieved by a four part podcast about the Klu Klux Klan, which almost felt like readings from the lizard Oz.

And so to the pictorial record of the trip...

First up the desolate, alienated chargers at Yass, starved for company by the chargers up the road. The mighty Yass Soldiers club is in the b/g... (click on to enlarge)

Just time for a coffee and a check of the town, which has hit hard times and has just knocked down a grand old pub, while restoring the local theatre ...

To add insult to injury, the town had bunged on an EV do ...curses, missed it ...

And there really is a Pastor Dave at the river end of the main drag, replete with faux Easter rock scene, just visible through the reflections ...

While at the Wodonga chargers, the pond really did see an Islamic family get out the prayer mat, and set themselves up to do their thing where the white car is in this snap ...

It's not exactly an exciting location for anything, but after the ritual they did head off to the nearby servo for whatever, and so must be considered dinkum, because anybody wanting to buy servo junk at inflated prices is doing right by the reptiles' idea of the Oz way of life.

It was also an excellent demonstration that there are many ways to enjoy a charging break.

And for the brief top up at the mighty Wang, the pond did take in a mysterious church message and did visit the arts centre for a pee and for coming attractions in stunning "digitally orchestrated" format ...

In which it's all hands on the Catholic deck for the antiChrist, with the bromancer leading the way ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:51:00 +0000

First, a little housekeeping: the pond is heading down to Melbourne for a funeral and so will be off air for some time.

To get there, the pond will be driving by way of an EV down the Hume.

This is an incredibly dangerous, tedious and expensive business and so the pond will likely take some time to recover.

The pond has it on good authority that EVs cost between $60 and $150k - there's not a single car below that price point - and that Telsas can run to $150k, and so the pond has had to take out a huge loan just to be able to do the EV thing.

Second, EVs are notably unsuitable for going on extended trips. Think of them as toys running on clockwork, with the spring pretty useless and likely to give out at crucial times.

The pond also understands that such a lengthy trip might involve getting in a queue to get a charge, and that you can get stuck in the queue for five interminable hours!

As the pond will be doing three charges, it's likely that will add at least fifteen hours to the trip, meaning it probably can't be done in under a day, even by driving all day and night, and ditto the reverse leg will also waste more than a day.

Along the way, the pond will encounter baleful reminders of the complete uselessness of renewables - there are the whale-killing windmills down Goulburn way (how the beefy boofhead failed in his mission!) and the solar arrays roadside in rural Victoria.

Pray for the pond in best King Donald style, and ruminate on what the world lost when tungsten light bulbs were cruelly tossed aside.

So sadly the rest of this week will be lost, and that means that this week's Our Henry must be rescued from the intermittent archive by dedicated correspondents.

(See below for the pond's expert sources on EVs).

And so to the day's reptile news, and hallelujah, the reptiles have had a come to Jesus moment...

Now the pond only showed that full array of the "news" section to show what the reptiles really thought of the beefy boofhead's talk on immigration.

Instead of following up with a reptile jihad, ye ancient cats and dogs they preferred featuring the absolute freedom of superyachts.

This was a supreme tragedy for the pond because there had been a number of cartoons lined up to greet the beefy boofhead ...

What a terrible waste ... and there was even more wastage to come ...

Alas, all wasted, and it was no better over on the extreme far right, where the beefy boofhead simply couldn't get a run, and early in the morning the bromancer was top of the world, ma ...

The header: For Christ’s sake, Donald Trump, just don’t go there; The US President’s blasphemous social media posts showing himself as Christ have prompted even his Catholic supporters to demand an apology.

The caption? No need for a caption when confronted by a vision of Jesus Christ on earth.

The bromancer could only summon up three minutes of ranting, and his favourite descriptor "nuts".

Is this what FAFO sounds like, bromancer style?

It would be going too far, and surely over-theologising mere personal weirdness, to suggest Donald Trump should call on the services of an exorcist.
But you have to wonder what wicked spirits got into the President’s mind to have him make a personal attack on Pope Leo XIV, and post an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure in biblical clothing, with divine light emanating from his hand as he cures a sick person by laying his hand on his head.
Mr President. Are you nuts?
Trump seems to have a special rule. He bears no personal accountability for the frequently ridiculous and offensive things he says, but anyone who criticises him has committed a mortal sin.
Thus Trump threatens to bomb Iran back to the stone age, to “end” a civilisation, to attack desalination plants that provide drinking water for civilians, then gets upset that the Pope argues for peace instead of war.
Trump has every right to disagree with the Pope on international politics, or anything else, but personal attacks on Leo and blasphemous self-glorifying social media images are nearly deranged.
Those who think Trump is always more clever than his interlocutors, playing 4-D chess, must believe there’s a giant vote of extreme right-wing Christian nationalists who hate the Pope and regard Trump as godlike. However big that vote is, Trump’s sure got it sewn up now.
I’m not sure it’s an election winning cohort.
It’s also the case, incidentally, that Leo, the first pope from the US, is no crypto-communist. When he lived in Chicago, Leo voted in Republican primaries. He has praised the NATO alliance, showing he’s not some lefty who demonises soldiers. He has also said nations have a right to secure borders, to decide who comes into their countries, but that they should treat all people with dignity and care.

The reptiles didn't provide any relief from the rant by way of stills so the pond decided to help out ...

The pond has rarely seen the bromancer so gloomy for such a prolonged stretch ...

What on earth would you expect the Pope to say? Leo is a thoughtful, cautious, sensible, prayerful Pope. Trump seems unable to understand, or even recognise, such a figure.
To descend to mere politics, these latest moves are self-destructive for Trump and Republicans.
Trump has always been a mixed grill. He does and says some good things which other presidents would not be bold enough to do. He also does and says some nearly insane things. And even when he does something defensible, he’s inclined to wreck it with hubris, spite and madness.
His supporters wildly overstate his political strength. Unlike George W. Bush, Trump never won a majority of the popular vote in a US election. At the last election, he won a majority of US Catholics. They are diverse, of course, but most are swing voters because while they tend to be patriotic and moderately socially conservative, they remember their recent working-class roots, they are universal rather than racial in their human outlook and have some concern for social justice and ethical standards.
Trump therefore presents to them the same contradictions as he does to other voters. Trump lost the Catholic vote to Joe Biden in 2020, but won it, fairly narrowly, against Kamala Harris, partly because Biden was such a bad president.
Catholics have not really bought on to the idea, popular in some fairly extreme evangelical circles, that Trump is somehow a specially chosen instrument of divine providence.
A majority of US Catholics now disapprove of Trump and recent incidents will make that much worse. Republicans are likely to suffer in the mid-term elections as a result.
Trump has mobilised even those mainstream figures who have striven to see the good in his administration into straightforward denunciation of him. On social media, he’s like an excited kid lacking parental supervision. He’s badly missing the adults of his first administration.
No mainstream European leader has striven harder to see the good in Trump than Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, yet she condemned his attack.

It was as if something had snapped ... as if he'd done a Melania ...

The bromancer even played the Orbán card, though the reptiles resolutely refused to deploy the acute accent over the á:

Even conservative American Catholics have now denounced Trump. Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Word on Fire internet ministry, is the most popular Catholic churchman in America, who serves on Trump’s religious liberty commission and has taken flak for supporting him on some issues. He too condemned Trump’s remarks and called on him to apologise to the Pope. This is a very widespread reaction among those Christians who have tried hard to identify with the good in the Trump program.
It’s now damaging to any political figure to have been Trump’s friend. His Vice-President, JD Vance, was in Hungary, wholly inappropriately, campaigning for Trump’s friend Viktor Orban, just before the election.
John O’Sullivan, the shrewdest of analysts, thinks this was a factor in the anti-Orban landslide that ensued.
If this is 4-D chess, Trump should go back to checkers.
And start his nightly prayers with an act of contrition.

Checkers? The cheeky bromancer has taken to bearding the emperor with wit?

And yet the hapless bromancer still thinks that King Donald might be up for an act of contrition, might know how to say a Hail Mary, the Apostle's creed, an Our Father, and a Glory Be, while clutching at his rosary beads?

At least the bro's still delusional ...

What was once the Australian Daily Catholic Times (before becoming the Australian Daily Zionist News and cheering on bigly ethnic cleansing) was so alarmed that it wheeled out a tyke to wonder if it was all the Pope's fault.

Unlike King Donald, a master of subtlety and nuance, the clunky Pope might well have sounded like an oafish boofhead:

The header: Pope v Trump reveals the complexity of ‘just war’ in our troubled times; Should Pope Leo have been more nuanced in his language on war?

The caption: Pope Leo XIV attends a meeting with the Algerian community in the Basilica of Our Lady of Africa, in Algiers on Monday. Picture: AFP

Now for that rap over the knuckles for that insensitive Pope addling his response to that extremely sensitive mad King Donald:

Given what has been reported in the media, there is an extra sentence that I would like Pope Leo to have added to his comments on the war in Iran: that he was “addressing all relevant political decision-makers”.
It is easy to see why, without this qualification, he seemed to be referring only to DonaldTrump, given that this war was the US President’s initiative.
Trump’s reactions have been predictably outrageous, though his AI-generated image as a healing religious figure exceeds even his own narcissistic standards.
But perhaps Pope Leo really was singling Trump out for special condemnation? Some commentators have asked why Leo has not likewise criticised leaders of Iran or Hezbollah. Leo has explained that his task is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, which commands us to be peacemakers.

It's outrageous that this wretched Pope should single out mad King Donald. What on earth was he thinking? Didn't he realise that the mad king was the recipient of the inaugural FIFA peace prize, and blessed are the cheesemakers?

And remember, this is a just war...

As an earlier pope, John Paul II, said: “War is always a failure of humanity” – a failure to resolve conflicts in a way that respects the life and dignity of all affected. Nonetheless, defensive wars are sometimes a legitimate, necessary evil, even if the failure is chiefly on one side. Leo would not deny this; he is not a pacifist.

The reptiles reminded us of the humble king by turning to a snap:

US President Donald Trump speaks to the press outside the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, on Monday. Picture: AFP

As for all that bloody peace business, why are the bloody popes always yammering on about peace when they should be applauding the likes of Vlad the Sociopath and Benji the greater Israel man in their quest for a piece of this and a piece of that:

It is true that several recent popes have been reluctant to apply traditional “just war” criteria and have sounded more and more pacifist. The criteria were developed centuries ago when wars were waged by standing armies on defined battlefields away from civilians. While the principle that non-combatants must not be directly harmed remains sacrosanct, it is not clear how just war criteria can be applied in contexts where an enemy uses human shields, installs weapons in hospitals and schools, and wages a grey war through terrorist proxies.
Perhaps it is the nature of contemporary warfare that has led popes to simply urge peacemaking in all circumstances.
In Leo’s words, war today is “senseless and inhuman violence” even if it is defensive.
Given the longstanding conduct of Iran and its proxies, it can be argued that Trump’s chosen war against Iran is in truth defensive. Many will dispute this, but a reasoned argument is needed in either case instead of the bald assertions on both sides.
But even if Trump’s war is defensive, there is always a further ethical question to be faced about strategy and means. On this point, those who defend Trump’s pre-emptive action must by now be having their doubts. Was there really no other way of dealing with the Iran threat? Is the chosen and ever evolving strategy proportionate to the noble goal?

Here we must pause to contemplate the wretch himself: the Pope addresses Algerian authorities, members of the civil society, and diplomatic corps at the Djamaa el Djazair Conference Center in Algiers, on Monday. Picture: AP

So to a little more both siderist thinking and cluck clucking and tut-tutting in a way worthy of any pious prelate:

It is worth recalling John Paul II’s condemnation of the war in Iraq and his prediction about its consequences. Likewise, Leo’s longstanding warning that the Middle East faces an “irreparable abyss” has become all too prophetic. In truth, many nations share responsibility for what has occurred – for they have stood by and allowed the violence and instability of the region to fester.
For better or (probably ) worse, the US and Israel have intervened – and both the surrounding nations and other influential nations are discovering too late that they should have taken responsibility sooner. There is a “failure of humanity” in every direction.
Even when a war has a legitimate defensive goal and is pursued by effective and proportionate strategies, this should never be an occasion for religious triumphalism.
Unlike US “secretary for war” Peter Hegseth, a Christian should wage war with profound and humble regret about the loss of innocent life, the destruction of cities and the economic harm to millions more. There is nothing to celebrate here; there will be blood on our hands, and the inevitable post-traumatic stress disorder for those closely involved.
Of course, religious leaders are likely to be criticised whether they do or do not speak out against aggression. When the Dutch Catholic bishops publicly condemned Nazism in 1942 the Gestapo began a new round-up of Jews, especially those such as philosopher and Carmelite nun Edith Stein (and her still Jewish sister), who had become Christians. They died in Auschwitz. Subsequently, The Netherlands had one of the highest mortality rates for Jews in Western Europe.
This does not necessarily mean the bishops should have remained silent; it does highlight the complexity of prudential judgments during wartime.
Pope Leo’s words could be more nuanced, even though he cannot purport to offer an ethical evaluation of the many facets of the current conflict. He is reminding us of the higher Christian perspective within which to view our actions. We must never cease from pursuing peaceful resolutions through dialogue and recognition of our common humanity. And if we must go to war, it should not be with an arrogant confidence in God’s blessing; at best, we can but trust that the defensive actions we need to take will be justified in the circumstances, and that God will bring good out of the evil we do.

And just who was that wanker?

Gerald Gleeson is a deputy vice-chancellor at the Australian Catholic University. He is a former vicar-general of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney.

He would have served ably in the church in Spain in the times of Franco ...

Glory unto King Donald ... hosannah in the highest ...

And here the pond clapped out though the finest reptile minds were out and about on parade, not least Dame Slap ... but after those sermons it was a bit of a downer for the pond to see that Dame Slap was blathering about "Civilisation":

Federal judge: Civilisation relies on us; don’t let the show down
A lecture from Federal Court judge Ian Jackman shows why character, not identity, should be the focus of citizenship.
By Janet Albrechtsen

The pond personally supervised her placement in the intermittent archive and will only offer this teaser trailer ...as she attempted to do a little bit of Our Henry in her opening flourish:

Given that Dame Slap was borrowing from a judge, one of that despicable bunch that Dame Slap routinely reviles, there was a hint of stolen valour in the way that Dame Slap pillaged his words and recycled them to her own glory.

And spoiler alert, here's the closer, a true measure of the extent of the meaningless blather ...

Say that again:

"Not letting the show down".

I say, gadzooks, wot wot, old chaps, there'll always be an England, must take the Spittie out for an early morning lap ...

...and what a chance to run the pond's favourite primary school poem, running deep with the thoughts of empire, doing the right thing, and conforming to the rigid teachings of Dame Slap ...

Vitaï Lampada

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night —
Ten to make and the match to win —
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

The sand of the desert is sodden red, —
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; —
The Gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

This is the word that year by year
While in her place the School is set
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind —
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

Wouldn't want to let the show down by not playing the game. Provided the pond can serve by way of keyboard.

And that's about that.

The pond decided to send warrior Liz to the intermittent archive cornfield ...

Ditch the talk, the best defence is innovation
Anything other than the two existential threats in Australia’s defence conversation is pretty much noise.
By Elizabeth Buchanan

The intermittent archive is working this morning, so a teaser trailer is more than enough ...

Splendid stuff, demanding an end to idle, meaningless talk, by bursting into action ... by writing a column for the lizard Oz.

Why that must mean the pond is action central.

Ditto Martin ...

The NDIS was a promise – now it’s a broken market
I hardly recognise what the National Disability Insurance Scheme has become; today the NDIS is hardly meeting anyone’s expectations.
By Martin Laverty

The only thing the pond will note about Martin is that the reptiles unfortunately started his piece with a snap of him looking like a smirking Cheshire cat ...

And so as promised to the source of the ancient reptile EV lore with which the pond began the day.

The pond never watches Sky Noise down under (still no rebrand?) and so was startled when the pond's logarithms unearthed this clip.

It featured dazzling blonde Danica De Giorgio, who is so thick she makes a piece of 4 be 2 look like a toothpick ...

It was titled Sky News Is Still Lying About EVs and Batteries - Here's what they just said... and so it caught the pond's eye.

It came as no surprise that the reptiles lied on Sky Noise - they lie every day in the lizard Oz, and the dog botherer was also featured, so naturally there'd be lies, but even the pond wasn't prepared for this level of inanity.

The pond only mentions it for those opening precious few moments of Sky Noise down under drivel ...

And speaking of war criminals deserving a papal lashing...

In which a gloomy bromancer tries to cope, and cultists should be appeased by a Dame Groan sighting ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:31:00 +0000

The pond's partner has a thing for JD, and while the pond tries to argue against it, the arguments in favour of the couch molester are hard to refute.

JD visits the pope, who promptly dies, and a new liberal - or at least King Donald incurious - pope is installed. A real win for a Catholic convert anxious to see the church get ahead.

JD flies off to Hungary to support Viktor Orbán. He loses, so JC can take credit for saving Europe. What a winner.

JD heads off to the middle east to lead the negotiations, and produces an incredible negotiated settlement that sees both sides blockade the strait, plunging the world into chaos. So much winning.

Is it any wonder that couches want to lie with him, so that their beastly cushions can do the two backs thingie with him?

Others think he deserves our deepest thanks ...

But in the rush to praise JD for his legendary work, let's not forget that each day there's the same sort of incredible winning on display by the reptiles parading in the lizard Oz ...

Come on down bromancer, do the winning thingie for News Corpse and Faux Noise ...

The header: Iran knows it has Donald Trump politically snookered; This will probably be for Trump as damaging as the withdrawal from Kabul was for Joe Biden, possibly much worse.

The caption for the demented mad King: President Donald Trump speaks with reporters at Joint Base Andrews. Picture: Julia Demaree Nikhinson / AP Photo

Watching the bromancer spend a bigly four minutes or so trying to cope with the doings of the mad King has become a peculiar pleasure for the pond of late.

Sure, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, in no small part due to the role played by the bro's kissing cousins at Faux Noise and to American-owned News Corp, but you must take your pleasures where you find them...

See how he struggles to discern some kind of sanity, marvel at the way he decodes the entrails ...

Australians should prepare for severe disruption for months, for shortages of fuel and other essentials, and the strong chance of recession, as a result of conflict in the Strait of Hormuz.
The military logic of what’s unfolding in the strait offers no reason to imagine a return to normal soon. Things will certainly get worse before they get better. They may get much, much worse.
One security insider put it to me this way: “The law of diminishing returns now applies to Trump. He wants to get out as quickly as possible. The law of increasing returns applies to Iran. It wants to keep using its new leverage.”
The case for taking action against Iran was very strong, because of its nuclear, ballistic missile, proxy and terrorist capabilities.
However, the way the Trump administration has handled this has in many ways played into Iran’s long-term strategic strengths. Mike Pezzullo argues that Trump should have involved allies much earlier. Failing to prepare de-mining capabilities or to get allies to help Gulf Arab states in counter-drone defences betrays poor planning.
The Americans say peace talks with Iran failed because they couldn’t get sufficient reassurance on nuclear enrichment. I think that’s misleading. The key today is Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.

The disgraced Pezzullo still being quoted as a reliable expert?

Only in bromancer land, as the reptiles featured that heroic winner, Vice President JD Vance speaks during a news conference in Islamabad. Picture: Jacquelyn Martin / AP Photo

On and on the bromancer rambled, with the possibility that China might be dragged into proceedings surely a cause for celebration, because at last he might get his much desired war with China well before Xmas ...

Washington has achieved degradation of Iranian military capabilities. But Iran uses drones, sea mines, missiles and even artillery to make the Strait of Hormuz impassable without its permission. If the US walks away leaving Iran controlling who gets through the strait, and charging each ship a toll, that’s a massive defeat.
Here’s a weird thing. Until now the US has allowed Iran to keep trading its own oil on shadow fleets. Because of the spike in oil prices, this meant Iran was making twice as much money from its oil as it was before the war.
The US blockade is designed to cut all that money off and therefore make it harder for Tehran to keep on resisting. This will in the short term remove more oil from the international system.
It’s unclear how the US will enforce the blockade. Presumably it won’t actually sink any oil tanker that refuses its order to stop and be inspected. Instead it would have to board such a ship with US Navy SEALs and the like, then determine whether the ship’s cargo carried was loaded in Iran, then take custody of the ship or turn it back.
Iran has been allowing ships from friendly nations such as China to get through. Will the US enforce its blockade against Chinese ships, or ships with other nations’ flags carrying oil for China?

On the basis that you can never have enough bro, the reptiles introduced an AV distraction featuring him blathering to petulant Peta in his usual gloomy way, and luckily the pond could reduce it to an indicative screen cap ... The Australian Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan says if the Iranians control the Strait of Hormuz, they have “won an enormous victory”. “They have withstood the worst that Trump can give, and they haven’t buckled,” Mr Sheridan told Sky News host Peta Credlin. “The Islamic Revolutionary Guard is still in control in Iran. “That is a big victory.”

What a defeatist, as the bromancer kept showing signs of blinking ...

Here is where my friend’s laws of diminishing returns for the US and increasing returns for Iran come in. Iranians can read US poll numbers. This is an exceptionally unpopular war with the American public, about one-third of whom support it. Trump’s statements have swung wildly throughout the war, creating much confusion and ill will. He alternates between trying to influence oil and stock markets by telling them the war is almost over, virtually over, about to be over. He follows with wild threats to destroy Iranian civilisation or attack every Iranian electricity plant etc.
The Iranians aren’t scared by these threats. They know Trump can’t, politically, carry them out. They interpret them as signs of Trump’s frustration, even some political desperation. All this gives Iranian policymakers an incentive to try to wait Trump out, confident that domestic US politics will force him to quit before he opens the strait. Alternatively, the Iranians believe that to get agreement on the strait, Trump could make huge concessions to them that he would try to disguise in presentation.
This will probably be for Trump as damaging as the withdrawal from Kabul was for Joe Biden, possibly much worse.
What about Australia? The three factors that will help us avoid technical recession are the huge rise in commodity prices (as usual, the Green-demonised mining industry could save us), immigration, which tends to make the overall economy bigger, and inflation.
But there’s every chance we’ll get inflation combined with massive disruption because of the energy crisis. That’s inflation plus recession – stagflation. In such circumstances the Albanese government will spend wildly, at home to cushion recession, abroad to bid for scarce resources.
Dangerous paths of escalation for this conflict are obvious, though not inevitable. If the Americans are serious about opening the strait against Iranian opposition they probably need to occupy a number of Iranian islands. That means renewed war, boots on the ground and probably US casualties.

Glorious days, as the reptiles tried to distract with a snap of other news, Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles announce senior leadership changes within the Australian Defence Force at Parliament House. The government has appointed Vice Admiral Mark Hammond as the Chief of the Defence Force. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Then there came a final plunge into bromancer gloomsville...

Iran would respond by attacking Gulf nations’ energy infrastructure. It may be able to get its Houthi clients to attack energy shipping in the Red Sea, meaning even bigger disruption.
Incoming chief of the defence force Mark Hammond claimed Australia could send our navy to the Strait of Hormuz if asked. Hammond is a distinguished, capable and honourable man who would never knowingly lie. His statement is technically true but substantially meaningless.
Our seven Anzac frigates are among the world’s least capable warships. They are old and have just eight vertical launch cells each. You could fit them with limited extra counter-drone systems but we have no serious capabilities in that area.
Of course, within a US air and sea defence bubble, even an Anzac frigate could survive. If the Americans protect civilian vessels, they will survive too. That’s the point of such operations. Our frigate couldn’t reliably defend itself. The Albanese government decided not to upgrade Anzac frigate capabilities. We could send an air warfare destroyer, of which we have just two in service, as a marginal contribution. You have to see Hammond’s comments as part of official propaganda to convince Australians we have a much more capable defence force than we really do.
The US is now retrofitting solutions to problems it should have anticipated. We have almost no influence in all this and are doing not much to prepare for an increasingly dangerous future.

Say what? Isn't AUKUS going to save us?

Maybe not ... (*intermittent archive link)

No wonder he's gloomy, but perhaps that's because he missed the story about mad King Donald the redeemer, which is pretty much everywhere, but which also appeared early in the morning in the lizard Oz just below the bromancer's piece ... though no reptile could be found to attach his name to it, and it was left to agencies...

Donald Trump deletes Jesus post of himself after outcry
Even among conservative-leaning bishops, there was dismay over the President’s unprecedented assault on Pope Leo and his Truth Social post. Trump heard them.
By AFP and AP

The nub of it was that photo ... how could the pond resist a dose of sacrilege and blasphemy early in the morning?

The likes of Marge took a view ...

Apparently many are asking these days if He's the Antichrist (Wired link), and it's on for young and old ...

But the explanation was perfectly reasonable and sensible, at least for anyone in their dotage ...

Asked about the post, Mr Trump denied that he was trying to look like Jesus Christ. “I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do Red Cross,” he told journalists. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better. And I do make people better. I make people a lot better.”

Talk about senility in plain sight ...

It isn't easy for local reptiles to match that level of comedy, and Geoff, as he chambered a round for the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, didn't even try ...

Taylor learns from Dutton errors
Angus Taylor has released the Coalition’s first immigration policy phase, learning from Peter Dutton’s past mistakes while targeting One Nation voters with detailed measures.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

The pond decided that a teaser trailer would do, with the intermittent archive hopefully doing the rest ...

Why do the reptiles think they're helping when they start with a snap of prime Angus grinning inanely and looking sunstruck, like a prize loon cherry red tomato in a hothouse?

So long ago, the days when talk of migrants eating cats and dogs was an election winner.

The pond didn't even bother to offer a teaser trailer for Jennings of the fifth form, delivering a standard whine ...

New ADF leaders, but no extra money
Australia’s military has appointed new leaders to senior positions, yet they inherit an under-resourced Defence Force struggling with rapidly escalating regional security threats.
By Peter Jennings

Come now, Jennings of the fifth form, surely putting a woman in charge of something is the real problem. Why, Pete Kegsbreath wouldn't stand for it ...

But at least that clearing of the reptile deck allowed space for Dame Groan's Tuesday outing.

It too was a standard whine, but the pond must pay attention to her cult following and their insatiable lust for hanging on every one of her words ...

The header: National fuel gauge is on empty – and no one is refilling; The government needs to take note as the global energy market, particularly for liquid fuels, is transformed, possibly forever.

The caption? Sadly there was no caption but that's possibly because everyone knew who he was ... Satan's little helper.

In fact Satan's little helper had probably set Dame Groan off ...

In this oil crisis, no one is calling for more fossil fuels: Bowen
Chris Bowen made the declaration as he leads the response to the fuel shock while balancing his duties as president of the COP31 UN summit.
By Rosie Lewis

Outrageous.

No one is calling for more fossil fuels?

Hold Dame Groan's beer ...

I have had my petrol car for some time. It is just fine apart from one minor defect. The fuel gauge moves from quarter to empty in the blink of an eye. I have learnt to deal with this by filling up the tank when the quarter mark approaches. It’s just a pity the federal government hasn’t adopted this cautious approach when it comes to the supply of liquid fuels – petrol, diesel, aviation fuel – that the country holds.
It came as a shock to many people that the country’s reserves of these critical fuels are around 30 days, a third of the level recommended by the International Energy Agency. We are at the bottom of the pack among advanced economies.
Even our cousins over the ditch have more than 50 days of reserve fuel. Italy has 90, France has 108 and Japan has 250 days.
There’s no need to rush out to fill up the tank if there are 200 days in reserve; 30 days is a different matter. It is not surprising therefore that the increase in the retail price of fuel has been higher in countries with relatively low reserves, leaving aside the impact of excise adjustment.
Successive governments have known about this problem for years but have dithered. Senator Jim Molan had loudly belled the cat on the issue. There was an earlier important report written by John Blackburn for the NRMA alerting us to the problem of our inadequate fuel reserves.
One option is to set up a government company that would purchase fuel reserves over several years to meet the IEA standard of 90 days. There would be a need for more storage, but over time this problem could be sorted.

It was everything her cult following expected, neigh demanded, and the next snap was also sure to send her off the deep end ... Anthony Albanese addresses the media at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Dame Groan offered an incredible solution ...

To be sure, the fuels couldn’t just be left in the tanks – the quality deteriorates – but this turnover also could be sorted. In the short term, we could store some fuel reserves with allies – an example of “friendshoring”.
There would be a cost to the taxpayer – perhaps as much as $20bn a year initially – but the reserves would sit as an asset in the books of the government company. An additional excise on fuel – say 10c a litre – could defray some of these costs, including for storage. Over time, it’s not clear that motorists would notice.

"Friendshoring"?

Hadn't that been tried with the US?

Oh dear, another beefy boofhead triumph, at least until we discovered that the friend had fallen under the baleful rule of a demented mad King ...

Perhaps Dame Groan was thinking of New Zealand? Or at a pinch Tasmania?

Apparently this talk of "friendshoring" is completely wrong in reptile la la land if it happens to involve people of the wrong skin colour.

But do carry on ...

A contribution also would be expected from those operators currently in receipt of the diesel fuel rebate because the revenue would be used to add to reserves that would benefit them as well.
A similar contribution would be expected from the aviation industry.
An ideal outcome would be if the addition to the national supplies of fuel could be sourced locally. But over the past two decades the proportion of liquid fuels from domestic wells has fallen sharply.
The almost complete absence of exploration and new developments has ensured this outcome as well as the closure of most of our refineries.
The broader context of this trend is the hostility to fossil fuel developments on the part of both the federal and state governments. Driven by an obsession with net zero and meeting arbitrary emissions reduction targets, potential investments in fossil fuel-based developments have fled the country.
It’s not as though our consumption of liquid fuels has fallen; we have simply exported the associated emissions to the countries from which we import the fuels, both crude and refined.
A crossroad has now been reached. There is broad recognition of the inadequacy of our liquid fuel reserves and the consequences that potential shortages and higher prices are having well beyond servo bowsers.

It couldn't be fully fossilised foolishness about fossil fuels without an appearance by fossil Jimbo, and so it came to pass ... Jim Molan

Of late it seems that the pond should spend some time introducing the dramatis personae to be found in reptile texts.

Come on down Vaclav Smil ...alleged "noted environmental scientist" ...

Ok, Doomer: What Vaclav Smil and the disinformation echo chamber get wrong about the climate crisis

After reading the fawning coverage of Vaclav Smil’s 41st, and hopefully final, book How the World Really Works (2022) — the latest edition of an old white dude mansplaining to future generations why a just, sustainable society is impossible — I got riled up and started to write a detailed rebuttal. There are so many problems with Smil’s book.. and the man himself.
A Professor Emeritus of Geography (retired) at the University of Manitoba, Smil is sort of the high priest of naysaying, who has a long history with the American Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank that has received millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests, including oil giant ExxonMobil. He is the master of a particular form of climate denial that I call climate action denial.
He doesn’t believe a world powered by 100% clean, renewable energy is feasible, and he has published literature sowing doubt about the significance of human-caused climate change. Unsurprisingly, he thinks fracking is awesome and that the public is far too worried about the risks posed by extractive industries. He characterized the idea of transitioning to electric vehicles as a “myth” and sustainability in general as a “laugh.”

And so on and on, and he sounds perfect for a walk-on role.

It's unlikely that Central Casting could have found anyone better suited to Dame Groan's needs ...

The impact is hitting agriculture, particularly in terms of diesel and urea availability and prices, mining, construction, healthcare as well as what’s left of manufacturing. There are still true believers who regard recent events as a signal to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels and push for higher rates of electrification, particularly of road transport.
But note here that road transport accounts for less than 20 per cent of total emissions.
We are still a long way off long-haul trucks converting to battery power at any scale and the costs of the conversion are extremely high. In the short to medium term, excavators, cranes, bulldozers, tractors, combine harvesters, irrigation pumps, marine equipment and the like are overwhelmingly powered by diesel.
It is worth noting here the finding of Vaclav Smil, the noted environmental scientist, that there are currently no practical and cost-effective alternatives to fossil fuel for primary iron, cement, ammonia (fertilisers) and plastics.
According to Smil’s calculation, the best we can expect from electrification is a decline in emissions of between 20 and 25 per cent. The recent demise of the green hydrogen dream as a zero-emissions liquid fuel has reinforced his conclusion.
It is alarming our political leaders are failing to comprehend the magnitude of the threat to our economy and way of life of our low fuel reserves. The Prime Minister has announced that “Singapore is a major supplier of fuel to Australia”, without realising that a great deal of the fuel that Singapore refines is sourced through the Strait of Hormuz.

At this point, the reptiles decided to crank up the volume by inserting an AV distraction featuring the mad King, who also serves these days as climate science denialist in chief, doing more to wreck the world than a hundred Groanings could manage ...

US President Donald Trump has vowed to end Iran’s “world extortion” in the Strait of Hormuz. He accused Tehran of exploiting global oil routes by demanding tolls from passing tankers. Trump warned that the US would take decisive action to reopen the critical shipping lane. “THIS IS WORLD EXTORTION, and Leaders of Countries, especially the United States of America, will never be extorted,” Trump wrote to Truth Social. The threat came after peace talks collapsed following 21 hours of negotiations.

And so at last to the final bleat, with nuking the country and coal also ready for walk-on roles, with special thanks to the mad King...

The Treasurer has been prattling on about the need for “cleaner and cheaper energy, more diverse sources and more reliable and robust supply chains”. Apart from the possibility of adding biofuels to our reserves it’s not even clear what he is talking about.
In muted terms, the Productivity Commission had warned the government about some of these problems, finding that “the main supply chain risks lie in the use of vulnerable chemical imports in health (human medicine manufacturing), energy (petrol and coal product refining) and water treatment industries”. It was just easier to ignore the warning.
The leaders of several countries are now explicitly declaring the primacy of energy security over other objectives. Japan is returning to nuclear power; Germany is prolonging the life of coal-fired electricity plants and is considering the reintroduction of nuclear; and the EU is walking away from rigid adherence to climate neutrality. The US, of course, has ditched its commitment to net zero and has exited the Paris Agreement.
The Australian government needs to take note of these developments as the global energy market, particularly for liquid fuels, is transformed, possibly forever.

Finally, the pond couldn't resist a gloat after spotting this in The Graudian ...

Tony Abbott labels Viktor Orbán ‘Trump with brains’ as future of Budapest thinktank linked to former PM in doubt
Former Australian PM, who has been associated with pro-Orbán Danube Institute since 2023, praises ousted Hungarian leader

What a deeply corrupt man he is, selling his narcissistic preening soul for a mess of authoritarian pottage...

Tony Abbott has likened Viktor Orbán to “[Donald] Trump with brains” and labelled him Hungary’s “greatest modern leader”, as the future of his work for the ousted leader’s pet thinktank hangs in the balance.
Orbán’s 16-year grip on power in Hungary has ended after the rightwing populist leader conceded his Fidesz party had lost to the opposition Tisza party led by Péter Magyar, which won at least 138 of the 199 seats in the country’s parliament.
Abbott has been connected to the conservative Danube Institute as a senior visiting fellow since 2023, according to Australia’s foreign influence transparency scheme. Orbán’s ousting puts the future of pro-Fidesz thinktanks like the Danube Institute, which rely heavily on his former government’s funding, in doubt.
Abbott, Australia’s 28th prime minister, praised Orbán on social media for making Budapest “something of a haven for conservative intellectuals”, saying he did not “expect the new government will want that to change”.
“The economy has strengthened, the city of Budapest has been transformed, and Hungary’s family policies and determination to keep its culture have been studied around the world,” Abbott said.
“[Orbán] and I differed on Ukraine but I thought he was dead right to defy the EU, on illegal immigration especially. Why should a sovereign nation be bullied by Brussels into policies that would jeopardise its future as a distinct people?”

If the new Hungarian government has a whit or jot of sense they'll kick this craven lickspittle and fellow traveller out so fast his budgie smugglers will be forced to wander a north shore beach desolate and alone.

The pond these days finds itself routinely astonished at being found quoting Anne Applebaum, and yet here we are in The Atlantic ...

Illiberalism Is Not Inevitable
If Viktor Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too. (*intermittent archive link)

In the end, the defeat of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, required not just an ordinary election campaign or new messaging but rather the construction of a broad, diverse, and patriotic grassroots social movement. And by building exactly that, Hungary’s opposition changed politics around the world.
Orbán’s loss brings to an end the assumption of inevitability that has pervaded the MAGA movement, as well as the belief—also present in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric—that illiberal parties are somehow destined not just to win but to hold power forever, because they have the support of the “real” people. As it turns out, history doesn’t work like that. “Real” people grow tired of their rulers. Old ideas become stale. Younger people question orthodoxy. Illiberalism leads to corruption. And if Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too.

So it was with the onion muncher, so surely it will hopefully be with mad king Donald.

And again ...

...whatever happens next, this election represents a real turning point. For most European governments, this result is a relief: We can’t know yet what kind of government Tisza will create, but it won’t be one that functions as Russia’s puppet in Europe, blocking EU funding for Ukraine or European sanctions on Russia. Nor will it be a regime that serves as a model for Americans or Europeans who want to capture their own states, or take apart their own checks and balances, or impose their own illiberal ideologies on people who don’t accept them.

It might be a frying pan v. fire situation, but at least there's a change of scenery.

And so ends another day ...

In which the Caterist and Major Mitchell lead the climate science denying, renewables bashing way. Yawn!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 21:37:00 +0000

The pond recently noticed this piece by Arianne Shahvisi in the LRB headed Gamer’s Dilemma (*intermittent archive link)

Shahvisi started off this way ...

In a strong field of contenders, the most morally troubling computer game ever made is probably RapeLay, released in Japan in 2006. Players are required to adopt the role of a sex offender who must stalk and rape a woman and her daughters, aged 12 and 17. It was banned in the UK in 2009 and eventually removed from sale in Japan too. The game spurred a debate among academic philosophers, centred on the ‘gamer’s dilemma’, a conceit formulated by Morgan Luck. Why is virtual killing morally acceptable in computer games, Luck asked, while virtual child sex abuse is not, given that no real person is harmed in either case?

... but quickly honed in on a more important dilemma ...

...If there are rumours that you’ve sexually abused a child, waging an expensive, unpopular, illegal war, let alone one whose opening salvo kills more than a hundred little girls, seems a strange bid at reputation laundering. But Trump is relying on the wonky moral arithmetic that produces the gamer’s dilemma, plus the racial supremacy that drives all Western foreign policy: the suspicion that he abused a white girl is a threat to his legitimacy in a way that the documented obliteration of a school of brown girls is not.
The inconsistency crops up again in the apologies that have spread like a rash among powerful men in Epstein’s orbit: they are sorry, they didn’t know, they hope for justice. Bill Clinton regrets his friendship. Does he regret obliterating Sudan’s malaria drugs and IV fluids? There is much to regret. Epstein was into everything: sexual abuse, eugenics, settler colonialism. He made donations to the Israeli Defence Forces and the Jewish National Fund, which finances illegal settlements on Palestinian land.
There is an audio recording of Epstein’s friend Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, telling the financier that he had told Vladimir Putin that Israel needed a million Russian Jews to ‘control the quality’ of the population, given the growing numbers of Palestinians and racialised Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, adding the sweetener that ‘many young, beautiful girls would come, tall and slim.’ Barak ‘regrets’ his links to Epstein. Does his regret his role as the defence minister who ordered the killing of 1400 Palestinians, including more than three hundred children, in Israel’s Operation Cast Lead?
The apologies from those linked to Epstein are grubby, suspect, insufficient. But they display a deference to the terms of some kind of morality: it is never OK to sexually abuse a child and it is very bad to be associated with those who do. Is it OK to kill a child? To associate with those who do? What about twenty thousand children? Will we ever see apologies from those whose friends have blown the limbs off children in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran? The discrepancy that drives the gamer’s dilemma doesn’t come from our rightful horror at paedophilia – virtual or real – but from our complacency about so much murder.

It made the pond wonder.

Nearly all refugees admitted in US since October 2025 were (white) South Africans, data shows...

No need to wonder, but will the pond - or the hive mind - ever see apologies from News Corp and its minions, who have enabled and encouraged ethnic cleansing and the killing fields and the white Xian nationalism?

Probably not, but it explains why the pond frequently feels the need to apologise for presenting reprehensible reptiles to an admittedly discreet and worldly wise bunch of correspondents ...

And so we begin again this day with some great news, though it was too late in the morning for those on the extreme far right of the rag to contemplate said BREAKING news ...

BREAKING
‘Painful’: Hungary’s Orban ousted in historic poll defeat
The long-serving Hungarian Prime Minister has conceded defeat, telling supporters: ‘The result of the election is clear and painful.’
By Jacquelin Magnay

So the onion muncher's and Vlad the Sociopath's and JD Vance's friend has gone down?

There's probably gong to be a sting in the tail somewhere down the line, but the pond will settle for a rush of joy.

Meanwhile there was other "news" in the "news" section of the lizard Oz...

Middle East at war
Trump announces US to blockade Strait of Hormuz
US President Donald Trump said the US Navy would begin blockading ‘any and all ships trying to enter or leave the Strait of Hormuz’, after peace talks with Iran in Islamabad collapsed.
By Jack Quail and Agencies

That splash led to a short summary ...

President Donald Trump on Sunday ordered a US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in response to Iran’s “unyielding” refusal to give up its nuclear ambitions during peace talks in Islamabad.
While acknowledging that the marathon talks in Pakistan had gone “well” and “most points were agreed to,” Trump said Tehran had refused to concede on the issue of its nuclear program.
“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform.
“I have also instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran. No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas,” Trump said.

So he intends to plunge the world's economy into a spiral of doom while acting as a common or garden eighteenth century pirate?

Agggh, me hearties.

The pond notes this because in the lizard Oz editorial whining about the recalcitrant Iranians came this corker...

The Tehran regime must understand, if it cares, that there will be no end to Iranians’ suffering, and more devastation until complete freedom of navigation through the Strait is assured. Western nations should be helping the US secure that crucial goal. The importance to the world of reopening the Strait has been underlined by the failure of the Islamabad talks.

So a compleat BLOCKADE is the way forward, complete freedom is a complete blockage, war is peace, and no doubt chairman Xi will take note.

Perhaps it's just another thought bubble from a mad King, who seems to more and more be favouring Roman Emperors as role models ...

And that's the end of the entertainment because alas, this day the reptiles used the crisis to indulge in yet another round of climate science denialism and fossil fuel worship.

Trust the reptiles always to learn the wrong lesson ...trust the quarry whisperer to lead the way:

The header: The four dates that punctured the left’s net-zero fantasies; As the Trump administration has shown, the net-zero industrial complex must be starved, not slain.

The caption for a snap much used by the reptiles: Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen during a visit to the Ampol Lytton refinery in Brisbane. Picture: NewsWire / Tertius Pickard

The pond will understand if senior herpetology students decide to sneak out of class this time.

Been there, done that so many times, with a yadda yadda here and a whatever there...

The monomaniacal pursuit of net zero had to be abandoned sooner or later. Politically contaminated science, coupled with the requirement for a watertight global agreement, made it vulnerable to the lightest brush with reality.
Historians may well recall that its demise occurred between February 2022 and April 9, 2026, beginning with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine that shut off Russian oil and gas supplies, and destroyed the romance of decarbonisation for hundreds of millions of Europeans.
The second pivotal moment occurred on October 7, 2023, when the global left’s response to mass torture, rape, killing and kidnapping of Israeli men, women and children revealed that Palestine had replaced global warming as its cause de jour.
The US-Israel campaign against Iran that began on February 28, triggering the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, destroyed the delusion that the energy transition was making progress. It turned out that the world was even more dependent on hydrocarbons than it had been 53 years earlier during the last major supply crisis.
In Australia, at least, historians will probably nominate Thursday, April 9, as the day the final nail was hammered into the coffin. It was the day Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Anthony Albanese visited the Lytton refinery near the Port of Brisbane, the first visit by a prime minister since May 2021, when Scott Morrison and his then energy minister, Angus Taylor, announced the deal to stop the Ampol refinery moving offshore.

The reptiles flung in a snap of their favourite villain ... Chris Bowen during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond has been zooming around town in the old EV startled by the singular absence of traffic even in peak hour, but refuses to gloat ... while the phantom flood waters analyst carried on in his luddite way..

The PM didn’t want to be seen near the joint this time last year when he was campaigning in the seat of Bonner. Today, however, it’s a different story, even if not every reporter at last week’s press conference was across the government’s revised talking points on fossil fuels. Subject: Loaded Adjectives. Text: Delete “dirty, harmful, and morally indefensible” and insert “reliable, affordable, and prosperity-enabling”.
Asked for an update on the Safeguard Mechanism, Labor’s keynote policy designed to reduce emissions from large industrial facilities such as Lytton, Bowen replied: “It’s not on the top of my to-do list right now, to be frank with you. I’m focused on other matters.”
Bowen may try to dismiss this as a throwaway line, just as he suggests that abandoning the 82 per cent renewables target for the east coast grid is of little consequence. Yet the government’s energy U-turn cannot easily be brushed off.
For four years, the Albanese government has lavished subsidies, raised punitive taxes and increased regulation to reduce fossil fuel demand. Now, as the PM told us after returning from Singapore, the government’s three top priorities are supply, supply and supply.
Just a year ago, Labor delayed approving a major extension of Australia’s largest LNG development until after the election to avoid a backlash from the left. Last week, the PM went cap-in-hand to Singapore, where he used gas from that very project as a bargaining chip to secure imports of petrol, diesel and avgas.

Not content with one Caterist, the reptiles doubled down with him appearing with lovely meter maid Rita (still no rebranding? Must we wait forever for the name?)

Menzies Research Centre Senior Fellow Nick Cater claims reality is catching up with the net zero debate. “Reality is starting to catch up with this debate,” Mr Cater told Sky News host Rita Panahi. “This is crazy modelling; they’ve stuck with it as long as they can.”

There then came some impeccable analysis by the quarry whisperer:

This brazen about-turn carries low political risk for Labor. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy’s 2010 prediction that the intellectual left’s animating cause would be a version of antisemitism has proved correct.
Raising awareness of the climate emergency by gluing oneself to the Harbour Bridge is old-school. Today, one’s social justice credentials are displayed by marching across it in a keffiyeh in the company of an assortment of dubious characters.
The moral force of net zero has diminished. Five years ago, Morrison signed up to the Paris Agreement not because he wanted to but because he was frightened that the Liberal Party’s support would collapse if he didn’t. As it turned out, the Liberals’ vote collapsed anyway. Late last year, the Coalition dropped the commitment to net zero, and almost no one noticed.

Um, perhaps because the coalition has, in following News Corp's lead on climate science, been a rabble whispering into a void, and now such a rump no one notices? Especially as it's a rump led by a beefy boofhead who earned his stripes ranting at windmills?

Correspondents will note that the pond is feeling a tad jaded by all this...

Yet we should not imagine, for a moment, that the change in the political wind means public policy will change course. Bureaucracies do not reverse on command. They carry stored momentum, converted into agencies, grant programs, reporting frameworks, procurement rules and career structures.
The degree of institutional inertia is considerable. Abolishing the Department of Climate Change and Energy, as One Nation promises to do, will do little more than place a line in the sand. The dense undergrowth of quasi-government bodies, regulators, advisory boards and grant recipients will largely remain untouched.

It wouldn't be a campaign ad proper if the mob didn't score a snap...

Leader of the Opposition Angus Taylor MP and Leader of the Nationals Senator Matt Canavan, joined by Liberal and National Party Members and Senators, hold a press conference at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

And that was about it ...

Even if the scalpel were taken to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Clean Energy Regulator, the Renewable Energy Target, the Emissions Reduction Fund and the Climate Change Authority, the real work would scarcely have begun.
Dozens of quangos, commissions, agencies and co-ordinators have been created at state level. Beyond government sits an even wider ecosystem: advocacy groups funded to keep the pressure on, universities with research centres and grants, public broadcasters with specialist climate rounds, and corporations whose incentives are driven by ESG.
Even after the political tide turns, all of this machinery goes on whirring. The momentum is embedded in payrolls, contracts, budgets and careers. The Coalition should take note.
As the Trump administration has shown, the net-zero industrial complex must be starved, not slain. It will be overcome by defunding, deregulation and the exhaustion of capital. NASA’s success in sending astronauts beyond the moon suggests the threat of deep cuts to the agency’s climate-related work is already bearing fruit.
There is no quick fix, however, particularly in a parliamentary system that does not allow an incoming prime minister to exercise the sweeping executive powers of a US president. Democratic correction here will be less dramatic, beginning with the slow bleed of money, status and cultural authority. Net zero will end not with a bang, but with a whimper.

As for the planet? If the Caterist and his companions at the lizard Oz have his way, it will end in the manner of a stuffed and right royally cooked goose ...

As for the rest of the rabble, the pond seized on the chance discovery of the intermittent archive in working mode to send a number of them off to that dismal cornfield.

The pond apologises in advance. It's a risky strategy, a minute by minute proposition, an exercise in frustration, but actually dealing with this mob would be worse.

Nick led the march of the damned ...

The hollow populism of Max Chandler-Mather
The Greens have not broken through but consolidated a niche – and a niche is not a mass movement.
By Nick Dyrenfurth
Contributor

Whenever the pond reads the tag, Nick Dyrenfurth is executive director of the John Curtin Research Centre, the pond can't help but ask why Nick has turned into a reptile regular. Still pleased to be one of the reptiles ruining the planet, Nick? Still determined to make Curtin keep rolling in his grave.

As usual, there was an obligatory piece about the war with China by Xmas, but instead of the bromancer, it was Rowan ...

Xi is planning a ‘peaceful’ Taiwan deal Trump can accept
When Trump meets Xi in a month, he may believe he holds the upper hand, no longer feeling a need to make concessions.
By Rowan Callick
Contributor

The pond was delighted that Rowan had only yesterday had an intimate discussion with Chairman Xi, and so had intimate knowledge of his plans, but the pond thought it might be better just to wait and see what actually might unfold.

After all, King Donald has shown the way forward. Blockade!

Brownie was also to hand ...

Tell us strait: there’s nothing wrong in a leader saying sorry
Anthony Albanese should be more prepared to admit mistakes and even issue the occasional apology when he gets it wrong.
By Greg Brown
Chief political correspondent

The pond might have taken Brownie seriously if he'd started with an apology for the unseemly way his boss had encouraged King Donald to embark on the Iran folly, with another apology for the way his kissing cousins at Faux Noise had acted as war mongering cheerleaders. Physician heal thyself, and set the example would have been good starting points for Brownie, but no such like.

As for simpleton Simon, it was just the usual bog standard outing ..

Jim’s ‘voodoo economics’ strikes back
Chalmers has been making all the right noises about not wasting a crisis, but he may be overruled again.
By Simon Benson
Political analys

The pond will wait for Dame Groan's groaning tomorrow ...

And that meant that all that was left was the sorry sight of assorted reptiles seizing on the current crisis to plunge the world back into the days of picket fences and gas guzzlers... including the lizard Oz editorialist...

The editorialist would say that, that's how it works in the hive mind, incessant repetition, incantations and yearning for things to stay the same, as if the climate heeds their monotonous chanting.

Cue Major Mitchell, doing a standard Major five minute rant ...

The header: Oil shock shows world still runs on fossil fuels, not green promises; Environment writers who claim the Iran war oil shock will be a boost for renewable energy don’t understand how industrial production actually works.

The caption: Scottich (sic) First Minister John Swinney launches an SNP campaign on fuel prices on April 7, in Leith, Scotland. Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Yawn.

The best the pond can do is introduce the dramatis personae in this turgid outing, as dull as George Bernard Shaw in full verbiage flight.

The first, a certain Michael Shellenberger, made an appearance in an old Damian Carrington piece for the Graudian, The four types of climate denier, and why you should ignore them all

A new book, described as “deeply and fatally flawed” by an expert reviewer, recently reached the top of Amazon’s bestseller list for environmental science and made it into a weekly top 10 list for all nonfiction titles.
How did this happen? Because, as Brendan Behan put it, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”. In an article promoting his book, Michael Shellenberger – with jaw-dropping hubris – apologises on behalf of all environmentalists for the “climate scare we created over the last 30 years”.
Shellenberger was named a hero of the environment by Time magazine in 2008 and is a loud advocate of nuclear power, but the article was described by six leading scientists as “cherry-picking”, “misleading” and containing “outright falsehoods”.

Sounds exactly like the sort of leading man the Major would love.

There's a lot more that can be found about him on the full to overflowing intertubes, but the short version is that he's a flake and a phoney.

As for the leading woman, some would think that the name alone, Zion Lights, explains everything.

The Major wants to think that she's been largely ignored, a stunning ingenue ready to take leading lady status and dominate centre stage, but in reality she could be found peddling her wares in the 'Tiser way back in October 2021 ...

Extinction Rebellion to climate champion: Zion Lights explains why nuclear power is our answer
A former key official in the Extinction Rebellion movement has revealed why she’s turning her back on its doomsday messages to back nuclear power.

That header alone suggests an explanation, which a metaphor might elucidate: Opus Dei fanatic becomes fanatical atheist, or vice versa, fanatical atheist becomes Opus Dei zealot ...

“I used to be in that kind of camp saying: ‘We should all use less,’ but, actually, let’s be honest, where has that gotten us?
“For decades, it’s gotten us nowhere. It hasn’t happened. Behavioural scientists have not found a way to make people magically to have a huge reduction in how much energy they use.”
Ms Lights argues reducing emissions means increasing electricity use, to transfer transport and heating from fossil fuel power.

Don't ask the pond to explain what that last line actually means. The important point is that Zion saw the Lights and she decided to nuke the planet to save the planet.

With that introduction to the main characters, it's on with the Major ...

Environment writers who claim the Iran war oil shock will be a boost for renewable energy don’t understand how industrial production actually works.
The world spent $US2.5 trillion ($3.55 trillion) on green projects in 2025 alone.
Yet more than 91 per cent of total Australian energy use still relies on fossil fuels. The global figure is more than 82 per cent.
All the renewable energy installed in the past decade has not shielded the world from the effects of the partial blockage of 20 per cent of the world’s oil by Iran in the Straits of Hormuz for only six weeks.
It’s a lesson that should have been learned earlier. Many countries, especially in Europe, accelerated the closure of reliable fossil fuel power after the gas shock triggered by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, thinking more renewables would protect them.
It’s like even governments don’t understand almost every industry globally depends on fossil fuels, from making fertiliser, plastics and cement to smelting metals, refining Avgas for planes, diesel for farm machinery, and trucks and heavy oil for shipping.
Yet environment editor Nick O’Malley in the Nine papers assured his readers on March 19 that the way forward from the present oil crisis was more subsidies for electrification.
O’Malley claimed China was showing the world the way forward without fossil fuels by building more renewables capacity since 2022 than the rest of the world combined. True but China is also the world’s biggest CO2 emitter, largest user of coal and second largest user of oil.
That won’t change any time soon because the green steel, green ammonia and green hydrogen the Nine papers have been spruiking for a decade do not exist.
Sure renewables are becoming the backbone of our electricity system but 80 per cent of our fossil fuel use is in industries other than electricity generation.
And while the world has been spending trillions of dollars a year since Covid building out renewables, it has wound back spending on oil and gas exploration and production.
Mike Shellenberger on the Public website estimates total global spending on oil and gas exploration and production peaked at $US780bn in 2014 and fell to $US350bn by 2020 – a fraction of what is spent on renewables that deliver only a small proportion of global total energy.
Discussing a new book, Abundance, that Labor ministers here have been spruiking, Shellenberger in “Democrats’ Fake ‘Abundance’ Agenda Will Continue Energy Scarcity” on April 5 said the Hormuz crisis showed the world needed to build more oil and gas pipelines.
“The only energy abundance solution that works at the scale of civilisation right now is piping natural gas and oil. A pipeline delivers energy continuously, at near zero marginal cost per unit delivered, with no exposure to shipping choke points, insurance markets or geopolitical disruption.”
Asking why the left continues to push the idea renewables are the solution to industrial processes renewables cannot power, Shellenberger answers, “The first reason is profit. Solar and wind development is an enormously lucrative business, not because the technology is superior but because the subsidies are guaranteed.”
Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act allocated $US370bn to solar, wind and batteries. The EU Green Deal offered a trillion euros.
“The returns are attractive precisely because the government guarantees them.”
This is the model the Albanese government and Minister for Energy Chris Bowen are copying without wondering where the rest of our energy requirement will come from even if we do manage to build an electrical grid on renewables, storage, batteries and gas back-up.
Shellenberger says bankers are the big drivers of support for renewables because every wind farm, solar array and big battery project involves commissions for financial intermediaries brokering deals between manufacturers and power providers.
“Goldman does not profit from cheap, abundant energy delivered through pipelines at near-zero marginal cost. Goldman profits from complex, capital intensive projects that require financing, structuring and advisory fees.”
As this column has argued for a decade, it’s big bankers and financiers preaching the gospel of sustainability who reap the rewards of renewables. Think Malcolm Turnbull and Simon Holmes a Court here.
Shellenberger says China is the other big winner.
“China proliferated cheap solar panels to the West not out of environmental conviction but as an industrial strategy that made Western nations dependant on Chinese manufacturing while China itself relied on the energy source that actually works at scale: coal.
“China burns more than half the world’s coal. It built an electricity grid twice the size of America’s. It stockpiled critical minerals.
“It built coal-to-chemicals facilities to produce diesel and jet fuel domestically and for military needs,” Shellenberger says.
Meanwhile, Australia, the largest exporter of coal to China, plans to shut all its coal power generation plants and places stringent approvals processes in front of any potential new coal mine. Yet Labor claims it is accelerating its Future Made in Australia strategy in response to the present oil crisis.
What of the world’s biggest losers from the renewables transition? That would be the poorest people from the world’s least developed countries.

The pond let the Major ramble on because the reptiles were so zonked on Valium they didn't have the heart to interrupt him with a single visual distraction.

Not one snap of demonic whale-killing windmills? Not one snap of renewables ruining landscapes?

The reptiles did briefly rouse from their slumbers to feature the demonic sun and sinister solar glistening in its evil light ... Bankers are the big drivers of support for renewables because every wind farm, solar array and big battery project involves commissions. Picture: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

Bankers! Evil bankers!! Possibly even cosmopolitans!!

Some might be wondering when Zion would make her appearance. Worry not, here she is, Lightsing the way ...

Shellenberger on April 1 interviewed Zion Lights, an activist who quit Extinction Rebellion in the UK in 2020 and was quoted in this column about XR’s extreme methods at the time.
Lights has written an important new book, Energy is Life, Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear.
She describes how for the past two decades “climate policy has been the dominant priority in wealthy nations’ engagement with the developing world”.
“Western NGOs have even blocked the construction of hydro-electric dams, which tends to be the first reliable source of power that poor nations develop as they rise the development ladder,” she tells Shellenberger’s podcast.
After the Paris Agreement in 2015, private institutions and national governments “began systematically restricting financing for oil, gas and coal projects in the developing world”.
“The practical effect was to deny poor countries the energy infrastructure that every wealthy nation used to climb out of poverty.
“Between 2017 and 2019, multilateral development banks provided an average $US9.7bn annually in direct fossil fuel finance.
“By 2020-22, that figure had collapsed to $US3.2bn.
“In March 2021, the UK’s export finance agency ended all financial support for overseas fossil fuel projects.”
At COP 26 in Glasgow in November 2021, 20 countries and five development banks pledged to stop financing unabated fossil fuels by the end of 2022
Lights goes on to outline how the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank then began forcing the closure of various fossil fuel projects.
Yet in Africa, 600 million people are living without electricity.
Lights says she has never been interviewed by the BBC. Our ABC, Guardian Australia and Nine papers are just as deaf to thoughtful voices on the realities of energy and environmentalism.

Relax, Zion, your natural home is the hive mind, dwelling amongst the reptiles in fossil fuel bliss ...murmuring all the while about evil bankers, perhaps even the Rothschilds, though that sounds a tad strange coming from the lips of a devoted Zionist of the Major kind ...

Enough already ,,, on with the main show ...

Go, Faux Noise... turn a pig's ear into a pearl right before our disbelieving eyes ...

In which Polonius sets the war crimes pace, the Ughmann takes a warrior sidestep, and Our Henry arrives to seal the war crimes deal ..

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:25:00 +0000

A word of explanation...

Yesterday this was at the top of the lizard Oz ...

... and the pond studiously ignored it.

First it was by that lesser member of the Kelly gang, Joe, and second, already everything has changed.

If you wanted a third, you could find it in the possibly working intermittent archive ...

If you wanted a fourth, the pond would much rather be reading Susan B. Glasser ranting away in The New Yorker in The Costs of Trump's Iran-War Folly (*archive link)

If you wanted a fifth, the pond much preferred this opening flourish by David Remnick's obvious comparison in his piece Trump's Strategic and Moral Failure in Iran (*archive link)

Not many years ago, a ruthless man with an uneasy mind took power in his country and created a cult of personality. In the center of the capital, he erected a gold statue of himself that rotated with the sun. He stashed billions in a foreign bank. He closed the academy of sciences, the ballet, the philharmonic, the circus, and all provincial libraries. His autobiography became the nation’s spiritual guide. He banned dogs from the capital for their “unappealing odor.” He renamed the months: January for himself, April for his mother. He was fond of melons. The second Sunday of August became National Melon Day. Such was the world of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s leader from 1985 until his death, by cardiac arrest, in 2006. For the Turkmen people, there was nothing comical about life under his dictatorship. He barred dissent and packed his jails with prisoners of conscience. The only consolation was that he could not impose his grandiosity on the globe.

So the United States is now a banana republic and, spoiler alert, it led to a corker of a punchline ...

...In the midst of the war, Trump released plans for his Presidential library. Its centerpiece will be an auditorium with an immense gold statue of himself. Whether it will turn with the sun is not yet known.

But the pond must make some attempt at reptile offerings for keen herpetology students.

The problem was that a considerable number were obsessed with the doings of an alleged war criminal, so the pond must set the scene ...

Soon enough, the trial will begin and the pond will refrain from commenting, as it does on matters before the court, but in the interim, the pond should note that on the balance of probabilities, Ben Roberts-Smith has already been found guilty of war crimes ... in a case he brought himself.

Also on the balance of probabilities, it seems that the hive mind pack are all in on the right to commit war crimes and get away with it.

The reptiles were wildly indignant at the persecution of the "war hero", with prattling Polonius leading the way ...

The header: War hero Ben Roberts-Smith merits the presumption of innocence;A dramatic arrest, media frenzy and political restraint collide, prompting questions about due process and the presumption of innocence.

The caption for the masked marauders: Ben Roberts-Smith is escorted by AFP officers at Sydney airport following his arrest. Picture: Australian Federal Police

Question.

Why is Ben Roberts-Smith still being called a war hero by the lizards of Oz, when on the balance of probabilities, according to an Australian court, he committed war crimes, including multiple murders?

Who knows?

For a while, at least, Ben Roberts-Smith was a name Australian Federal Police commissioner Krissy Barrett dared not speak.
Shortly after 1pm on April 7, Barrett read a statement to the media that began: “A former Australian Defence Force member has today been arrested and will be charged with five counts of war crime – murder after a joint investigation between the Office of the Special Investigator and the AFP.”
Barrett added: “The former soldier was arrested at Sydney’s domestic airport this morning and is expected to face a NSW court later today.” Everyone at the media conference knew the reference was to Roberts-Smith. But the AFP was running a “no names, no pack-drill” line.
Until the lead-up to the evening TV news bulletins, that is. By then, the AFP had released film of Roberts-Smith being escorted off a plane at Sydney airport by AFP members. He had been charged with murder in the presence of his teenage children and partner. Later that day, the AFP did not prevent the media from photographing the accused sitting in a prison van, handcuffed.
It’s not the kind of behaviour that facilitates a fair trial. In The Nightly on April 8, Aaron Patrick wrote: “Mr Roberts-Smith’s lawyers offered in writing to make him available ‘at any place, at any time’ to the authorities, a source close to the former SAS corporal said.”
Obviously, the AFP wanted to put on a show.
Interviewed on Sky News’ The Bolt Report on April 9, former NSW Labor police minister Michael Costa said this was no way to treat a man who had served with distinction and had been awarded a Victoria Cross in the process.
Costa said: “He wasn’t a flight risk; he should have been phoned up and asked to attend the police station for the charging with his lawyer.” He then made a broader point that “this is happening all the time” – referring to the case of Cardinal George Pell – before adding “the list is endless”.

Ah, the Pellist ploy.

And Costa. The pond had hoped to have heard the last of him when he announced I'm leaving a failure.

The pond should note at this point the reptiles didn't offer Polonius any more visual distractions.

The pond should also point out that when it comes to snaps of the man - who on the balance of probabilities committed war crimes - the reptiles rarely feature him in all his elemental glory ... so the pond will help out.

He might not be guilty of war crimes - let the court decide - but he's certainly guilty of other crimes.

And so to a final beefy chunk of Polonial goodness ...

Then there was the media on the morning after. Roberts-Smith had unsuccessfully sued Nine – that is Network Nine and Nine newspapers such as The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. The entire front page of the SMH on April 8 contained a photo of a darkened, sinister-looking Roberts-Smith, his eyes diverted downwards. It declared in scoffing tone: “From Medals To Murder Charges”. The following six pages were devoted to the accused. As if the Middle East war, oil and fertiliser shortages and the cost of living were of lesser interest to everyday Australians.
It was the same with The Age. Except that the article on the case written by Nine journalist Nick McKenzie had a different heading to that in the SMH. It read: “Many narcissists have tried to twist the legal system; one thing sets this man apart.” McKenzie, an activist journalist who is a long-term Roberts-Smith antagonist, alleged the former soldier had “positioned himself” above the law. How? Well, Roberts-Smith attempted “to use the civil legal system to suppress his conduct in Afghanistan” and this “revealed him as a man who thought the law his servant, a tool to bend to his will”.
No he didn’t. Roberts-Smith took a defamation case against Nine, with respect to claims made about him by Nine’s McKenzie and others, and lost. That’s all. This is not the action of a man “above the law” – whatever that might mean. In his sneering tone the journalist felt the need to refer to the VC winner “as the son of a Supreme Court judge”. What’s that got to do with it?
Having read McKenzie’s lightweight piece in the Nine newspapers, respected Melbourne Law School professor Jeremy Gans posted on X a one-word assessment – “bile”. Yet Nine editors, in their wisdom or lack of same, saw fit to publish such verbal sludge in a prominent place.
The one thing that can be said for truisms is that they are true. It is true that everyone is entitled to a fair trial. And also a presumption of innocence until found guilty, in a criminal trial, to the standard of “beyond reasonable doubt”. Roberts-Smith’s defamation case against Nine was a civil case in the Federal Court of Australia where the standard of proof is “on the balance of probabilities”.
Both Anthony Albanese and Angus Taylor responded to the news of the charges laid against Roberts-Smith with professionalism. Both have said that the matter is before the courts.
In her scripted comments, Barrett said: “The overwhelming majority of our ADF do our country proud. Today’s charges are not reflective of the majority members who serve under our Australian flag with honour, distinction and with the values of a democratic nation.” This is capable of being interpreted that a minority – of undisclosed size – do not. This overlooks the fact that of the 30,000 men and women who served in Afghanistan, two have faced charges and none has been convicted of war crimes so far.
Former senior politicians are entitled to discuss the case, as are journalists, provided they are careful with their words.
Writing in The Australian on April 8, Stephen Rice provided an excellent summary of the prosecution’s case. The analysis suggests the case against Roberts-Smith is certainly contestable.
In a statement, former prime minister Tony Abbott made this important point: “If Ben Roberts-Smith transgressed, why wasn’t this picked up prior to his gallantry awards and why wasn’t any culture of brutality towards prisoners detected by his more senior officers, and dealt with quickly, rather than being allowed to fester, as has been alleged, for over a decade?”
While stating that no man or woman is above the reach of the law, John Howard called for the trial to be held “as expeditiously as possible”. The reference is to the truism that justice delayed is justice denied.
As to the AFP’s actions, Roberts-Smith deserves the respect due to all who have been charged with criminal offences. This means not parading the accused under arrest before media outlets.

At this point the pond should pause for a break, because who doesn't love war criminals committing war crimes ...

Refreshed, the pond could turn to the Ughmann...

The header: Australia’s busted bet: the imperative for energy independence; Canberra’s escort of US minesweepers from the Gulf signalled the end of a world order Australia’s economy built upon. Its ‘busted flush’ demands urgent energy and security re-evaluation.

The caption: The USS Canberra (LCS 30) escorts the merchant vessel Seaway Hawk, laden with four decommissioned US Navy Avenger-class minesweepers, through the Arabian Gulf, on January 21, 2026. Picture: Supplied

This might seem like a step away from war crimes, but only by degree, because the Ughmann is big on war and warriors (and the pond thanks him for his seminarian service):

In January, the Pentagon released an image of the USS Canberra escorting a massive cargo ship carrying four ageing US Navy Avenger-class minesweepers out of the Persian Gulf.
The wood and fibreglass vessels were beginning a long journey to a scrapyard in Philadelphia after being retired from service with the Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet last year.
American minesweepers have been patrolling the waterways of the Gulf since tankers were targeted during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. But as the Cold War peace dividend was cashed in, de-mining slipped down the Pentagon’s priorities. Mine Warfare Command was dismantled in 2006 and its ageing fleet was left to atrophy in a corner of the US Navy that had no real champion.
The picture of the minesweepers’ departure, just before the shooting started in the third Gulf War, is pregnant with meaning. Most immediately, it reveals Operation Epic Fury as an epic failure of timing, judgment and strategic imagination.
Days after the war began, Iran laid mines in the Strait of Hormuz, disrupted the world’s most vital artery and sent shockwaves through the global economy. The presence of the minesweepers was testimony to the fact the US had understood this risk for 40 years. Donald Trump chose to ignore it.

No need to pause here, except to join the Ughmann in his celebration of kit, The M/V Seaway Hawk transports four decommissioned Avenger-class minesweepers, a visible legacy of a 40-year-old risk that Donald Trump chose to ignore. Picture: Supplied

So there's a sixth reason: the Ughmann is going to go over the same old tired grounds where many reptiles have trodden ...

A New York Times article co-authored by its Australian-born and bred White House reporter, Jonathan Swan, revealed this week that the US President was convinced any war with Iran would be swift and decisive. He was already leaning into that view before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in the White House Situation Room on February 11 to argue that Iran was ripe for regime change and that a joint US-Israeli mission could topple the Islamic Republic.
The next day Trump’s advisers gathered without their Israeli counterparts to caution the President against the notion of a quick and clean victory. CIA director John Ratcliffe is reported to have described the regime change scenarios as farcical. Secretary of State Marco Rubio weighed in, saying, “In other words, it’s bullshit.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine warned that a major campaign against Iran would drastically deplete American weapons stockpiles. He also flagged the enormous difficulty of securing the Strait of Hormuz and the risk that Iran would attempt to block it.
Those who believe Trump enjoys a kind of secular papal infallibility will dismiss this report because of the masthead that printed it. The counter is that Swan has been remarkably good at his craft for a long time and the report rings true because the concerns raised are exactly what anyone paying even modest attention to the region, its history and its geography would have concluded.
Someone also might have added that the enduring feature of American military campaigns since Vietnam has been the difficulty of converting overwhelming tactical superiority into lasting strategic success.
Once Trump would have volunteered this view. One of the reasons so many war-weary Americans were drawn to him was his pledge to end the forever wars. In 2020 he told a group of West Point graduates it was not the job of American forces “to solve ancient conflicts in faraway lands that many people have not even heard of”.

Oh dear, not a collage ... US President Donald Trump and advisers monitor Operation Epic Fury against Iran. Picture: AFP

And yes, all that was just a prelude to the Ughmann going full isolationist, full prepper, full "get your kit ready for the bug out", full we must industrialise and do everything at home, in short, full survivalist ...

Since last year’s 12-day warm-up in Iran and the assault on Venezuela, it is as if the President had discovered a new key he believed could unlock all doors. It must be intoxicating to have the power to rain destruction on your enemies but, alas, not all have the same motivation. Some don’t do earthly deals. The threat of death does not work on people who believe martyrdom is a glorious gateway to eternal life.
Those of us who love life are left to grapple with how best to deal with navigating the realities of this world. And earthly concerns have been rapidly reordered around the planet.
That is why there is a far deeper meaning buried in the image of ageing American minesweepers being led out of the Persian Gulf by a ship bearing the name of our capital. It speaks to something difficult to capture in words other than epoch defining.
This was a funeral procession for a world order Australia’s leaders assumed would endure. It is a photograph taken at the hinge of history, capturing not just the retirement of a class of ships but the crumbling of an empire of ideas. The old order has been discarded, largely through a wilful act of vandalism by the President of the nation that built and defended it.
Unfortunately, Australia built its modern economy on that order. That bet is now a busted flush. The only certainty from here is that the times will suit us less well. So, we need to deal with the world as it is, not as we hope it might be.
In the shadow of the US security guarantee, we built an island nation that could outsource most of the goods it needs to survive. We grew things, dug things up and sold them for export cash that crashed on to our shores in ever larger waves as commodity prices rose with the spectacular rise of China.
We slowly unlearned how to make things as manufacturing was shipped offshore. In its place we built supply chains that circled the globe and delivered cheap imports. We grew rich and became complacent as inflation fell and the job losses that come with recessions passed out of memory.

What an unhealthy seven minutes of swill, all the more ironic as its coming from a newspaper owned by Americans ...

How did that happen, how did we ship our news offshore? Cargo ships at the Port of Melbourne. Australia built an island nation on global supply chains and outsourced goods, a bet now a

As with all things Ughmann, it wouldn't be a weekend offering without a goodly, bigly dose of climate science denialism, coal worship and renewables bashing ...

It was in that era that one of the most liquid fuel-dependent countries on Earth mostly stopped producing oil, shut down domestic refining and became addicted to imports. We dismantled our buffers and discarded resilience as inefficiency.
We barely contemplated the idea that the world beyond our shores might not always be open, stable and benign. We organised our economy around a just-in-time delivery in a world where, one day, times were bound to turn. Which is why, when the system failed, the shock was immediate and elemental.
We are now scrounging around the world for shipments of fuel at any price. What matters now is how we respond. We need a short, medium and long-term plan for securing our energy independence. It will not be cheap or easy but the cost of not doing it could not be written more starkly and there are opportunities for a country with Australia’s deep energy endowment.
In tailoring our response, we should watch what the world is doing as it confronts the same crisis.
With a fifth of the world’s oil and gas disrupted by war, a vast hydrocarbon hole has opened in the global economy. Countries are scrambling to fill it. Governments are turning to what they can control. Thermal coal prices have climbed from around $US110 a tonne earlier this year to about $US130 to $US140, as gas disruptions in Asia force utilities to switch fuel.
Coal-fired plants that were meant to close are being kept open. Others are being run harder. Japan is increasing coal-fired generation to conserve gas. South Korea has lifted caps on coal output. India has ordered its coal fleet to run flat out. The Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Thailand are doing the same. Italy has postponed the closure of its coal-fired plants for more than a decade. Germany, once the wind and solar standard bearer and now twice mugged by the real world, is beating a strategic retreat. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned that if this crisis endures, Berlin may have to keep coal-fired power plants running longer than planned.
“We have to supply this country with electricity,” Merz said. “I am not prepared to jeopardise the core of our industry just because we have decided on phase-out plans that have become unrealistic.”

This is what happens in the hive mind, the incessant repetition, the inanely similar squawking, the relentless repetition by rote, until all the reptiles are thinking the same thoughts ... and expect their hive mind readership to join in the inane chorus Noshiro Thermal Power Station, Akita Prefecture. Japan is increasing coal-fired generation to conserve gas and ease an energy crunch, a direct consequence of the Middle East war. Picture: AFP

The pond has already been here before with the dog botherer, and how wearisome it is to be here again ...

At a conference in Texas Berlin’s Energy Minister Katherina Reiche said the EU should loosen its “rigid” adherence to climate neutrality and allow itself to miss its 2050 net-zero goal.
Reiche stressed that economic growth must come before green targets.
“At the end of the day, it is good to have a goal of sustainability – but if sustainability crashes your economy, you have to readjust,” Reiche said. “And that’s what we’re doing right now.”
In Europe, the price of carbon has fallen since the war began. The system designed to penalise emissions is under pressure to release more permits and soften its constraints. The price of emitting is being lowered just as the incentive to emit is rising.
Decisions taken under stress tell you a lot. Energy security is a must-have. Cutting carbon is an adornment.

One last snap featuring coal worship ... Labourers sort coal as India’s power plants run flat out to counter Middle East war-induced energy disruptions. Soaring LPG prices are forcing families back to coal, exacerbating health and air quality concerns. Picture: AFP

And one last gobbet of more of the same ...

The markets are sending the same signal. Oil moves with every presidential utterance, but the more important story lies further down the chain. Diesel, petrol and jet fuel are what move trucks, ships, planes and armies, and they are rising faster than crude. With the interruption to the oil supply and the worldwide scramble for fuels those costs will stay high even if the passage through the Strait of Hormuz is cleared.
In bond markets, the cost of money is climbing. Governments are paying more to borrow as energy, inflation and risk are repriced together. They are also preparing to spend more to cushion the shock, pushing long-term borrowing costs higher still. The cost of keeping the system running is rising at the same time as the system itself becomes more uncertain.
Put these signals together and a pattern emerges. When the system is stressed, it behaves as built and the house hydrocarbons built still runs on coal, oil and gas.
That reality should shape Australia’s response. We should use every resource at our disposal to secure our independence in liquid fuels and all other sources of power. We should be truly energy agnostic. Coal, gas, oil, uranium, wind, solar and batteries all have a role to play and we should aim to become an energy superpower.
The Gulf states understood this decades ago. They did not just extract hydrocarbons. They built the industries that flow from them, from plastics to fertilisers, from petrochemicals to pharmaceuticals. They captured value across the entire chain.
Australia could do the same. We could power energy-intensive industries. We could host the data centres that will drive the next wave of artificial intelligence. We could secure our own future while helping to fill the hydrocarbon deficit now emerging in the global system.
That requires a shift in thinking. It requires us to see energy not as a carbon-emitting liability to be managed but as a strategic asset to be developed. The lesson from this crisis is that security is essential and energy security underpins economic and national security. No fuel, no future.
A ship bearing the name Canberra escorting the last minesweepers out of the Gulf is a snapshot of an era when the world was governed by American power and a network of alliances.
That era has passed. Now we endeavour to chart our own future or live in a world where hostile states determine it for us. We are not powerless unless we choose to ignore the power beneath our feet.

And here we are, and what can be done to Gaza can be done to the world ...

And now back to the matter of Ben Roberts-Smith.

Any number of reptiles splashed in this water, but the pond had to send a couple to the intermittent archive, so many there were ... (both intermittent archive links)

The BRS case has been troubling from the start
Poor bugger, Ben Roberts-Smith. The decorated soldier stands no chance.
By Noel Pearson

Anzac’s tragic irony: Diggers face prosecution as their enemies walk free
As Anzac Day approaches, a profound paradox haunts Australia’s war heroes: justice pursued for some, while others walk free.
By Joel Fitzgibbon

A reminder: on the balance of probabilities, Ben Roberts-Smith was found guilty of war crimes, so Noel and Joel are going out of their way to defend the right to commit war crimes ...

It's easy to see why the pond decided to cut Noel and Joel short.

The pond has never been big on war crimes or war criminals, or their talk ...

Reluctantly the pond must concede that the hive mind is not entirely monolithic.

This came via the venerable Beade in the Weekly Beast last Friday: Andrew Bolt swims against News Corp tide on Ben Roberts-Smith prosecution:

Occasionally the Murdoch commentator Andrew Bolt defies the party line. In 2021 he said News Corp Australia’s editorial campaign for net zero emissions by 2050 was “rubbish” and “global warming propaganda”.
This week Bolt stuck his neck out in support of the war crimes prosecution of Ben Roberts-Smith, in a marked departure from News Corp’s approach since 2018, when the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald published a series of stories alleging the Victoria Cross recipient had committed murder and other war crimes.
“I have a simple question for the people angrily defending Ben Roberts-Smith, claiming a war hero is being persecuted by woke civilians judging soldiers in battle from the comfort of their sofas,” Bolt wrote in his Herald Sun column. “Do you think Australian soldiers should be allowed to shoot unarmed prisoners?”
Reporters Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters have had to contend with multiple attacks on their journalism in News Corp pages.
In 2018 Roberts-Smith hired a PR firm and the investigative reporter Ross Coulthart as a consultant, and the Weekend Australian gave him a favourable sit-down interview, accompanied by photos of Roberts-Smith with his then wife Emma.
The former soldier claimed in a front-page story run by the national broadsheet that the stories were “demonstrably false’’.
“Nine has accused me of murder,” he said. “Frankly, it is time for their journalists to put up their evidence or admit they have none.”
As recently as May last year McKenzie was subjected to accusations on Sky News Australia that he had been “caught on secret tapes” acting unethically. Roberts-Smith’s application to reopen the appeal over the recording was rejected.
In his 2023 book Flawed Hero: Truth, Lies and War Crimes, Masters wrote: “I do not buy The Australian. It makes me sick.”

The lizard Oz makes the pond sick, but the pond doesn't buy it. Instead the pond confesses to a morbid fascination, a deep masochism, a wilful sickness.

After Joel's and Noel's attempts at FUD then comes a remarkable challenge. Could Our Henry sound more depraved than the Bolter?

Oh there's much more humbug on offer, much more of a word salad of pompous ancient references, but line him up and you could find him in the Nuremberg trials on the wrong side.

The pond discovered this because the reptiles offered a weekend special bonus Our Henry, with the hole in bucket repair man all in on war crimes and war criminals ... understandable enough when you remember that war criminal Benji is one of his heroes:

The header: Both great and terrible things happen in combat — that’s the hard truth; The laws we expect our soldiers to obey are increasingly at odds with the grim realities of modern armed conflict.

The reptiles left out any credit for that triptych and once again they muffed the chance to feature a different view, though they had these snaps in their archive ...

By golly, there are war crimes and then there are dress code violations...

On with Our Henry, and this day is rolled gold Henry, a reversion to the good old days. (Rolled gold might just be a thin coating, but who thought Our Henry was deep?)

Yes, it's peak Henry, it's fully certified Thucydides ...

War, said Thucydides, is the cruellest teacher – and what it teaches is cruelty. A former Athenian general, Thucydides was a hard man, neck-deep in the human condition as it is, rather than as it could be.
To know life, he wrote, is to know that war is not just ineradicable but at times necessary – for other than the credible threat of violence, little can deter the bad from crushing the good.
And victory, he cautioned, goes only to those who are immune to “expensive hope” – mankind’s habit of “carelessly longing for what it desires, using sovereign reason to thrust aside what it does not fancy”. Prudent without being timorous, they are the few who combine an acute awareness of danger with the capacity for resolute action, instinctively performing deeds of valour when others would be frozen by doubt.
Thucydides’ reflections – shaped by both a clear-eyed sympathy for war’s victims and a genuine admiration for those who put their lives at risk on their fellow citizens’ behalf – are worth recalling as Australians consider the charges against Ben Roberts-Smith. They bring into view dilemmas as old as organised violence itself.
Some points are clear. To kill prisoners in cold blood is completely indefensible: the refusal to do so is one of the marks by which civilisation distinguishes itself from barbarism. But clarity at that margin does not resolve the harder question: how norms are to be sustained when confronting adversaries who reject them altogether.
The rules of war and a collapse into savagery
The idea that those adversaries should benefit from the protections the norms afford is a very recent one. The Greeks, for example, developed elaborate rules of war that were intended to ensure the clash of arms remained governed by reason rather than naked fury. Yet they never supposed that the restraints on the conduct of battle bound all alike.
It is therefore unsurprising that when Plato suggested, in The Laws, that Athens should apply the same constraints to wars with barbarians that applied to those with Greeks, his proposal was ridiculed as utterly naive.

There's an incredible amount of humbug at play here. After all US submariners cheerfully left Iranian sailors to die, with the full throated support of war criminal Pete Kegsbreath, and no reptile has said boo to that barbaric goose.

And by reverting to ancient times, Our Henry manages to skirt around the Nuremberg trials and the Geneva Conventions that arose from the second world war, and which were designed to stop the appalling behaviour of war criminals committing war crimes.

But apologists will always find a way to skirt the rules and find their heroes ...

Then-SAS Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith on a tour of duty in Afghanistan with the Australian Special Operations Task Group in 2010. Roberts-Smith was awarded a Victoria Cross for saving the lives of wounded comrades in battle.

The pond is quite ready to believe that Roberts-Smith will get off, on the basis of the many attempts to influence the court in his behaviour even before the trial begins, and on the basis of the many filthy rich and influential people backing his cause. and not least because the likes of Our Henry are keen to discover a keen philosophical basis for war criminality ... but no matter what, on the balance of probabilities, a court has already found him guilty of war crimes ...

Nor, centuries later, did the rules of chivalry extend to those who had not sworn to uphold them. In practice, their protections were confined to the knightly class – those able, if wronged, to invoke enforcement by a Christian prince. And there is little evidence that chivalry’s rules were observed in the Crusades – no more by the Crusaders than by their Muslim adversaries.
The collapse, in the late 16th century, of the norms of chivalry – and the descent of warfare into savagery during the Wars of Religion – prompted a reformulation of the laws of war by Enlightenment jurists. Like their predecessors, however, they did not contend that the restraints they formulated could or should bear on conflicts with adversaries who rejected them altogether.
Thus, German philosopher Christian Wolff, who introduced the distinction between combatants and non-combatants in his 1749 treatise on the Law of Nations, emphasised that the distinction could be sustained only if the combatants on each side clearly demarcated themselves from their civilian counterparts; adversaries who didn’t were no better than pirates and deserved to be erased from the face of the Earth.
Retired Special Forces Major Heston Russell discusses the recent arrest of Ben Roberts-Smith and calls out the media for the “dramatic" way in which he was detained.
So too Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel, whose Law of Nations (1758) is often treated as a foundation of modern international law. Of those guilty of “enormous breaches of the law of nations” – such as hiding behind civilians – he wrote: “Enemies of the human race, who injure all nations by trampling underfoot the foundations of humanity’s common safety, they must be refused any quarter.”
The St Petersburg Declaration
When international lawyers began to translate the evolving norms into binding instruments – starting with the St Petersburg Declaration of 1868 – it was widely assumed, if not always stated, that they applied only within the “family of nations”: the states whose “government is sufficiently stable to undertake binding commitments under international law”, including as to the conduct of war.
But the catastrophes of the two world wars brought an immense expansion and a universalisation of the restraints the laws of war imposed. Driven in part by humanitarian impulse, in part by revulsion at the scale of the slaughter, and in part by the utopian belief that rationally constructed rules – enforced through international institutions – could tame the furies of war, increasingly stringent obligations were imposed on the deployment of armed force.

It goes without saying that Our Henry is inclined to the furies of war, and almost goes full Taliban ... Taliban fighters stand guard near the Torkham border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Nangarhar province.

But then Our Henry is devoted to Benji, as big a war criminal as can be found, up there with the mad Mullahs, so the hole in bucket man knows he must make sure to dehumanise any victims of unlawful violence ...

And it was, for the first time, unambiguously asserted that the obligations were binding in all conflicts, even against adversaries who blatantly ignored them.
Reality, however, has borne no relationship to the soaring aspirations that inspired those changes. States that take the rules seriously have rarely, if ever, fought one another. Instead, their soldiers have confronted enemies prepared to use any means available in their quest for victory – including by exploiting the protections the laws of war afford. In the fog of battle, where decisions are made in an instant and often at the edge of survival, the apparent clarity of intricate rules has repeatedly proven to be illusory.
Assuming the worst of our soldiers
To make things worse, terrorists and their supporters have increasingly levelled claims of violations without any credible evidence, propagating them so as to demonise their opponents, drive them into undue caution and secure a decisive operational advantage – the reckless allegations by Hamas’s supporters against Israel being merely the latest case in point.

Just to add to the emotional balance, the reptiles threw in a snap designed to stir the hive mind ... Palestinian militants drive back to the Gaza Strip with the body of Shani Louk, a German-Israeli dual citizen, after kidnapping her from Israel’s Nova music festival on October 7, 2023.

And so to a final exhortation to allow the right to commit war crimes to continue unhindered, at least if you're supposed to be a goodie:

The result has been to politicise the processes by which those claims are debated, undermining objectivity in their assessment and inducing a rush to judgment – not least about Roberts-Smith.
On one side, “progressives”, deeply hostile to the culture and ethos of the military – especially its elite units – are quick to assume the worst of our soldiers. On the other, conservatives, appalled by what they see as a collapse of loyalty and the refusal to acknowledge the burdens borne by those who fight on Australia’s behalf, are equally quick to insist that whatever our troops have done must be defended.
That polarisation has been exacerbated by the shabby treatment of the units concerned – including investigatory delays that are, in themselves, absolutely inexcusable – deepening the anger conservatives feel at the sanctimony of their opponents.
Whatever the causes of those delays, it is now reasonable to wonder whether Roberts-Smith can, after so many years and with Afghanistan firmly in the Taliban’s grip, receive a fair trial. Nonetheless, a trial there will be; and it will need to be judged on its merits, as will Roberts-Smith, taking account of the circumstances in which the alleged events occurred and the overwhelming pressures those circumstances create.
The Greeks placed their rules of war under the patronage of Athena, the goddess not of fury but of discipline. They knew, however, that the god Ares, a “bloodthirsty marauder” (as Homer called him) who haunted the field of battle, could seize the mind of even the finest warriors – as he did in propelling Achilles’ murderous instincts, Ajax’s rage and the savage outbursts of Ulysses.
That both great things and terrible things are done in combat is a fact as old as mankind. Even so, the focus there will quite properly be on this trial should not blind us to the larger truth: that the laws we expect our soldiers to obey are increasingly at odds with the grim realities of armed conflict.
Thucydides described the suffering war inflicts as “meizo e kata dacrya”: too great to be measured by tears. And as its horrors stripped away the veneer of civilised morality, even the gods were driven to weep. While retaining and preserving our values, we should ensure we do not impose more suffering on our fighting men and women than realism, reason and prudence demand.

And there you have it.

A double Thucydides bunger, with Our Henry fully down with the grim realities of armed conflict.

Murder an unarmed civilian, take off his prosthetic leg and drink from it, perhaps toasting Our Henry for his splendid philosophical insights?

Sure thing ... it's the dinkum Our Henry way ...

Altar wine lifts fragile Xian spirits, and every Xian loves a good teleportation story ... it also shows the spirits at work ...

Finally the pond has problems with Wolff, but not as many as Melania has ...

In which the bromancer continues his decline, while the dog botherer and Lloydie of the Amazon do bog standard News Corp denialism ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 21:44:00 +0000

The big question to be sorted this morning: given the infallibly stupid suggestion by the onion muncher that we join mad King Donald in his crusade (a subsidiary to sociopathic Benji's quest for a greater Israel), how does the bromancer feel about the venture? And what's he thinking about his best bro?

The headline didn't make the pond feel that comfortable about the direction the bromancer might be heading ...

The header: Donald Trump’s wild talk is destroying vital US alliances; America has been at the heart of Australia’s security and national identity for more than 100 years. Now all that is under threat.

The caption for a snap which didn't feature either bunny or an autopen: President Donald Trump speaks during the White House Easter Egg Roll in Washington. Picture: AP

A subsidiary question might concern the authoritarian dictator Viktor Orbán - what does the bromancer think about his best bro's lickspittle fawning devotion to the Putin puppet?

Will the bromancer take a stand if Orbán, whatever the result, however much election stacking has gone down, refuses to walk off into the night? Will he celebrate with the onion muncher, and couch-molester JD if Orbán stays the course?

But the pond isn't greedy.

An answer to the big question will suffice ...and it took five minutes for the bromancer of yabbering around the point for the pond to realise that maybe the bromancer wasn't entirely up for a middle east adventure with mad King Donald...

Australia’s security alliance with the US is not only the beating heart of our national security. It’s fundamental to our national identity, in a way that’s little understood today.
The influence of the US on Australia over the past century is far greater than Britain’s, culturally, militarily, inspirationally, in every way.
In the age of Donald Trump that whole complex web of institutional, cultural, military and social dynamics is suddenly under threat. In recent months, Trump’s wild, often bizarre and ridiculous statements have done more to damage the structure of US alliances than any modern president.
Anthony Albanese has responded essentially by making a token military deployment, otherwise hoping not to be noticed. It’s not the worst possible policy option but it’s not much.
In responding to the Trump effect, Australia shouldn’t panic. But autopilot isn’t good enough either.
Nobody really knows how the Iran ceasefire will work out. If Trump achieves free passage in the Strait of Hormuz, gets his hands on Iran’s 60 per cent enriched uranium or the regime collapses, history may forgive bizarre presidential statements. But if the Iranian regime survives, keeps its enriched uranium and control of the strait – the situation today – that’s a bad defeat, made much worse by Trump’s personal behaviour.

The pond should interrupt at this point to note that the reptiles didn't break up the bromancer's words with illustrations or AV distractions.

And this is about as close to answering the big question that the bromancer gets.

Apparently he couldn't bring himself to completely break in public with the onion muncher, his very best bro - but his devotion to the cause of mad King Donald is clearly waning ...

It’s no longer any good concentrating on Trump’s actions rather than his words. His words now have strategic effects that damage US alliances, US capabilities and Australian security. How we respond to this new and ugly reality is challenging.
Trump has said repeatedly he may leave NATO, thereby already damaging US alliance credibility. He has accused NATO allies of doing nothing to help the US and said he might punish selected NATO countries. Trump is simply lying about all this. Britain, Portugal, Germany and Italy have allowed substantial US access to bases on their soil, France more restricted access, while Spain has been worst. Greece provided refuelling and resupply for US aircraft carriers involved in the Iran war. Some European countries, France and Britain among them, have sent military forces to the Middle East to help secure Gulf Arab nations that are US allies.
Australia, similarly, sent an AWAC Wedgetail intelligence and control aircraft to the United Arab Emirates. The intelligence it gathers is shared with the US.
Trump abuses allies, including Australia, for not sending ships to the Strait of Hormuz, but the US itself escorts no ships in the strait and has advanced no specific military plan regarding it.
Trump is scapegoating allies for his own chaotic mismanagement of the politics and diplomacy of the war. It’s crude and irresponsible.
Not only that, Trump has also said he would bomb Iranian desalination plants and destroy every single electricity generating plant in Iran, as well as “ending” the Iranian civilisation, presumably through strategic bombing. Those would all be explicit war crimes. It’s impossible for any European or Australian leader to support those missions, even if Trump finally never went through with them.
He has announced countless deadlines, then ignored them. Much that he says never happens. But a more rational president would have enjoyed much more allied support. The American military furnished Trump a much more limited list of potential energy targets in Iran, all of which had explicit military roles. They reject Trump’s fantasies too.
Trump previously threatened to invade Greenland, the sovereign territory of a NATO ally. He also makes offensive remarks about the wife of French President Emmanuel Macron. There’s no universe in which any of this is funny, clever or beneficial to anybody.
Should Australia reconsider commitment to the US alliance? The answer’s no, because the alliance serves our interests and historically served our values.
Trump has no mandate to wreck the institutions he’s so careless of. It’s popular in the US to want allies to do more, it’s not popular to destroy US alliances. Six European nations already spend a higher percentage of their GNP on defence than the US does and all are doing more. We too should do much more in our own interests.

It's hardly a ringing endorsement of the onion muncher's proposal we join mad King Donald's crusade, and it then became apparent that the bromancer was in a state of mourning.

All he could do was take a walk down memory lane, celebrating the good days.

It got so teary and sentimental, so Banjo, that the pond almost felt the need to send a box of tissues to Surrey Hills by courier ...

No nation, not even Canada, has had the US so much at the heart of its national life as Australia has. From the very first, America inhabited our imagination and fired our dreams. In 1901 the states federated to become a nation for national security, so Australia could secure possession of this continent. Our Constitution was a mix of British and US influences. Federalism and the Senate followed US models.
Quickly, Australian leaders worked to draw the US into our security. Alfred Deakin, our most brilliant and complex prime minister, defied British instruction, and Winston Churchill’s vigorous opposition, to invite US president Teddy Roosevelt to send the Great White Fleet to Australia in 1908. Deakin already worried about Japanese military power. The fleet got a fantastic, rapturous public welcome that led Roosevelt, who incidentally loved Banjo Paterson’s ballads, to declare: “I have a hearty … admiration for Australia and I believe America should be ready to stand back of Australia in any serious emergency.”
When American troops first entered World War I, they did so under the command of John Monash, our greatest general. In the darkest days of World War II, prime minister John Curtin famously declared: “Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links of kinship with the United Kingdom.”
After World War II, Labor in government tried unsuccessfully to get a security treaty with the US. In June 1950, Percy Spender, foreign minister in Robert Menzies’ government, got word that Britain was planning to send ground troops to help the US in the Korean war. Spender, like Deakin, had visited the US before he ever went to Britain and was fired with American ambition. Menzies was on a ship travelling from Britain to the US. Spender was so conscious of the strategic importance of the relationship with Washington that, in Menzies’ absence, he forced acting prime minister Arthur Fadden to declare, before Britain, that Australia would send troops to Korea.
This brought Australia credit for being the first to come to the side of the US in battle. This was crucial in 1951 when Spender came to sell, almost single-handedly, what became the ANZUS Treaty to US president Harry Truman, who had fought beside Australians in the first world war.
Australia later became a key member of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance with the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand. Under John Howard and George W. Bush the alliance achieved the greatest intimacy it has ever enjoyed, then or since. Canberra secured unparalleled access to US intelligence and decision-making.
Now there are Australian service personnel throughout the US system and Americans in our system, which makes the story that Australian servicemen on a US submarine retired to their bunks when that sub sank an Iranian ship near Sri Lanka utterly bizarre. Cross-crewing is about increasing capability. That’s not possible if you’re scared to fight.

Or maybe they avoided participating in a war crime?

Never mind, there's still a lingering war monger in the bromancer.

That must have perked up the onion muncher, though the bromancer was keen to deny he was a servile lickspittle like his best buddy bro...

The US is by far the greatest cultural influence on Australia, much more so than Britain. Conversely, our influence with the US is part of our influence with other nations. None of this makes Australia servile. Canberra gets immense benefits from the alliance but disagrees with Washington when necessary.
The US is a modern universal. Many nations define themselves in part by their relationship with the US. But even the most pro-alliance politicians must deal with Trumpian reality and thus sometimes publicly disagree with Trump. But the Trump presidency will pass. We need to influence it where we can, and ensure alliance structures and institutions survive intact, at a time when Trump’s negative genius has made it intensely unfashionable to defend.
This requires from our political class moral leadership, greater national self-reliance, nuance, a grasp of history, dynamism, agency, integrated strategy, a focus on our core national interests. Any takers?
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

Here you go, here's a taker, just the man, thick as a brick and ready to serve ...(warning, News Corp link)

What a chance to join the victory parade ...

And so to the dog botherer, and the pond had serious qualms of conscience.

How could the pond serve up yet again a load of dog botherer climate science denying, renewables bashing bollocks?

Sadly the reptiles keep doing it, and so must the pond.

The header: How the green energy dream became a civilisational crisis; As we ignore the engineering of coal and nuclear, our economy is paying the ultimate price for political virtue signaling. (sic)

Say what? No credit for the singular collage which manages to feature Satan's little helper, wretched solar panels and terrifying whale-killing windmills? Apparently so ... perhaps AI is a modest little helper and needs to credit for destroying the last remaining shreds of what was once a proud graphics department.

As for the dog botherer, it was a tedious five minute outing, but as usual the pond could seize the chance and use the outing as an excuse to note some alternative worlds ...

Red List alarm: Emperor penguins, Antarctic fur seals 'Endangered'

The emperor penguin and Antarctic fur seal have both been uplisted to Endangered on the IUCN Red List, as scientists warn that melting sea-ice and warming oceans are reshaping life at the bottom of the world.
Antarctica has long been a place apart – a place where life endures against extraordinary odds. But the latest update to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species signals that even the continent’s most iconic inhabitants are losing their battle with a rapidly changing climate.
The emperor penguin, long considered a symbol of Antarctic resilience, has been uplisted from Near Threatened to Endangered. Satellite data reveals that the species lost around 10% of its population between 2009 and 2018 alone – more than 20,000 adult birds. The primary culprit is the early break-up of fast ice, the coastal and grounded sea-ice upon which emperor penguins depend for raising chicks and moulting.

Fiddle-faddle, what does the dog botherer care about that sort of hysteria?

We are a country convulsed by fuel anxiety; distressed about housing affordability; hampered by electricity prices, the demise of manufacturing and poor productivity; burdened by debt and deficit; and worried about our capacity to improve any of this while dealing with record immigration. We are a strong and significant nation made vulnerable.
Rich in energy resources, we are enduring crises in supply and affordability for electricity and liquid fuels. A world-leading exporter of coal, gas and uranium, we are trying to wean ourselves off the hydrocarbons and refuse to use nuclear power.
It is time to observe what we have done and where we are heading. It is time to make the calculations about economics, engineering, environment and politics.
Decades of warnings about national energy self-harm have been ignored. South Australia provided the test case, shutting down coal-fired generation and its only coalmine so that it became the canary without a coalmine.
Governments ignored predictions this would make it dangerously dependent on electricity brought overland from Victoria and a decade ago, when a storm took down some transmission lines and wind farms dropped offline, the interconnector failed and the state went dark for the first time. In response, the government imported $600m worth of diesel generators for emergency back-up.
The state has the nation’s highest penetration of renewable energy, most expensive electricity and least reliable supplies. But politicians around the country – state, federal, Labor, Liberal, Green and teal – are in denial about causal links.

As always, the reptiles made sure there was a snap of Satan's little solar panel helper, and Satan himself, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen during a visit to the Ampol Lytton refinery in Brisbane. Picture: NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

This is the sort of rant where the dog botherer rails at the 'leets, apparently unaware of his own position as a member of the News Corp/Sky Noise down under 'leet squad (still no rebrand?):

Other states pursue the same strategy and even the pro-renewables Australian Energy Market Operator has intervened to keep significant coal generators going to guarantee supplies. Taxpayers subsidises renewable energy to force coal generation out, then subsidise coal generation to insure against unreliable renewables, and subsidies also go to consumers and industries so they can survive record power costs.
This is all as absurd and macabre as a David Lynch film. All our energy problems are predictable and self-generated (pun intended), yet we have refused to learn any lessons.
We are led, like lemmings, by politicians and bureaucrats convinced they are leaping into a green energy future. They tell us Australia will be a “renewable energy superpower”, which sounds about as likely as a balsa wood aircraft carrier; they even talk about “reliable renewables”, a phrase that renders satire redundant.
Our governing elites are loath to confess the total cost of their unnecessary renewable energy experiment, but with the help of artificial intelligence we can ascertain that in the past 25 years the federal government has spent at least $150bn, with the states adding about half that again. On top of that there is more than $100bn and growing of private investment that will all be recouped with margins from consumers.
The opportunity cost of all this is difficult to quantify. It has added to debt, inflation and taxation pressures; it has taken people, investment and resources from more productive pursuits; it has baked in added cost pressures for business and industry; it has alienated land; and it has not produced any material benefit for the nation or the environment.

Nothing new here and for that the pond apologises, and the reptiles must also have felt the emptiness because they offered an audio distraction...

Luckily the pond just has to note the distraction - screen caps don't play - and press on ...

To justify this economic madness, politicians and media deliberately conflate normal weather extremes with “dangerous climate change” to fuel an alarmist narrative. Children are indoctrinated with the same catastrophism as floods, fires, droughts and heatwaves are described as “unprecedented” when a simple check of the record exposes the ruse.
I have detailed examples in these pages relating to floods, fires and maximum temperatures. The facts are not rebutted, just ignored in favour of the hysterical narrative.
Our temporary predicament over liquid fuels must be a turning point in our debate. In their green frenzy governments have forgotten the basics and left us exposed, and the fragility of our petrol and diesel dependence will be sorely exposed if we ever see conflict in the East Asia region.

He's detailed the facts? He's done a Sgt Joe Friday?

Could the pond help a little? Per the Graudian:

US had hottest March on record as nation faced ‘unprecedented’ heat
The continental US registered its most abnormally hot month in 132 years of records, according to Noaa data

March’s persistent unseasonable heat was so intense that the continental United States registered its most abnormally hot month in 132 years of records, according to federal weather data. And the next year or so looks to turn the dial up on global warmth even more, as some forecasts predict a brewing El Niño will reach super strength.
Not only was it the hottest March on record for the US but the amount it was above normal beat any other month in history for the lower 48 states. March’s average temperature of 50.85F(10.47C) was 9.35F (5.19C) above the 20th-century normal for March.
That easily passed the old record of 8.9F set in March 2012 as the most abnormally hot month on record – regardless of the month of the year – according to records released on Wednesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).
Nationals Leader Matt Canavan claims the Labor government is “addicted to the status quo” with their clean energy projects. “We’re losing our country, losing it down the drain,” Mr Canavan told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “They’re not willing to make any changes; they think we should do more of the same, which has got us in this mess.”

And so on, and at this point the reptiles recycled snaps of their bog standard villains ...

Teal MP Allegra Spender Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman; Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Picture: NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

The dog botherer remained all in on fossilised fools...

We are reminded of the centrality of liquid fossil fuels in our lives. Remedies bandied about by the likes of teal MP Allegra Spender and Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen are alarming in their green inanity.
If we all drove electric cars, they suggest, none of this would be a problem. Except we would also need to electrify delivery trucks, long-distance transport, combine harvesters, aviation, tractors, our defence forces, pumps, excavators, cranes and you name it, even SA’s back-up generators.
Like all modern economies, we run on electricity and transport. Two-thirds or more of both come from fossil fuels.
Speaking to true believers at The Guardian last week Bowen wanted everyone to think he was as clever as his own self-assessment. “You know, the sun has to travel 150 million kilometres to get to the Earth but it does not have to travel the 150km that are the Straits of Hormuz,” he said, proving the Seinfeld dictum that smugness is not a good quality.

At this point the reptiles decided to double down, on the basis that you can never have enough dog bothering in a day, so why not an AV featuring yet more dog botherer ...

Sky News host Chris Kenny says the ceasefire between the US and Iran “remains in place”. Mr Kenny said, despite the ceasefire, ships in the Strait of Hormuz are “at a standstill”. “After conflicting reports about the passage reopening and then closing again.”

The dog botherer kept making wiled-eyed claims ... with a tangy hint of the reptiles' war with China by Xmas...

“So it is ours, and the wind can’t be sanctioned, and Vladimir Putin cannot, you know, prohibit the export of renewable energy from his country, because it’s directly ours,” explained Bowen, claiming that renewables deliver “secure” energy. The entire problem with renewable energy (apart from demanding vast expanses of land to host kit and connection) is the lack of security – it is intermittent, unreliable and prohibitively difficult and expensive to store in necessary quantities.
Even Bowen’s point about sovereign independence is ridiculous given we purchase most of our solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, EVs and appliances from China. The communist giant manufactures much of this with our natural resources and could cut us off on a whim.
We have exported our jobs, emissions and self-reliance in pursuit of foolish emissions reduction goals that much larger countries, such as China, are not meeting, which means global emissions are rising and our efforts are redundant. We lose, there is no environmental benefit and China flourishes. Never before has a sovereign nation inflicted so much pain on itself to provide no net benefit, except to rival nations. Green genius.
Climate alarmists have talked up tipping points for decades, points at which the destruction of life as we know it would be unstoppable.

Just to reassure the hive mind, the reptiles introduced snaps of demons who always get it wrong, unlike the infallible dog botherer ... Tipping points predicted by luminaries like King Charles and Greta Thunberg have come and gone. Picture: Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images; Greta Thunberg. Picture: Martin Sylvest / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP

Hey ho, on we go ...

Surely our current malaise should be a reverse tipping point. It must be time to conclude that the single worst policy decision in our nation’s history and the most detrimental current setting is the commitment to net zero.
There is no benefit, only huge costs. There is generational pain but no gain.
Our political debate, education system, corporate world and media zeitgeist are caught up in a feedback loop of climate catastrophism, virtue signalling and self-flagellation that has undermined the fundamentals of our economic and intellectual success. This is far broader and deeper than an energy crisis, this is a civilisational crisis – which is unsurprising, I guess, when you consider that it is the provision of reliable and affordable energy that has triggered the prosperity and innovation at the heart of Western civilisation.
Yet we get this from Bowen: “I think potentially that this is an important moment to really double down on the argument that renewable energy is lower emissions, cheap and sovereign and secure.” This is national vandalism.

Relax, there's a new hero for our troubled times, and it's the "coal that batters" man, and he's in congress with the dog botherer on Sky Noise down under (wot, still no rebrand?) ...

Nationals Leader Matt Canavan claims the Labor government is “addicted to the status quo” with their clean energy projects. “We’re losing our country, losing it down the drain,” Mr Canavan told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “They’re not willing to make any changes; they think we should do more of the same, which has got us in this mess.”

It was all the way with the Canavan caravan ...

Nationals leader Matt Canavan addressed reality at the National Press Club on Wednesday: “To recapture our sovereign capability, we’ve got to end this net-zero madness,” he said. “We’ve got to invest again in all types of energy, including coal, oil, gas and nuclear.” That this is viewed as a politically challenging proposition shows how far we have strayed.
If there is one overriding reason our economy, budgets, prosperity, productivity, education, innovation and public debate are in a mess, it is our irrational subservience to pointless UN net-zero goals. It is also a major reason that about half of all Coalition voters have switched to One Nation.
The Liberals need to wake up to this before their polling hits net zero.

The pond at this point would like to note the dog botherer's uncanny resemblance to the worst of MAGA, with this in the Graudian ...

Trump’s EPA chief Zeldin gives keynote speech at climate-denying group’s event
Lee Zeldin opens conference for Heartland Institute, which once compared climate advocates to the Unabomber

“No longer are we going to rely on bad, flawed assumptions instead of accurate, present-day facts, without apology or regret,” Zeldin said at the Heartland Institute’s conference on climate change in Washington DC, referring to well-established climate science.
Zeldin has been widely criticized by climate experts. Last month, more than 160 environmental and public health organizations called for him to resign or be fired, saying no EPA administrator in history “has so brazenly betrayed the agency’s core mission”.
In his speech, Zeldin poked fun at the media for calling him “controversial” for not “following blind obedience to whatever the dire, doom and gloom position of the day is from John Kerry or Al Gore or AOC” – referring to the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“It’s controversial that we won’t sign up for the script that the world is imminently about to end,” he said.
He derided previous administrations’ heeding of climate scientists’ warnings about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions, and for ignoring “what’s good and necessary about carbon dioxide for the life of the planet”.
“What happened for years and decades in this country is that the elite, the ruling class, the people who would run the agencies, the people who have decided that they are in charge of the science, the politicians, the biggest grifters: there would be a cabal that would decide exactly which model is the chosen model, which methodology is the higher methodology,” he said. “And if all of you in this room, if any of you in this room dare to challenge any of that, well shame on you.”

This is where News Corp has helped take the world, to the outer edge of madness and self-inflicted wounds, with one of their favourite denialists featured ...

Another report author, Judith Curry – a climatologist who rails against climate “alarmism” – criticized the “monolithic consensus” on climate science that is “presented to the world”. Though the US government disbanded the group which produced the controversial report on the endangerment finding, Curry said the authors were currently reviewing comments on the report and preparing a new version to release this year.
Earlier on Wednesday morning, the Heartland Institute’s president, James Taylor, kicked off the conference with a rousing speech in which he invoked the debunked climate myth that increased carbon emissions are good for plants: “Restoring CO2 and restoring warmth to our world is … a restoration to more ideal conditions,” he said.
“The truth is clear: there is no climate crisis,” said Taylor. “The science is very clear.”

Many truths seem clearer by the day ...

At this point the pond looked around at the alternatives for a bonus but came up short.

Dame Slap is now faraway on her own planet above the magic faraway tree ...

Lived experience’ – the new CV must-have
Merit is being sidelined. In a new era of identity-driven hiring, a personal diagnosis is becoming more valuable than a professional degree.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

With the intermittent archive briefly working, the pond sent Dame Slap there.

This was such a weird retreat away from her climate-science denialist, MAGA cap donning days that for a minute the pond thought it might have some weird anthropological appeal.

But it was simply too arcane, too fluff-gathering and navel-gazing, too deeply Freudian.

The best the pond could do was a teaser trailer for her offering.

Tonly thing of interest there the way that these days the reptiles often don't credit anyone for the wretched collages at the start of their pieces, perhaps because 'no credit' allows members of the graphics department to walk freely in public:

Dame Slap is now about as far out there as Melania has been these past few days ...

The pond decided it was better to be in for a climate science penny, in for a global warming pound with Lloydie of the Amazon ... and with that immortal Rowe in mind, settled for a good screaming:

What cunning wording, and yet what did "the great climate retreat" mean?

Was the climate in retreat? Or was it simply that News Corp's denialism was ascendant?

The header: NASA cools on Earth’s climate for a new moon shot; The Trump administration is freezing out global warming research and is returning focus to the space race.

The caption for the space ship: Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch looks back at Earth through the window of the Orion spacecraft on April 2, 2026. Picture: ANSA via AP

Lloydie of the Amazon seemed remarkably pleased at the work of mad King Donald and his minions:

The Trump administration is freezing out global warming research and is returning focus to the space race.
Donald Trump has put NASA back into the space race with the Artemis II flight to the dark side of the moon and back, but NASA scientists focused on planet Earth have found themselves in the climate change deep freeze.
It is all part of a comprehensive shift in priorities for NASA as the US under Trump withdraws from the international co-operations that have spent decades warning of the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the Earth’s climate.
This includes a US exit from the Paris Agreement, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The fruits of Trump’s new priorities are coming into season. Some are sweet, such as the success of Artemis II, while others are delivering a sour punch to scientists around the world.

A sour punch? Oh surely not ... after all, as Uncle Leon has suggested, the 'leets will need to flee a ruined earth for la dolce vita on Mars - the pond understands from the movies that you can terraform a planet in nanoseconds, see Total Recall - and these are just the first baby steps ...

Stunning images captured by NASA’s Artemis II crew on Monday, April 6, show a view of the Earth from the far side of the moon. At 1:57 pm EDT on Monday, the Artemis II crew broke the record set by Apollo 13 in 1970 as their Orion spacecraft reached the far side of the moon, placing them at 252,756 miles from Earth. Credit: NASA via Storyful

It was grand days for News Corp inspired ludditism ...

The Trump administration is dismantling the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, long considered the crown jewel in the US’s Earth science infrastructure but decried by the Trump White House as “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country”. Vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.
With the US turning off the funding tap, the IPCC is in financial crisis. The IPCC secretariat told a meeting of member nations in Thailand in March that in 2024 and 2025 expenditures from the IPCC Trust Fund exceeded contributions.
It said based on the current trajectory, the IPCC’s cash balance will be fully depleted by the end of 2028. And that without a substantial increase in contributions, significant annual deficits will persist and jeopardise the completion of the highly anticipated IPCC update of the state of climate science known as AR7 – Assessment Report Seven.
Turning off the climate funding tap
The most recent document, AR6, was released in 2023 but the IPCC can’t agree on a timeline for when AR7 will be ready for policymakers. Reports typically are released every five to seven years.
A lot of the concerns have to do with funding, made more acute by the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw. According to Politico, the US gave about $US1.8m to the IPCC in 2024, more by far than the other 34 countries and organisations that contributed to the group. Germany, the second largest donor, gave $US383,000.
The Biden administration represented a peak in funding for the IPCC, which is now being forced to ask other donors for more money to replace what has been lost from the US. The secretariat has suggested three options: higher contributions to equal expenditure; contributions at the minimum level to complete AR7; or the status quo, which would result in “severe spending cuts with fully virtual operations and the suspension of multiple activities”.
For advice on what this looks like, climate scientists need go no further than NASA. The impact of NASA’s withdrawal from taking a lead in climate change research and advocacy is on full display. The agency sparked concern in January when it released its benchmark annual report on global temperatures without making any mention of climate change, emissions, fossil fuels or the term global warming.
This compares with earlier reports where NASA explicitly said: “This global warming has been caused by human activities.” Previously, NASA also has linked increased temperatures to extreme weather events such as heatwaves, wildfires, “intense” rainfall and flooding. But not this year.

For some peculiar reason, the reptiles decided to slip in a disaster ... A wildfire in Pumarejo de Tera near Zamora, northern Spain.

Odd, that's the very same snap the Beeb used in noting a link to climate change ...

Never mind, nothing is happening, it's all good, the dog botherer has spoken, and Lloydie of the Amazon is on hand to celebrate News Corp inspired Ludditism ...

The January 2026 release said: “Earth’s global surface temperature in 2025 was slightly warmer than 2023 – but within the margin of error: the two years are effectively tied according to an analysis by NASA scientists.”
The statement in January 2025 quoted former NASA administrator Bill Nelson that 2024 was the hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880.
“Between record-breaking temperatures and wildfires currently threatening our centres and workforce in California, it has never been more important to understand our changing planet,” Nelson said. The NASA statement said scientists had concluded “the warming trend of recent decades is driven by heat-trapping carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases. In 2022 and 2023, Earth saw record increases in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, according to a recent international analysis.”
The retreat from climate
The retreat from climate is causing consternation at NASA. Celebrated climate scientist Kate Marvel told Scientific American on March 25 she had resigned from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences because of the change in priorities for the space agency. According to Marvel, “(GISS) used to have a lease on a building over Tom’s Restaurant at 112th and Broadway in New York City, and that lease was ended. We were kicked out. We were dispersed. We have been kind of couch surfing at various New York City universities and libraries. That was very disruptive. And then, when we apply for grants, we don’t hear about them or we hear, ‘This is a good proposal. Under any other circumstances, we would want to fund it, but we don’t know anything about the money.’
“So it’s just waking up every day not knowing ‘Is this the day that I get fired? Is this the day somebody I work with who I respect gets fired? Could I get this money and plan ahead to do this science or not?’
“I was personally finding that more and more difficult to do.”
Back to space
On the other side, NASA’s astronauts are flying high again. The agency website is again dedicated to space adventure, not wild weather. The Artemis II program has been a global success, putting the US on track to put humans back on the moon in what is being perceived as a race against China.

Back to eternal glory ...

NASA astronaut Christina Koch illuminated by a screen inside the darkened Orion spacecraft on April 3, 2026 as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen (R) peers out of one of Orion's windows. Picture: NASA via AP

All good, in space they can't hear the overheated scream ...

Lloydie of the Amazon seemed pleased...we shouldn't just be nuking Oz, we should be nuking the moon.

What could possibly go wrong?

After the Artemis II astronauts completed their journey around the far side of the moon, Trump told them: “Your mission paves the way for America’s return to the moon. We are going all out, and led by (NASA administrator) Jared Isaacman, we will be on the moon very soon, and we will set up a base on the moon. We’ll plant our flag again. We will push on to Mars.”
The central goal is to land American astronauts on the moon by 2028 and establish a sustainable, long-term presence (base) by 2030.
The administration is pushing for the development and deployment of nuclear reactors on the moon and in orbit. The International Space Station is being phased out in favour of commercial joint ventures.

There came a final celebratory snap ... The Artemis II crewed lunar mission lifts off from Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 1, 2026. Picture: AFP

Then Lloydie of the Amazon joined mad King Donald in burying climate science and climate change research, a resounding victory for the dog botherer and all who sail in News Corp's denialist ship ...

Trump told the Artemis II astronauts he had considered closing NASA completely.
“I had a decision to make in my first term, and that decision was what are we going to do with NASA. Are we going to have it be revived, or are we going to close it down?” Trump said.
While NASA may be back in space and heading for a moon landing and possible mission to Mars, the funding cuts have not stopped. Two days after Artemis II’s April 1 blast-off for the moon, Trump delivered his 2027 NASA budget request for a 23 per cent reduction in funding.
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know where, if approved by congress, the bulk of those cuts will land.

Wars of choice, the destruction of the planet, is there no end to the achievements of mad King Donald, Faux Noise and News Corp?

Meanwhile, in an aged care home, serious issues arise ...

Weird days, weird times...

In which Our Henry is legendary, and more than makes up for disappointing outings by Killer and the craven Craven ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:35:00 +0000

Amazing scenes ...

The pond didn't expect to wake up to the lizard Oz breaking the news that the Emperor Penguin and the Antarctic fur seal were in a spot of bother.

Sssh, never disturb the reptiles when they're in their climate denialist slumber.

The reptiles love themselves extinction events and do everything to make them possible. It requires quiet, diligent unostentatious work, and the rewards are in the deeds themselves ...

Nor did the pond expect the reptiles to care about Melania trying to deny any connection to Epstein. (Oh dear, the tabloid Beast video take is here, and it seems the denials are accompanied by the worst poll figures ever).

The reptiles long ago forgot about those files, so who cares if Melania blowing all that smoke hinted at a some hidden fire.

Instead, what with the lizard Oz being the Australian Daily Zionist News, the pond had expected a celebration of the sociopathic current government of Israel, and its current mission to arrive at a greater Israel ...

But when the pond turned eagerly to read Our Henry on a Friday to cop its daily dose of Zionism, the dear lad, the pompous pedant, went one better ...

The header: Why Donald Trump is the bastard son of the Enlightenment; It is an illusion to think that fundamentalists are driven by a rational assessment of interests rather than by their fanaticism.

The caption for the snap of the mad King showing off his tiny hands: President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office. Picture: Alex Brandon / AP Photo

Our Henry this day returned to top form, ably assisted by the lizard Oz graphics department, burrowing through ancient archives to find royalty-free images.

The old humbug modestly admitted to eccentricity and perhaps a touch of blasphemy as he blamed King Donald on ancient nobs.

Yes, King Donald is all the fault of the Enlightenment ...

It may seem eccentric – if not positively blasphemous – to suggest that Donald Trump is a child of the Enlightenment. Voltaire, Hume and Kant would scarcely have recognised him as their progeny; they might have winced, incredulous at history’s cruel irony.
Yet the family resemblance is real. For it was the long 18th century’s great philosophers who advanced one of modernity’s most consequential wagers: that interests would subdue passions. If human beings could be induced to pursue their interests rather than defend dogmas and chase glory, conflict itself might be domesticated – shifted from the battlefield to the bargaining table.
This was, in other words, the intellectual origin of “the art of the deal”: the belief that, in the end, every actor has a price, and that rational self-interest will draw antagonists toward compromise. Strangely, the 19th and 20th centuries – whose wars grew ever more destructive – did not abandon that conviction but entrenched it, even as the evidence mounted that it obscured more than it revealed.
The intellectual genealogy, too complex to detail here, runs from the early modern rehabilitation of self-interest to “Mar-a-Lago on the Gaza shore” – but the crucial moment lies in Duc Henri de Rohan’s 1638 distinction between passion, grounded in impulse, and interest, grounded in calculation. His maxim, rendered in English as “interest will not lie”, eventually became, in JA Gunn’s phrase, “the most fashionable political concept in the 17th century”.
Interests, Rohan maintained, were stable, reasonable and predictable. Passions, by contrast, connoted volatility, irrationality and barbarism. The genius of the moderns was to transform conflicts over values into conflicts over interests – interests that could be divided, negotiated and settled.
What gave this idea its force was the rise of commerce, the domain of calculation par excellence. A powerful chain of reasoning followed: a commercial society would cultivate habits of calculative rationality; those habits would permeate social norms and expectations, and; over time, coolly defined interests would supplant tempestuous passions. The result would not be the disappearance of conflict, but its intelligent management: regularised, negotiated and, above all, contained.

Here's where the reptile graphics department helped out, what with their incessant thirst for free images pillaged from the full to overflowing intertubes ... Immanuel Kant. David Hume.

Inspired, the hole in bucket man plunged on with his thesis, which was a nifty way of distracting from the sociopathic ways of Benji and his minions ...

Montesquieu coined that proposition’s most celebrated formulation in 1748. “The natural effect of commerce,” he wrote in The Spirit of the Laws, “is to bring about peace. Two nations which trade together render themselves reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling.” In this way, “the spirit of commerce unites nations”.
More ambitiously still, commerce offers a “cure for the most destructive prejudices”; for, “wherever there is commerce, there we meet with agreeable manners” – the “mild” (doux) habits that sustain contracts between traders and agreements between states.
In Montesquieu’s thought, this tendency had a providential cast. The 19th and 20th centuries translated it into a secular idiom. It was no longer commerce alone that would inculcate rationality, but the expanding authority of science and, even more, of complex technology – domains whose effective operation seemed to require disciplined, instrumentally rational thought. Although rarely stated so baldly, much of the “modernisation” literature of the 1950s and 1960s implied a simple syllogism: anyone capable of building missiles must reason as the boffins in Langley do – and, sooner or later, will act with similar calculative restraint in both conflict and co-operation.
The consequence was that fanaticism – what David Hume called “enthusiasm” – would gradually recede. Hume argued that disputes “from interest are the most reasonable and the most excusable”, precisely because they admit of bargained resolution; those of religion, by contrast, are “more furious and enraged than the most cruel factions that ever arose from interest”.
But the extinction of “enthusiasm” did not require religion’s disappearance. It was, said Alexis de Tocqueville, enough that religion evolve toward forms that reinforced the mundane virtues of co-operation, moderation, tolerance and self-mastery. And that, the modernisation theorists believed, was precisely the direction the major faiths would take in technologically savvy societies.

Now the pond will concede that Our Henry showed off his Zionist Islamophobia ... never let it be said that his enthusiasm slacks off or recedes ...

Clifford Geertz cast doubt on that optimism. In Islam Observed (1968), synthesising years of fieldwork in Morocco and Indonesia, he argued that modernisation – and the spread of education – could inflame rather than tame religious extremism.
Minds trained to prize analytical coherence had, in his experience, recoiled from the tolerant syncretism of Moroccan Sufism and from Indonesia’s gentle blend of Islam, Hinduism and animism, turning instead toward more rigorous, purified and uncompromising forms of faith.
It was therefore no accident that, as Albert Hourani observed in Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1983), Jamal al-Din al-Afghani anticipated later currents of Islamic fundamentalism, despite being one of the 19th century’s most influential Muslim advocates of science and technology. “If someone asks: why are Muslims in retreat?”, wrote al-Afghani, “I will answer: when they were truly Muslims, the world bore witness to their excellence.” Nor was it accidental that several of the September 11 terrorists were highly trained engineers.

The pond acknowledges that Our Henry seems incapable of contemplating the worst excesses of rabid Xian fundamentalists and evangelical bigots, or for that matter, the outer reaches of weird fundamentalist Judaism.

But feel the width of all the guilty parties ... Francois Voltaire. John Stuart Mill.

Sock it to 'em ...

Technical mastery did not inevitably advance the spirit of bargaining and moderation. On the contrary, the ability to build missiles could give zealots the means to hasten the apocalypse, dismember the infidels, and honour a compact not with other men but with God – a compact that admits neither compromise nor restraint. Utterly irrational ends could be pursued by eminently rational means.
That conjunction – technical sophistication in the service of fanaticism – is the Iranian regime in miniature. That does not mean the regime will never enter into agreements. But, following the precedent set by the Prophet Muhammad at the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, any such agreement is a “hudna” or temporary armistice at best, a fleeting ceasefire at worst, to be systematically violated whenever possible, and openly repudiated as soon as practicable.
Far from vindicating the Enlightenment’s hopes, those agreements show how readily fanatics can advance their cause by exploiting the West’s illusions, knowing that it lacks the stomach for a prolonged fight. And to make things worse, the agreements’ record is a miserably poor one. As John Stuart Mill – whom no one could plausibly accuse of warmongering – warned, the lesson of the centuries is that “barbarians cannot be depended on for observing any rules,” nor to “reciprocate concessions”.
Time and again, the tiny seed the Due de Rohan planted has therefore borne bitter fruit, as striking deals with fanatics becomes, all too often, an excuse for compromises that turn out to be capitulations.
Yet the “art of the deal”, and the confidence that every conflict is merely a high-stakes version of a real estate negotiation, has a magnetic hold on the Western mind – and on few minds is its grip firmer than on that of America’s 47th president. That his negotiators with Iran have been commercial deal-makers, not hardened experts in handling rogue regimes, should therefore come as no surprise.
Yes, as they look down from on high, Voltaire, Hume and Kant may shake their heads in disbelief. But this much is undeniable: Donald J. Trump is the Enlightenment’s bastard son.

Splendid stuff. That's the way to wrap your bigotry, in a word salad of pretentious bile ...

And so to Killer, and after the hole in bucket man's splendid effort, the pond must confess to being disappointed...

The header: Why more pollies in federal parliament just makes sense; There’s been no significant increase in federal parliamentarians since 1984, despite a near doubling of the population.

The caption for a snap of a den of iniquity: Anthony Albanese during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond will always pay attention to Killer, but the heady days of Covid, masks, vaccines and such like are long gone, and this was contrarianism pushed to a stupefying level of dullness ...

When the Institute of Public Affairs and the left-wing Australia Institute agree on a policy, it’s likely a meritorious one that deserves consideration.
It’s a reminder of how broken our political system has become when a proposal to increase the number of members of federal parliament was killed off by the Prime Minister late last month after the Coalition dared the government to publicly support it.
Sensible people in the Labor and Liberal parties have supported an increase, as the number of voters per federal seat – almost 121,000 – has become absurdly large, making a mockery of the idea that MPs share a deep connection with constituents. There’s been no significant increase in federal parliamentarians since 1984, despite a near doubling of the population.
Then Liberal MP James Stevens in 2024 asked the Parliamentary Budget Office to cost an increase of 24 new MPs and 16 senators. Labor minister Don Farrell has been promoting a similar change too.
Representation isn’t the only argument in favour of change. Committees with odd numbers of members are logically able to produce clear majorities, yet our half-Senate elections make only six Senate spots available in every state (and four for the territories).
Whatever the trials and tribulations of individual parties, those of the right and left in Australia enjoy the support of about half the electorate, which tends to produce impotent 3-3 voting blocs. Half-Senate elections of seven or nine senators per state would make the upper house more likely to produce ideological majorities – and more quickly.
Significantly more members and senators would help transform the parliament from a costly rubber stamp for the government into what it was meant to be: a check on power and a forum for a genuine exchange of ideas.

The pond supposes it should quibble.

Why is the Australian Institute dubbed "lefty", while Killer avoids describing the Institute of Public Affairs as an extreme far right organisation in the grip of big tobacco, big mining, and anything else big enough to keep paying their wages?

Is there anything worse than Killer trying to sound normal, mounting staid, tedious arguments for more pollies?

Even the distracting snaps are incredibly dull: Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaking during the weekly session of Prime Minister's Questions. Picture: House of Commons / AFP.

Perhaps Killer means well, but the pond would much rather be off with Melania ...

Section 65 of the Constitution mandates that the number of ministers “should not exceed seven in number … until the parliament otherwise provides”.
It’s a great shame that second part was included, because the number of ministers and hangers-on dependent on government largesse has exploded, ensuring no backbencher dares criticise the government for fear of ruling out a potentially lucrative promotion.
While our question time has become a stage-managed joke, in the UK’s 650-member House of Commons MPs in the cheap seats routinely rise to slam senior members of their own party – the ratio of ministers to backbench MPs is tiny.
Meanwhile, in Canberra, the ratio is ludicrously large. In 2019, for instance, I wrote a column that pointed out how 96 of the 104 Coalition members of the federal parliament were ministers, former ministers, committee chairs or deputy chairs, or holders of some other parliamentary office that bumped up their salary.
Comically, more than 40 per cent of Coalition MPs were ministers given the Morrison government’s previous slim election victory.
Angus Taylor warned that expanding the parliament would cost $620m including all associated staff and travel costs. But that was over eight years, and amounts to a farcically small share of the $786bn the federal government plans to spend this financial year alone.
The National and Liberal parties apparently didn’t think to make their support for any increase strictly conditional on permanent budget savings, a move that doesn’t inspire confidence in their ability to slash the budget by far more than a relatively paltry $78m a year.
Educated proponents of the prevailing number of seats might well quote the great conservative writer Edmund Burke, who famously told voters in the late 18th century in Bristol that their representative in London “owed you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion”.
Naturally, members of parliament should think for themselves and be prepared to persuade their constituents of what he or she believes to be right. But surely Burke assumed MPs would at least know what their constituents’ views were to begin with.

How dull could the distractions get? Why, it's ancient history time ... Canada’s former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Picture: Chris Wattie / Reuters

The pond gets it.

It's incredibly bold and brave for Killer to push back against the likes of the beefy boofhead, or to mock the liar from the shire, but this faux attempt at peace-making is tedious as all get out ...

Rapid population growth in the cities relative to the regions has created numerous vast federal seats larger than most European nations, making it practically impossible, and even dangerous, for MPs to attempt to meet voters. Durack in Western Australia is larger than France and Spain combined.
Moreover, as urban seats become larger and larger, they necessarily become more similar to each other, neutering the whole point of a Westminster system that is meant to give different regions and suburbs a unique voice.
The modest increase currently on the table would still leave the federal parliament critically smaller than its peers. Canada’s federal lower house includes 341 members, for instance, while New Zealand’s has around 30,000 voters per member.
Perhaps fearful of the direct financial impact of One Nation’s rise, the two major parties recently got together to legislate a massive increase in their claim on the public purse. Soon the per vote taxpayer-funded subsidy of political parties will jump from around $3.50 to $5, the biggest increase ever.
The IPA and the Australia Institute probably would not agree on that outrageous gouge. If only the two parties had chosen instead to conspire on something that would both benefit them as well as the voting public.
Alas, for now that seems too much to ask.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Quick, back to scribbling about masks, vaccines, and the ways to score a FIFA peace prize...

As for the rest, the reptiles over on the extreme far right were focussed on that upcoming trial.

The meretricious Merritt was busy with his usual serve of FUD.

Why Ben Roberts-Smith may be denied a fair trial
This country needs to come to terms with the fact that there is a real risk that Ben Roberts-Smith will not be given a fair trial.
By Chris Merritt
Legal Affairs Contributor

The pond was forced to send this to the intermittent archive, always a dodgy thing to do.

It was barely working this morning, but at least a teaser trailer would show the cut of his jib and give correspondents the chance to think about whether they really needed to read the rest of the FUD ...

Yeah, yeah, FUD ...

The pond had to toss the rest ofthe meretricious Merritt FUD into the void to make room for the craven Craven.

Not that there's anything interesting to read in the outing, save that it's a chance to see the craven Craven sailing against the meretricious tide ... and just like Killer, the craven Craven will always find a home in the pond, no matter how tedious or righteous he manages to sound ...

Say what? Jail the meretricious Merritt for contempt of court?

Well if being a baying commentator is the crime, then he's guilty as hell.

After those opening flourishes - surely the reference to Charles I keeps the spirit of Our Henry alive? - the craven Craven began to sound righteous in a most un-reptile way ...

....Fundamentally, he cannot be found guilty unless a rigorously selected jury finds him so beyond reasonable doubt. This is the appropriately high bar for the punishment of any Australian citizen, particularly on charges as dreadful as these.
So the rule of law both holds Roberts-Smith to account – and protects him. He is bound by the law, but cannot be convicted without due process against a prodigious standard of proof, before a rigorously selected jury.
This is what his extra-legal supporters have to understand. You cannot have one without the other. If you ditch the law of criminal responsibility, you necessarily ditch the corresponding principle of the presumption of innocence. Of course, rule of law is pretty easy when you are dealing with common burglary or embezzlement. But put it in the context of a national hero fighting a dirty war against treacherous opponents and fault lines emerge.
Add to this a large evidential cast of fellow soldiers, friends, detractors and even potentially actual Afghan enemies and you have a legal witch’s brew.
Then stir in the evidence and outcomes of Roberts-Smith’s utterly ill-advised defamation action to produce a quagmire of confusion. In principle, these civil outcomes should not affect the criminal trial, but they will identify plenty of bushes for the prosecution to look under. Certainly, they will influence public opinion.
There is a natural temptation – even a commonsense intuition – to assess the alleged actions of Roberts-Smith exclusively in the context of the Afghan War. What are you meant to do when everyone is a potential armed enemy?
There also is the siren’s song of rampant pragmatism. How can we expect Australians to enlist as soldiers for horrific wars if they know they’ll be legally abandoned at the first sustained legal volley?
These arguments have been put forward by my friend, Tony Abbott, and my very much non-friend, Pauline Hanson. But they are wrong, both in terms of the legal process and legal principle.

What was in the water this day? Killer calling for more pollies, the craven Craven renouncing the onion muncher?

Luckily the reptiles blurred this snap so the pond didn't have the foggiest idea who it was ... Ben Roberts-Smith arrested at Sydney Airport over alleged war crimes. Picture: Australian Federal Police

Perhaps a snap featuring tatts would have helped ...

Extraordinary hidden meaning of Ben Roberts-Smith's 'Crusader' tattoos - as he removes one forever

The pond took the chance to provide a little balance to Our Henry's wise words ...

On his right side, there is a Spartan helmet emblazoned across his ribcage, in a nod to the fearsome warriors of Ancient Greece...
...The father of twin girls also has a Jerusalem Cross across the right side of his chest, with what appears to be a knight on a horse inset into the centre of the motif.
The Jerusalem Cross is also known as the Crusader's Cross.
The cross is rooted in the Crusades of 1095-1291, when European Christians fought Muslims for control of Jerusalem, which Muslims ultimately won.
Donald Trump's US Secretary of War and ex-Fox News host Pete Hegseth also sports a Crusader's Cross tattoo over his heart.
The former National Guard member claims he was pulled from duty on the day of Joe Biden's 2021 presidential inauguration because his cross tattoo 'unfairly' identified him as an extremist.
The Crusader's Cross can also be seen on the national flag of Georgia.
Above Roberts-Smith's cross are the words 'I shall never fail my brothers', written in cursive script...
...On left side of the soldiers's body, there is a small cross with a loop at the top, visible underneath the start of his intricate dragon sleeve.
The crucifix-like image is an Ankh, or the ancient Egyptian 'key of life' symbol.
Inside Roberts-Smith's left-arm sleeve, along his inner forearm, are the Latin words Decus Prosapia Tellus, roughly translated as 'Glory/honour of the family's land'.

And so on, and now back to the craven Craven ...

On process, now is not the time to be ventilating material that either hurts or harms Roberts-Smith. It is indispensable to a fair trial that no jury be potentially contaminated by speculation or contumely. Anybody who tries it will be guilty of contempt.
This applies particularly to investigative journalists inclined to bask publicly in their triumph. A prison cell is a cold place to receive a Walkley. As a matter of principle, the presumption of innocence requires trial by law, not media. Evidence is to be formally sifted and tested, not advanced by irrefutable innuendo.
But these cannot be used as arguments that Roberts-Smith should be “let off” because he is a war hero, was in a rotten war, faced a corrupt and deceptive foe or simply had no choice in the matter.
We should remember that the situation alleged did not actually amount to an impossible choice, as sometimes happens in war. Roberts-Smith and his men did not face certain death – or even capture – without a field execution. The survival of a plausible enemy in their vicinity certainly elevated risk in an already dire situation of a small group of men stuck in hostile territory against a background of almost unimaginable stress.
But the fundamental question is stark. Are we really Nazis or Stalinist commissars who see death as a transactional calculation? Do we believe the killing of ostensibly unarmed prisoners is merely a question of circumstance, to be argued away by what our legal system traditionally has referred to as “necessity, the devil’s plea”.
There are philosophers who have argued the point. But no philosophical formula can ever argue away the proposition of common human decency that even a besieged soldier cannot kill outside actual, deadly combat.

In a rotten war?

Dear sweet long absent lord, the pond's world is falling apart, what a relief that the reptiles offered a couple of snaps of genuine heroes ... Senator Pauline Hanson. Senator Pauline Hanson. Former prime minister Tony Abbott.

And so the final gobbet ...

Ironically, this is a pungent expression of the same basic value that must protect Roberts-Smith. Just as an enemy operative cannot be slaughtered as a matter of calculated tactical advantage, neither can an accused Australian soldier be locked up for the edification of hostile journalists or army-hating progressives.
In these sorts of awful matters, there is indeed a point at which the pressures of surrounding horror, uncertainty and homicidal hostility become relevant. But hard as it is to say, that is at the point of sentencing and punishment, not trial.
If we accept that Australian soldiers can execute as well as kill, we can have no argument against our enemies doing the same to us. Moral equivalence cuts both ways.
I have no idea what I would do if I were trapped in a hostile country with every stone, tree and person an enemy. Probably, I would hide under a rock or run screaming away, coward that I am.
But admiration for the brave can never excuse atrocity. Otherwise, the difference between us and the war criminals of WWII is merely one of great degree, not difference.
Greg Craven is a former vice- chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.

He even invoked the Nuremberg clause?!

Is it time for the ICC to make a move, because clearly senility, dementia, sundowning or infancy is no defence ...

And so to a brief mention of some thoughts that could be found in Anne Applebaum's latest open letter...

As the onion muncher has been mentioned, it's worth remembering that he has been a lickspittle fellow traveller, a worshipper at the feet of Orbán ...

...The re-election of Orbán would be bad for Hungarians and bad for Europe. Inside the EU, Orbán functions as a Russian puppet, blocking European aid to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia. In telephone conversations with the Russian president, leaked to Bloomberg, the Hungarian prime minister can be heard telling the Russian president that he is a “mouse” to Putin’s “lion.” The Hungarian foreign minister also makes regular calls to his Russian counterpart after EU meetings. Given that Russian missiles are still killing Ukrainians every day, that Russian cyberattacks and sabotage continue to destablize Europe and that Russian propaganda still seeks to undermine European democracies, Vance’s mere presence in Budapest was deeply offensive to millions of Europeans.
It was also very strange. Vance, while interfering in Hungary’s election, baselessly condemned the EU for allegedly interfering in Hungary’s election. He talked about “faceless bureaucrats” from Brussels, a phrase borrowed from British politics that illustrates real ignorance. Important decisions in Brussels are taken by the political leaders of the 27 member states. During his speech, which you can watch here, Vance also peddled a myth that Hungary is under threat from “a small band of radicals” who hate Western civilization. But Peter Magyar, leader of Tisza, the large Hungarian opposition party, waves Hungarian flags and used to be a member of Orbán’s own party. Tisza is not some kind of revolutionary Marxist cell.
In truth, Vance knows little or nothing about the country he is visiting, and in this sense he resembles Trump. Like Trump, Vance is using American foreign policy for personal self-promotion. He knows that Orbán has symbolic importance to the autocratic far-right, especially in the US. Project 2025 was heavily influenced by the Hungarian example, as was the Trump administration’s assault on American universities. By paying homage to Europe’s leading autocratic populist, Vance is symbolically supporting those American projects. He has no more interest in the people of Hungary, their prosperity and well-being, than Trump has in the people of Iran. If he did, he would not be there at all.

Well yes, and now this is just to troll Our Henry ...

In which the bromancer and Joe are gloomy, but the Lynch mob arrives in the nick of time to save the day ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:40:00 +0000

On the downside, every so often the pond looks outside the incestuous hive mind of the lizard Oz, and discovers there are even worse possibilities out there ...

No, Iran Isn’t Winning the War aka The Iranian Advantage Is an Illusion (*archive link, no guarantee it's working)

Bret Stephens is a doofus of the first water, and therefore in the perfect position to serve as an NY Times columnist ... the rag always has both siderist needs, and Stephens offers the side that's all in on stupidity.

The target for this particular set of insights, and the existential despair they should be feeling, the loss of comfort they're suffering?

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a gifted midcareer intelligence officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

But only imagine that if you can fit it into the complacent mindset of a triumphalist American scribbler ...

Right now, there’s no telling what will happen. But as you survey where Iran stands now compared with where it stood just three years ago, you are overwhelmed with a sense of loss. Your once-powerful proxies in Gaza, Beirut, Damascus: decimated, deposed or dead. The Arab states: increasingly on side with the Americans and Zionists. Your nuclear program: set back for years or decades, if not forever. Your economy: in even deeper crisis than it was before the war, with no turnaround in sight. Your most capable leaders: dead. Your own people: waiting for the war and the state of emergency to end so they can rise against you again.
It’s a solace of sorts that sophisticated Western commentators think you’re winning this thing. From wherever you are now hiding — since it’s not safe to go to work — it doesn’t feel that way.

This is a man ostensibly writing informed commentary for one of the United States' alleged great newspapers.

Yet somehow his take got old really quick.

As any number of Stephens' readers pointed out - why they subscribe remains a mystery - the Iranian regime's main aim was to survive the war intact. Anything else would be a bonus. They never had a chance to win militarily, but if they get sanctions lifted and get to impose an excise tax on tankers, they'll have an unexpected form of revenue.

Stephens offers the sort of stupidity that allows some Americans to still go around boasting about the many ways they won the 'Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars ...

For a moment it almost seemed like he got intimations of his own stupidity:

For all the damage the United States and Israel have inflicted on Iran’s leadership ranks and war-making capabilities, the regime remains intact, unbowed, functional. There has been no mass uprising, thanks to the brutal crackdown that followed protests in early January. Closing the Strait of Hormuz, which required minimal military effort by Iran, has exercised maximum leverage over the global economy while boosting your oil revenues. The war is even more unpopular in the United States today than it was at the start; it is also causing more Americans to rethink the wisdom of their reflexive support for Israel. President Trump’s expletive-laden social media posts increasingly sound more desperate than they do fierce. And the I.R.G.C. is more powerful than ever.
One insight, repeatedly cited by Western pundits as evidence that Iran has the upper hand in the current war, has led you to its source, a 1969 critique of U.S. policy in Vietnam from none other than Henry Kissinger.
“We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process, we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.”
This should bring you comfort. It doesn’t.

Imagine you're a completely whacked out opinion columnist for the NY Times, so clueless they can't even take on war criminal Henry's advice

Meanwhile, over in that other place which the pond rarely visits...

Why Trump may have changed the world’s oil markets forever (*archive link)
Stephen Bartholomeusz
Senior business columnist

Inter alia ...

...Iran’s response to the war has been to attack US allies in the region, damaging their energy infrastructure in retaliation for the devastation the US and Israel have wrought. That damage, and production in the region that has been shut in because the oil couldn’t be shipped, will take time to be restored.
Qatar’s massive Ras Laffan LNG facility has for instance, suffered significant damage that it says will take two to five years to be repaired. In the meantime, Qatar, which supplies about 20 per cent of the world’s LNG, has lost about 17 per cent of its LNG capacity.
That, like the spike in WTI prices, is good for US shale oil and gas producers, but not so good for US domestic gas consumers– or companies and consumers elsewhere in the world.
It is, of course, conceivable that the ceasefire doesn’t hold and Iran closes the strait again. In any event, the world of oil will never be the same again because Iran has done what it has threatened but never done before and demonstrated its ability to take out a material chunk of the world’s oil supply.
The premium at which WTI traded over Brent could easily become a permanent feature of the market, with oil industry customers, having experienced a deliverability crisis, looking for the security of sourcing their supplies from places other than the now even more volatile Middle East.
Trump, thanks to a war he started, but has yet to provide a coherent rationale for, may have structurally increased, not just global oil prices but US domestic energy prices, raising inflation rates and lowering global and US economic growth rates in the process.

But enough Tootling off the rails and wandering into forbidden pastures.

It's a matter of national and professional pride to make sure a reptile at the lizard Oz can match Stephens' rampant idiocy ... and look who turned up at the bottom of the "news" early this morning ...

The bromancer!

How could the pond turn away the bromancer, especially as he's always been inclined to the triumphalism of a Stephens?

The proud warrior has always been up for a war with China, preferably by Xmas, and is always willing to contemplate bunging on a do, what with war just being a natural extension of politics.

Uh oh ...

The header: Scepticism aside, it’s difficult to see a strategic triumph here for the West; Iran may gain control of the Strait of Hormuz and charge ships $US2m tolls under Donald Trump’s ceasefire deal, despite his claims of achieving ‘total victory’ against Tehran.

The caption for the snap of the mad King: US President Donald Trump has agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran. Picture: AFP

The bromancer sounded surprisingly gloomy.

Has his Weltanschauung taken a turn for the worse?:

If the two-week ceasefire announced by Donald Trump means Iran gains effective control of the Strait of Hormuz, that’s a significant strategic win for Iran, and a tremendous setback for the US, its allies and, in the long run, the global economy.
At first blush, this looks like a good deal for Iran.
Of course it’s impossible to know at this stage how the ceasefire will actually play out because the deal Trump describes, and the deal the Iranian government describes, seem to inhabit wholly different universes.
Trump says the US has won “a total victory, no question”. Iran says it has comprehensively defeated the US and that’s why it’s willing to talk.
One disturbing element is that Trump has said the ceasefire came about because Iran submitted a 10-point plant that is a “workable basis” for negotiation.
Trump didn’t release this
10-point plan. (sic)
Iran did release a version, and it’s full of provisions the Americans couldn’t possibly agree to, such as the withdrawal of all US troops from the region, acceptance of Iran’s uranium enrichment program and payment of reparations to Iran for its war damage.
No one in Iran thinks any of that could ever happen. In the best light, those are just declaratory negotiating positions, but Iranian foreign ministry and national security statements say ships will travel through the Strait of Hormuz under the supervision of the Iranian military.

Even worse, the bromancer talked with petulant Peta and remained resolutely gloomy ... The Australian Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan says if the Iranians control the Strait of Hormuz, they have “won an enormous victory”. “They have withstood the worst that Trump can give, and they haven’t buckled,” Mr Sheridan told Sky News host Peta Credlin. “The Islamic Revolutionary Guard is still in control in Iran. “That is a big victory.”

Despite his desire to disclaim scepticism, the bromancer found a little scepticism went a long way ...

There are widespread international reports that Iran expects to levy a toll, putatively of $US2m a ship, for container vessels passing through the Strait. If the Iranians are bluffing and in fact plan to let ships through unhindered, without any toll, Trump has secured a reasonable deal. Even if the US doesn’t get the 400kg of uranium enriched to 60 per cent, Trump can claim he’s degraded Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities, as he said he would, and re-established free movement through the Strait of Hormuz.
If the Iranians get to charge a toll, they’ve had a huge victory.
We should know what’s happening on that fairly soon.
Trump’s people have briefed the US media that Iran has agreed to give up all its nuclear enrichment activities, including the enriched uranium, agreed to allow fully and free passage through the Strait of Hormuz and so on.
It is not evidence of Trump Derangement Syndrome to treat these claims with extreme caution, if not outright scepticism. During his first term, Trump declared he’d solved the problem of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, that Kim Jong-un had agreed to denuclearise.
That was just flat-out wrong and Pyongyang has continued enlarging its nuclear weapons arsenal and long range missiles.
More recently, Trump announced a detailed peace “agreement” for the Gaza Strip, including Hamas voluntarily disarming, the establishment of a technocratic government for Gaza, a new police force, international peacekeepers and much else.
Almost nothing of that has come to pass.

The reptiles were so desperate to cheer up the bromancer that they flung in a serve of the Bolter ... Sky News host Andrew Bolt discusses the US and Iran agreeing to a two-week ceasefire, which has led to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. “Well, shock and surprise, there’s a ceasefire in the Iran war, after just five weeks. Both the US and Iran have agreed to a two-week ceasefire while they talk peace. And the Strait of Hormuz is meanwhile open to oil tankers again,” Mr Bolt said. “Fact is, this ceasefire puts the lie to so much of what you were told by Trump-hating journalists, and politicians, and activists, and assorted experts. Remember how you were told this would be the forever war, how this was a quagmire, how it was Trump’s Vietnam War, with Trump having no plan or offramp, all those predictions which have now been proved wrong.”

There, exactly the sort of triumphalism designed to put the bromancer in a cheery mood - victory is ours Mein Herr... but for some reason the bromancer remained perversely, obstinately in a depressive state.

Was it that heart attack that made him aware of the fragilities of life?

So far, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remains in control within Iran, the enriched uranium hasn’t been handed over, Tehran has maintained missile and drone attacks on Israel and Gulf Arab states, it’s getting strong support from China and Russia, it’s making more money from its own oil exports than it did before the war began and it may keep control of the Strait of Hormuz.
So while Iran has sustained severe damage, it’s difficult to see a strategic triumph for the West.
Trump has damaged the US alliance structure. A more considered president would have brought US allies with him, at least in some measure.
Trump’s rhetoric has been self-contradictory and increasingly verbally bizarre. Apart from the juvenile scatological references, he threatened that “a whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again”, presumably by sustained strategic bombing of Iran.
This follows earlier threats to bomb desalination plants.

Quick, a serve of the dog botherer boasting of significant wins.

That should fix up the bromancer ... Sky News host Chris Kenny gives his opinion on the Iran ceasefire. “The ceasefire is due to last two weeks while a permanent settlement is negotiated. Iran has undertaken to open the Strait of Hormuz to shipping,” Mr Kenny said. “So, all in all, with much left to unfold, it appears to be a significant win for Trump and for Middle East security, and the global economy. “We are all used to Trump's wild rhetoric, and we all knew he was attempting to threaten Iran into accepting a deal, but still, the words used by the President, the leader of the free world, yesterday, well, they were shocking.”

Nothing worked, as the bromancer stayed mired in the gloomy mud ...

These comments were widely condemned, including by many who usually support Washington.
Anthony Albanese was right to describe them as “inappropriate”. The Prime Minister joined Nationals’ leader Matt Canavan and Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie in condemning Trump’s language.
It’s right for political leaders to be careful to avoid needlessly provoking Trump but they are obliged to deal with reality.
Australia is one of the most pro-American countries, yet polls show more than 70 per cent of Australians believe Trump has handled the war badly. A majority of Americans concur.
Previous presidents understood the need to gain public support, at home and among allied countries. Apart from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, any allied leader who backs Trump now does so in the face of settled hostility from their own publics.
It’s good that the fighting in Iran has stopped for the moment. But this whole saga still has a long way to run.

Come on bro, it's a new age ... rediscover your inner Cro-Magnon man...

And now for a quick survey of what's lurking in the lizard Oz outside the war in coverage.

Luckily the intermittent archive was working - no guarantee it still is - and that allowed the pond to send off a number of reptiles to that swamp-infested land.

State Liberals’ biggest woe? Their own president Phil Davis
Criticism of Victorian Liberal leadership highlights deeper tensions over strategy, identity and voter drift to One Nation.
By Peta Credlin

The pond usually avoids petulant Peta, and this day it was a good thing, what with it being a bout of navel gazing about Vic Liberals, compleat with the notion that bigoted transphobe Moira Deeming was the way forward.

The pond also had no time for this attempt to lather up EV fear ...

EVs could power the grid — but at what cost to owners?
Electric vehicles promise cheaper, cleaner energy and grid support, but hidden costs and unanswered legal questions pose risks.
By Mark Le Grand

It was a pile of alarmist, hysterical tosh, and the pond had to wander down to the credit to work out why ... Mark Le Grand has served for five decades in the law and with various law enforcement bodies.

Arrest those vehicles, seize that grid, come out with your hands up.

The pond also gave this short shrift ...

Ditching ACON first step in reclaiming truth over ideology
After ending funding for ACON’s Pride in Diversity, the ABC faces scrutiny over media coverage and ideological influence on reporting.
By Sall Grover

Again the credit gave the game away ...

Sall Grover is the founder of Giggle, a women-only social app, and is a women’s rights advocate.

The pond knows what that code means .. and couldn't even raise a chuckle.

The pond also had to send away Yoni, grinding out a different brand of hysteria, fear and panic ...

Why the Taiwan Strait could eclipse the Middle East crisis
Could China deploy Iran’s playbook in the Taiwan Strait? A new report warns the consequences would be catastrophic, especially for Australia.
By Yoni Bashan
North Asia Correspondent

The pond could at least allow this Yoni a teaser trailer ...

Not content with one disaster?

Imagine another ... but don't worry Yoni, the pond is sure the bromancer will start feeling his oats again, and be up for that war with China by Xmas.

Then it was back to the war with a lesser member of the Kelly gang...

Back from the brink into fragile uncertainty
The Strait of Hormuz is reopening and markets are cheering. But the Iranian regime is unbroken and its list of demands maximalist.
By Joe Kelly
Washington correspondent

While the pond found a home for Joe at the intermittent archive, the pond found his gloom piquant, down there with the bromancer's, and so worthy of proper treatment ...

Joe was as determined as the bromancer to be gloomy ...

...Yes, Trump has avoided a dangerous escalation in the war and the globe has dodged an economic catastrophe and humanitarian crisis in the Middle East but the hardest part is to come. And Trump has incurred a high cost to arrive at this point.
His threats to kill off Iranian civilisation were shocking public remarks unbefitting a US president. They will be remembered as a symbol of the changed character of American leadership in the world.
A large grouping of Democrats have used the threat to call for the removal of Trump from office; the MAGA base has fractured.
Trump has also alienated America’s closest allies and taken NATO to breaking point.
Key Iranian figures are already framing the shift towards diplomacy as a major victory.
On Monday, the US President said the Iranian plan was “not good enough”. But as his 8pm deadline shifted closer into view on Tuesday, he seized on it as an opportunity after the intervention by Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.
Iran’s push for a new protocol in the Strait allowing the regime to charge ships up to $2m for safe passage must not be accepted.
It would accede to Iranian extortion in the Strait and see the regime emerge in a stronger financial position with a valuable revenue stream worth billions of dollars each month.
A strong argument can be made that this is a far worse outcome than what existed before the war.
Trump will also need to impose restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program if he is to convince Americans the intervention was worth it.
Preventing Tehran from obtaining a nuclear bomb has become the central justification for and objective of the military campaign.
It is hard to see how Washington and Tehran can bridge their differences on these issues, and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has consistently played down the likelihood of progress being made through diplomacy.
Both sides are now back to where they were before Trump launched Operation Epic Fury on February 28 – the negotiating table.
The progress of talks over the next two weeks will determine how Operation Epic Fury will be seen.
At this stage, there can be no certainty the final outcome will leave the US – and its allies – any better off.

Sheesh, but all our wars have gone incredibly well, and shown how good it is to be manly in battle ...

The pond was determined to lift the reptile spirits, and then a miracle happened.

The Lynch mob came along to set things right ...

The header: If Iran is not our foe, then what’s the point in having enemies? Too much of the global left want Iran to represent some brave resistance to Western imperialism.

The caption for the lickspittle surrender monkey who lacks the Lynch mob's spine: A demonstrator holds a sign during a protest against US military action in Iran in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Picture: Charly Triballeau / AFP

Huzzah, and in due course the pond will be able to demonstrate that it can match King Donald at doing a weave.

But first please allow the Lynch mob to contemplate the joys of nuking those bloody Islamics ...

On July 16, 1945, president Harry Truman learned of the first successful explosion of a nuclear bomb. Nine days later, he authorised its use against Japan. On August 6, that attack took place. A second followed three days later.
The decision to use the A-bomb was not a vexed one. Instead, how to use it consumed the president and his advisers. It was only after Japan’s surrender that Truman wrestled with the ethical implications. The “thought of wiping out another 100,000 people is horrible”, he said. “Killing all those kids” repelled him. “You have got to understand that this is not a military weapon … It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses.”
Donald Trump’s moral struggle over means and ends probably doesn’t match Truman’s. There is nothing in the Democrat’s rhetoric to suggest he wanted to end Japanese civilisation. Indeed, he began its rebuilding. But, like him, the incumbent President has relied on hard power against civilians to force his opponents’ capitulation.
OK, we have a ceasefire with Iran’s depleted leaders rather than their total surrender. But we would be historically myopic not to see how the threat of destruction has resulted in behaviour modification. We would need a deep cynicism to not discern a better future for all those afflicted by Iranian power.

At this point the reptiles flung in snaps of two presidential giants ... President Donald Trump; President Harry Truman

The Lynch mob was all in on history lessons, what with breathtaking comparisons between a world war and a regional carry on ...

Nuke 'em, nuke 'em all, the long, the short and the tall...

Neither Imperial Japan nor Islamist Iran prioritised civilians in their warmaking. Both displayed a criminal disregard for the lives of their citizens. No democracy could countenance losing so many in pursuit of its survival.
In the history of war there is no perfect analogy. Scholars of the Cold War will recoil at a favourable comparison between Truman and Trump. But I think the Iran war is replete with similarities.
An uncouth Trump and pious Truman does not render the 33rd president superior to the 45 and 47th in his transformational power. Indeed, Trump’s war (even if this ceasefire doesn’t hold) almost certainly will not entail the slaughter of Truman’s.
I understand why Trump’s rhetoric has confirmed for many his unfitness for the office he holds. But speaking coarsely while carrying a little stick has resulted in the severe weakening of Iran’s power.
Trump has set back the cause of Iran’s sharia supremacy – the constitutional principle that Islamic law (sharia) has ultimate authority over all state laws, institutions and political decisions in the Islamic Republic. He did this while fighting a war with the goodwill of more Arab allies than any in US history. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pushed Trump to make war with Iran, framing the US-Israeli offensive as a “historic opportunity” to reshape the region.
International lawyers have complained at the death of Iranian civilians. We should mourn the loss of innocent lives in any war. But Trump’s violence has killed a fraction of those killed by the regime’s own security forces – more than 40,000 by some estimates.

Dammit, kill all the innocents, it's the only way forward. (And maybe borrow Pontius Pilate's bowl of water and towel, for the washing and wiping of hands thereof)

Then the reptiles had to produce a downer in the form of Rita, lovely meter maid ... Centre of the American Experiment President John Hinderaker says the US “can’t trust” any agreement with Iran. Mr Hinderaker told Sky News host Rita Panahi Iran will “promise,” which cannot be trusted. “They might promise not to seek nuclear weapons or to stop supporting terrorism, but as long as the regime remains in place, they’re going to abandon those promises as soon as they are able.”

Trust the mad mullahs?

Nah, but it goes without saying that everyone can absolutely trust every word that comes out of King Donald's mouth ...has there ever been a more consummate and convincing con artist?

Crusader Lynch mob carried on with his crusading ..

Trump has made a 47-year experiment in theocratic repression seem temporary, toppleable. No amount of UN resolutions and Obama-Biden nuclear deals had this effect. The loss of US military lives in pursuit of this transformational objective – a Middle East denuded of its chief terrorist exporter – is tiny. A Ballarat tradie who needs cheaper diesel may demure. I do feel his pain and have seen my superannuation fall. But, again, what price was worth paying to hasten the demise of Ali Khamenei?
Trump chose a nemesis that surely meets every definition of just war. Khamenei made misogyny basic to his rule. His regime denied homosexuality existed, while murdering more than 5000 gay men. His HHH axis – made up of Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis – targeted civilians in Israel and across the Gulf. Hamas made rape a weapon of war.
If the Iranian regime is not our enemy, we are no longer capable of having an enemy. Too much of the global left want Iran to represent some brave resistance to Western imperialism. The mullahs are not that. Rather than Che Guevara-style guerrillas, these theocrats have controlled for nearly a half-century a state of ancient lineage, to minimal strategic or ideological gain. Their co-religionists deplore them. The Great and Little Satan have combined to assassinate their supreme leader.

Um, so theocracy is the issue?

How about Israel?

If madness while in possession of nukes is a problem, when do we launch a war on North Korea?

The reptiles interrupted with another snap designed to agitate the Lynch mob ... A demonstrator holds a picture of Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei in Tehran. Picture: Francisco Seco / AP Photo

And this is where the pond can show the power of the weave ...

The regime’s own bureaucrats, who keep the wheels of the state turning, are surely questioning the wisdom of their political leaders. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps promised to safeguard a proud, nuclear-armed Iran. Instead, Trump has made them the organisers of human shields.
Bret Stephens at The New York Times imagined what lower-level officials in Tehran and Mashhad must be thinking: “Your economy: in even deeper crisis than it was before the war, with no turnaround in sight. Your most capable leaders: dead. Your own people: waiting for the war and the state of emergency to end so they can rise against you again.”

You see?

There was the monstrous stupidity and triumphalism of Stephens replicated by the Lynch mob.

The reptiles can produce commentary as dumb as a stick, and more than a match for anything as silly as that emanating from Stephens of the NY Times...

Trump failed to predict, let alone pre-empt, Iranian shenanigans in the Strait of Hormuz. Voters will punish him in the November midterms. I do wonder, however, if history will record a more enduring turning point, one that matches the collapse of Imperial Japan in global significance: the ending of a failed experiment in political Islam and the building of a better Middle East.
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the rebirth of Japan. That enemy went on to become one of the freest, wealthiest and closest allies America has ever enjoyed. This was the inauspicious but necessary beginning of a regional transformation. Trump has started his own – at a fraction of the civilian lives lost.

Yes, nuke 'em, nuke 'em all, it's the only way forward to an enduring civilisation.

And so cheap in terms of lives lost. Bargain basement transformation.

Credit where credit is due, because the pond can never resist defaming the University of Melbourne's tattered reputation:

Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

The long absent lord help his students ...

And so to a footnote and a commendation, though Geoff really should have chambered a larger round ...

That's the best the reptiles could do in their attempt to inflate the tyres of the Canavan caravan?

So much winning.

Dark days indeed ...

And so to turn to the immortal Rowe for the closer ...

It's always in the details, and the pond did like these ...nice tatt ...

Could it get any weirder?

Of course it could ...JD Vance Confronted With Report the Pentagon Allegedly Threatened Vatican with Military Foce.

No couch or pope can feel safe ...

In which the swishing Switzer does some bog standard fossil fuel worship and Our Henry makes a non-canonical appearance ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 21:40:00 +0000

All - as a correspondent recently noted - is a sour mash of slop, feculence, and slime, not to mention sociopathy and war crimes - and amazing scenes where even Marge and gravel-voiced Alex are in a dither:

Oh yes ...

How are the reptiles coping with this Emeritus Chairman, Faux Noise production?

Well Dame Slap did the wise and sensible thing.

Ignore it all together, forget the night she donned her MAGA cap and walked out into the streets of New York in a state of ecstatic triumph, and return to the ancient and noble reptile sport of black bashing ...

Why aren’t Indigenous leaders demanding an audit?
We should never forget the bullet we dodged when this country rejected a constitutionally entrenched voice.
Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

Moi don a MAGA cap? Can't remember, everything's hazy ...

Sadly the intermittent archive was in yet another of its funks, so the best the pond could do was offer a link in the hope that it might come in handy down the track

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fwhy-arent-indigenous-leaders-demanding-an-audit%2Fnews-story%2F6a2c46c434abbd376aac5b034323c7bf?amp

The pond had to do the same for Jihad Jack, as Jack the Insider cheerfully joined in the current reptile jihad.

There are some who think that Jack is better than your average reptile, but he's just your average jihadist, happy to toil away in the belly of the beast.

Get hold of a keffiyeh. Make a big noise … and let the dollars roll in
Abdel-Fattah’s hypocrisy knows no bounds. From the comfort of academia, she fights against racism by fomenting a lot of it.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fget-hold-of-a-keffiyeh-make-a-big-noise-and-let-the-dollars-roll-in%2Fnews-story%2Ffd59ab5c355ac380825a8c6e613e77af?amp

Jack, doing a Boris, was just joining Natasha as she indulged in another bit a Bita bitterness ...

EXCLUSIVE
C-grade review yet ARC gave grant ‘OK’
Confidential documents reveal stark divisions among peer reviewers over anti-Israel activist Randa Abdel-Fattah’s $889,000 taxpayer-funded research grant.
By Natasha Bita

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/education%2Franda-abdelfattahs-889000-grant-awarded-by-arc-despite-cgrade-review-and-formal-warnings%2Fnews-story%2Fa391ec5a8f239b34be9a476e8bc78bb8?amp

None of them had any appeal to the pond.

What a pity then that the intermittent archive spluttered and conked out, so that the pond couldn't personally send these efforts to that dank, dark cornfield.

But that left the pond with very little to do today.

It's already been established on the probabilities that BRS (as the reptiles call him) is a war criminal guilty of appalling war crimes, and the news that Pauline launched a fierce defence of him only made his guilt more plausible.

Marvel at the way that in the midst of King Donald acting as god and promising a genocide, the reptiles still found space to highlight not just BRS, but their current jihad ...

On the BRS matter, over on the extreme far right a soggy Rice attempted to do a little cooking to save the day...

War crimes prosecutors will face challenges convicting BRS
The VC recipient’s defamation case was an own goal, but war crimes prosecutors will have a much more challenging time proving their case beyond reasonable doubt.
By Stephen Rice
Sydney Bureau Chief

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fwar-crimes-prosecutors-will-face-challenges-convicting-ben-robertssmith%2Fnews-story%2F96fc1de3f4164781ea35c21bd4ffdaf8?amp

In the end, the pond settled for a standard serve of renewables bashing and climate science denialism, served up by the swishing Switzer, still on his never ending rehabilitation tour ...

The header: The era of climate policy consensus is dead. So why are we digging in? The Iran crisis has performed an unintended service: it has exposed, with brutal clarity, the folly of Australia’s energy policy.

The caption for Frank's inimitable effort, Anthony Albanese. Artwork by Frank Ling.

That image of Albo, emerging once again from the lizard Oz's antediluvian swamp, reminded the pond of previous Frank efforts...

Sure enough, it wasn't new and fresh, it was as stale as week-old reptile bread.

It had been recycled, no doubt to help save the planet...

Good old Lloydie of the Amazon, just the right company for the swishing Switzer.

Frank's unifying artwork spread far and wide, with another member of the Kelly gang also entranced ...

Haven't thought about Craig for yonks, but what a relief to see he's landed on his FEE feet ...

Oh wait, it's not that one, it's this mysterious one, see Crikey ...(paywall)

Sheesh, how did the pond end up there, amidst cranks and kooks?

Truth to tell, the pond just wanted to establish that the swishing Switzer and the lizard Oz hive mind were still keeping the right sort of company, and all thanks to Frank's incredible artwork.

As for the swishing Switzer offering, it was short weight, just three minutes, so the reptiles said...

Anthony Albanese is now our longest-serving prime minister since John Howard – long enough to own, in full, the consequences of his government’s policies. And as we now know, those consequences on energy are becoming impossible to ignore: Australia is exposed, vulnerable and paying the price for a government that prefers ideology to pragmatism.
For several years now, Canberra has layered intervention upon intervention: price caps, market controls, regulatory uncertainty and glacial approval processes for new projects. At the same time, Australia has failed to reinvigorate exploration for gas and oil and allowed domestic refining capacity to erode – with only two refineries now operational.
As this newspaper’s Chris Uhlmann has argued, energy is not just another commodity but the foundation of economic life and national security. Australia now sits at the end of long supply chains, reliant on imported liquid fuels to keep the economy functioning. With more than 90 per cent of our energy still derived from coal, oil and gas – and diesel the indispensable fuel of industry, transport agriculture and mining – any serious disruption was bound to bring the country to a standstill.

Here the pond should note that the reptiles, at the mention of his name, provided a link to the Ughmann ... and though it's already been featured in the pond, here's a reminder of the company the swishing Switzer likes to keep...

Enough of that, the Ughmann features regularly in the pond, as the swishing Switzer got down and dirty with the climate science denying dog botherer ... The Australian’s Columnist Tom Switzer says the US President Donald Trump has made a “monumental mistake” with his attack on Iran. Mr Switzer told Sky News host Chris Kenny that Donald Trump most likely assumes striking Iran would “be enough”. “To bring down the regime, he probably in hindsight, should’ve followed the advice of his America first instincts.”

There's nothing new to see here ...

To be sure, this predicament did not begin with the Albanese government. As far back as 2019, The Wall Street Journal captured the absurdity with a stark headline: “Australia, a Top Natural-Gas Exporter, Considers Imports to Stop Blackouts.”
A popular online parody of Albanese captures the same contradiction: an Australia that boasts of climate leadership while exporting vast quantities of coal and gas, importing refined energy at home, and relying on China to process the minerals it claims are strategic. The joke lands because it is so close to the truth.
But this is no longer a laughing matter. Against the backdrop of the Iran crisis and tightening global supply, our vulnerability is being exposed.
And the consequences are increasingly grave: disruptions to petrol supply, renewed inflationary pressure, higher interest rates, weak growth and rising business failures – all pointing to the spectre of stagflation.
A serious government would use this moment to reset policy – acknowledging that fossil fuels will remain central to Australia’s economy for decades and acting accordingly.

Uh huh, and so to a snap of the chief villain, Chris Bowen pictured speaking at a press conference outside his electorate office in Fairfield West. Picture: NewsWire

The pond didn't have the heart to interrupt the swishing Switzer with another tale of the planet going downhill fast...

That would require difficult but necessary decisions: opening new gas fields, encouraging oil exploration, revisiting refining capacity, removing barriers to investment and broadening the energy mix to include options such as nuclear power. It would also mean recognising that energy security is inseparable from national security, requiring greater investment in defence capability and industrial resilience.
The question, as Graham Lloyd recently put it, is whether this government is capable of such a shift. Albanese and Labor remain wedded to the belief that climate change represents such an overriding threat that the world will unite to phase out fossil fuels. And much of the mainstream media encourages the government: now is the moment, we are told, to accelerate moves to renewable energy.
But this is not how the world is behaving. Electricity demand is rising and emissions continue to hit record highs as fossil fuels remain the surest path out of poverty in the developing world.
Even in advanced economies, political resolve is weakening – as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has conceded, the consensus on climate policy has gone.
Yet Canberra persists with an approach that risks making energy more expensive and less reliable, with little measurable impact on global emissions. In doing so, it is not only placing pressure on living standards but also increasing our dependence on imported technologies and supply chains.

Yes, why do anything, when you can do nothing, or perhaps trot out a snap of Sir Keir, Keir Starmer speaks during a press conference at Downing Street. Picture: Getty Images

And that was pretty much it, with the swishing Switzer nobly battling the activist establishment ...

None of this is to deny that the Trump administration has created turmoil in the Persian Gulf, with consequences that are proving difficult to contain. The longer the Strait of Hormuz remains closed or the more damage is done to Middle Eastern oil infrastructure, the more the war will roil the global economy.
But the crisis has performed an unintended service: it has exposed, with brutal clarity, the folly of Australia’s own energy policy.
We are a country that could be far closer to energy self-sufficiency. Instead we have chosen dependence – on imports, on fragile supply chains and on the goodwill of others in a tightening world. The Coalition is right to reject Labor’s net-zero agenda. It now has an opportunity – and an obligation – to press the case relentlessly and unapologetically: for supply, for sovereignty and for a policy framework grounded in economic and strategic reality.
Such a course would be fiercely contested by Labor, the Greens and much of the activist establishment. But if the Coalition – alongside One Nation – is prepared to prosecute the argument, it may yet force a long-overdue reckoning and give Australia a fighting chance of securing our energy future and, with it, our economic potential and national security.

Oh yes, let Pauline and the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way get together and help destroy the planet.

Thanks for that astonishing insight and credit where credit is due ...

Tom Switzer is presenter of Switzerland, a podcast about politics, modern history and international relations.

Why does the pond feel like it's running on empty?

As a little coda, the lizard Oz editorialist was also out and about today, no doubt alarmed by news of the recent surge in EV sales figures...

Not a clue - EVs already do things better and at a lower cost for consumers and trust the pond, the Hume highway is a doddle except for those whale-killing windmills in the beefy boofhead's home turf - and luckily the infallible Pope was on hand to help out ...

The pond has been insufferable lately asking the extended family about how their infernal diesel machines are going.

And so to the bonus, and here a fierce dispute broke out in the pond's editorial offices.

Our Henry had made a rare mid-week appearance, but was it non-canonical?

There was much argument, but consider the Cambridge university dictionary definition ...

not part of a set of works or subjects that are generally agreed to be good, important, and worth studying:

non-canonical texts can still be very influential.
non-canonical book The Bible translators did not believe the Apocrypha were inspired, but translated these non-canonical books because of their historical significance.
non-canonical literature The ruling party viewed noncanonical literature with suspicion.

For starters, how could this outing in the lizard Oz be good, important and worth studying?

How could it be looked at without harbouring a deep suspicion?

The pond contended that the presence of Pincus made it non-canonical, and a fey reference to Pride and Prejudice proved this was not authentic 'hole in the bucket' man musings.

This wasn't the stuff of Our Henry's ponderous, portentous, pompous Friday outings.

Sure it was back in the days of the industrial revolution, but Darcy? Bingley? Why it was no better than chique chick lit.

Accordingly it could be tossed off in a few screen grabs, because who would want to do a cut and paste, merely so that they could comment on Our Henry referencing Our Jane, as if he was some kind of brooding, introverted Matthew Macfadyen?

Even that distraction seemed non-canonical - Petey boy as the distraction?! - and the final gobbet was equally dismal, as it failed to mention Thucydides once!

The pond might have reconsidered if there'd been a reference to ancient Greece or Rome or the 300 Spartans or Xerxes, or even better, a medieval theologian or philosopher, but it was just a heap of blather about the dismal art. (Well you could hardly do a Carlyle and call it a dismal science)

That might appeal to some cultists, but only in a non-canonical way ...

Boring!

If only Our Henry had mouthed off some theological and philosophical platitudes, but that pesky Pincus got in the way. Vulgar youff will have to search for alternatives to lead them into the future.

And now, with the bromancer resting, it was left to the lizard Oz editorialist to deal with King Donald ...

His objectives in Iran remain estimable?

Apart from annihilating a civilisation, what exactly are those those objectives?

Never mind ... it's all going well ...

Weird times ...

In which the bro, Joe and Jack try to cope with mad King Donald, and Dame Groan does her standard oil junkie schtick ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:24:00 +0000

It seems the pond's main duty these days is to try to cope with the bromancer trying to cope with mad King Donald.

The bro has always been Trump curious.

Lately he seems to have become increasingly disenchanted, yet still feels compelled to both siderist his suffering.

His latest headline is a classic of the both siderist art form perfected by the NY Times.

The header: Triumph or tragedy? Does Donald Trump have any options left in Iran? The case for acting against Iran was strong, but Trump made many miscalculations and was not prepared for easily foreseen contingencies.

The caption: President Donald J. Trump delivers a message on Holy Week. Picture: Supplied

What on earth is the message King Donald delivered on Holy Week? Obscenity, blasphemy, and the pagan rantings of an ancient Moloch?

Mad King Donald is way less Xian than the pond, and that's saying something.

As for the bro, it's amazing really that anyone could find any hope of a "triumph" in what King Donald has done to the United States and to the planet, yet there it was in the headline, taking up as much room as "tragedy" as the way into the bro's four minute ramble.

The bromancer diligently ferreted through the tea leaves and the chicken's entrails, hoping against hope that he'd see signs of the triumph ...

Donald Trump has two options and one hope in Iran. The options: escalate or leave. The hope: a deal with Tehran that allows him to claim victory and go home. He’s probably happy to leave the Iranian regime intact provided it opens the Strait of Hormuz, and makes at least a pro forma commitment to end its nuclear program.
One Trump tragedy is that he gives many good things a bad name. The case for acting against Iran was strong, but Trump and his administration have made many miscalculations and not prepared for easily foreseen contingencies.
Much worse, the way the President talks, his wild language, endless self-contradictions, and contempt and humiliation for US allies, is doing serious strategic harm to the US and its allies.
Trump’s most recent threat bears repeating. On Truth Social he posted: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F..kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
This is both an astonishing and contemptible social media post from Trump. It also almost certainly indicates a failure of analysis of the nature of the Iranian regime.
One of the reasons America is so friendless in this military campaign, which is inherently defensible if done properly, is because no one can sign up to Trump’s rhetorical instability, his reversals day by day (only a few days ago, in a formal address to the American people, he said the US had no concerns about the Strait of Hormuz).
The Iranian regime is defined by its activist hatreds of America and Israel, and its social practices of pietistic fundamentalist Shia Islamism. That is a toxic and evil mixture. Trump thinks that every time he threatens Iran, he’s putting its leaders under pressure. The Iranians apparently regard Trump’s wild declarations as a sign of desperation.

You see?

Somehow "inherently defensible" creeps into the narrative, accompanied by a small billy goat butt - "if done properly", which is the sort of thing that happens when the pond attempts a triple pike into the pool and ends up doing a belly flop.

In what possible way could it be "inherently defensible" when in reality that sort of attempt to bomb into submission is inherently stupid and ineffectual, as Vlad the sociopath has discovered to his cost in his long and inherently indefensible monstering of Ukraine.

Even the both siderist NY Times gets this ...

Bombing Kyiv Into Submission? History Says It Won’t Work.
Even though it creates misery and loss, the methodical bombing of civilian centers has more often been shown to rally support for resistance. (*intermittent archive, and you know what that means)

...The victorious allies in World War II did emphasize a strategy of heavily bombing cities, which is part of why countries have come to repeat this so many times since. Cities including Dresden and Tokyo were devastated, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and forcing millions into homelessness.
Still, historians generally now argue that, even if that did play some role in exhausting those countries, it was largely because of damage to German and Japanese industrial output rather than the terror it caused. Axis countries were also aggressive in bombing enemy cities, casting further doubt on notions that the strategy could be a decisive factor on its own.
And any World War II lessons may be of limited utility in understanding the wars that came after, as countries quickly learned from that conflict to move military production away from city centers. Tellingly, such bombing has seldom worked since.
American war planners discovered this in the Korean War, when bombing Pyongyang only hardened the North’s commitment. A decade later, they tried it again in Vietnam. But an internal Pentagon report concluded that striking Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital, had been “in retrospect, a colossal misjudgment.”
Iran and Iraq struck each other’s capitals during their 1980s conflict to try to force one side to back down. Instead, both nations were rallied by watching foreign bombs fall on civilian neighborhoods, helping to stretch the war to nearly a decade.
Insurgent groups have likewise adapted this tactic, to little more success.
Northern Irish groups struck repeatedly in London, hoping to dispel British commitment to the territory. Instead, the bombings led to more severe measures by British authorities in Northern Ireland. Palestinian groups that ignited bus and cafe bombs in Israeli cities during a period of conflict in the 2000s found much the same result.
Al Qaeda’s justification for the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks has shifted, but the group has said that one aim was to compel American withdrawal from the Middle East. But Americans, rather than rising up against their country’s overseas deployments as Al Qaeda leaders had hoped, rallied in support of invading Afghanistan and then Iraq.
Though each conflict is different, this pattern is not a coincidence, but is explained by the politics as well as the psychology of warfare. And both appear to apply in Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Capital strikes intended to push a government toward conciliation or retreat instead do much to close off those options.
In practice, such attacks tell targeted leaders that they, and perhaps the very existence of their government, will not be secure until they eliminate the threat through outright victory. They will tend to escalate in response, rather than back down as their attackers hope.
And a negotiated peace, like the one Mr. Putin has urged, becomes harder for those leaders to enter because it means accepting that the threat to the capital will remain.
The public will often reach the same calculus, coming to see their attacker as an implacable threat that can only be neutralized through defeat.
The stiffening resolve inspired by such strikes can be equal parts strategic and emotional.
German rocket and air attacks on British cities during World War II, known as the Blitz, aimed to degrade British production as well as public support for the war, so that Britain would agree to withdraw from the conflict.
Instead, the attacks led to a drastic reduction in British support for peace talks with Germany, polls at the time found, raising pressure on British leaders to uphold the fight.
And German leaders had hoped that turning whole blocks of London into rubble would inspire Britons to turn against the leaders who insisted on staying in the war. But British approval of their government rose to near 90 percent.
The United States has stumbled on this effect several times, but perhaps most powerfully in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, when it sought to force back its Communist adversaries by bombing their towns and cities. Instead, the campaigns convinced those governments, as well as their populations, that they could only be safe by defeating the Americans for good, whatever the cost.

And here we go again, and what a regime to help, as at this point the reptiles flung in a visual distraction ... Demonstrators attend a pro-government gathering in a square in Tehran, Iran. Picture: AP

The pond does like the way that the bromancer consistently side steps around the way that Benji's fundamentalist theocratic government, campaigning for a greater Israel, managed to lure mad King Donald into the war ...

Trump may for the first time in his life have met a foe not motivated by money, self-interest or even national interest, but by ideological, and in this case theocratic, conviction. It’s overwhelmingly to be hoped that the US and Israel succeed in Iran. Nothing would be better for the Middle East, and the world, than for the odious Tehran regime to disappear.
But analytically, we must deal with reality. The Iranian regime is tough and is built for war. It doesn’t care about suffering endured by its society. It has decentralised decision-making. A big chunk of society gets paid by the regime, and a big chunk has committed violence and murder on behalf of the regime. These folks won’t give up control.
The US has degraded Iran’s military capabilities. But Tehran is still firing missiles and drones, and controls the Strait of Hormuz.
It’s now clear Tehran is getting some help from both Russia and China, without any major pushback from Washington, which has its hands full. In the past few days, notwithstanding the devastation of Iran’s air defences, it has shot down a number of US aircraft.
It targets US bases, and Gulf Arab infrastructure, with some precision. Chinese and Russian help not only benefits it materially, but boosts the morale and self-belief of Iran’s rulers.
Any Trump escalation in Iran will lead to further disruption in the global economy and rising oil prices. This is disastrous politically for Trump and Republicans. It’s now all but certain Republicans lose the House in November’s midterm elections. They could well lose the Senate.

What's another bomb? Cars drive on the highway in front of a plume of smoke rising from the Dahieh neighbourhood after an Israeli airstrike on April 5 in Beirut. Picture: Getty Images

Put it another way, as they did in The Times ...

At this point, the bromancer began to waver, to have saucy doubts and fears ...

That provides a disincentive to escalation, but Trump may go that route anyway. He can’t run for re-election, and can’t accept defeat from Iran. But Iran won’t accept defeat either. While Tehran is weakened militarily, it’s earning about twice the revenue from oil sales that it earnt before the war. It’s letting tankers from “friendly” nations, such as China, pass through the Strait of Hormuz and charging a toll.
Geo-strategically, the big winner so far is Russia, earning billions and billions more for its oil, while the missiles and missile interceptors needed by Ukraine are expended and can’t be replaced at the rate they’re being used.
Trump is abusing allies, NATO especially, for not offering military support especially in the Strait of Hormuz. But this Trump demand is again literally incoherent. The US itself is not escorting any tankers through the Strait. It has not proposed a specific operation to clear the Strait. The Strait itself is so narrow, and drones now so cheap and plentiful, that it’s quite likely no operation to clear the Strait, short of invading Iran, is physically possible.
So why is Trump so wilfully mismanaging US allies, at such detriment to the US? US Studies Centre scholar Jared Mondschein offers one insight: “Trump has always seen NATO as something that entangles the US, rather than as a force multiplier as previous presidents did.”
If the Iranian regime survives this war and emerges with control of the Strait of Hormuz, it will likely earn enough revenue to rebuild its military, and it will have more influence on the global economy, and on the Middle East economy, than ever before.

Uh huh, that sounds like ending up way more tragedy than triumph, as the reptiles slipped in a final visual distraction: A protester waves the pre-Islamic Revolution Iranian flag and the Free France flag from World War II during a march against the Islamic Republic of Iran in Paris on April 5. Picture: AFP

But just as soon as the bro sees a little darkness, he turns around and discovers that mad King Donald has been "astonishingly effective":

Trump has often been astonishingly effective at overturning popular wisdom and winning politically – his two presidential victories, surviving all the legal charges thrown at him, decapitating the Venezuelan government, instituting a vast tariff regime without tanking the US or global economies.
This has made him overconfident. The tariffs didn’t work in policy terms. They didn’t cut the US trade deficit, didn’t create massive numbers of new manufacturing jobs, and led to China working out its far more powerful critical minerals weapon. Even to build the replacements to the weapons it’s using in Iran, the US needs Chinese critical minerals.
Trump is becoming more erratic even by his own standards. There is no one in this administration who talks back to him, gives him bad news, cautions him.
The near mass sackings of senior US generals are intensely disturbing. Senior military folks are not warmongers, but instinctively prudent, realistic. They also obey the law. In this most critical conflict, Trump’s hubris may well have led to severe, dangerous miscalculation. Then again, anything is possible, even a good outcome.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

And there you have it.

After all that, still the bromancer holds out hope, even for "even a good outcome".

What can you say, except that he's almost as barking mad as King Donald ...

At this point, the pond should note that the current reptile jihad continues, thanks to a bit of bitter Bita ...

Once they get their teeth into a victim, the vampire reptiles never let go of their jihads, not until the last drop of blood is sucked dry...

Nothing will stop them, not garlic, silver bullets, stakes in the heart, holy water or crucifixes in hand.

As an aside, the pond can't help but immediately think of Boris and Natasha whenever Natasha's name bobs up. (They even scored their own live-action movie)

To note the crusade isn't to endorse or join it and in the normal course of things, the pond would have sent Natasha's hit piece to the intermittent archive ... but the archive is acting kinda funny at the moment, and the pond had trouble saving a link.

For those who care and want to try at some point ...

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation%2Ftaxpayerfunded-academic-cited-romance-novels-as-research-to-secure-900000-grant%2Fnews-story%2Fc3b530ba38957bf4a633ffb20f45077b?amp

(Hang on a mo', it came to life. Hopefully it will stop working again soon and save a stray correspondent from the jihad)

The pond was left wondering what it must feel like to hack away daily at hit pieces for the lizard Oz, with seemingly the sole purpose to generate fear, hate and loathing in the hive mind.

What an empty life ... it's not as if there aren't more obvious targets...

And that brings the pond to that lesser member of the Kelly gang, a certain Joe, who earlier had also tried to sort out mad King Donald for the reptiles ...

The header: Donald Trump faces blowback whether he strikes Iran’s infrastructure or backs down; Striking Iranian power plants risks punishing civilians and handing Tehran a propaganda win.

The caption for a man imitating a cane toad: US President Donald Trump has extended his deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Picture: AFP

The good thing about Joe's piece was that it was just two minutes long, and could be swallowed in a bite, with Joe showing signs of a little more concern than the bromancer:

Donald Trump needs to urgently land a deal with Tehran given his threats to target civilian infrastructure – a step which risks punishing the Iranian people in his ongoing military campaign against the Islamic regime.
The US President has now extended his deadline for the regime to reopen the Strait of Hormuz until Tuesday at 8pm local time (10am Wednesday AEST) before he begins destroying Iran’s power plants and other infrastructure.
If Trump makes good on his threat, Iran will undoubtedly use the strikes for propaganda purposes to try to galvanise popular support against Washington and strengthen its own domestic position.
Doubts are already being raised over the extent to which US attacks on energy plants and other infrastructure will advance the key objectives set out by the administration at the start of the war.
Questions over the legality of potential strikes on civilian infrastructure will also risk staining the legitimacy of the US campaign against an oppressive regime.
More broadly, it may further isolate Washington and draw criticism from trusted allies and partners.
None of the options is good.
The US President faces blowback if he follows through on his threat. But if he continues to extend the deadline, his threats lose credibility.
Another option is the deployment of ground troops, with more than 50,000 US forces now in the Middle East that could be used to help secure the Strait by force, seize the regime’s enriched uranium or capture the oil terminal on Kharg Island to use as leverage – all options fraught with the risk of US casualties.
Six weeks after launching Operation Epic Fury, the frustration of the US President boiled over in his Truth Social post on Easter Sunday where he called on the regime to “open the f..kin’ strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell”.
An eleventh-hour deal would give Trump an offramp from the cycle of escalation he now finds himself in, although both sides remain far apart.
The terms of any agreement and what happens to the Strait of Hormuz would be seen as the crucial measure of who holds the upper hand.
Iran is demanding that it retain control over the waterway – an unacceptable outcome for Washington and the world.
A new front has also emerged in the conflict in the form of a deeper and profound rift between the US and Europe. This threatens to be one of the most consequential developments of the conflict so far.
Already Trump’s position on NATO has shifted decisively.
His previous complaint was that the alliance wasn’t working given the free-riding of European partners. But now he has adopted a more confronting and existential position: he no longer believes in NATO at all.

The debate is no longer about European nations paying more.
Trump is now publicly canvassing a withdrawal and making clear that the trust underpinning the alliance has been killed off by the refusal of US allies and partners to secure the Strait of Hormuz.
White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly told The Australian that “President Trump has made his disappointment with NATO and other allies clear, and as the President emphasised, ‘the United States will remember’.”
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte is due to meet with Trump on Wednesday, an opportunity to try to repair the damage in the transatlantic partnership.
In practical terms, Trump’s disenchantment may have meaningful consequences for Europe and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, including the diversion of US military resources and munitions intended for Ukraine to assist the Iranian war campaign.
A key risk is Trump washing his hands of the conflict in Eastern Europe given his belief the US was abandoned by its allies in the Middle East.

A key risk?

Oh Joe, Joe, mad King Donald abandoned the Ukrainians long ago, and has done everything in his power to help out and enable Vlad the sociopath, and now keeps boasting about how he can emulate Vlad's war criminal behaviour by bombing Iran back to the stone age ...

And now thanks to mad King Donald and the reptiles, the pond comes to a genuine curiosity ...

The header: Donald Trump using the F-word is the least of our problems with the President; There is a bit of General George Patton in Trump, in the way he bullies through with little concern for consequences.

The caption for that snap of a maniacal grin: This is not US President Donald Trump’s first excursion into obscenity. Picture: AFP

The pond confesses to not having thought of Jack Marx for years, and so was completely surprised to see him bob up in the hive mind.

His wiki listing is out of date, and his Facebook page has just 121 followers ... with his last post a couple of years old and about his struggles in rehab.

His return would have been interesting if he'd had something remotely interesting to say ...

It has been said that taboo slang is the last bastion of the intellectually bankrupt. But outrage in the face of it – hand-to-bosom shock at an F-word – is surely the Alamo of the morally fraudulent.
Such impostors are living large this week, on the back of Donald Trump having used the notorious “doing word” in a post on Truth Social. (Those easily offended should be assured, however, that they can approach the following paragraph with confidence.)
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” the American President wrote. “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F..kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Actually that's not what he said ... this is what he said ...

Yes, he used the "f" word in full, he didn't slip in dots or asterisks or dashes or some other tomfoolery, which is why the reptiles diluting it was full of rich irony - as if they were being run by the google bot overlord who takes a view on what turns up in this blog.

Suddenly Jack's attempt at being a hard hitting takedown artist looked pretty feeble ...

The post was directed at Iran, whose leaders really should have been more offended by Trump’s obviously ironic abuse of the Prophet’s name. But Seyyed Mehdi Tabatabaei, deputy for communications at the Iranian President’s office, seemed more alarmed by the swearing, declaring Trump had “resorted to obscenities and nonsense out of sheer desperation and anger”.
Also deeply hurt was Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene – the devout Christian who was banned from Twitter for “multiple violations of our civic integrity policy” – who called fellow Republican Lauren Boebert a “little bitch” and recommended the then Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, be executed. Greene said everyone in Trump’s administration needed to “beg forgiveness from God” for Donald’s vulgarity. God, it seems, has no problem with corruption, infidelity or homicidal wrath, but really gets upset when confronted by a bit of the old bad language.

Jack decided to dress this latest example of dementia in action as a form of "plain speaking" ... US President Donald Trump is a plain speaker. Picture: AFP

Actually like a lot of swearing, it's merely a sign of impotence, frustration and a limited vocabulary.

When you get down to basics, it's deeply pathetic.

Jack was all in on being naughty, except he still couldn't be properly naughty, at least when it came to the dreaded "f" word (the pond could also sense the evil google bot hovering, ready to strike, but Jack and the reptiles of Oz saved the pond's bacon):

Everyone seems to have forgotten this is not Donald Trump’s first excursion into obscenity. In 2018, he referred to African countries as “shitholes”. In 2020, on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, he told the Islamic Republic there would be trouble “if you f..k around with us”. And last year he referred to Israel and Iran as two countries that “don’t know what the f..k they’re doing”. When it comes to scandalous utterances, Donald Trump is no Pat Boone.
And then there’s the word itself, irrespective of who is using it. It’s quite bizarre that it’s deemed offensive, considering what it represents. It describes an act of creation – the privatisation of The Big Bang – which is the reason we are all here. We should be more offended by “death”, “murder”, “cancer”, “lack of air”.
My father died last week. I watched him take his last breath. It fell to me to deliver his eulogy, and the choice of words has never been heavier. I felt bossed about by that odd aversion to crude absolutes, like “death”, “dead” and “died”, some pansy voice inside me suggesting “passed”, “passed away” and “no longer with us” instead. I ignored that voice. I’m glad I did. My dad was a plain speaker.
Donald Trump is a plain speaker, too. The unwise do not have the luxury to be manipulative. He says whatever comes into his head, and it’s left to his handlers to clean up the mess. He might be the first politician in history whose words can be absolutely trusted, even if his motives cannot.

Stupid is as stupid scribbles, and the reptiles blessed us with another snap of a man whose words apparently can absolutely be trusted ... except in the many ways he lies and tells porkies and invents alternative realities... US President Donald Trump gestures after speaking at a televised address on the conflict in the Middle East. Picture: AFP

Perhaps with Jack's guidance, the pond might learn to trust King Donald's words in due course ... possibly the process might only take those immortal two weeks the mad king keeps talking about ...

It’s a very American thing to speak with recklessness and discourtesy. General George Patton was good at it, got pounded for saying “the wrong thing”, and for that was forever loved. There’s a bit of Patton in Trump, in the way he bullies through with little concern for consequences.
Patton was no strategist – he believed in charging ahead at full speed, using profane language to inspire his men to follow him (those who recall Franklin Schaffner’s film from 1970 will remember it well). Trump does the same; his army of followers willing to go with him, die with him. They will, too. But they won’t do so because Donald Trump uses bad language. Rude words never hurt anyone. It’s Donald Trump’s mind, the thing with which he sleeps, that is the danger. We should be thankful, I guess, that the window to his mind is yawning open. Even if there are rude words in there, I think we can handle it.
Those focusing on Trump’s profanity are like people beating up fleas in a catfight. The administration he captains is guilty of many things, but ribald language is the least of them. It’s hardly surprising – those in an argument who’ve run out of ammunition always pick on the bad language of their adversary, as if piety is more important than acumen. F..k that.

Oh dear. An attempt at a final flourish, and still the dots got in the way.

That saved the pond from its omniscient overlord, the google bot, but it didn't help Jack maintain his hard-swearing tough guy pose ...

And so to Dame Groan, and the reason the pond dilly-dallied and delayed with Joe and Jack was that it would make the arrival at the Tuesday groaning all the sweeter and more rewarding ...

The header: Our war on fossil fuels is ending in a battle for energy; The so-called ‘experts’ simply did not accept the possibility renewable energy would not replace fossil fuels.

The caption for the wildly exciting snap of gas guzzlers in a queue: Lining up at the bowser for petrol at Costco service station in Kilburn, South Australia. Picture: Brett Hartwig

The trouble with delaying Dame Groan's arrival is that instead of a cosmic explosion, an ecstatic eruption, it's more likely to be just the usual onanisms about renewables and climate science spilling to the ground ...

Dame Groan is an oil and gas junkie.

Always has been, always will be ...and how she hurts at the cruel way they've been treated ...

Australia has been waging a war against fossil fuels for nearly two decades. While Labor governments have fought this battle with the most aggression, Coalition governments have contributed as well. Recall here Morrison’s commitment to net zero 2050 made in 2021 on the eve of the COP climate meeting in Glasgow.
Working on the assumption that the net-zero transition is an economic prize – an assumption that is immediately refuted by dint of the necessary compulsion and large subsidies required to achieve it – Australia has put up multiple barriers to any fossil fuel-based developments.
Add in the false proposition that renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy and we have been led down a path of economic harm and insecurity.
We are now witnessing the consequences of our overdependence on imported fossil fuels – think petrol, diesel, aviation fuel, helium, fertilisers, plastics – and an inability to remedy the situation in an acceptable time frame.
There was always an astonishing naivety – nay, complete ignorance – about the consequences of blocking the use and development of fossil fuels. Far too much attention was given to the electricity grid and the scope for turbines and solar panels to generate electrons to replace ageing coal-fired plants.
The external environmental costs of turbines, solar panels and large-scale batteries have essentially been ignored. True environmentalists should hang their collective heads in shame. As a less dense form of power than coal/gas/nuclear, renewable energy would always require vastly larger land masses, with much larger environmental footprints.
The need for extraordinarily expensive transmission lines has simply added to the catastrophe. There is also the important point that the turbines, solar panels and batteries have relatively short lives relative to coal-fired and nuclear plants, with the associated need for expensive replacement. But here’s the thing: notwithstanding the billions of dollars expended to spur the expansion of renewable energy, there hasn’t been a significant decline in the overall use of fossil fuels here. According to the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, “fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) accounted for 91 per cent of Australia’s primary energy mix in 2023-24”. In energy terms, Australians consume twice as much in liquid fuels as in electricity.

Okay, so we've read it all before, and the pond is sure we'll read it all again, and as usual, the reptiles will parade the villains who have treated Dame Groan so vilely ... Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen pictured speaking at a press conference outside his electorate office in Fairfield West. Picture: NewsWire / Monique Harmer

Usually the pond would be inclined to slip in another story about how stuffed the planet is ... but not having the intermittent archive to hand means paywalls can get in the way.

What the heck ...

How to Poison an Ocean
Trump envisions a new era of offshore oil drilling. Scientists know all too well how that story ends.
By Jeffrey Marlow (*intermittent archive, still working?)

A teaser trailer ...

Meanwhile, the groaning carried on ...

The so-called “experts” simply didn’t accept the possibility renewable energy wouldn’t replace fossil fuels but would add to it. With the prospect of new data centres and their need for constant power (and water), there is a good chance that the proportion of our energy mix accounted for by fossil fuels could increase.
Far too much emphasis has been placed on the scope for electrification while ignoring the vital and largely uncontested role of fossil fuels in primary iron, cement, fertilisers and plastics. This naivety has been clearly demonstrated by recent events. It’s worth outlining how the war against fossil fuels has been waged by governments across many fronts to understand our current predicament.
To take a recent example, the mandate of the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation had been altered to prevent any investments in fossil fuels. To ensure ongoing oil delivery, however, the Albanese government has had to reverse this mandate.
Then there are the recent amendments to the Environmental Protection and Biosecurity Act, which explicitly exclude fossil fuel projects from using the streamlined assessment pathway.
They cannot obtain the benefit of being classified a “national interest proposal” or be granted an exemption from being a “restricted action” in a conservation zone. The likely effect is to thwart new fossil fuel developments, including drilling for oil.

There followed another snap of assorted villains ... Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Treasurer Jim Chalmers, and Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen hold a joint press conference at Parliament House on the national fuel security crisis and emergency economic measures. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Dame Groan's lust for oil was worse than a meth addict looking for a fix ...

The mandate of the Future Fund was changed in 2024 to include support for the energy transition as one of three priorities, effectively ruling out large-scale investment in fossil fuels. The federal government funds anti-fossil fuel groups such as the Environmental Defenders Office to pursue legal action against fossil fuel developments. The recently concluded Australia-EU Free Trade Agreement contains “a binding commitment to implement obligations under the Paris Agreement on climate change”.
The point is that the federal government executes its anti-fossil fuel stance in many ways in addition to the massive subsidies made available to the transition of the electricity grid. It is hardly surprising therefore that exploration for oil, for example, has effectively dried up, notwithstanding the fact that there are a number of highly prospective areas in this country.
It was only two decades ago that we were nearly self-sufficient in oil; we are now down to 20 per cent and falling. We no longer have a large-scale urea factory – the Gibson Island plant closed two years ago – and Qenos, the country’s largest producer of polyethylene and polymers, has also shut up shop. Mind you, state governments, including Coalition ones, have also demonstrated hostility to fossil fuels by facilitating the rollout of renewable energy and refusing to green-light any new or replacement coal-fired power plants. They have blocked or significantly delayed fossil fuel exploration and extraction. They have also wasted money on unachievable pipedreams – green hydrogen in South Australia, anyone?
It’s worth noting the economic effects of this intransigent opposition to fossil fuels. According to CBA Economics, “the closure of critical air and shipping routes, especially the Strait of Hormuz, is rupturing fragile global supply chains, slowing down the passage and pushing up prices of a variety of products, including oil, gas, chemicals, resins, fertilisers, cement and grains”.

A last snap of the villain in chief, Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen speaking to an Endeavour Energy employee in Bidwill, Western Sydney launching a local community battery. Picture: Jane Dempster / The Australian

... followed by a last groaning and a sighing, and Dame Groan's despair at the way that we still haven't sufficiently f*cked the earth, the sky and the oceans (*you see Jack, we all end up wimps under the iron rule of the google bot overlord):

The further point is that “the elongated supply chain disruption in the Middle East has exposed vulnerabilities in Australian fuel markets, with the country heavily reliant on importation of liquid fuels such as refined petroleum, diesel and jet fuel to power our domestic energy-intensive industries”. The industries singled out as being particularly vulnerable include agriculture, transport, construction and mining.
The idea of running a “just in time” economy has a certain appeal until consideration is given to the large adverse consequences of disruptions to vital supply chains. It might look cheaper at the time, but the real costs become apparent when the flows of vital inputs to economic activity are impeded and their price skyrockets. We should have learned that lesson from the Covid experience, but it was essentially ignored.
A reserve of petrol/diesel/aviation fuel of around 30 days was always insufficient. It also puts us at significant odds with many other countries. Australia needs to remove immediately the impediments to increasing the domestic availability of liquid fuels lest we find ourselves in this position time and time again.

The pond has said it before and will say it again. If we don't get off being oil and gas and coal junkies, there won't be much of a future ...

The old biddy has done a lot of her time already, but the pond quaintly imagined that white Xian nationalists in the lizard Oz wanted children to inherit an earth.

Instead we're in the last chance theatre watching Godot's last stand or Krapp's last tape ...

It's always in the details ... especially that shadowy figure lurking in the wings that the bromancer never manages to see ...

Good old Sky (no rebrand yet?), good old Covid Sharri, good old war mongering Faux Noise, good old Jesse and his mum ...

Crazy times ... crazy people ...

In which Lord Downer goes biblical, the Caterist goes Ming, and Major Mitchell goes full Pauline ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:42:00 +0000

The pond had hoped to be able to put aside friendly atheist Easter banter and get back to the main sociopathic extreme far right lizard Oz reptile business - ruining the fragile condition of the planet even more than it is at the moment.

After all, if you happen to read the whole bible - which to its eternal shame, the pond has done a couple of times - after you've got past the begats and the dystopian vision of the old testament, there's only so long you can try to ignore the socialistic, almost full commie, fully woke talk in Christ's new testament teachings (especially if you ignore misogynistic late comers like St Paul, and note that Christ was even prepared to give hookers a fair go, and had not a word to say about teh gaze).

But then Lord Downer had to come along on Easter feria secunda and ruin it all...

The header: Why we must resist the progressive push to abolish our core Australian traditions; An ABC announcer’s reluctance to mention Good Friday while discussing fish sales has highlighted progressive efforts to diminish Christian traditions in Australian society.

The caption for the flag-waving snap: A Royal Australian Navy MH-60R Seahawk flies the flag on Australia Day. The progressive left has taken aim at the national flag and many of our traditions.

The pond was tempted to send this nonsensical blather straight to the intermittent archive - his effort was there early in the Mōnandæg morning - but it's been acting kinda funny lately, and how could the pond deprive others of the chance to plunge into a dose of white Xian nationalism, His Lordship style, especially as it's all the fault of the ABC:

Last Friday morning an ABC announcer told us there was a big upsurge in sales of fish at the new Sydney Fish Market. When she was speculating as to why, she thought it was because last Friday was a public holiday.
She couldn’t bring herself to remind us that Friday was Good Friday, a day of huge significance to the large number of Australians who are Christians. It is the tradition for Christians on Good Friday to eat fish. That an ABC announcer should avoid any reference to Good Friday should come as no surprise. The ABC, particularly in Sydney, is run by the progressive left.

Dear sweet long absent lord, are we all tykes now?

Back in the day, the pond can remember proddie swine giving tykes a terribly hard time about eating fish on Friday:

It sounds like the plot of a Dan Brown thriller: A powerful medieval pope makes a secret pact to prop up the fishing industry that ultimately alters global economics. The result: Millions of Catholics around the world end up eating fish on Fridays as part of a religious observance.
This "realpolitik" explanation of why Catholics eat fish on Friday has circulated for so long, many people grew up believing it as fact. Some, myself included, even learned it in Catholic school. It's a humdinger of a tale — the kind conspiracy theorists can really sink their teeth into. But is it true?

The answer at NPR here had this annotation ...

...after Henry became smitten with Anne Boleyn, English fish-eating took a nosedive.
You see, Henry was desperate with desire for Anne — but Anne wanted a wedding ring. The problem was, Henry already had a wife, Catherine of Aragon, and the pope refused to annul that decades' long marriage. So Henry broke off from the Roman Catholic Church, declared himself the head of the Church of England and divorced Catherine so he could marry Anne.
Suddenly, eating fish became political. Fish was seen as a " 'popish flesh' that lost favour as fast as Anglicism took root," as Kate Colquhoun recounts in her book Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking.

Well yes, they were still carrying on that way about fish-eating in the tykes v proddy wars in Tamworth in the twentieth century, but do go on ...

Fishermen were hurting. So much so that when Henry's young son, Edward VI, took over in 1547, fast days were reinstated by law — "for worldly and civil policy, to spare flesh, and use fish, for the benefit of the commonwealth, where many be fishers, and use the trade of living."
In fact, fish fasting remained surprisingly influential in global economics well into the 20th century.
As one economic analysis noted, U.S. fish prices plummeted soon after Pope Paul VI loosened fasting rules in the 1960s. The Friday meat ban, by the way, still applies to the 40 days of the Lenten fast.
A few years before the Vatican relaxed the rules, Lou Groen, an enterprising McDonald's franchise owner in a largely Catholic part of Cincinnati, found himself struggling to sell burgers on Fridays. His solution? The Filet-O-Fish.
While not exactly the miracle of loaves and fishes, Groen's little battered sandwich has fed millions around the world.

So there's the answer. Food that passingly resembles fish, but tastes like cardboard.

A treatise on fish eating was the last place the pond had expected His Lordship to take his readers, and yet here we are.

The pond decided to let His Lordship have the rest of his say without any theological niceties intruding on the rant ...

Oh sheesh, not the whole bloody war on Xmas thingie again, in bloody April!

Let’s understand what members of the progressive left are trying to achieve. They want to deconstruct existing society and replace it with their conception of a utopian society. To achieve this quiet revolution they not only aim to direct control over the private lives of individuals but they want to destroy many of our traditions, be they public or private.
Some of the traditions they want to abolish are relatively minor and some are significant. Where once we happily sent cards in December wishing people a Merry Christmas, the progressive left just says “Happy Holidays”. Let’s abolish Christmas. In the progressive world, Christianity and Christian celebrations should be downgraded.
That applies to Easter as well. The Easter holidays are just an excuse to have two extra days off. The progressives wouldn’t want to mention why or the origins of these celebrations.
Progressives want to get rid of as many links as we have with Britain, despite the fact modern Australia has its roots in the UK. King’s Counsels are to become senior counsels. Judges should abandon their robes. The monarchy is to be abolished. The national flag should be changed or, if that’s too difficult, other symbolic flags should also be flown alongside it to reduce its status as a symbol of the nation. Australia Day should be replaced altogether. The list is a long one.
Interestingly, while progressives want to abolish most of the traditions of modern Australia, they nevertheless worship the traditions of other cultures. Our progressive Prime Minister acknowledged the beginning of Ramadan but totally ignored Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. Indeed they don’t object to those non-European traditions being injected into our society as long as our more familiar traditions are abolished, such is the incoherence of the ideology of progressives. They are more defined by what they dislike rather than what they like.
This progressive agenda, which has increasingly gained traction in Australia, should be resisted. It needs to be resisted for two reasons. First, deconstructing existing society and trying to reconstruct it along the lines of some utopian model always fails. You don’t have to go back far in history to see that Robespierre’s France, Lenin’s plans for Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Hitler and Mussolini’s visions in Europe all ended in disaster. In every case they tried to build a model society, tearing down institutions and traditions to build something completely new in their place. To do that they had to compel people to abandon their way of life, and that involved brutal coercion.
Second, the societies that have thrived have been ones that have maintained strong traditions while embracing modernity and change to ensure society remains workable and prosperous. As circumstances and technology change, so too should institutions and traditions evolve.
Being open to modernity and evolution is common sense. Traditions are the important foundation for the durability and coherence of society.
In a world of constant and rapid change, traditions provide a sense of stability. Traditions anchor people. They connect the past, the present and the future so life doesn’t feel like a random sequence of events. Looked at another way, in a world where modernisation is inevitable and technological change is largely welcome, traditions provide continuity and grounding for society.
Traditions are more than that. They are also about identity. They tell you what group you belong to, whether that’s a family, a nation, or a culture. Without them, a country is just a group of taxpayers who happen to share physical space.

As befits a spray of white Xian nationalism (to hell with the Jews and the Islamics and the secularists), the reptiles featured a foreshadowing of later Anzac action as the sole remaining visual interruption... Abolishing Anzac Day would attack the heart of our national self-image. Picture: Evan Morgan

Perhaps Lord Downer is right, perhaps this tendency to modernity is ruining everything, perhaps people should look to traditional pursuits, which would place them in the mainstream of modern American 'looning ...

Oh you sly old devil, you eye-catching rogue ...

As for the rest, you've heard it a zillion times, and here it is for the zillionth and once time ...

Modern Australia has developed its own traditions across the past 238 years. We honour Anzac Day as the day when we remember those who have sacrificed for the nation. Abolishing Anzac Day would attack the heart of our national self-image.
Australia Day celebrates the founding of modern Australia. To abolish Australia Day is seen by many as a strike against our pride in our nation and its history.
We celebrate Christmas and Easter as Christian holidays because modern Australia was founded as a Christian society. In the last census 43 per cent of Australians identified as Christians, yet only 3.1 per cent identified as Muslims and fewer still as Hindus and Buddhists. While we respect traditions of other societies, we expect our traditions to be properly respected too and our traditions are steeped in history.
As a society we may not be as Christian as we once were – 39 per cent say they have no religion. But Christianity forms the foundation of our modern society; our morality, our human rights, our commitment to the equal value of all individuals regardless of their gender and ethnicity. In our society all these things are derived from Christian teaching.
Then there are the rites of passage: at birth there are everything from baptisms to baby showers. There are weddings and funerals. The format of these traditions has gradually changed. There are fewer weddings in churches and more at the beach. You’re likelier to hear a welcome to country than the Lord‘s Prayer at a wedding! But the institution of marriage has remained because it helps to provide continuity and certainty in relationships that may bring children into the world.
Members of the progressive left mock our traditions. They want to get rid of them. Some recognise politically that such changes will take a great deal of time but the ambition is there to get rid of our traditions. If they succeed they will hollow out our society and we will be nothing more than millions of individuals living on our vast island, disconnected from our past and disconnected from each other.

Ah, it's all the fault of those deviant uppity blacks, carrying on as if they were first in country.

Thank you Lord Downer ...

Before proceeding further, the pond should note a splendid new bit of visual cleverness in the reptile's "news" coverage.

A bifurcated, loosely animated set of rotating images! Look, AI magic, an AI marvel ...

Oh dear, not One Nation again, as Geoff chambered a round and Brownie was so desperate he turned to comrade Bill ... (what next, comrade Dan makes a comeback? Desperate times)

Sorry, the pond had to send them to the intermittent archive, because the Caterist was loose in a quarry and inspecting the flow of floodwaters again ...

The header: Political leaders trade clarity for data-driven clicks in digital era; In an interconnected world in which we rely on a global energy market, the idea we can stand apart is a comforting fiction.

The caption for that sneering man: The messaging of the Prime Minister made a persuasive case for nothing. Picture: Martin Ollman

At the moment, the pond would settle for nothing, with nobody a close second ... but go on, do the Ming the Merciless trick we love so well ...

In the era of TikTokification, political leaders seldom talk to people. They talk to the algorithm, the invisible hand of the digital communications market that rewards not what is true or important but what is likeliest to hold attention.
Anyone who expected Anthony Albanese’s address to the nation last week to be imbued with the gravity of, say, Robert Menzies’ 1939 declaration of war was bound to be disappointed.
Menzies’ radio broadcast was delivered live as an unskippable, unclippable speech, marshalling facts in logical sequence to make a persuasive case for war.
Albanese’s speech, by contrast, was a grab-bag of brief, search engine-optimised statements, making a persuasive case for nothing while failing to resolve competing propositions.
The Prime Minister’s insistence that Australia is “not a participant” in the conflict is not so much wrong as beside the point.
In an interconnected world in which we rely on a global energy market, the idea we can stand apart is a comforting fiction.

The reptiles made sure to note where the fault lay, and a grievous fault it was ... Anthony Albanese failed to spark the nation with his address. Picture: David Beach

That snap of the downcast man inspired the quarry cultist to new heights ...

More important, it avoids the more difficult question: where, in strategic and moral terms, does Australia stand?
Iran is not a distant or neutral actor. Its conduct, including hostile activity on Australian soil, is that of an enemy. A government with a clear strategic compass would recognise the war against Iran is in Australia’s interests. It would acknowledge without equivocation the longstanding basis of its support for Israel.
While the analog era rewarded clarity and conviction, the digital world encourages content banks of safe, repeatable and context-free fragments.
The trend towards data-driven, emotionally calibrated messaging, accelerated by artificial intelligence, helps explain why political language often feels formulaic, repetitive and risk-averse. At consequential moments such as this, that becomes a problem, particularly in the democratic world, where leaders require consent for sacrifice.
In his televised address at the start of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, John F. Kennedy delivered one of the finest and most persuasive speeches of his presidency. The build-up of Soviet missiles had been secret, swift and extraordinary, he said. The US didn’t seek conflict but it had been taught a clear lesson in the 1930s: aggressive conduct, if left unchecked, ultimately leads to war.

Hmm, the pond is getting more than a faint whiff of war mongering, backed by this interrupting snap, and Xian messaging from a notorious flogger of Chinese-manufactured bibles ... US President Donald Trump delivers a message on Holy Week – ‘Happy Easter to all, may God bless you, may God bless the United States of America’. Picture: X/WhiteHouse

Some faint sense of reality about the mad King finally entered the flood-water divining Caterist picture ...

Contrast that with Donald Trump’s eight-minute video posted on Truth Social announcing the start of hostilities against Iran on February 28.
The underlying reason for action – to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons – was the same yet the tone was different. Trump promised “a massive and ongoing operation” against “a very wicked, radical dictatorship”. It would raze Iran’s missile industry to the ground, annihilate its navy.
Unlike JFK, Trump has failed to convince nonpartisan Americans to rally around the flag. In 1962, the administration’s action had broad support among Republicans and Democrats. In 2026, support for US action falls mainly along party political lines.
Almost alone among democratic leaders, Trump has embraced social media boldly and provocatively.
His predecessor, Joe Biden, took the more common path of cautious and repetitive framing, using words that would remain safe when clipped and were therefore insufferably bland. His platform-friendly statement to Americans that “we’re going to be OK … making progress … building back better” were easy to remember and even easier to forget.

Boldly and provocatively?

The pond is always impressed by the Caterist's way with words. Others might call it Batshyte Crazy ...

Trump Triggers 25th Amendment Calls With Unhinged Easter Meltdown (intermittent archive)

Oh dear, and then we'd get JD ... out of the battered fish frying pan into the battered fish griller.

But the pond gets the Caterist point.

Why not join this sundowning weirdo on a little excursion, a little journey, even if the Poms are a tad reluctant and yearning to overturn Brexit? British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has also taken a risk-averse approach. Picture: Getty Images

Talk about scaredy cats ...get down with the bold, brave Caterist, always up for risk-taking and bunging on a do ...

Britain’s Keir Starmer has taken the same safe path and is now widely considered to be in his death throes as Prime Minister: bloodless, managerial, risk-averse to the point of opacity.
Like Starmer, Albanese keeps his animating vision, if he has one, close to his chest. Last week’s National Press Club speech bore the hallmarks of modern industrial political communication: modular construction, repetition and emotional calibration. It cycles through the empathetic settings of concern (“I understand”), reassurance (“commonsense approach”) and communal obligation (“looking after people”, “working together”), hiding its moral vagueness under a blanket of emotional warmth.
Albanese’s lips were moving but what was he saying? Was it a war speech? A fuel crisis and national resilience speech? Was it a Future Made in Australia speech, a gambling reform speech or a budget preview? It was all of them and none of them at once. Its core weakness was its failure to answer the hard questions it raises.
Albanese says the degrading of Iran’s military capacity is “a good thing” but doesn’t explain why when Australia is not an active participant, as we have been in other major wars in which the US has engaged. He calls for de-escalation but it is not clear whether Australia supports continuation of the campaign and Trump’s threat to “rain hell” on Iran or if he believes action is strategically justified beyond its original objectives.
Crucially, he does not say what costs Australians should be prepared to bear in return for a noble victory, if there can be one.
Instead the Prime Minister finds himself wedged, like Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark, caught between passive suffering of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and taking arms in the war it entails.

A noble victory? That's what they're calling war crimes these days? The reported wreckage and remains of targeted and crashed US aircraft in central Iran on Sunday. Picture: Sepah News/AFP

For some reason, at that moment the careening Caterist careered off into the digital era...

If the tech-savvy, smart young things who advise Albanese thought their boss would be basking in adulation by the end of the week, they clearly underestimated popular intelligence. At a moment of genuine consequence – global instability, supply shocks and the risk of inflation tipping into recession – people expect leadership.
Yet the PM had almost nothing to say about the cause of the oil shortages that were the ostensible reason for commanding three minutes and 13 seconds of prime time: the US and Israeli military action against a despotic regime that presents a real and present danger to the peace-loving world.
Instead, he seeks to befog the debate with a checklist of policies that conveys a sense of busyness. His government is acting to keep Australia moving, to make the country stronger and fairer, stronger because it is fairer, recognising there is no security in maintaining a status quo that doesn’t work for people. On and on it goes, the rhetorical equivalent of hotel lobby music: short sentences and simple syntax, heavy in emotional legibility but low in analytical density, full of sound and fury and symbolising nothing.
It’s tempting to arrive at Byung-Chul Han’s dismal conclusion in his 2022 book Infocracy: Digitisation and the Crisis of Democracy, which argues democracy will not be defeated by censorship but by overload of information that fragments attention and dissolves shared meaning.
However much technology may dominate our lives, we must be wary of such deterministic narratives and remind ourselves that the pursuit of freedom that inspires democracy is not an ideological construct but a response to human nature.
The political leadership to navigate a path through the digital era in a way that strengthens rather than erodes democracy will one day emerge, even if it is not immediately apparent among current global leaders.

Thank you quarry meister and the pond will pay attention to all the digital lessons to be learned in the King Donald era ...

Forgotten already, her noble work already just digital fush and chups wrappings?

And here the pond was faced with an agonising choice, a bit like a mother caught between choosing one child over the other, when truly both are blessed...

Cruel, inhuman fiends for forcing the pond to make a choice...

Sadly the pond had to send simpleton Simon to the intermittent archive with a god speed and a teaser trailer ...

What a wondrous snap of a bemused, quizzical, perhaps a tad startled beefy boofhead from down Goulburn.

How the pond was torn, how the pond would have loved to have stayed on with simpleton Simon, and shared the snap that immediately followed...of a man in proper, prayerful, gesticulating Easter form ...

Ye ancient cats and howling dogs, what ghostly figure is that in the background?

But the Major called, and the sacrifice was worth it, because Major Mitchell was dealing with the crisis in his own inimitable way ... by writing a stump speech for Pauline, outlining all the ways she could succeed, if only she followed his Major thoughts ...

The header: How economic decline and voter anger are fuelling the rise of One Nation; Political analysts once dismissed One Nation voters as globalisation’s losers, but the party now threatens to reshape Australian politics.

The caption for that leering Jimbo: Treasurer Jim Chalmers needs backing to use the May 12 budget to stimulate productivity and begin budget repair. Picture: Martin Ollman

The Major was in bigly five minute read form, and for once there wasn't much to appeal to readers of the Australian Daily Zionist News ...but it should produce oodles of converts to the Pauline cause ...

Thirty years ago, political analysts thought One Nation voters were the economic losers of globalisation.
Today globalisation is dead but One Nation is on the rise, polling a quarter of the vote.
Its rise reflects the decline in our nation’s political, media and business culture.
The timidity of both sides of politics since John Howard’s November 2007 election loss is eating away at their electoral support.
This column on February 8 quoted former ABC election analyst Antony Green suggesting Pauline Hanson’s party could win up to 25 federal seats if its support held up. That piece warned Labor might be the big winner as One Nation cannibalised Liberal and National Party seats.
Fast forward to the South Australian election on March 21. One Nation picked up three or four Lower House seats and the Liberals lost 11 to finish with five. Assorted independents won four.
Peter Malinauskas’s Labor government won seven extra seats to finish with 34 in the 47-seat Lower House.

The reptiles interrupted with a snap of that woman, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party has reeped (sic, the pond only records, and never corrects, being in something of a typo glass house without the wonders of a spell checker) the benefit of working class abandoning Labor. Picture: Martin Ollman.

The Major did his very best to make a good stump speech for Pauline and One Nation ... so many Major talking points...

The pattern could be repeated in Victoria on November 28, where One Nation seems certain to win seats and young Liberal leader Jess Wilson is being hurt by her party’s limitless propensity for self-harm, this time over the preselection of pro-women campaigner Moira Deeming.
It would be a travesty were Labor Premier Jacinta Allan to win with what is easily the worst record in government, state or federal, this century.
Former NSW premier Mike Baird in this newspaper on Wednesday said the economy had been growing at an average 2.5 per cent a year since 2011 but debt had been rising 3 per cent a year. This had left all levels of government with a $48bn annual interest bill.
This “is 2½ times what we spend on policing across the country, it is more than we spend on aged care, it is enough money to upgrade the Bruce Highway six times, build three WestConnex motorways or three Melbourne Metros each and every year”, Mr Baird wrote.
Australia is languishing with poor productivity and high population growth.
These problems disproportionately affect lower socio-economic demographics in the outer suburbs of our large cities, regional towns and rural Australia.
These are One Nation hot spots, and federal Labor knows it too could lose seats in places such as the Hunter.
Yet concern about high immigration is treated by much of the left media as a trojan horse for racism. Never mind few leaders in media, business or politics live in areas where new schools, roads, public transport, hospitals and jobs are not keeping up with population growth.
ABC journalists are more interested in non-means-tested welfare handouts than budget repair.
Productivity is treated as a way to squeeze more from the poor. Journalists have forgotten the 30 years of uninterrupted growth the productivity improvements of the 1980s and 90s gave Australia.
Kos Samaras, from the RedBridge polling group, in The Australian Financial Review on March 30, described the rise of One Nation as a “story about what happens when a significant cohort of Australians spends nearly two decades watching its world dismantled, its concerns dismissed and its votes treated as a problem to be managed rather than a signal to be heard”.
Samaras cites the closure of the car industry in Victoria and South Australia as the beginning of the end of Australian manufacturing.
Rapid declines in steelmaking, textiles, abattoirs and canneries shook the faith of “people with TAFE qualifications, trade certificates and decades of embodied knowledge the market, suddenly, had no use for”.
Samaras rejects the idea that One Nation voters are being manipulated.
“They have lived, for nearly two decades, through the managed decline of the world they were promised, and they have watched the institutions charged with their welfare either accelerate that decline or look away.”
For many, the bipartisan commitment to net-zero emissions is as big a threat to jobs as mass immigration is to living standards.
Labor’s primary vote is near historic lows, despite holding 94 of 150 federal seats. Facing an oil shock that will lift inflation past 5 per cent and could dramatically slow growth, our cautious PM needs to give Treasurer Jim Chalmers room to use the May 12 budget to stimulate productivity and begin budget repair.

The reptiles then slipped in a snap of Peter in the sort of head gear you need when taking pot shots of a Glock 9mm kind at writers' festivals ... Re-elected South Australian Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas. Picture: Eleni Tzanos (When I hear 'culture', I release the safety catch on my Browning!)

Then the Major carried on in reliable reptile renewables bashing way ...

It’s a nightmare for a Treasurer who looks like going into a slowdown with the prospect of at least two more interest rate rises this year.
After the GFC and Covid, Labor really should have been squirrelling away money from the mining boom to prepare for the next economic shock. Unfortunately its idea of reform has been about raising more tax and giving away more money.
Last week it signalled it is looking at the capital gains tax discount on investor housing. This may temporarily quiet complaints about housing affordability but is likely to raise much less money than the Greens claim, while investors will ramp up rents to offset the increased costs of tax changes.
The government – like Nationals leader Matt Canavan and Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie – talks about supply chain resilience and making more of what we need here.
Unfortunately, Labor’s Future Made in Australia policies look like an old-fashioned case of picking winners.
We were told last term that Australia was going to lead the world in green hydrogen and green steel. Albanese earmarked a billion taxpayer dollars for the “solar sunshot” plan to make solar panels here but little has happened.
It wold (sic, the pond merely transcribes) be far smarter to boost productivity in things Australia is good at: selling iron ore, coal, gas and uranium.

How about opening gas exploration in places such as Victoria?

Indeed, indeed ...

The fuel crisis shows the energy future3 has arrived. All Barnaby Joyce and One Nation have to offer is bluster ...

From early birds to emerging butterflies: UK shows signs of earliest spring on record ...

See where flowers and leaves arer emerging early after record-warm March ...

What could go wrong?

Trump wants to remake the way we fight wildfires. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
The new Wildland Fire Service will consolidate all Interior Department firefighting efforts as a lacking winter and ongoing drought promises a bad fire season. (Sorry, last two links to intermittent archive)

Well the pond did begin by wondering when we could return to getting back to turning an already dire planet into a worse one, in accordance with the lizard Oz's climate science denying agenda, and here we are, as the Major finishing scribbling his stump speech for Pauline ...

The Australian’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly on March 27 discussed the economic headwinds: inflation – already too high – being further pushed up by oil prices, growth constrained to 2 per cent, and productivity that Chalmers himself says will reach 1.2 per cent annual improvement, but not for another five years. Productivity growth in the Hawke, Keating and Howard years averaged 2.2 per cent.
Albanese and Chalmers have done too little to curb the cost blowout in the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
They encouraged trade union activism in a return to sector-wide industrial bargaining.
Now they plan universal child care rebates for all, up to a family income of $530,000 a year.
They handed out free money in power bill relief and are doing the same with the 50 per cent cut in petrol excise, which will only lift inflation. They used federal money to underwrite wages in aged care and child care, and boosted prices for consumers in the process.
Chalmers tried to hobble the Reserve Bank with a new oversight board: the RBA was then too slow to lift rates and too quick to cut them before last year’s election.
Labor has shored up bulk-billing with a package that delivers doctors $3 for every dollar saved on service delivery to patients.
Australians paying for this folly are moving to a protest party that at least acknowledges their problems.

Oh yes ...

... and the boot stickers were right there for the Major ...

Great days for the far reich ...

In which Polonius, true to breed is incredibly boring, while the bromancer is incredibly zealous...and all the pond wants for Easter is some chocolate.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:00:00 +0000

By the way, the pond forgot to mention a few days ago the name of the biblical epic it watched as a build up to taking in the Coen brothers' piece of Hollywood fluff, Hail Caesar.

It was The Silver Chalice, which was honoured by Paul Newman's first feature film appearance and a remarkably silly plot (Newman hated the film).

The pond also took in Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharaohs ...a complete Scorsese cult hoot, featuring a miscast Jack Hawkins and Joan Collins (ah, ancient days)

This one was risible because of the "let my people go" angle assigned to the designer of a mighty secure, mighty keen and peachy pyramid for the Pharaoh, with the architect played by a certain James Robertson Justice - leading to Egypt banning the film because of his allegedly Jewish looking nose.

The pond always enjoyed the way that Roman flicks, sword and sandal romps, and blue eyed white Jesus epics all merged into genre comedy (who could resist Gina and Yul and poor old George in Solomon and Sheba, and Victor Mature was a bible legend, whether The Robe or Samson and Delilah - watch him wrestle lions and Hedy Lamarr, and there's poor old George again).

The pond has always had a soft spot for the biblical genre, though the pond was too young to enjoy DeMille's The Ten Commandments when it first landed in Tamworth.

But for some inexplicable reason it kept coming back on regular Xian seasonal rotation. The only reason the pond could think of? ...Tamworth, oh Tamworth.

The pond credits the film for helping nudge the pond towards atheism.

It features blatant and wretched myth-making of the kind that litters the old testament, much ripped from previous myth-makers, and even at an early age the pond could spot the dodgy special effects.

The parting of the Red Sea? Sublimely silly (though the pond did like all the signs and portents and the plagues and the blood in the water, not to mention all the rampant paganism).

Swallowing that sort of Hollywood hokum is as credible as believing that there was an angry god committing genocide on a huge scale by flooding the world, just so that a select few could crowd onto an ark.

Growing up Catholic, the priests were too canny to go with literalist interpretations of the bible, but they showed other ways to fall.

The pond remembers one bright young priest, handsome and engaging, who briefly rocked into town. His appearance saw many young women suddenly develop an overwhelming desire to turn up to mass.

One moment he was there, the next gone, with the pond's parents muttering about him being naughty.

The pond didn't exactly understand the naughtiness, but would later get there by reading Boccaccio ... you know, priests with a fondness for mortar grinding with pestles. (Eighth day, second story, though a more modern, colloquial translation would help)

Never mind, that's just the pond's seasonal thoughts, and the pond will return to the topic down below, courtesy the bromancer.

But first the pond must get past a brooding Polonius, agitated by Malware and the pasty Hastie:

The header: A Hastie decision may sink the (Liberal) party; Malcolm Turnbull’s praise elevates Andrew Hastie’s profile, yet exposes policy tensions that could unsettle Liberal voters.

The caption for the downcast one:Andrew Hastie’s media performance fuels leadership speculation — and scrutiny of his policy views. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

May sink the Liberal party?

It's not already sunk?

It really is a bit of a sorry story that Polonius should only now be catching up with his prattle, and ignoring the Easter bunny season in the process.

Even more tiresome, this offering was just a standard four minute Polonial rant, with the upside that the reptiles saw no reason to interrupt with snaps or AVs after that opening visual flourish.

This meant the pond could race through it and get to the bromancer more quickly:

It was a somewhat unfortunate accident of timing. On March 27 the news.com.au website carried a story about Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberal Party he once led.
Turnbull was quoted as saying: “Australian politics is determined by the centre and unfortunately … the only political party that is operating at the centre of Australian politics is the Labor Party.” This read like a suggestion that Liberal Party voters should vote Labor – delivered on the eve of the South Australian election.
Turnbull criticising the party that made it possible for him to become prime minister is not news. He has been bagging his former political colleagues since August 2018 when he lost the support of his partyroom and was replaced by Scott Morrison.
Last Sunday Andrew Hastie, the Liberal member for the West Australian seat of Canning since September 2015 and opposition industry and sovereign capability spokesman, was interviewed for 22 minutes on ABC TV’s Insiders.
To some viewers, at least, this looked like a pitch for the Liberal Party leadership, although Hastie later distanced himself from this. But it was an impressive performance since the former Special Air Service Regiment officer has the ability to get a message across. The nature of the message was something else.
Not long after the interview, the Australian Financial Review online ran an article by Ronald Mizen, “Andrew Hastie reveals ‘father-son dynamic’ with unlikely mentor Malcolm Turnbull”. Turnbull was quoted as saying about Hastie: “I’m sure he’ll be Liberal leader one day, I’d be amazed if he isn’t.” He said Hastie “spoke from a position of knowledge when it comes to national security and, even if you disagree with him, he is a well read, thoughtful person who didn’t just parrot talking points”.

The pond hates it when the reptiles refuse to provide links ...

Andrew Hastie reveals unlikely friendship with Malcolm Turnbull (why should the pond do all the worrying about intermittent archive links?)

Of course if you listen to 2GB, which the pond never does, it was all a mistake ...

Andrew Hastie has categorically denied having Malcolm Turnbull as a mentor.
The senior Liberal told Clinton Maynard people have “unhelpfully” focused on a story in the Australian Financial Review.
“I’m my own man with my own mind,” he said.

It's not the pond's fault that Polonius is being unhelpful.

It's getting so that the pond has about much faith in Easter bunnies as it does in Polonius ...

For his part, Hastie said he was “glad to have his friendship even if we’ve had our disagreements over the years”. He said Turnbull “was only a few years behind my dad at Sydney Grammar so we have a common link”.
Turnbull told Mizen a key question about Hastie’s leadership prospects was whether he could outgrow the right-wing politics that “destroyed the party” and outline a vision for the country that most voters could get behind.
Turnbull maintains the Liberals’ move to the right “destroyed the party”. But the evidence suggests otherwise. In the past half-century, only three Liberals have led their party to office after prevailing over Labor; namely, Malcolm Fraser (who won office for three terms), John Howard (who was in office for four terms) and Tony Abbott (who won in 2013 but was replaced by Turnbull in 2015).

Uh oh, correspondents know where this is heading: a Polonial history lesson.

On the bright side, no mention of the ABC yet, though the wretches soon get involved, with that interview ...

When they came to office in 1975, 1996 and 2013, respectively, Fraser, Howard and Abbott were political conservatives. It was Turnbull who attempted to move the Liberal Party to the left (what he would call the centre). In the process the party lost 14 seats to Labor at the 2016 election and nearly lost the election; shedding, in the process, the seats Abbott had won from the Gillard-Rudd government in 2010 and 2013.
Turnbull remains embittered at being replaced by Morrison. He will not accept that a leader who determines the timing of an election and the party’s policy program and loses 14 seats is unlikely to prevail until the following election.
It is not clear whether Turnbull’s support for Hastie will do the latter much good among Liberals. Towards the end of his interview with David Speers, Hastie proclaimed: “I think multinationals and big business in this country have lost their social licence.” What – all of them? This sounds like an editorial in, say, the Green Left Weekly.
When asked why he was “so open to negative gearing, capital gains tax changes”, Hastie replied: “I just think we’ve got to – this is a new era.” The official position of the Liberal Party – as provided by leader Angus Taylor, deputy leader Jane Hume and opposition Treasury spokesman Tim Wilson – is that increasing taxes is not the way to increase home ownership.

Ah, the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way. What an inspiration ...

The pond thought that there were never any conservative voices on the ABC, but that's probably because the pasty Hastieis no conservative. Or so Polonius suggests.

Time for the closing gobbet ...

Hastie told Speers he was “open-minded” about government imposing a windfall profit tax on gas exports. His reason? Well, “the Liberal Party is not the first line of defence for corporate Australia”. Perhaps it should be. After all, corporate Australia is responsible for 20 per cent of federal government revenue each year.
Then there is foreign policy. Hastie described the decision of Donald Trump to bomb Iran as “a huge miscalculation”. Some will agree with Hastie, others not so. But the question arises whether this is a wise comment for a senior opposition spokesman to make since the sad fact is that without the US alliance this nation would not be able to protect the sea lanes and air lanes against an aggressor.
Sometimes it makes sense to remain silent. After all, Trump said at the start of hostilities that the US’s intention was to destroy Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons. This position was supported at the time by Anthony Albanese and his Labor government. A stance with which the Coalition agreed.
Some of Hastie’s views will appeal to Labor, teals and Greens voters. But this does not mean they will vote for the Coalition. He correctly regards One Nation as a threat to the Liberals. But Hastie, despite his appeal, will not gain votes for the Coalition from One Nation by moving to the left.
According to Turnbull, the Liberal Party ought to be talking about the economy. It is. But Turnbull overlooks the fact that Hastie opposes net-zero emissions by 2050 and advocates the use of coal – positions Turnbull despises.
Hastie’s Insiders interview attracted attention. However, it indicated that the talented opposition spokesman would be advised to give more thought to policy outcomes before he talks at length.

Did the pastie Hastie have a moment of introspection?

"What would it be like to have foreign commandos kicking in our doors at night the way we were kicking in the doors of Pashtun families?" (here)

Good question, but if you think starting up new Holden and Ford plants is the answer, perhaps it's the wrong question.

And that sudden self-awareness noted, the more the likes of Polonius carries on, flogging this dead creationist spawn horse to talk up the beefy boofhead, the more the pond is inclined to start up a lettuce v. prime Angus competition.

And now as a warm up to the bromancer, let the lizard Oz editorialist celebrate the season...

Inspirational stuff ... it's as if the lizard Oz theologian hadn't yet caught up with the divergence between Jewish and Xian definitions of the one long absent lord ...

The essential difference between Jews and Christians is that Christians accept Jesus as messiah and personal savior. Jesus is not part of Jewish theology. Amongst Jews, Jesus is not considered a divine being. Therefore all holidays that have a connection to the life of Jesus are not part of Jewish life and/or practice (Christmas, Easter, Lent, Advent, Palm Sunday, etc.). (here)

In short, one or the other of the two mobs have got it completely wrong, and the losers will be off to hell in due course.

Could it be the Catholics because they're so clueless they've been banned from having a mass at the Pentagon by Pete Kegsbreath? (Oh dear, tykes go to war with war and Hogsbreath, *archive link)

And with introductions over, sound the trumpets, bang the drums wildly, because the pond can now attend - thanks to the bromancer - to seasonal duties:

The header: A heart attack, talk with God and why Easter offers hope this fractured world needs now; In a time of great despair, the resurrection of Jesus after crucifixion – the birth of a new and elevated humanism – remains the greatest source of cheer.

The caption: Greg Sheridan and wife Jessie at home on Friday. Sheridan suffered a heart attack in January and it was Jessie who “brought me back with some CPR”. Picture: Brad Fleet

The bromancer embarked on a cunning strategy to disarm the pond by beginning with sundry personal touches, touching perhaps but not the best way to do theology.

The pond has also had a heart attack, and didn't find it a reason to begin thinking about life in hell.

Instead the pond looked at that opening snap, and wondered what the bromancer made of all those assaults on migrants in the lizard Oz?

It almost looked like an Usha/couch-molesting JD situation.

Never mind ...

It’s funny the things you think, when you think you might be about to die. At Easter, it’s worth considering death and resurrection. In January I suffered a heart attack, which was distressing for my wife, Jessie, less so for me because I was unconscious for the most exciting bits.
Jessie brought me back with some CPR, an ambulance whisked me to Geelong public hospital which, on a weekend night, was a good microcosm of Australian life. The fellow in the next cubicle was handcuffed to his bed, with a solid policeman for company. Nurses and doctors coped superbly with the sometimes chaotic variety of humanity in distress.

Cue an ambulance, because so many have never seen one or can afford one ... Ambulances outside Geelong hospital's emergency department, where Greg Sheridan was taken after a heart attack.

The pond's partner did the same - that's what watching Black Mirror will do - but in the car and to the RPA, wherein were many angels in human, practical and professional form.

But still there was no reason to refer to the long absent lord because the pond didn't spot Her on the way into the operating theatre ...

Next day, for various clinical reasons, I was sent to the Victorian Heart Hospital in Melbourne’s Clayton. It’s a magnificent facility – gleaming, clever machines; careful, competent people. Everyone there – nurses of many backgrounds, folks serving food, cardiologist Rob Gooley – exhibits technical skill and a kind of natural, undramatic human solidarity.
I was first diagnosed with serious heart disease at 37, had quintuple bypass surgery at 56, a stent a year later and now, 12 years after that, a new stent where the old one failed, plus a loop monitor inserted to watch the rhythm (growing older now means becoming a cyborg, with bits of clever metal junk strewn around the body).
There are things wrong with Australia, but it’s a great country to get sick in.
So I’ve had a long time to think these things over. The strangest element of this most recent episode was that while unconscious I had the strongest sense of talking to God; not a transforming feeling of God’s presence, just a clear sense of what I was saying to him. And that was: I’m sorry. I repeated it again and again. I thought I was saying it out loud.
It wasn’t said in despair, it’s just what I urgently wanted to say. I’m not a secret axe murderer and these words had no political content but, of course, there’s a lot to forgive.
There’s a paradox in Christian belief. Christianity hates death. It proclaims the defeat of death. That’s the message of Easter. Paul, in his first letter to the Christians in Corinth, proclaims: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

The pond gets it.

Fear of death is what motivates all sorts of cults, and leads the bible to advise that the path to hell is to indulge in graven images.

Oops, that needs a lot of theological finessing - paintings allowed, just no worshipping allowed - because then ... Calvary by Andrea Mantegna, depicting the crucifixion of Jesus Christ

Is it too early for a spoiler?

Should the pond note that this is really just another way for the bromancer to flog his book?

Paul is clear about Christianity’s most radical, supernatural (weird?) belief, that all people will live for all eternity in a new version of their physical bodies. Paul: “For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.”
Jesus says, in Mark’s account, that the God of Abraham is “the God not of the dead, but of the living”. This doesn’t mean God forgets about you when you die. Instead, you’ll live forever. Death, which is a profound alienation from the true human condition, the condition in perfect harmony with God, is defeated in Jesus, who rose from the dead and proclaims eternal life for all.
Without God, every human being would stand constantly on the brink of disaster and oblivion. The attitude to death, and the promise of eternal life, was a stark contradiction between early Christians and the pagan Greco-Roman world around them.
Before Jesus’ Easter resurrection, humanity was extraordinarily glum about death, which was thought to be the dismal end of all lives. In Sophocles’s famous play, Oedipus questions: “What’s the use of glory … if in its flow it streams away to nothing?” Marcus Aurelius, newly familiar from the Gladiator movies and momentarily fashionable again, grimly concluded: “Fame after life is no better than oblivion.”
The classical poets weren’t any cheerier. Virgil wrote of “death unpitying sweep them from the scene”. Homer said all human beings ended in “the dark mist of death”. Catullus similarly: “There is one endless night that we must sleep.” In the Iliad, Homer had Zeus declare: “There is nothing alive more agonised than man.”

Ah, it's book flogging time with petulant Peta ...

The Australian’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan has discussed his book, ‘Christians: The urgent case for Jesus in our world’, with Sky News host Peta Credlin. “One reason I love writing about Christianity is because I can actually be positive about it,” Mr Sheridan said. “The culture is turning its back on Christianity very comprehensively; one reason for writing this book is that as a result of that, there’s a certain crisis of knowledge, very few people now even really know what the content of Christianity is. “But one of my favourite chapters in the book, one that I had most fun writing was about the treatment of Christianity in popular culture.”

Time to bring in a herd of fellow Xians shouting to the sky ...

Easter revolutionised the human condition. It cheered up the human race. Easter, Christianity, gave birth to a new and elevated humanism. The belief in resurrection and eternal life celebrates transcendent value in the whole human being, body and soul. This tradition began in Judaism, in Genesis, which declares that human beings are made in the likeness and image of God. These traditions are the foundation of universal human rights.
Imago Dei, the image of God, men and women as heirs to eternal life. The early Christians were devoted to this understanding. That made Christians cheerful while pagans were glum, even though Christians also knew they generally had a lot to repent of in their own lives.
Christianity thus has the most elevated view of human nature, of the human being, in all of history. But with this elevated status, this transcendent significance, comes responsibility. Not that you must be perfect but you need to try, and you’re accountable, yet you can be forgiven. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, at the end of his enthralling book Believe, asks all his readers: “Life is short, and death is certain, and what account will you give of yourself if the believers turn out to have been right all along? That you took pointlessness for granted in a world shot through with signs of meaning and design?”
Jesus also offers love and forgiveness. But the thunderclap of Easter is that the world is transformed by this momentous event. In one of Douthat’s favourite Christian books (and one of mine), The Everlasting Man, GK Chesterton recalls the first Easter: “On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth.”

Um, the pond must have missed theology 101, because how can that be?

Wasn't the trinitarian Christ part of god way back when, in the times when god was committing floodwater genocide? (Where's a Caterist when he's needed?)

Okay, trinitarian theology never made the slightest bit of sense, not helped by GKC being as thick as your average Edwardian brick ... English journalist GK Chesterton. (Sssh, don't mention "the Jewish problem")

At this point the bromancer tries to get serious, but leaves all the heavy lifting to Douthat, a man notably as mad as a both siderist NY Times hatter ...

Humanity frequently needs reminding to take itself seriously. In matters of religious belief, there is, and of course should be, no coercion. Many people without religious belief recognise social and cultural value in the Judeo-Christian tradition. That’s good. But Christians should never make those flimsy, anaemic, utilitarian arguments their main pitch to the world, so to speak, even if confessing belief explicitly can seem a little embarrassing.
Easter only really counts if it’s true, if Jesus actually rose from the dead and lives forever with his father in heaven, waiting to welcome us. If it’s not actually true, if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead in his body, I’d rather be at the races.

He'd rather watch horses go around in a circle, in what is loosely dubbed a "sport"? Now that's weird, the pond hadn't picked the bromancer as a gambling man, because surely gambling and seeing the odd horse die are the best reasons to head off to the track.

Douthat persuasively argues the historical authenticity of the gospels and other New Testament writings. The shift in modern scholarship on this question is overwhelming. He also persuasively advances the sheer, irrefutable, witness quality of the gospel accounts.
JRR Tolkien, the genius who wrote The Lord of the Rings, called the resurrection the “eucatastrophe”, the unexpected, dramatic event leading to the happiest ending, the outbreak of impossible joy. But the resurrection comes only after Jesus’ passion and crucifixion. Resurrection after the suffering of life and death. I challenge anyone to read the crucifixion accounts and not be moved by the visceral immediacy, the graphic impact, of the experience.
Jesus, though himself God, suffers the shocking, terrifying alienation of intense suffering. Tempted to despair, yet he doesn’t despair. He promises the good thief, crucified beside him, that “today you will be with me in paradise”. Almost his last words are to ask his best friend, John, to look after his mother, Mary. Finally, complete surrender to God the father: “Into your hands, I commend my spirit.” Then the resurrection.
Truly, it’s the greatest story ever told. We can all hope in the resurrection. This fractured world has seldom needed Easter’s hope more than now.

Oh he's risen all right, see how he floats in a rapture ...

Shucks, the pond almost forgot the plug, because there are many ways to make sucker Xians part with a shekel or two ...

Greg Sheridan’s latest book, How Christians Can Succeed Today: Reclaiming the Genius of the Early Church, is published by Allen & Unwin.

What else?

Well the tinkling Trinca was out and about this day, though she steered well clear of the white Xian nationalism that frequently litters the lizard Oz pages ...

The pond thought about it, but then looked at the time on the clock.

Seven minutes!

It was unendurable, it was a waste of time better spent hunting for chocolate ...

The pond personally supervised its listing in the intermittent archive ...

Australia: Are we patriots, nationalists or something else entirely?
From Federation to One Nation, historians and commentators debate whether nationalism unites Australians — or risks dividing them.

Just in case the archive fell over, as it often does, the pond thought it would do a spoiler and cut to the conclusion, only because Greg of the 'Gong turned up, a name long absent from the lizard Oz and so from the pond...

“There’s probably not as much consensus as there might be about the symbols of civic identity in Australia,” Bonnell says. “In America, the flag is revered; in Australia, we’re not sure … We have a symbolically weak civic nationalism.”
His students don’t know much about our political institutions: “They struggle with explaining the basics of the Australian Constitution or the federal system. We have a pragmatic version of civic nationalism – we kind of muddle along and get along – but it’s not based on very strong attachment to shared symbols or to a deep knowledge of what the political institutions are.”
Historian Frank Bongiorno of the University of Canberra says our nationalism has not been as distinctive as the American version because of its British Empire origins; the nationalism that emerged after Federation was “a kind of a post-imperial nationalism”. The US broke dramatically with its British past but there was no such defining moment here. Australia may be hard-pressed to date the emergence of a national sensibility. Historians suggest it emerged in the 60s as a response to our distress/anger at being sidelined by the Poms in favour of the European Economic Community. That’s when we began to “craft our own symbols”, Bongiorno says, in what became a major project.
Civic nationalism is clearer in the US. Says Bongiorno: “The US constitution sits at the heart of what it means to be American. In Australia we have not seen civic identity as being at the heart of our identity.” We looked elsewhere – to the landscape and to Anzac, which once may have been encased in military value but increasingly has morphed into softer values around mateship, for example. We lack iconic figures such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln who serve as symbols of civic nationalism, and settle instead for sport stars or perhaps Simpson and his donkey, or Sir John Monash, Bongiorno says.

Yes, it's on that flag waving level of vacuity ...

Now come on down Greg of the sometime 'Gong ... (the pond isn't sure about this "previously") ...

In the 70s we tried to use multiculturalism as a way to define the country but that concept has lost favour in recent years, under pressure from a much more ethnically diverse population.
Historian Greg Melleuish, previously of the University of Wollongong, says there was a very Australian nationalism articulated in the magazine The Bulletin from the 1880s. It was a “particular type of nationalism, very masculinist, didn’t like religion very much, republican, and it was against the sort of effete English (culture)”. Two world wars helped keep Australia in the British camp despite an education system that focused more on the Australian story, albeit with the message that “we were Australians but members of the empire – an idea that did not start to die out until the 1960s”, says Melleuish.
He points out, too, that a lot of Australian nationalism in the 20th century was about literature and art, and cites publisher Reginald “Inky” Stephensen, who was a leading figure in the rise of radical Australian nationalism in the 30s. Stephensen began by arguing for cultural independence from Britain but ended up espousing far-right ideas.
“He was a rather nasty man,” says Melleuish. “He was an antisemite, among other things, but he had this idea that Australia varied from Britain because the environment was different and therefore Australians wrote about different things, they had different experiences. The kernel of Australian nationalism was the relationship of people to their environment. That’s why a lot of Australian nationalism was literary nationalism.”
He says The Bulletin’s nationalism “was all about autarky, about being self-sufficient” and contemporary economic conditions are pushing us towards a nationalism about “standing on your own two feet”.
“A lot of the criticism of internationalism in the last few weeks is ‘Why did we let industries go? Why aren’t we more self-sufficient? How the hell did we end up with two oil refineries?’ But … whatever happens, Australia will always be dependent on international trade. That’s a reality, and nationalism has to deal with that.
“A lot of the discourse, I suspect, will be about should we build up our own industries or should we continue supplying the rest of the world, which is partly what we’ve done for so long. If you think about it, that comes out of being originally on the periphery of empire – that’s what Australia was set up to do, it was set up to supply raw materials … if you want to see nationalism as a sort of autarkic self-reliance, that’s not possible. We don’t have the capability.”

Wrong message, Greg sometime of the 'Gong.

The reptiles have their saviour to hand, and it's the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth, and we must do our best to Make Australia Awesome Again:

Fear not, thanks to the bromancer and the reptiles, we've always got AUKUS.

And now just to keep the theology thingie going, recently there came news that the couch-molesting JD thinks that UFO aliens are in reality demons ...

It all heads back to that piece featured in Wired, by Laura Bullard, way back in 2025...

The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession(*intermittent archive link)
Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They’ve been a road map for the billionaire ever since.

With Thiel recently in Rome delivering anti-Christ lectures, what better way to spend an Easter than contemplating the deep weirdness of America?

ABH... always be hustling...

Their tiny church is on the cover of JD Vance’s new book. They don’t know him.

The members of a Methodist church in rural Virginia are excited — if a little confused — that the vice president’s memoir of his path to Catholicism has put them in the spotlight. (*intermittent archive link)

This is the current fallback for the US Presidency, Thiel's lapdog ...

And this is news of the current incumbent ...

In which the Angelic one prays, the Ughmann does shipping, and the long absent lord help us, grating Gemma does furries ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:41:00 +0000

The pond should properly open with a tip of the hat to the correspondent who noted silly Hugh Marks attempting to befriend the reptiles, as reported by the venerable Meade yesterday, with a reference to the fable of the frog and the scorpion: Top Marks for cosying up to News Corp – but Hugh knows if it’ll stop constant attacks on the ABC? (as told by prime ham Orson Welles in Mr Akradin)

Sadly, as the pond can personally testify, Marks is one of those snowflakes who has risen to the top to prove that the Peter Principle remains solidly in place and working as well as it's ever done.

Now back to the war ...

As King Donald celebrates the spirit of the season by promising to commit war crimes - attacking power plants in the same way that Vlad the Sociopath has been doing to Ukraine - what could the reptiles do, but send out the Angelic one to lead the county in prayer?

The header: ‘Huge miscalculation’: Easter prayer amid widespread fears of food and medicine shortages;Easter hope takes a hit as war in the Middle East threatens potential shortages of everything from fertiliser to lifesaving medications.

The caption for a sight that has no meaning to EV owners: Cuts to fuel excise have been welcomed as 'better than nothing' but the bigger picture remained surety of supply, said trucking company owners. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

Why the Angelic one?

Well, she can cluck and commiserate ...

Easter in the Christian tradition is a time of hope; hope and new life. Yet I’d bet that not many of us are feeling too hopeful right now.
The war in the Middle East may do something few other wars have done to Australia: cause the collapse of our much-vaunted national complacency. The war’s consequences are not short-term, no matter where you live in our country: the city, the suburbs or the bush. People are rightly nervous.
The latest Newspoll is proof of this. Asked whether they approved or disapproved of US military action against Iran, 72 per cent of voters said they disapproved (including 50 per cent who strongly disapproved) compared with 23 per cent who approved and 5 per cent who said they didn’t know.

The reptiles quickly jumped to an AV distraction, and some sign of hope ... Foreign Minister Penny Wong was among ministers from around 40 countries who met virtually overnight to discuss reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The vital shipping lane has been closed to most marine traffic since the outbreak of war in Iran. The meeting was held after Donald Trump's comments that securing the waterway was for others to resolve. The UK is leading the response. Leaders from France, Germany, Canada and the United Arab Emirates were among those who attended the meeting. But France's President Emmanuel Macron told reporters in South Korea it was “unrealistic” to open the Strait by force.

The Angelic one was still stuck on the job of reporting the bad polling ...

On the question of whether Australia should join allied nations in supporting the US to keep the Strait of Hormuz open for international shipping, 63 per cent of voters opposed sending naval vessels.
If you think this is just a leftie position, think again. More than two-thirds of every age group disapproved of the US military action in Iran. However, proving that their focus is the narrowest of any voting group (and heralding a possible decline in the Hanson party’s sudden popularity as the war continues), only One Nation voters were likelier to support the war in Iran.
So, one aspect of the response from the public to this war is that it does not divide into obvious left and right camps, although the media is a different story. It is fairly obvious to most – whether they be average readers and armchair critics or distinguished overseas academic political theorists such as John Mearsheimer – that by closing the strait, Iran holds all the cards.

Uh huh, quick, turn to the pastie Hastie before all this leftie talk radicalises the pond ... Andrew Hastie addresses a press conference at Eze Steel in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

How desperate are the times?

Pretty desperate if you read the Daily Terror ...

Commiserations to the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, as the Angelic one pressed on ...

Opposition industry and sovereign capability spokesman Andrew Hastie is in good company when he says: “We can be critical of bad strategic decisions … I think this was a huge miscalculation. Iran has managed to pretty much hold the whole world economy to ransom, and because we’re at the end of a very long supply chain we’re going to experience pain.”
The Trump administration’s attempts to extricate itself from this expanding imbroglio with a 15-point plan that the Iranians have ignored is widely regarded as nothing more than face-saving grandstanding for the US president. To paraphrase that old saying, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. The lack of hope, or at least a strong feeling of pessimism, pervades the commentary.
In Australia, the government’s marked lack of preparedness is a big part of that. It is true there was almost no warning about this disastrous war. We’ve had one shock, in the Covid pandemic, which we know will probably happen again, so the lack of preparation of this government for another long-term economic shock infuriates many.
The short-term thinking is stark. A piffling halving of the fuel excise is hardly reassuring and what is galling for most Australians is that we know we have huge untapped resources, especially coal and gas, and gave up drilling for our own oil years ago.

At least there's a chance to remind the hive mind of the real villain ... Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

The Angelic one finally remembered her duty and launched an obligatory attack on renewables and cockamamy talk of actual climate science ...

What is more inexplicable is that even if there had been some warning of this crisis, it is unlikely the government would abandon its rigid renewable energy policy to take any firm action. Everyone on Labor’s frontbench is committed to this as an article of faith. The result of the government’s fundamentalist ideology on renewables is to ignore some of the most valuable resources a country could have in a time of crisis, thus doing great harm to the population and our ability to export those resources.
But life goes on and checking out the prices of electric vehicles and cancelling plans to travel to Europe are minor problems caused by the oil shortage.

Throw in a snap of a ship and the reptile terror was complete ...Supply chains are being stifled by the blockade of one of the world’s most important shipping routes, the Strait of Hormuz. Picture: AFP

Please, long absent lord, slake the Angelic one's thirst for oil ...

Petroleum products are our biggest imports. We need diesel for farmers and mining, for road transport across the continent. Plastics manufacture will be affected, but even more serious ramifications of the interruption of supplies are on the horizon. This week it became apparent that farmers are running short of fertiliser, since most of it comes through the Strait of Hormuz. Lack of fertiliser can mean food shortages in the short term and no food in the long term.
In our part of the world, where we are used to having what we need at the local shop, this could be an inconvenience. But Australia exports two-thirds of the food it produces and an irksome difficulty for us is a looming disaster for other parts of the world where disruptions in food supply and distribution have serious consequences, such as famine and wars.

But who could have encouraged this apocalypse? As the fuel crisis deepens, farmers in regional Australia warn that it may bring their businesses to a halt.

On that question, the Angelic one was strangely silent ...

Then there are consequences of interruptions to supply for people who need medical help. It is likely we will have a shortage of medical supplies of all sorts, from equipment to everyday stuff, including medicine.
Britain’s National Health Service is already running out of supplies. Australia imports 90 per cent of our medications. An interruption of these drugs is dire for people who have chronic and life-threatening conditions, as do some of my children whose medicines were sometimes in short supply during the Covid crisis.
Some of us are right to be pessimistic. We are acutely aware that this war is going to have consequences in more ways than petrol prices at the bowser. I may be accused of being a catastrophist – perhaps I am – but this Easter, this suburban mum will do the only thing she or any of us can in the face of this war. Pray – hard.

Prayer?

Hard prayer? Die hard praying?

That's the best the Angelic one can offer?

How about leaving News Corp?

Rupert Murdoch, Netanyahu ‘pressed Trump’ to strike Iran (caution: intermittent archive link)

Washington | Donald Trump’s decision to wage war on Iran was partly motivated by pressure from outside allies while his own White House team stayed more muted – underscoring how in his second term, guardrails have been traded for a green light.
Those privately pressing Trump to strike Iran included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, media mogul Rupert Murdoch and some conservative commentators, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
The News Corp founder communicated with Trump several times as he urged the president to take on Tehran, according to one person briefed on their interactions.

On what known planet should the pond be forced to agree with Megyn "white Santa, white Jesus" Kelly?

'He'll Be Dead Soon': Megyn Kelly Rages At Ex-Boss Rupert Murdoch Over Iran War Stance
The onetime Fox News headliner ripped Murdoch and other Republicans who've egged on Donald Trump's war against Iran.

And yet here we are ...

The pond really should have saved that one for the bromancer, who will appear tomorrow in the pond for an Easter Sunday homily, but it suits the Angelic one just as well ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles continue to amaze by dodging and ducking and weaving, and who better at that art (or sport) than the Ughmann?

Why he was so hot to trot that the reptiles stuck him at the top of the digital page early on Saturday morning ...

It was a seven minute read, so the reptiles said ...

The header: The ship that proves Australia is losing global fuel security game; A ship from Kuwait on an unprecedented route to Botany Bay exposes a supply chain so fragile it could bring the nation to a standstill. If the fuel stops, Australia stops.

The caption for the uncredited work of art: Australia’s future now hangs on a complex international chess game involving ships carrying liquid fuel from distant refineries across the oceans to our shores.

The pond was delighted to see that the reptiles have at last discovered the sort of service to be found at the likes of Maritime Traffic, and mortified that they didn't feel the need to provide a link. (You can waste hours finding your vessel)

The pond's correspondents know what's coming.

The Ughmann loves the war, loves the chance to celebrate the importance of oil, loves the chance to denigrate renewables and deny climate science yet again ... all the more exciting because he can use arcane new shipping ways to make his points:

It is sobering to track this traffic in real time on a Kpler dashboard, where loaded vessels appear as green arrows inching towards their destination. Touch an arrow and the name of the ship appears, along with its cargo, the port it left and the one it is bound for. That thin green line pointing towards Australia is all that stands between continuity and crisis in this island nation. If it breaks, or even slows, the effects here will be swift and severe.

Quick, another graphic if you please ... The STI Solace’s green-line progress of its fuel shipment to Australia. Picture: Kpler

Time, please, gentlemen, for a plug ...

Kpler is a global trade intelligence company that sits at the nerve centre of the physical economy, stitching together billions of data points to show how energy and commodities are actually moving around the world. It has generously given this column access to its data.

And so to make sundry ponderous points:

Isolate the trade in diesel, petrol and jet fuel to Australia and it shows 36 ships on their way at the time of writing. Twenty-eight are coming from the Asian refineries that usually supply 90 per cent of our fuel. More than two of these ships must off-load at a port here every single day to feed our voracious appetite for liquid fuel, as more than 40 per cent of all the energy consumed in Australia is burned in the engines that drive transport, mining and agriculture.
The notable recent shift in the fuel trade is the emergence of long-haul supply. Four ships have crossed the Panama Canal after loading on the US Gulf coast. Two more have sailed from a refinery in Washington state and another was loading there on Thursday. Historically, fuel imports from the US have been rare, so a distant and more expensive supply line has been tapped to keep Australia moving.
But one cargo now slowly tracking down the west coast of Africa stands out, and its journey here tells the story of a nation scrounging around the world to fill supply gaps at any price.
The STI Solace set sail from Southwold Anchorage, off the Suffolk coast, on March 19 and is due to dock in Sydney on April 29. It is a mid-sized tanker carrying nearly 654,000 barrels of fuel, or about 104 million litres. It sounds like a lot but Australia uses about 173 million litres of refined fuel every day. So the STI Solace has enough fuel in its tanks to keep the country running for little more than half a day.

How about a snap of the ship? Done: The STI Solace – the drude oil oil tanker bound for Botany Bay. Picture: VesselFinder

The proud possessor of arcane knowledge ploughed on ...

On paper, this cargo looks like a shipment from the UK. But the fuel did not originate in Britain. It was transferred there.
Another tanker, the Oslo Star, loaded this cargo from a refinery in Kuwait in mid-February and sailed out of the Gulf before the shooting started. It then tracked west into the Red Sea and up through the Suez Canal, emerging into European waters in early March. As it crossed the Mediterranean and entered the Atlantic, its destination shifted repeatedly, first towards North Africa, then Rotterdam and finally to an anchorage off the Suffolk coast.
When it reached Southwold on the morning of March 19, the cargo was transferred ship-to-ship on to the STI Solace, which set sail that evening and is now carrying it halfway around the world to Australia.
Kpler’s data goes back to 2014, and this is the first time the company has recorded such a trade.
The complex logistical dance was choreographed by the Scorpio Group, a Monaco-based company that operates large fleets of tankers moving fuel between continents. Firms such as this do not produce energy. They move it, trade it and, since the war in the Gulf kicked off, redirect it in response to price and scarcity.
Forgive the blizzard of detail, but it reveals something important. This was not a shipment planned for Australia. It was a cargo looking for a buyer and in the end Australia paid the highest price. So this is not a straight supply chain, it is an expensive relay where each baton change adds costs and complexity.

Enough of all that, bring it home ... Signs cover petrol bowsers at a closed petrol station in Sydney on March 30, 2026. Picture: AFP

And with all that dancing done, the Ughmann could get down to the denialist gritty:

Australia is now engaged in a bewildering and increasingly desperate global scramble for fuel in a deeply fractured market. Our security sits largely in the hands of major producers and international traders who are constantly reshuffling cargoes to meet demand. When supply tightens, the system stretches. Cargoes are rerouted. Ships change hands at sea. Fuel travels farther, costs more and takes longer to arrive.
The world entered this crisis with good supply and a significant volume of oil, including a black fleet of sanctioned Russian cargoes, sitting on the water in tankers. That floating stock is now being rapidly drawn into the market at higher prices. No one is knocking back Russian fuel any more. But this is a limited buffer. As those cargoes are absorbed, the global chessboard will start to lose pieces and supply will tighten further.
In the gap between supply and demand lies the risk. The longer the Strait of Hormuz remains constrained and under the control of Iran, the more precarious this market becomes. It should be noted that Iran is still shipping oil and making a hefty profit on it.
In the supply chain chess game the Albanese government is a bystander.
Band-Aids on supply
That was writ large in the Prime Minister’s address to the nation and his speech at the National Press Club. When asked about the fuel crisis, Anthony Albanese talked about tempering demand by travelling less or lowering costs by cutting the heavy vehicle duty, the fuel excise and the GST.
These are price and demand Band-Aids on a haemorrhage of supply.
The government’s only supply-side moves have been to change rules to allow the limited amount of fuel we refine to stay onshore and to let the Export Finance Corporation underwrite additional fuel shipments. This is to provide comfort to the big energy companies that source the fuel.
The cargo on the STI Solace would have come at a premium. If the price drops in the month it takes to get here, the taxpayer will wear the cost.
When asked about his long-term plans to secure supply, the Prime Minister said everything was on the table but then ran through the usual bureaucrat’s list of reasons that most of it would be too hard, take too long or be too expensive.
It should be self-evident to even a casual observer that our future depends on becoming self-sufficient in liquid fuels as rapidly as we can. It will not be quick, cheap or easy, but contemplate the alternative. If the fuel stops, Australia stops.

If the pond might interrupt at this point, it should be self-evident that becoming self-sufficient in "liquid fuels" is a ludicrous proposition, and that moving towards self-sufficiency in energy might be more to the point, and that the best forms of energy are now coming from the renewables sector, what with King Donald having put the strait in dire straits, and possibly for some considerable time.

But that sort of thinking doesn't sit well with an unreformed seminarian:

That means using conventional and unconventional methods to secure the fuel we need to run the nation. Western Australia and Queensland have oil. NSW has gas and, as Robert Gottliebsen has argued in these pages, Victoria’s vast brown coal reserves should be tapped. Technologies now exist to convert coal into diesel and aviation fuel, turning a stranded resource into a strategic asset.
Energy security is national security and our security is now out of our hands. This was a wilful, catastrophic failure of the political class more than 20 years in the making. This crisis should be the catalyst to fix it but the early signs are not good.
Anyone who says electric cars are the answer is not serious. They have a role, but truck traffic between Sydney and Melbourne on the Hume Highway alone runs at 1900 B-double equivalent trips a day. That is 700,000 trips a year. The technology to rapidly replace all that traffic at the same cost and efficiency as diesel does not exist.

Pond correspondents have already noted that new technologies are rapidly being developed.

The question is whether we want to join King Donald and revert to the1950s, or wake up to the way that China has stolen the renewables and EV race from the United States ... Oil tankers and high speed crafts sit anchored at Muscat Anchorage near the Strait of Hormuz on March 30, 2026 in Muscat, Oman. Picture: Getty Images

King Donald, in his almost infinite fatuity, and his singular failure to understand the way world markets have worked, has dropped the world in it... and the Ughmann, with equal fatuity, thinks he can get away with it.

Just before Albanese addressed the press club, Donald Trump spoke to his people. The American President made the point that the US could walk away from the war in Iran without reopening the Strait of Hormuz because his country did not rely on it for fuel security.
He is right. After decades of declining oil production, something extraordinary happened to US energy supplies from 2010 on. The shale oil revolution turned the US into the world’s biggest producer of oil and natural gas.
Trump can walk away from the war with Iran and his country will absorb the shock. Prices may rise. Consumers will feel it. But the system holds. The US has choices. Europe and Australia do not.

He's right?

No he's not, he's a demented, clueless old king, in the last stages of reign and life.

He can walk away from it, and all will be well?

No, he can't. To paraphrase, no man or country is an island, entire of itself, every country is a piece of the world, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, the United States is the less ...

Right now, the system in the United States is being torn apart, fragmented, destroyed, with the country at war with itself, and no solution to hand.

Every day is spent in speculation about who will next get the knife, as the demented, mad king seeks ever diminishing ways to shift the blame from him.

Who knew that a desire to avoid the Epstein files would lead to all this?

This is a world News Corp has helped shape. This is why the moment is so stark:

That is what makes this moment so stark.
The world is organised around energy. As the world’s best energy analysts at Doomberg argue, power, prosperity and security flow from those who produce it. For decades, globalisation obscured that reality. Oil moved freely, trade routes were protected and supply chains, though complex, were dependable. The Gulf war has exposed how fragile the old system was.
Supply is no longer guaranteed. It is contested, disrupted and increasingly weaponised as the global energy market fragments into competing spheres of influence. That world is breaking and will not return to business as usual.
In the emerging world order, geography and resources matter again.
The US, Russia and China are well placed in the new order. They have energy within their borders or within their reach. Europe does not. Australia has it but has chosen not to use it. Both have come to rely on long supply chains in a world where distance is now a vulnerability. Both have demonised the fuels on which their societies run. This virtue signalling is a vanity we can no longer afford to indulge.
Doomberg’s central insight is that energy systems do not evolve gradually. They appear stable, then shift suddenly when a shock hits. When that happens, the system does not return to what it was. It reorganises around new realities.
For exposed, import-dependent nations such as Australia, the implications are profound. Energy is not just another commodity. It is the foundation of economic life and national security.
We can ignore that truth or we can act on it. Because if we do nothing and that thin green line breaks, so do we.

Oh go yap to the Emeritus Chairman and get him to explain his grand plan, and what he was thinking when he encouraged the mad king in his folly ...

And after all that the pond will only briefly note garrulous Gemma, attempting to take the pond back to the days of "they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs."

Frankly the pond almost ground to a halt the moment that "furries" turned up in the header.

Hasn't Gemma been keeping up?

The new trend is "looning"...(the pond thinks there should be a copyright claim in that, and at least some decent royalties ...

Forget that cornballl cute image of a furry clutching its cheeks, like a zillion football and other sporting mascots around the world.

Dare the pond urge students to go doggies?

Nah, if you're going to have a kink or a fetish, do it in style ...

Besides, the intermittent archive is working at the moment, so correspondents can head off there if they want to be grated by Gemma ...

Hey kid, you’re not a dog’: Italy’s schools can teach us hard lessons
Good luck turning up to class in Italy and barking at classmates. Australia’s education system cossets kids, Italy’s fosters resilience, not furries.
By Gemma Tognini
Columnist

The pond couldn't believe that in a time of war and pending calamity, this was the best that garrulous Gemma could serve up ...

Feelings and furries
In Australia, the education system shields and mollycoddles. Reading lists come with trigger warnings. Feelings take precedence.
I recall a few years ago chatting with a friend whose child was at a private school in which some students were identifying as animals. Furries. Read about it, it’s ridiculous. When I laughed and asked how long they were suspended for, she told me they were being “accommodated”.
An article I found from 2023 quoted an educator who offered this solution: “It is important to build a safe environment for them (the student) based on trust, where they feel comfortable expressing themselves to you.”
‘Hey kid, you’re not a dog’
No, it’s important to say, “Hey kid, you’re not a dog.” This absence of any kind of line in the sand is what I’m talking about.
Good luck rocking up to school in Italy in a pair of ears and barking at your classmates.
Is our system robust and focused on critical thinking or is it about constantly lowering the educational and behavioural bars? Some stats are telling, such as the number of kids being homeschooled.
In Queensland, as of August 2025 just shy of 12,000 students were being homeschooled. Between 2021 and 2025, primary school registrations grew by 110 per cent. In high schoolers, it was 167 per cent. A fraction of the millions of Australian kids in school perhaps but, as they say, it’s about the trend.
Education should be a preparation for life. It should absolutely be hard sometimes. Ditto challenging. Critical thinking, learning, should be valued and prized. Rough edges on young minds should be sloughed off over time, in class, not indulged.
I often wonder what it will take for various things to shift. To recalibrate. This is no exception. Perhaps it’s time for those in charge of the education sector in Australia to look beyond the Hills Hoist and understand what’s at stake. Maybe then something will change.

Read about it?

Alas, there was no link to follow ... but the pond does recall a Media Watch yarn back in May 2025 ...

And the reptiles are still wondering why the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and quik stix at that ...

That's the best garrulous Gemma could offer for an Easter weekend?

Furries when there's a demented mad king still not in his retirement home?

Sheesh, Pam Bondi's already ancient news ... who's next to feel the wrath of the doddery delinquent?

In which the bromancer offers blessedly rational insights, Lloydie of the Amazon is resurrected in a gushing Easter miracle, and Our Henry goes full theologian ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 21:04:00 +0000

Some days the pond has to give up a lot to follow the reptiles at the lizard Oz.

Look elsewhere, and you might find news of King Donald giving Pam Bondi the boot.

Or news of him mocking the Macrons' marriage, producing the mild retort that the thuggish one was "neither elegant nor up to standard" in his verbiage.

Or more fun with the ongoing bimbofication sessions saga. (caution, intermittent archive link)

Or the King's retreat from SCOTUS.

And other stories, such as White House Scrambles to Wipe Trump Meltdown Footage never had the ghost of a chance

The White House posted and then rushed to delete an hour-long recording of an event with President Donald Trump that captured him lashing out at the Supreme Court after justices signaled expressed skepticism about his birthright citizenship case.
The president privately hosted a group of MAGA pastors and religious allies Wednesday for an Easter luncheon at the White House. Trump made several bonkers remarks during the event, which was never meant to be seen by the public, as the White House quickly deleted the footage from its official pages.

Instead the pond has to cope with the bromancer trying to decipher the real meaning of the low energy word salad that King Donald fed his base ...

The header: Donald Trump’s clearest Iran pitch was still full of contradictions; The US President’s address contained myriad inconsistencies, and leaves the world not much better informed about his plans for the Middle East.

The caption for the snap of the King: President Donald Trump arrives from the Blue Room to speak about the Iran war. Picture: AP

Usually the sight of the King would immediately inspire a matching cartoon, but the pond didn't have the time or the space.

Worse, the bromancer could only manage a paltry three minutes as he tried to shape something coherent out of a completely incoherent speech.

The pond supposes that it's like that old joke complaining about the lack of quality in the food, and the small portions in the serves:

Donald Trump’s address to America was his most coherent statement of purpose in Iran for many weeks. He offered, at the start of the speech, a good rationale for why action against Iran was justified.
Yet, while Trump is always better when he sticks closer to the teleprompter, the speech still contained myriad contradictions, and leaves the world not much better informed about what he plans to do, or what might happen, in Iran.
One explanation for what Trump has been saying for weeks is a continuing attempt by him to jawbone the markets. Every time Trump says “the war’s nearly finished, I’m going to bring the troops home soon”, the markets respond favourably, the price of oil drops, the prices of stocks rise.
Except that didn’t happen this time. That’s because of the law of diminishing returns, and because whenever Trump says something cheerful and hopeful, he contradicts it a minute later with prophecies of Armageddon.
This speech was no exception. The war’s going great. We’ve nearly achieved all our objectives, nearly finished, it’ll be over soon.
Phew!
But then, actually we’re going to keep bombing for another two or three weeks and we’re going to hit harder than ever.
And, we the US don’t need any access to the Strait of Hormuz. We don’t need any deal from Iran. We don’t get our oil from the Strait of Hormuz. So after we’ve gone that will be someone else’s problem.

It was a feeble effort, already running out of steam.

Even the bromancer, a devotee of nonsensical war mongering, couldn't make sense of it all.

By the time the reptiles offered an AV distraction, the bromancer was getting ready to fall down the rabbit hole, if not with Alice, then certainly with the King ... Donald Trump says ‘never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks’.

After that point, the bromancer's thinking dissolved into a puddle, like Frosty the snowman caught in a climate science denialist's heatwave...

But, if we don’t get a deal from Iran, then we will bomb it back to the Stone Age. We’ll destroy every single one of their electricity-generating plans. We may well destroy all its oil industry facilities.
So is a deal completely unnecessary to Trump and the US? Or is it so important that Trump will bomb Iran back to the Stone Age and destroy its oil industry if he doesn’t get one? Your guess is as good as mine.
At least this time he didn’t threaten to bomb Iran’s desalination plants. Did someone take it out of the speech? Does even Trump realise there must be some limits to what he threatens?
On regime change, Trump claims, fantastically, that regime change has already happened in Iran. This is preposterous. Trump has long held the view that he has a special power to create reality by just saying something.
It’s astonishing how often that actually works for him. But if Trump truly believes there has been regime change in Iran because the US has killed dozens of its leaders, he’s hallucinating. Of course, he doesn’t really believe that. This is the power of his brazenness, which sometimes serves him well but which, increasingly, people can see simply denies reality.
On the matter of Iran’s 400kg of uranium enriched to 60 per cent, which is near weapons grade, Trump no longer believes it’s necessary for the US to get hold of this, either through Iran surrendering it or US forces taking it.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier said it would be necessary for US forces to take this material. Trump’s special negotiator, Steve Witkoff, said the existence of this stockpile was why the US went to war.
Trump now says US bombing has made a big, dusty mess of the sites where the uranium is believed to be stored and America can simply watch these sites from the air – from satellites, presumably – and if Iranian personnel make any attempt to retrieve the material, the US can hit them again.
But all that could have been achieved with a military operation of a few days.
And, of course, Trump might very well be trying to mislead, while US special forces prepare what would have to be the most daring raid in history.
The tone from Trump this time was blessedly rational. But we still have almost no idea what he plans to do, or what he might do.
That’s our world.

That's what's passes as "blessedly rational" in the bromancer's world?

Roll it around on the tongue, savour the taste of blessedly rational as an Easter treat ...

...we still have almost no idea what he plans to do, or what he might do.
That’s our world.

Put it another way.

Now there's a blessedly rational car wreck for you ...

And now to the reason the pond felt constipated, jammed up, overloaded this Friday.

You see at the top of the page there came the return of Lloydie of the Amazon, a gushing Easter miracle, and the reptiles were all in ...

Lloydie of the Amazon was equally into it, with a bigly eight minutes opus on offer ...

The header: Does Australia - and our PM - have what it takes to drill baby drill?; In just two decades, Australia has gone from energy self-sufficiency to dangerous dependence. Like the US, we can turn it around. The question is, will we?

The caption: What, say what, no caption for that splendid piece of lizard Oz graphic art? 'Tis sad, but true, the way that creative genius goes unrecognised this day...

The pond had almost forgotten that Lloydie of the Amazon existed - thought he might have got lost in the Amazon again as he tried to save the world via tourist resorts - but instead he's back and worse than ever.

All the pond could do was stand back and let him gush his devotion to fossil fuels ...

Like the explosive power of fossil fuels, the global story of energy is shaped by crisis. Australia is no exception. The war in Iran is forcing government to confront our import dependence. Since 2000 Australia’s liquid fuel equation has flipped. We have gone from being self-sufficient in oil and petrol, with eight refineries supplying 98 per cent of consumption, to having two refineries and a reliance on imports for roughly 90 per cent of our fuel needs.
Across the same two-decade period, the US has achieved the reverse and both Japan and Germany have absorbed a bitter lesson in energy vulnerability.
Lessons from the US, Europe and Japan
Two Gulf wars and the ingenuity of a wildcat driller, George Mitchell, transformed the US from being dependent on the Middle East for crude oil to being the world’s biggest producer and an energy export superpower. The transformation is due to Mitchell’s discovery in 1997 of how to drill wells horizontally and liberate oil and gas held deep underground in rock formations.
The energy crisis theory also works in reverse. During the same period, the Japanese tsunami in 2011 and associated Fukushima nuclear disaster up-ended the power equation and energy security of industrial powerhouses Japan and Germany. Both countries swore off nuclear energy as a result of the Fukushima nuclear accident – despite the fact it did not cause any deaths – but both have now changed their minds.

It was nuke the country to save the planet time ... The No. 3 reactor building at Tokyo Electric Power Co's tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2010.

When Lloydie gets gushing and nuking like this, there's nothing to do but stand back, or get caught in the geyser ...

Japan has restarted 15 nuclear reactors and another 10 are in the process of restart approval. Energy market disruption caused by the war in Ukraine spurred Japan to further reconsider nuclear because without it Japan must import about 90 per cent of its energy requirements. This is why debate in Australia about changes to gas production, exports and the prospect of super profit taxation is watched closely and of great concern in Tokyo.
The loss of Russian gas because of the invasion of Ukraine also left Europe badly exposed.
Germany had turned to Russia for gas as it shut its last three nuclear power plants in 2023, but German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told business leaders this year it had been a “serious strategic mistake” and the country would rebuild nuclear production.
In 2025, nearly 70 per cent of Germany’s energy needs were met through international imports despite the many billions of dollars that have been spent on a world-leading renewable energy transition. “I want us to eventually have acceptable market prices for energy production again and not have to permanently subsidise energy prices from the federal budget,” Merz said. His answer is nuclear.
Australia’s feat of energy self-harm
It can be argued that, like Germany and Japan, Australia has performed its own feat of energy self-harm. Exploration for oil has been allowed to falter and production of liquid fuels has been sent offshore by a combination of economies of scale, lack of investment and strict environmental mandates from government.
In Australia, climate change has become the crisis that drives energy policy. But, as the war in Iran has shown, energy security is about a lot more than phasing out coal-fired power stations to make electricity. Australia runs on diesel fuel. Fossil fuels produce the fertilisers we need to grow our food and export crops. Fossil fuels make plastics that are ubiquitous to construction and modern life. Diesel-powered cranes unload containers at the wharves and diesel-powered machinery mines the coal and iron ore we export and fuels the trucks that keep our supermarket shelves stocked.
Work is being done on electric-powered trucks but they have their limits. They are more expensive to buy and their small range is not suited to Australia’s long-haul routes. Heavy batteries lessen the payload that can be carried and presumably further increase the cost of freight.
Big miners are exploring ways to shift production to electric diggers and dump trucks, but while Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue is talking a big game about what the future holds, BHP and Rio have slashed spending on green initiatives. This mirrors a global trend to get back to basics.
The evidence is that Australia must work to encourage future investment in the energy and resource projects that pay the bills against strong competition from Canada, the US, South America, Africa and elsewhere. And we must decide if we want to re-establish domestic energy security or remain dependent on extended import supply lines at a time of global upheaval and potential conflict.
There have been plenty of opportunities lost. The failure of the much-hyped hydrogen revolution to work at cost and scale has left us without a clear pathway to replace liquid fuels.

In cases like this, the pond can merely observe and offer for the pleasure of its correspondents, with illustrations... Oil from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The BP-leased oil platform exploded and sank in 2010, leaking an estimated 200,000 gallons of crude oil per day from the broken pipeline.

How Lloydie relished the disaster:

Deepwater Horizon and our last best chance
The failure of the last best chance to replace the dwindling oil reserves from Bass Strait can be traced to another crisis: BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The Deepwater crisis gave environment groups the leverage they needed to campaign against BP’s ambitions to drill for oil in the deep waters off the Great Australian Bight.
Deepwater Horizon in 2010 was the world’s biggest oil spill in which 800 million litres of oil was spewed into the Gulf of Mexico across 87 days. Only about 25 per cent of the oil was recovered, leaving half a billion litres of oil in the Gulf. BP said economics, not environmental politics, caused it to pull out of the bight project but its own oil spill modelling showed a Deepwater Horizon-style spill in the bight could take more than six months to control, would be certain to hit land and would spread oil for thousands of kilometres. If a spill happened there was a “high probability” it would affect important marine species, including sperm whales and pygmy blue whales.

Yet more disaster footage... The US Coast Guard battles blazing remnants of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

Lloydie gushed on ...

After BP pulled out, Norwegian energy giant Equinor was given permission to drill for oil in the Great Australian Bight but it also pulled out in February 2020, citing poor project economics. Equinor said the project did not stack up financially with other global energy projects. This is despite estimates that more than nine billion barrels of oil could be extracted from several fields, making it – despite the much deeper waters – the logical replacement for dwindling reserves in Bass Strait.
The discovery of oil in Bass Strait in the Gippsland Basin off Victoria in 1965 by Esso and BHP fundamentally changed the nation by delivering energy self-sufficiency. More than five billion barrels of oil have been produced from Bass Strait across five decades but production has been in steady decline since peaking in the 1980s.
Export exposure
Rather than being self-sufficient, Australia today is a major exporter of energy, principally coal and gas, but a net importer of liquid fuels. According to the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, in 2022-23 Australia produced 771 petajoules (equivalent of 131 million barrels) of crude oil, condensate and LPG, of which more than 94 per cent was sent offshore.
In return about 90 per cent of refined products including petrol and diesel were imported, mostly from refineries in South Korea and Singapore. Australia now has only two operating oil refineries – the Lytton Refinery in Brisbane and the Geelong Refinery in Victoria – which provide only about 17 per cent of domestic demand. Australia consistently falls short of the International Energy Agency requirement to hold 90 days of net oil imports, typically maintaining roughly half that amount.
Opting to import our liquid fuel requirements was a conscious decision. The Australian Institute of Petroleum, an industry lobby group set up to promote self-regulation, argued in 2017: “Australia’s transport fuel security depends on flexible supply chains and diversity of product supply, not domestic refining of domestic crude oil.”

Lloydie was wild-eyed with local excitements... Offshore oil and gas production on the North West Shelf off WA.

There's nothing like living the climate science denying, renewables fearing, fossil fuels loving dream ...

Its members were Ampol Limited, BP Australia, Mobil Oil and Viva Energy Australia.
The AIP argument was that Australia did not need to subsidise local refineries or a new nationally owned refinery.
It said if Australia had more refineries to meet domestic fuel demand, this would simply result in more crude imports as domestic crude production was insufficient and unsuitable by itself to achieve “self-sufficiency” in transport fuels.
The AIP said substituting crude oil imports for petroleum product imports would not increase transport fuel security.
It said no new refinery had been constructed in an industrialised/Western nation for more than 20 years. And Australia offered none of the capital or operating cost benefits available in many developing countries.
“Compared to refineries across Asia, Australian refineries suffer from substantial disadvantages in operating and capital costs that preclude Australia from consideration for major new refinery projects,” the AIP said.
“In the context of Australia’s demonstrated efficient and reliable access to large-scale refineries in Asia (and excess Asian supply currently and forecast), it is difficult to see any case for the very significant cost of a taxpayer-funded refinery (for example, at least $US5bn for a minimum efficient scale refinery).
“High coastal shipping costs would make domestic distribution from a ‘central’ refinery uncompetitive against imported cargoes of fuel.”
Many of these things still may be true. But the Iran war crisis has exposed our vulnerability. We are dependent on much more than fuel and if the war continues the economic costs will continue to escalate.
How we can turn this dependency around
Like the US, Australia is well placed to turn around our import dependency.
At present, Australia’s oil production is heavily concentrated in a few offshore regions, with most of the remaining crude resources located in the continent’s northwest and southeast.
According to Geoscience Australia, the Northern Carnarvon Basin in Western Australia is Australia’s most prolific oil-producing region, accounting for nearly 70 per cent of the country’s remaining identified crude oil resources.
The Gippsland Basin, which includes Bass Strait, is in a significant state of decline and transitioning towards decommissioning.
The Cooper-Eromanga Basin in South Australia and Queensland is the largest onshore oil and gas province in Australia.
The Bonaparte and Browse Basins in Western Australia and the Northern Territory are massive gas hubs but produce large quantities of condensate, which is used as a refinery feedstock.
There is renewed interest in Queensland’s Surat and Bowen basins, where the Taroom Trough has been identified as a “new oil frontier”, with major exploration and appraisal drilling under way.
This week Queensland Premier David Crisafulli said the field had the potential to produce “hundreds of millions of barrels” of oil.

What set Lloydie off? What brought him back?

Could this be another terrifying thing to pin on King Donald's Iranian excursion folly?

It's perhaps not down there with murdering 150+ schoolgirls, but it's a goodly firestorm, An oil tanker burns after being hit by an Iranian strike in the ship-to-ship transfer zone at Khor al-Zubair port near Basra, Iraq, on March 11.

Lloydie stayed all in, until the final frenzied gush of oil-fuelled madness ...

“There’s potential for a veritable sea of domestic oil right here in Queensland,” he told the Liberal National Party’s annual State Council. “We must promise ourselves, as a nation, never again will we be vulnerable entirely to foreign conflicts injuring our energy security. For too long, the national conversation about mining has treated the industry as something we should be embarrassed about.”
The Iran war is a wake-up call and a chance to rethink national priorities.
To succeed, however, it would be necessary to match crude oil production with refining capacity, create large stockpile reserves and to develop an efficient way to distribute product around the country. And, as in the US, this might involve leaning into unconventional technologies such as fracking that have proved highly controversial.
There is still work to do to prove up reserves in the Taroom Trough in Queensland. And there are bitter fights to be had about the environmental risks of deep-sea drilling in the Great Australian Bight.
But, as in the US, shale oil could be our big untapped potential. The Beetaloo Basin is a massive, highly prospective shale gas field in the Northern Territory that is transitioning from exploration to commercial production, with first gas sales to the NT domestic market targeted for mid to late 2026. Several key wells in the Beetaloo Basin have confirmed the presence of liquid hydrocarbons with estimates of hundreds of millions of barrels.
The same is true for the Canning Basin in Western Australia.
The question is whether Australia still has the institutional and political wherewithal to drill baby drill.

Phew, please allow the pond to pause to celebrate what war can produce ...

At this point, the pond had no alternative but to do a hard cut on Killer of the IPA, a scandalous sacrilege for a Good Friday...

At best, the pond could offer a teaser trailer ...

And the pond could offer a fragile link to Killer in the intermittent archive, working early this day ...

PM’s fuel excise cut just ignores our real energy problems
For weeks people have put up with being accused of irrationality for ‘hoarding’ petrol when such behaviour is a perfectly rational response.
By Adam Creighton
Adam Creighton
Contributor

But the pond had to rule against full coverage, on the grounds of space and redundancy.

What could Killer add to what Lloydie of the Amazon had already gushed about?

Not much ...

...The sad transition from having among the cheapest energy in the world to the most expensive rests mainly on the government’s obsession with replacing cheap fossil fuel with unreliable wind and solar energy. Barely 6 per cent of the workforce was employed in manufacturing last year, around half the level it was two decades ago.
Albanese also extolled the wonders of removing the lower minimum pay rates for 18, 19 and 20 year olds. After returning from the US last year, where there are no such concessional pay rates, I was struck by how many young people worked in retail. These changes won’t be great news for many young Australians who will simply be passed over for a more experienced, older worker.
What new limitations on gambling advertisements, also part of the PM’s speech, has to do with how the government would handle the emerging fuel crisis is anyone’s guess.
Unfortunately, there’s little governments can do to alleviate panic buying once it’s begun. Unless they can convince people their facts were mistaken – very difficult in a crisis when governments are known to lie – formal rationing can only exacerbate the panic. Next week could be interesting.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

So Killer had to be sacrificed, but it was for a good cause - in the spirit of the season.

With Killer of the IPA truncated, neigh crucified, that left room for a full outing with Our Henry, proudly on hand for the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

The header: How the ancient story of the Exodus forged the foundations of Western freedom; What happened at Sinai was not merely a religious revelation. It was the founding moment of a new kind of political order.

The caption for the painting that helps date Our Henry's thinking: ‘The miracle of the Exodus’. Moses and the Children of Israel Crossing the Red Sea, c.1855, by Henri Frédéric Schopin.

The 1850s? Possibly a tad too modern, muh lud.

The hole in bucket man offered a bigly seven minutes of Easter piety, skating around the awkward way that Jews and Jesus lovers and trinitarians have their issues.

The pond was reminded of this recently when it took another look at the Coen brothers' bit of fluff Hail Caesar, about Hollywood making a bible epic ...

Narrator: Ancient Rome. Twelve years into the rule of Tiberius, ruler maximus. Rome's legions are masters of the world, the stomp of its sandals heard from the Iberian peninsula in the west through the halls of the great library of Alexandria in the east. As oppressed people everywhere writhe under the Roman lash, freeman and vassal are united in one compulsory worship. The emperor, Caesar, is Godhead, lord of every man's body and spirit. For those who will not submit, the galleys, the arenas, even crucifixion await. But there is a new wind, blowing from the east, from the dusty streets of Bethlehem, that will soon challenge the vast house of Caesar, that edifice wrought of brick and blood which now seems so secure!

Why, it's almost as good as a Thucydides reference.

Curiously only the week before that the pond had dipped into a really terrible Bible flick from the 1950s and the Coen brothers were true to brand ...

Protestant Clergyman: Who plays Christ?
Eddie Mannix (the studio head trying to get the assembled clergy to give the script a tick of approval): A kid we're all very excited about, Todd Hocheiser, a wonderful young actor we found in Akron, Ohio, after a nationwide talent hunt. But Hocheiser is seen only fleetingly and with extreme taste. Our story is told through the eyes of a Roman tribune, Autochlus Antonius, an ordinary man, skeptical at first, but who comes to a grudging respect for this swell figure from the East.

The film was full of great theology:

Catholic Clergyman: God has children.
Rabbi: What? And a dog? A collie, maybe? God doesn't have children. He's a bachelor. And very angry.
Catholic Clergyman: No! No! He used to be angry!
Rabbi: What? He got over it?
Protestant Clergyman: You worship the god of another age!
Catholic Clergyman: Who has no love!
Rabbi: Not true! He likes Jews.

Our Henry's playing the role of the rabbi ...

At last, the time had come: as they prepared to flee Egypt, the children of Israel stood on the threshold of deliverance. But even before they were freed, they received a commandment that would echo through the ages.
“This day shall be unto you for a memorial,” said the Lord, “and throughout your generations you shall keep it a feast forever.”
That command, given thousands of years ago, was once again observed this week as Jewish families across Australia celebrated Passover. In many homes, the mood will have been sombre – darkened by the hostility that erupted with the massacres of October 7, 2023, and then metastasised into murderous antisemitic violence.
Yet the Passover Seder – the ritual meal in which the Exodus story is recited and retold – is above all a time to remember, to celebrate and to pass on from one generation to the next the miracle of the Exodus.
It would be a mistake to see the narrative of the flight of the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt as simply a gift to the Jewish people. Its themes have shaped the Western tradition itself and, through it, the democratic inheritance Australia received with British settlement.
That inheritance is now increasingly fragile. Understanding the ideas that underpin our liberty is therefore more crucial than ever. The Exodus narrative is, at its core, the story of how they entered our world.
Not conquest, consent
What happened at Sinai was not merely a religious revelation. It was the founding moment of a new kind of political order. When the children of Israel stood at the foot of the mountain, they did not receive a code imposed by a conqueror or a law decreed by a king. They entered into a covenant.
The Hebrew word – berit – describes a binding, bilateral, conditional commitment between God and the people, in which obligations run in both directions. God committed himself to Israel; Israel committed itself to God’s law. The community the covenant created rested not on conquest but consent.
Nothing like this existed in the ancient world. The great empires – Egypt, Assyria, Babylon – understood power as flowing downward from a god-king whose authority was absolute. The Exodus inverted this logic entirely. The God of Israel had heard the cry of slaves and taken their side against the greatest empire on Earth.
Power was no longer self-justifying. Those who wielded it were answerable for its use.
The covenant at Sinai added something more far-reaching still: that even the highest authority was bound by commitments it had made. A ruler who broke the covenant – who governed in his own interest rather than his subjects’ – forfeited the claim to their obedience.

Don't expect the pond to make any sense of this. The pond is a hard core atheist, not of the angry king, but rather the sort that's bemused at the notion of putting the cutlery out in the garden ... Orthodox Jews in New York observe ‘biur chametz,’ a Jewish ritual where leavened food items are burned on the morning ahead of Passover.

There's a bigly sprinkling of theological references of the sort designed to pander to devotees of portentous Henry's ability to parade pompously his book larnin'///

The most just constitution the world had ever seen
For centuries after the fall of Rome, the Exodus’s political implications lay dormant, confined to the small, harshly persecuted Jewish community. It took the Protestant Reformation to recover the Exodus narrative as a political text. The catalytic moment came in Geneva, where John Calvin preached his famous Deuteronomy sermons in the 1550s, devoting fully 22 weeks to Moses’s speeches at the edge of Canaan. For Calvin, Moses was not primarily a wonderworker but a lawgiver: the author of the most just constitution the world had ever seen, in which the subjects’ duty to obey depended on the ruler’s obedience to law.
Calvin’s followers drew conclusions he never dared articulate. They fused the Exodus covenant with older constitutional traditions to argue that a ruler who violated his covenant obligations could be resisted and deposed.
The greatest English voice in this tradition was John Milton. Writing in 1644, he cast England itself as a new Israel – a covenanted people called to bring freedom to the world. If England was the “nation chosen before any other”, it was surely so that “out of her, as out of Sion, should be sounded forth the trumpet of reformation”.
The consequences for the British constitutional tradition were momentous. Magna Carta, sealed in 1215, had played almost no constitutional role for centuries. Then suddenly, between 1581 and 1616, it burst on to the scene, championed by often Puritan lawyers who saw no distinction between freedom of conscience and freedom from arbitrary power.

The reptiles interrupted with a truly bizarre visual distraction, Runnymede in Surrey, where the Magna Carta was signed in 1215.

Couldn't they dig up a meaningful snap of the actual document?

As for the rest, the pond likes to keep its theology and its constitutional arguments simple ...

Catholic Clergyman: It's the foundation of our belief that Christ is most properly referred to as the Son of God. It's the Son of God who takes the sins of the world upon himself, so that the rest of God's children, we imperfect beings, through faith, may enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Eddie Mannix: So, God is - split?
Catholic Clergyman: Yes! And no.
Eastern Orthodox Clergyman: There is unity in division.
Protestant Clergyman: And division in unity.
Eddie Mannix: I'm not sure I follow padre.
Rabbi: Young man, you don't follow for a very simple reason. These men are screwballs.

By this point, Our Henry sounded like he was expecting to be swept up in a constitutional rapture by this Sunday, a kind of new rising from the dead ...

The pre-eminent figure in giving these ideas a coherent intellectual basis was John Selden (1584-1654), simultaneously an outstanding English common lawyer and the foremost political Hebraist in Europe – a Christian scholar who was a magnificent translator of Talmudic commentary.
Selden placed the notion of a covenant between rulers and the ruled at the heart of English political and legal theory. Law was not the command of the sovereign; it was the accumulated wisdom of the community, binding even on kings because it preceded any act of regal will. And the common law was its embodiment and glory.
The Puritan settlers who crossed the Atlantic carried that covenantal vision with them. They saw themselves as a new Israel, their journey an Exodus, the ocean the Red Sea. John Winthrop, addressing his fellow passengers aboard the Arbella in 1630, invoked the Exodus in urging them to discard the corruptions they were leaving behind: “So He carried the Israelites into the wilderness and made them forgette the fleshpotts of Egipt.”
The Mayflower Compact the settlers signed was not a constitution in the modern sense. It was a covenant: a mutual commitment, made in the presence of God, to form “a city upon a hill”, a body politic enacting laws for the general good. Community preceded government, and government derived its authority from the community’s consent.
Those institutions became the experience of self-governance for the makers of the American Revolution. By then the Exodus connection was ubiquitous: asked about the Great Seal of the United States, Benjamin Franklin immediately suggested “Moses lifting up his Wand, and dividing the Red Sea, and Pharaoh, in his Chariot overwhelmed with the Waters.”
On Sinai’s foundations Britain forged the rule of law; the United States infused it with the spirit of democracy.

It wouldn't be a genuine contribution to the Australian Daily Zionist News without the following ...

Remember, Islamophobia is never far from the surface in Our Henry and in The Australian Daily Zionist News ...

By contrast, Islam
Set against that tradition, the Exodus’s Islamic reception is striking. Moses is the most frequently mentioned prophet in the Koran, appearing 136 times, far more than Mohammed himself. Yet Exodus’s significance follows a logic diametrically opposed to its reception in Judaism and post-Reformation Christianity.
In Judaism, the Exodus is the founding event of a people; in Protestantism, it became the template for constitutional liberty. In Islam, by contrast, it serves primarily as a prefiguration of Mohammed’s superior prophethood, before which even Moses recedes.
The result is that the covenant has never possessed, in Islamic political thought, the explosive emancipatory power it acquired in the West. Instead, authority flows downward from God, not upward from a consenting community.
Brilliant 19th-century Islamic reformers – Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad ‘Abduh, the Young Ottomans – and their liberal successors tried to derive a Koranic basis for constitutional government. Al-Afghani himself lamented that Muslim thought had fallen into taqlid – blind deference to inherited authority.
But they were working against the grain. Their tradition had no Reformation recovery of the Sinai covenant, no Puritan-common law alliance, no Mayflower Compact. Precarious and institutionally unrooted, the constitutionalism they promoted collapsed under the onslaught of secular authoritarianism on the one hand and Islamic fundamentalism on the other.
The example of Islam makes plain that what is at stake is not antiquarian curiosity. It is the survival of a distinctly Western political inheritance whose foundations we have largely forgotten – and that is under assault.
The ancient Greeks were right: the antonym for truth is forgetfulness. When it triumphs, truth dies. The truth being lost is this: the Exodus did not merely inspire institutions. It shaped a way of thinking about power – that authority is conditional, that it must answer to law and that citizens are not mere subjects but participants, with rights and duties, sharing a community of tradition and destiny.
Not just remembrance, but education
That way of thinking cannot be assumed. It must be taught, relearnt and defended. That is why Jews treasure the Passover Seder. It is not simply a ritual of remembrance; it is a ritual of education based on a pedagogy that embraces, rather than suppresses, disagreement.
The central ritual obligation in the Seder is triggered not by a priest or a scholar but by a child’s question: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The adult’s duty is not to answer authoritatively but to respond in a way that generates further inquiry. The narrative must be argued over, not just recited. As the evening ends, the participants must feel that they themselves, not their ancestors centuries ago, had been brought out of Egypt.

Just to rub it in ... Families celebrate the Passover Eve dinner at a festive table in an underground shelter, in Ramat Gan, Israel, on April 1.

Look, we can all come together, we can all agree ...

Eddie Mannix: As for the religious aspect, does the depiction of Christ Jesus cut the mustard?
Catholic Clergyman: Well, the nature of Christ is not quite as simple as your photoplay would have it.
Eddie Mannix: How so, father?
Catholic Clergyman: It's not the case, simply, that Christ is God or God - Christ.
Rabbi: You can say that again! The Nazarene was not God.
Eastern Orthodox Clergyman: He was not not God.
Rabbi: He was a man.
Protestant Clergyman: Part God.
Rabbi: No, sir!
Eddie Mannix: Rabbi, all of us have a little bit of God in us, don't we?

Gentlemen, please...

Protestant Clergyman: God loves everyone!
Catholic Clergyman: God is love!
Eastern Orthodox Clergyman: God is who he is.
Rabbi: This is special? Who isn't who he is?
Catholic Clergyman: But, how should God be rendered in a motion picture?
Rabbi: God isn't in the motion picture!

What about the action?

Eddie Mannix: We don't want to send it to market except in the certainty that it will not offend any reasonable American, regardless of faith or creed. Now that's where you come in. You've read the script; I wanna know if the theological elements of the story are up to snuff.
Eastern Orthodox Clergyman: I thought the chariot scene was fakey. How is he going to jump from one chariot to the other, going full speed?

Final thoughts?

Eddie Mannix: We don't need to agree on the nature of the deity here. If we could focus on the Christ, whatever his parentage. My question is: is our depiction fair?
Eastern Orthodox Clergyman: I have seen worse.
Eddie Mannix: Reverend?
Protestant Clergyman: There's nothing to offend a - reasonable man.
Eddie Mannix: Father?
Catholic Clergyman: The motion picture teleplay was respectful and exhibited tastefulness and class.
Rabbi: Who made you an expert all of the sudden?
Eddie Mannix: And, what do you think, Rabbi?
Rabbi: Eh? I haven't an opinion.

Thank you, Rabbi Henry, but don't be modest, you always have an opinion ...

Sock it to us in a final gobbet of Zionist glory ...

Beneath that insistence lies a deeper truth: freedom is never self-sustaining. It depends on habits that have to be cultivated and preserved. If those habits weaken, the institutions built upon them crumble.
We are living through such a moment. The language of rights is invoked by those who would use them to bury the rights of others. The language of duties is reviled. Authority is dismissed outright. Reasoned disagreement gives way to a cancel culture that masquerades under the banner of freedom of expression.
To remember the Exodus, then, is not merely to honour a distant past. It is to recall the conditions of our own freedom – and to pledge, as we do at the Seder, to cherish and renew its foundations.
There may come a time, God forbid, when children no longer know how to ask why we gather on that night and parents no longer know how to answer. But for so long as Judaism survives – with its love of questions over answers, of debate over conformity, of learning over ignorance – Passover will teach generation after generation the joy of inquiry, the virtue of wisdom and, most of all, humanity’s inextinguishable quest for freedom on this Earth.

And so constitutional democracy carries on its warrior ways, with the full blessing of Rabbi Henry ...

And with that, another oldie, a real test of what the google bot will tolerate ...

In which the bromancer lowers the tone and the swishing Switzer continues his rehabilitation tour and the rest is teaser trailers ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:57:00 +0000

Only in King Donald's America:

We were horrible in Vietnam until we did Thunder One – Rolling Thunder One and Rolling Thunder Two, and then we won.

We were horrible in Afghanistan and Iraq until we did surge ops, and then we won. Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) (Mediaite)

So much winning. If only he hadn't had those baleful bonespurs, King Donald could have been part of that glorious victory which produced incredible footage of the fall of Hanoi (recorded, it should be remembered, by Australia's own war correspondent Neil Davis, though for some strange reason he imagined he was the only western cameraman filming in Saigon in 1975).

Speaking of horrible ... the current excursion rolled on, but the reptiles were obsessed with the home front ...

They desperately tried to stay up to the minute by holding out hope that there was a new regime of moderates in power ready to do the deal, a deal, any deal, provided the deal was done quickly ...

The pond thinks King Donald's current strategy is positively Lincoln-esque or even Churchillian.

The pond vividly remembers the time when Lincoln made a national address advising the South if they just held on for a couple more weeks, victory would be theirs, and who forget Churchill's memorable speech advising Adolf they certainly saw no reason to fight them on the beaches or defend the English channel. (It's not just Americans who can warp the historical record for AI's benefit)

Naturally the bromancer invoked this spirit of Lincoln in his take ...

The header: This was no Gettysburg Address, more Dame Edna on a bad night; The Albanese government is as empty of policy ambition as any government we’ve ever seen in Canberra. It will never willingly pay any political price to secure a good policy outcome.

The caption: Anthony Albanese after a prerecorded address to the nation in his office at Parliament House, Canberra, on Wednesday. Picture: AAP

Poor bromancer. This day the lizard Oz's Reichsmarschall des GroßAustralisch Reiches could only manage a feeble two minute splutter ...

The Prime Minister’s address to the nation reflected the character of his whole prime ministership – short, tactical, small ‘p’ political, pretty hollow if not altogether vacuous, and nothing to offer but surface blandness and a fistful of dollars, or in this case 26c a litre off the price of petrol.
Apart from making sure the biggest number of people possible get to hear about the government putting cash in people’s pockets through the temporary cut in the fuel excise, it’s all but impossible to discern any real purpose in Anthony Albanese’s remarks.
A prime ministerial address to the nation should be a solemn affair, certainly offering reassurance but also a way forward in national policy and resolve. But the Albanese government is as empty of policy ambition as any government we’ve seen in Canberra.
This government will never willingly pay any political price to secure a good policy outcome.
The gravity of the national crisis we face is mocked by the bland emptiness of the PM’s address. The Iran war should necessitate four urgent debates – our lack of oil, gas and fertiliser security; our acute fiscal delinquency and exposure as increasingly a high-debt country; our general inability to mobilise as a nation in the face of any external crisis because we lack relevant capabilities; and our woeful lack of any defence muscle.

No mention of the real villains who have produced this grave national crisis, just a dumping on Albo ...The PM addresses Australians as the nation braces for what he describes as an unprecedented global crisis.

The Reichsmarschall couldn't do anything because of his lack of kit ...

Thus we couldn’t send navy ships to help clear the Strait of Hormuz if we wanted to because we don’t have modern warships equipped to handle simultaneous missile and drone attacks, much less modern mine-clearing vessels.

And what of King Donald and his minions, and their contribution to the new strategy of "we broke it, you own it"?

The pond couldn't help but scrape this from last night's Colbert monologue ...

Some days the pond wonders if the Pope's a Catholic, other days whether the bromancer is one of them, or just a war monger whose prayers for the kit to wage war in the straits should be rejected ...

These glaring inadequacies all reflect the supply side strangulation we’ve imposed across our economy.
We don’t produce our own fuel, we can’t transport our own cargo, we don’t process or transform the vast natural resources we possess, we are so expensive and suffer such dismal productivity that no manufacturing enterprise would locate itself in Australia without massive government subsidies.
This is completely unsustainable. And history teaches a bitter lesson – if a situation is unsustainable, it won’t be indefinitely sustained.
Yet the Albanese broadcast addressed none of this. There was not a speck of recognition of the deep structural reforms we need to undertake to build national resilience.
There is an embarrassing quality to this address – so bland and banal that you would think it had been written by Barry Humphries as a parody of Australian mediocrity. This was no Gettysburg Address, more Dame Edna on a bad night.

The complete cheek - scribbling that prepper isolationist tosh for a rag that's an outpost of an American corporate empire...

There's got to be a 'toon to celebrate where that sort of yearning for the chance to join in the excursion might take us..

Beyond the valley of the pathetic...

... but how lucky is the pond that the intermittent archive continues to be broken, and so the pond can avoid petulant Peta, always a Thursday blight ...

That's more than enough of a teaser trailer for those wanting to know what they missed.

The pond couldn't give two hoots about the hapless Victorian Liberal party, paying endlessly for their importation of bizarre far right Xians and transphobic warriors.

The nub of PP's piece was transphobia and bigotry, and naturally petulant Peta was deeply sympathetic to the bigot in chief, a troublemaking troll intent on destroying any hint of moderation (all the more comical because a moderate "liberal" in Victoria is usually to the far right of Genghis Khan):

...Deeming is the upper house Liberal MP who helped to organise a women’s rights rally in 2023 that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis; who was accused by her then leader, John Pesutto, of herself being a neo-Nazi sympathiser; who was subsequently expelled from the Liberal partyroom, only successfully to sue Pesutto for defamation; and who was then readmitted to the partyroom and promoted – only to be beaten last weekend for preselection by a serial candidate accused of ethnic branch-stacking. Who was then dumped as the endorsed candidate himself for giving a convicted pedophile a glowing pre-sentence personal reference despite knowing what it was for and subsequently denying that he’d done so.
You cannot make this stuff up, can you?
There are recent precedents where head office has simply endorsed candidates, but instead of doing this with Deeming – beaten by someone who should never have been allowed to run – the Victorian Liberal Party has now called for a fresh preselection with nominations to close at noon on Thursday.
Already, moderates are hitting the phones to marshal the ousted Dinesh Gourisetty’s bloc of votes against Deeming, so it is hard to see that she will face a fair fight. Gourisetty, it should be noted, donated to Pesutto’s legal defence, as disclosed in the latest parliamentary returns (as did Heath Williams and former MP Louise Staley, who both publicly abused Deeming online this week).
Right now, Deeming is considering her position, unsure whether to give the Libs one last chance to treat her fairly or to walk, perhaps to join One Nation, a party that would welcome her with open arms, as a conservative woman who has become a hero to everyone who thinks trans rights should not trump women’s rights.

Update: Huzzah, the intermittent archive is back. It's very slow and constipated, but it can help out those who want the whole bloody mess...

The pond usually avoids transphobic bigots, but couldn't resist this 'toon comment:

Speaking of the batty fair right, Jack the Insider attempted to cope with a cop killer in a bog standard way, by reverting to Ned, the real one, not the fake ones that scribble for the lizard Oz:

The pond apologises for the bittiness sans archive, but the pond has about as much time for sov cits as it does for Victorian liberal party loons.

Eventually Jack got around to noting that in fact it was a movement deeply embedded in the far right, and therefore in sympathy with Pauline, Barners and the lizard Oz's radical agendas:

...On ABC radio on Tuesday, Anthony Albanese faced criticism for stating it was “good” that Freeman had been killed.
Meanwhile, there was nowt but an eerie silence from Pauline Hanson and One Nation. The second rising of the PHON souffle has brought with it a substantial boost to the party’s membership.
Many of those self-identifying financial members of PHON were active on X declaring without evidence that Freeman was murdered by police or offering some twisted justification for Freeman’s calculated crimes.
A clear statement from the One Nation leader denouncing Freeman and offering support for police would be the best way to settle those concerns.
For much of the past seven months the media has attempted to define the sovereign citizen phenomenon, often in a confusing and unhelpful way. Suffice to say, those who hold these views have been taught that the state is illegitimate and its foot soldiers are the enemy. Often falsely described as doomsday preppers who largely keep to themselves, sovereign citizens sanction and promote violence against their communities.
The movement’s influencers use a grab bag of pseudo-legal concepts. Some argue Australia’s Constitution is invalid because it was not ratified by the UK parliament (untrue) while others claim the Australia Act (1986), which severed the remaining legal ties with the UK, was unconstitutional (also untrue). A lot of legal cherrypicking goes on. Some sov-cits cling to concepts in 17th-century Portuguese maritime law. Regardless, the view is that the state has no jurisdiction over the individual and thus taxes are not payable, fines can be ignored and, at its most deranged, police and members of the public are fair game.
The sovereign citizen movement began in the 1980s in the US midwest.

And this is why you might be better off to reverting to the wiki on the subject:

The movement appeared in the U.S. in the early 1970s and has since expanded to other countries; the similar freeman on the land movement emerged during the 2000s in Canada before spreading to other Commonwealth countries.

Out by a decade or so Jack.

And again ...

The sovereign citizen movement originated from a combination of tax protester ideas, 1960s–70s radical and racist anti-government movements and pseudolaw, which has existed in the U.S. since at least the 1950s. The movement's belief in the illegitimacy of federal income tax gradually expanded to challenging the legitimacy of the government.
The concept of a "sovereign citizen" whose rights are unfairly denied appeared in 1971 within the Posse Comitatus as part of the teachings of Christian Identity minister William Potter Gale. The Posse Comitatus, whose name derived from the historical militias led by local sheriffs, was a far-right, anti-government movement that denounced income tax, debt-based currency, and debt collection as tools of Jewish control over the United States. The roots of the sovereign citizen movement were thus strongly associated with white supremacist and antisemitic ideologies. Gale's racist beliefs were far from unique, but he innovated by devising a "legal" philosophy about the government's illegitimacy. Posse Comitatus members used the term "sovereign citizens" to convey the idea that they were entitled to enforce their interpretation of the Constitution.
After originating in that particular group, the sovereign citizen concept went on to influence the broader tax protester and Christian Patriot movements. Until the 1990s, observers primarily classified the Posse Comitatus as a tax-protest movement rather than an outright far-right extremist group. The Posse Comitatus, Christian Identity, and militia movements did not fully overlap, but they shared members and influenced one another. (see the wiki for the footnotes)

Yes, it's the hippies and bloody weird Xians again, never a good mix.

And the Xians can now count the likes of the bloodthirsty Pete Kegsbreath amongst their white nationalist membership.

Jack tried to cope by ignoring the Xian component:

..It was a two-way con and remains so. Sov-cit influencers would travel from town to town charging susceptible and financially vulnerable people the price of entry to the town hall meetings. Those who chose to take up the legal mumbo jumbo then would be charged an additional fee to receive worthless documents and dismal instructions.
This led to a whirlwind of tax fraud, and desperate farmers in the US being convicted and sentenced to long spells in prison. In 2015 the FBI declared the movement a domestic terror group. Fraudsters and charlatans were replaced with gun-toting nihilists.
There are various hubs of the movement around Australia, including in the wheat belt district around Geraldton in Western Australia, 400km due north of Perth. Sov-cits bob up with alarming frequency in the courts in the Northern Rivers region of NSW, in the Sunshine Coast hinterland in Queensland and in Freeman’s old stomping grounds in Victoria’s Alpine district.
It is these people who radicalise others that police and intelligence agencies should be keeping an eye on. They are the nihilistic equivalent to Islamist hate preachers.
The Islamists may offer greater risks to the community but they have structure and organisation, making it easier to prohibit one group or another. The sovereign citizen movement is amorphous and dislocated. In some places the movement is restricted to relatively harmless idiots who choke up the courts with pseudo-law nonsense. Others demand violence in internet echo chambers directly to the gullible.
The greatest concern is not that Freeman may have received assistance from people of like mind in the sovereign citizen space but the sheer number of people who regard him in life and now in death as a hero.

Oh Jack, Jack, does that small bunch of weirdos in any way compare to the sheer number of people who watch Faux Noise, and have King Donald as their hero, a hero who accepts the advice of the Emeritus Chairman that an Iranian excursion might be a golly good vacation? (The archive clapped out again, please leave a link in the comments if you get it working

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fwhy-sovcits-cast-dezi-freeman-as-a-hero%2Fnews-story%2Fc09baaaae91c8fdb77a94e75e1c7a433?amp).

And speaking of naughty boys, so to the swishing Switzer, who lost his cool this day, while still on his extended rehabilitation tour ...

The header: I love America but this President is a detestable figure; Rarely, if ever, has the US stumbled so swiftly to the brink of a disaster, and done so despite clear warnings of the risks involved.

The caption for the King: President Donald Trump answers questions from reporters after signing an executive order in the Oval Office. Picture: Alex Brandon / AP Photo

That image has to be worth a 'toon ...

The swishing Switzer was careful to make sure he didn't tread on too many reptile toes, and so opened by paying cautious homage to the bromancer ...

I have long admired America – its power, its ideals and its central role in underwriting the global order. I have no time for what Greg Sheridan calls reflexive anti-Americanism. I want the US to thrive. Its success matters to the world – and to Australia.

Oh dear, that could only mean a giant billy goat butt was coming, and the swishing Switzer let it rip ...

Yet I have reached a deeply uncomfortable conclusion: the current President is a detestable, pitiable figure whose reckless conduct over Iran will have damaging consequences. Rarely, if ever, has the US stumbled so swiftly to the brink of a disaster – and done so despite clear warnings of the risks involved.
The Iran debacle reflects not only Donald Trump’s poor judgment but also his impulsive intervention abroad, untethered from clear objectives or a coherent definition of success. This was a President who devoted barely one minute to Iran in a two-hour State of the Union address days before launching this war. Yet, when presented with a rare opportunity to strike at the regime’s leadership, he acted without any serious regard for the likely consequences.

And ditto the Emeritus Chairman who encouraged the excursion?

Let's not get too racial ... A resident weeps while talking on the phone near a residential building that was hit in an airstrike in the west of Tehran, Iran. Picture: Majid Saeedi / Getty Images

The pond always marvels at the way that the reptiles can ignore their US kissing cousins and cheerleaders in chief at Faux Noise ...

Before February 28, Tehran’s leverage over global energy markets was contained; it sat astride the Strait of Hormuz, controlling a mere 4-5 per cent of the world’s energy exports – essentially its own output.
Now the consequences may be far graver. Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz means its influence could extend over as much as 20 per cent of global energy flows. Factor in the Houthis’ ability to disrupt commercial shipping in the Red Sea, and close to a third of the world’s energy supply could fall under Iranian-aligned control – an astonishing and wholly avoidable strategic reversal.
Let’s be clear: the US-Israeli strike all but guaranteed retaliation. A regime that once exercised its leverage with caution is now acting as if it faces an existential crisis – which, from Tehran’s perspective, it does.
It is exploiting its strategic position to disrupt vital arteries of global commerce. And Washington’s allies, never consulted before the February 28 operation, are left to absorb the economic and strategic shockwaves.
Increasingly, Trump appears to be operating in a world of his own making. There are no direct talks with Iran, only faint, indirect contacts through intermediaries. And the Iranians, in no hurry to negotiate, are content to let Trump dangle in the wind – a spectator to a process he neither controls nor fully understands. At the same time, Trump is now so deeply enmeshed we are told he must stay the course, finish the job and topple the regime. If that requires ground troops, so be it.
The notion that the US could topple or subdue the regime with 10,000 or 20,000 troops is fanciful.

Switzer was interrupted by a snap of King Donald and war minion Kegsbreath ... US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and US President Donald Trump walk to board Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. Picture: Jim Watson / AFP

Credit for this rehabilitation tour. At least the swishing Switzer didn't take the bromancer's easy way out with cheap jibes about Lincoln and Dames (as if the pond would ever joke about a Dame Slap or a Dame Groan) ...

Iraq required more than 200,000 personnel to conquer and occupy a smaller, less populous country. Iran, with a population of more than 90 million – nearly twice that of Iraq – and a landmass almost four times as large, would be an altogether more formidable challenge. To embark on such a venture without overwhelming force, clear objectives and any real public support in an election year is not strategy; it is madness.
Some have floated the idea of seizing Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil terminal. But even if tactically successful, it would solve little. Holding it would be difficult; destroying it – along with the desalination plants Trump has threatened to target unless a deal is reached before April 6 – would amplify the global economic shock.
Others point to precision raids to seize Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. But these facilities are buried, fortified and heavily defended – in many cases beyond the reach of conventional strikes. Any such operation would be immensely complicated and fraught with risk.
We should be angry. Trump is not our President; Australians did not vote for him. Yet we will bear the consequences of his reckless decisions: rising inflation, soaring petrol prices and the looming threat of fuel shortages.
We are paying for a war that was never properly planned. The goals – preventing Iran from going nuclear, perhaps even regime change – are noble. But to say again: there was no credible plan for what would follow the strikes, no thought for keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, no preparation for the economic shockwaves now rippling towards us.

Inevitably Albo turned up ... Anthony Albanese during Question Time. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

And the swishing Switzer had some splendid advice for him.

Keep tugging the forelock ... apparently on the basis of recent revelations about the quarry puppy killer's partner, King Donald might like a little cross-dressing of the bimbo or the Dame Everage kind ...

Yet anger is not a policy. Australia will soon find itself in a far more precarious position: short of fuel and increasingly dependent on others – the result of our crazy reliance on imported energy, compounded by our failure to reinvigorate domestic exploration and production.
Our Asian partners will help where they can but they cannot supply what they do not have. In a tight market, goodwill is no substitute for capacity. Our liquefied natural gas and coal will be in high demand, but any gains may be offset by the cost of securing the fuel we lack. Access will depend not only on our ability to pay but also on the willingness of key suppliers – above all the US – to prioritise our needs over others.
The cold hard reality demands diplomatic dexterity. However justified our criticism of the Iran misadventure, our leaders cannot afford to antagonise Trump. He is, after all, notoriously sensitive to slights and inclined to view alliances in personal, transactional terms. The national interest requires that we remain in a position to call on American support if circumstances deteriorate.
Australians are entitled to be upset by Trump’s conduct.
But these are not conditions in which we can indulge the comfort of outrage. In the end, prudence must prevail because we may yet find ourselves dependent on the power we most wish had acted differently.
Tom Switzer is presenter of Switzerland, a podcast about politics, modern history and international relations.

Prudence, dear prudence is all ... won't you come out to play? Just ask the infallible Pope...

And so to a final teaser trailer because Marriott of The Times had been imported, and dressed up with a terrible stock photo opening image...

Because the pond was triggered by this, the pond decided to offer the rest as plain text:

...In my adolescence a smartphone was an incontestably glamorous object; the best indicator of prosperous and indulgent parents. And to teenagers in suburban Newcastle even a Twitter account signalled a certain cosmopolitan savoir-faire – what better sign of sophistication than an acquaintance with the moment-by-moment musings of Sir Stephen Fry?
Now everyone has a smartphone. And a social media habit, to judge by the popularity of the slang words slop and brainrot, no longer signals smart thinking. As we become more attuned to the deceits of online life, the kind of person who constantly posts about their holidays or career no longer seems desirable but rather desperate. A certain mysterious absence is the classier move.
After Christmas a friend remarked to me: “This year no one had their phones out at all and we talked about how this was something of a new decorum.” Some of his family, he suspected, now viewed mindless scrolling as “common”. Doubtless, many middle-class people are sincerely concerned about declining IQ and the teenage mental health crisis, but I think restricting your phone use may also work as a subtle status signal. Perhaps as a sign of willpower. Perhaps it shows you are in the know: you have read Jonathan Haidt; you subscribe to the kind of broadsheet newspaper that runs articles about “digital detoxes”.
Economically, at least, smartphone dependency is a sign of low status. It has sometimes been observed that the major divide in modern employment is whether you work “above or below the API” – the application programming interface.
Do you issue instructions to software or do you take instructions from software? Uber drivers, Deliveroo bikers and other workers in the digital precariat live at the mercy of their phones. The shrill ping of a delivery app is the 21st-century factory hooter. The higher you are in the economic hierarchy, the less likely you are to be fired if you don’t leap into action at the prompting of an app.
Importantly, middle-class status has long been defined by an ethic of ostentatious self-denial.
Think of those prosperous burghers of Amsterdam in the paintings of Rembrandt, the world’s first international capitalists, dressed not in purple robes but in sober black. In an age of abundant calories, you express your status more effectively through veganism and marathons than through obesity. It is not impossible to imagine that the statusful middle-class activities of the future will be book clubs, maths olympiads and tech fasts.
Even those middle-class parents who are unable to tame their own phone addictions now control their children’s screen time with hypochondriac vigilance. According to a recent New York Times report, you can lose your job as a nanny to an American upper-bourgeois family if you so much as look at your own phone screen in the presence of the child.
This environment is a major change from the atmosphere of unreflecting technological utopianism in which most adults were raised. It may be that in the coming decades the children of the upper middle classes will not be able to touch their phones without a twinge of the information-age equivalent of Catholic guilt. Another piece in The New York Times followed a cohort of university students giving up their phones. These students, obviously, were not studying at their local state universities but at an exclusive liberal arts college.
This is not to endorse snobbery, only to observe that status competition is an important driver of cultural change. Throughout history baby names, table manners and habits of dress have trickled down through society. The prospect of a zombified tech-addicted future is eminently possible.
But if we ever do manage to break the grip of the smartphone on human attention, I suspect the story will be as much about status as about legislation.
Though I suspect my own dream of an indoor scrolling ban remains elusive.
The Times

Good luck with all that, and this is probably not the right time to confess that the pond has never ever used Uber, and nor has it ever made a food delivery order of any kind.

Hold on a nervous tick, did the pond say that this was the last teaser trailer?

The pond should at least note that the meretricious Merritt was out and about ...

The pond won't go on with him, he's always a stupendous bore, and his conclusion was suitably boring ...

...There is one more issue. In support of its campaign, news.com.au cited the appalling treatment of Diane Lucas, administrator of the Canberra Rape Crisis Centre, who was jailed for refusing to hand over a rape survivor’s counselling notes when served with a subpoena.

But this predates Shaw’s 1997 legislation.

Robyn Gilbert, a senior solicitor with Legal Aid’s Sexual Assault Communications Privilege Service, outlined the Lucas prosecution for the NSW Judicial Officers’ Bulletin in February last year.

She wrote that after Lucas’s jailing in 1995, “calls for reform followed and in 1997 the (NSW) parliament created the sexual assault communications privilege”.

This history is important. Our criminal justice system has rightly addressed an imbalance that previously existed, where sexual assault survivors often faced aggressive cross-examination and significant barriers to conviction.

Now, we have a careful balance between the rights of accuser and defendant. Only by maintaining this equilibrium can we ensure our system is fair.

What's really notable about all that?

It's yet another attempt by the reptiles at the lizard Oz to pour cold water on a news.com.au campaign?

Note the way that the meretricious Merritt contends that the news.com.au campaign is "fraught">

Are the reptiles miffed about being beaten by the allegedly more "liberal" website?

Is it another shot across the bows, in a war already noted by the venerable Meade last week in Murdoch mastheads at odds?

Whatever, and as usual, the pond will tune in to the Weekly Beast tomorrow to see what's what in reptile land.

For the moment, time to end with the news that Doonesbury still survives in a weekly format, and went on that march ...

Put it another way ...

The pond has no idea if anyone actually watches these on the deliberately smart phone unfriendly pond, but whatever, they amuse the pond ...

News from America ...

And news from Britain trying to cope with America ... wasn't Brexit an absolutely spiffing idea?

In which the Iranian folly troubles the bromancer, Baker of the WSJ, and Joe, lesser member of the Kelly gang, in different ways ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:42:00 +0000

Without wanting to sound like Our Henry, the pond came across this William Hazlitt quote while reading Andrew O'Hagan's Stay Classy in the LRB.(*intermittent archive link, very intermittent this day)

O'Hagan was giving a right royal bollocking to randy Andy, the man formerly known as Prince, and wretched Fergie, but given that we're living in the time of King Donald and his court of corrupt minions, it seems equally applicable...

...The goods of fortune, the baits of power, the indulgences of vanity, may be accumulated without end, and the taste for them increases as it is gratified: the love of virtue, the pursuit of truth, grow stale and dull in the dissipation of a court. Virtue is thought cribbed and morose, knowledge pedantic, while every sense is pampered, and every folly tolerated. Everything tends naturally to personal aggrandisement and unrestrained self-will. It is easier for monarchs as well as other men "to tread the primrose path of dalliance" than "to scale the steep and thorny road to haven" The vices, when they have leave from power and authority, go greater lengths than the virtues; example justifies almost every excess, and "nice customs curtesy to great kings."

It's all the happier timing with the news that the two kings will still be meeting up to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the sundering of the two kingdoms ...

...The air of a court is not assuredly that which is most favourable to the practice of sefl-denial and strict morality. We increase the temptations of wealth, of power, ands pleasure a thousand-fold, while we can give no additional force to the antagonist principles of reason, disinterested integrity and goodness of heart. It is to be wondered that courts and palaces have produced so many monsters of avarice, cruelty, and lust? The adept in voluptuousness is not likely to be a proportionable proficient in humanity. To feed on plate or be clothed in purple, is not to feel for the hungry and the naked. He who has the greatest power put into his hands, will only become more impatient of any restraint in the use of it. To have the welfare and the lives of millions placed at our disposal, is a sort of warrant, a challenge to squander them without mercy. An arbitrary monarch set over the head so his fellows does not identify himself with them, or learn to comprehend their rights or sympathize with their interests, but looks down upon them as of a different species from himself, as insect crawling on the face of the earth, that he may trample on at his pleasure, or if he spares them, it is an act of royal grace; -- he is besotted with power. Blinded with prerogative, an alien to his nature, a traitor to his trust, and instead of being the organ of public feeling and public opinion, is an excrescence and an anomaly in the state, a bloated mass of morbid humours and proud flesh!

And so on ... a time of writing it could be found in modern font here (the internet archive version is a little harder on modern eyes but reeks of authenticity).

How did the United States start off so grandly and end up a corrupt kingdom (or a banana republic, pretty much the same thing).

There's a clue in those two lines...

Virtue is thought cribbed and morose, knowledge pedantic, while every sense is pampered, and every folly tolerated. Everything tends naturally to personal aggrandisement and unrestrained self-will.

Welcome to the world of the Emeritus Chairman, and the land of the lizard Oz, feeding climate science denialism to the hive mind (knowledge pedantic), and tolerating every form of folly, dressed up as swill.

First up the pond must abandon the sort of sick and sorry revelations coming together courtesy of the tabloid combo of the Daily Beast......

ICE Barbie’s Husband Humiliates Her With Sick ‘Barbie Models’ Fetish
BARBIE WORLD
The Noems’ marriage is yet again under the spotlight after bombshell revelations. (sorry, the intermittent archive is playing up)

And the UK's Daily Terror..

Secret double life of Kristi Noem's crossdressing husband Bryon: The pouting 'busty bimbo' photos and trove of explicit messages

It's not that the pond doesn't appreciate any attempt to out-nero Nero, or crush Caligula with a clever modern variant - let anyone without a kink throw the first Barbie doll - it's just that the pond is dedicated to the hive mind of the lizard Oz, and the bromancer was out yet again today, attempting to grapple with King Donald's folly ...

If you didn't blink, you'd find him just below a reptile panic, as they dragged out Mike Baird, dusted off the mothballs and the dead moths and produced a set of headlines for the ages ...

The pond was tremendously reassured to discover that the reptiles still considered Baird a thing, but out of all that hysteria, the pond, as it always does, stuck with the bromancer ...

The header: Donald Trump’s chaotic Iran war gamble risks global energy crisis and US credibility; Trump’s contradictory Iran war statements have created global energy chaos, with the US President threatening to bomb civilian infrastructure while his own officials predict victory in weeks.

The caption for the meaningless snap: Commercial vessels off the coast of Dubai. Picture: AFP

At last it seems that the bromancer's loyalty to King Donald and his minions might be wearing a tad thing.

There might now be too many straws impacting this camel's back:

The global energy crisis arising from the Iran war has barely begun. It will get much worse before it gets any better. And it could well get catastrophically worse. Even if Donald Trump and whoever is now running Iran conclude a deal tomorrow, it will take months to re-establish anything like energy normality.
But an increasingly serious problem is Trump’s endless self-contradictory statements, declarations, deadlines, ultimatums and alternating suggestions he is finished with it all and will leave Iran in a minute, or that he plans to bomb Iranian society into terrible permanent humanitarian crisis and may well launch a partial ground invasion as well.
Trump remains an extreme risk taker and gambler. If, in alliance with Israel, he finally succeeds in dislodging the mullahs and destroying their nuclear program forever – and that is by no means impossible – then history may judge this a highly successful intervention.
But the chance that it ends in chaos, continued oil disruption, or even a wounded and in many ways diminished Iran with unprecedented control over the Strait of Hormuz and determined to rebuild for revenge, is equally possible.
No one can tell what Trump thinks will be an acceptable outcome because he contradicts himself several times a day.

Inevitably there came a snap of the king, US President Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One. Picture: AP

As usual, the pond felt the need to match it with a 'toon ...

The bromancer appeared to be trying to position himself as a voice in the wilderness, a voice outside the coterie of the King's loyalists ...

Trump loyalists paint this as a shrewd misdirection of the enemy, a crafty negotiating technique. But it has enormous costs. There are no allies beyond Israel actively working with the US in this military campaign. This is for three reasons. Trump doesn’t consult allies. He frequently insults them. And he hasn’t laid out any consistent military or strategic plan beyond the relentless bombing of Iran.
Trump’s administration can’t speak with consistency because Trump himself doesn’t speak with any consistency. At no point has Trump laid out to the American people a coherent rationale for what he’s doing. His approval ratings are at their lowest ever this term, and only a minority of Americans support the war at all. strong majority opposes it, while there is a huge consensus against using US ground troops.
You could write a thousand books tracing Trump’s contradictions on Iran. Consider just a couple of the most extreme. Trump posted on Truth Social that if he didn’t get a deal from the Iranians soon, which included fully opening the Strait of Hormuz as well as his other requirements of Iran abandoning uranium enrichment and limiting its missiles, the US would attack and demolish “all of their (Iran’s) Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells, and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinisation plants)”.
This is one of the most extraordinary statements ever made by an American president. To attack desalination plants as policy is a direct attack on life-giving, non-military, civilian infrastructure, designed to cause the death of civilians through the removal of drinking water. Washington has always rightly insisted it never intentionally attacks civilians. No one else in Trump’s administration talks like this.
But how does this square with other Trump administration statements this week? Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the war will be finished in “weeks not months”. Other White House spokespeople say the war is still on its original six- to eight-week timeline, which means a couple more weeks at the most.
Yet Trump has moved thousands of US marines and ground troops into the area. If the US took Kharg island, as Trump this week threatened, that would ensure a campaign of many more weeks. You can take Kharg Island, or you can leave in two weeks, you can’t do both.
Trump says he’s negotiating with new, more reasonable Iranians; Rubio says it’s opaque how decisions are made in Iran just now.

The exasperation seemed to be building, so the reptiles hastily flung in an AV distraction, Shahria Ahi, the former adviser to Reza Pahlavi, is one of the attendees at the Iran Freedom Congress, which aims to address a major problem for Iran that has now become a problem for the world.

The bromancer turned to the WSJ for guidance, though as that's a part of the empire that urged on King Donald to his Iranian folly, it might not help ...

The Wall Street Journal reports rump telling his closest aides he might declare victory and finish all bombing even without any deal on opening the Strait of Hormuz. The idea would be to put Iran under diplomatic pressure to allow free passage through the strait, or get Europe to take the lead.
More likely, Iran would favour ships from strategically friendly nations and charge a big tariff for others. It would terrify and blackmail the Gulf states.
That sort of exit not only flatly contradicts Trump’s Truth Social post, it could leave the Middle East, and global energy markets, in worse shape than when Trump went in. Whatever his war aims were, they surely didn’t include total Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz and permanent disruption to the global oil, gas and fertiliser markets, all of which are vital for economies, and indeed human life, around the world.
The credibility and reliability of the words of the American president have, since at least World War II, been a vital stabilising factor in global geo-strategic balances. It is not to suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome to observe that in needlessly sacrificing that, Trump is throwing away a precious asset for no benefit.
Nor is it sensible or sustainable for those around the world who strongly want the US and Israel to prevail in Iran to feel that they cannot criticise Trump. For the more politicians avoid reality, the more they too lose credibility.

Sorry, bromancer, this late turning and wheeling in the sky came far too late. You've never had any credibility, so worry not about any loss of it ...

In despair, the bromancer turned to berating locals, indirectly handing a sideswipe to the beefy performative boofhead ...

Both sides of Australian politics support the US action in Iran in principle. Neither side has made any significant contribution to the one overriding Australian responsibility – which is for Australia to be much more energy and fuel self-reliant, resilient and prepared.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor said Australia should actively support US-led efforts to keep the Strait of Hormuz. However, he sensibly told The Australian: “The lack of investment in our naval fleet makes it much harder to offer any naval support.”
Andrew Hastie rightly observed on the ABC’s Insiders program that our ships can’t go to the Gulf because they don’t have the necessary self-protection capabilities. He’s the only senior politician I’ve heard make that fundamental point. Otherwise, all talk about supporting or not supporting activities in the Gulf is just performative blather, the kind of fantasy dialogue and avoidance of plain speaking which has helped destroy the credibility of mainstream politics.
There’s an unpredicted casualty of the Iran war for you.

Sheesh, grim days...

Over on the extreme far right, things got even grimmer, as Dame Slap carried on in a way that only someone on Planet Janet, situated above the Faraway Tree can do ...

Lady Justice conned again by ‘believe all women’ fad
In the ACT, the zealots are perfectly capable of taking not only an innocent defendant’s liberty, dignity and reputation, but his money too, leaving an innocent man shattered and on the edge of suicide.
Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

Given the very intermittent behaviour of the archive - at time of writing it's consistently offering 504 Gateway Time-outs (a server side issue) - the pond thought it might just offer up the URL and anyone wanting to try later might have better luck.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Flady-justice-conned-again-by-believe-all-women-fad%2Fnews-story%2F530242d75b80e872076efe8450b90123?amp

Anyway, there was just one hoot line, which came right at the end.

When will the ideologues ever be satiated?

On her best days, Dame Slap can still produce tremendous one liners. Barking mad, but in her ideological battiness, occasional good fund.

Ditto for aforementioned Mike Baird ...

Australia’s debt is now shaped by our states
As we move towards the most important budget in decades, there must be an understanding that we’re running out of easy options.
By Mike Baird
Contributor

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Faustralias-debt-is-now-shaped-by-our-states%2Fnews-story%2F757845d67cfa5d0f2365dc6da8d2eb34?amp

Couldn't run a state, why do you expect him to write a decent column?

And finally there was Nick, trying to redeem himself by appearing centrist:

Trump bump 2.0: voters look for the adult in the room
Trump’s global chaos has created an unexpected political lifeline for moderate leaders who stand up to him, with voters increasingly choosing stability over populist insurgency.
By Nick Dyrenfurth
Contributor

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fthe-trump-bump-20-is-here-and-it-is-not-what-populists-were-expecting%2Fnews-story%2F32ffbe002942e4c666d576943cada367?amp

Nah, too late Nick ... Curtin's still rolling in his grave.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, the poor old bouffant one was sounding just as gloomy, just as grim ...

Unfortunately the intermittent archive was being more intermittent than usual - this might work or it might not - but luckily the gist of the whine could be summed up in just a couple of gobbets.

The pond trimmed out an unnecessary AV distraction, and flung in a distracting 'toon to reassure the bouffant one ...

And then with a final short gobbet, it was done...

Excellent stuff ... is it time yet to bring the lettuce out of retirement and put up against prime Angus, already showing signs of what a beefy beefhead out in the Goulburn sun for too long starts to smell like?

At this point, the pond should note that the reptiles have studiously avoided that further turning of a fundamentalist theocracy into a fascist state ...

That came from the UK Terror of all places ...and there was some attempt at push back from full fascism ...

Call for law to be annulled
The bill appears to conflict with Israel’s Basic Laws, which prohibit arbitrary discrimination.
Shortly after it was passed, a leading human rights group announced that it had filed a petition with the Supreme Court demanding the legislation’s annulment.
“The law creates two parallel tracks, both designed to apply to Palestinians,” the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said in a statement.
“In military courts – which have jurisdiction over West Bank Palestinians – it establishes a near-mandatory death sentence,” the rights group said.
In civilian courts, the law’s stipulation that defendants must have acted “with the aim of negating the existence” of Israel “structurally excludes Jewish perpetrators”, the group added.
The association argued the law should be annulled on both jurisdictional and constitutional grounds.
During the debate in parliament, Ram Ben Barak, an opposition lawmaker and former deputy Mossad director, expressed outrage at the legislation.
“Do you understand what it means that there is one law for Arabs in Judea and Samaria, and a different law for the general public for which the State of Israel is responsible?” he asked fellow parliamentarians, using the Israeli name for the West Bank.
“It says that Hamas has defeated us. It has defeated us because we have lost all our values.”

Meanwhile, the push for a Greater Israel - to the river in Lebanon - and the ethnic cleansing continued apace, as Ukraine receded into the distance, and Gaza became an afterthought.

The reptiles at war theme continued in the lizard Oz with a truly wretched offering, apparently designed to make the local bromancer look good.

The header: You may already have won the Iran war; Someone will soon make a case that Operation Epic Fury is the greatest triumph of arms since Agincourt – or the most disastrous defeat since the Romans were out-generalled by Hannibal.

The caption for a gratifyingly amorphous and stunningly meaningless snap, a rich introduction to the word salad to follow: Israel is continuing to batter Tehran with air strikes. Picture: AFP.

Baker, this day of the WSJ, and therefore one of the employees of the Emeritus Chairman who encouraged the Iran War folly, tried his hand at a bit of both siderism worthy of the NY Times.

He played the role of a doubting Thomas, though his underlying faith shone through every verbal tic and conjunction:

“I wish I was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything.”
The plaintive observation, ascribed to the early Victorian British prime minister Viscount Melbourne about the acerbically self-confident historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, remains the motto of the thoughtfully sceptical man through the ages. Some of us still harbour doubt about the consequences of actions in a complex world. But we live in an era when instantaneous certitude about everything, an iron conviction in subjective judgment in the face of objective uncertainty, is the only guarantee of a hearing.
This is in part a corollary of the hyperpartisanship that characterises our modern political conversation. If you believe your side represents the only route to virtue and the other side the sure path to perdition, you’ve already taken a position of metaphysical certainty.
Such assuredness is acceptable from politicians. No one wants to hear a leader publicly fret over the range of possible outcomes of a course he’s chosen. But since the line between partisan engagement and independent observation has been blurred, similar devotion to the veracity of one’s own judgment is obligatory in the commentator class too.
So it comes as no surprise that less than a month into the latest war, almost everyone seems certain not only about the outcome of the war, but about what it means for decades to come.
Last week the Economist, a publication with a long and spotty track record of declarative certitude in the face of unpredictability, announced the war was an American failure. “A month of bombing has achieved nothing,” its cover thundered.
The academy is on the same page. Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, insists the war is a “longtime disaster” and the “most catastrophic failure of air power we have ever seen”.

Quick, bring in a chickenhawk and honour his service: Former US national security adviser John Bolton has suggested America focus on clearing the Strait of Hormuz as soon as possible which “may require military force”. “But I also think this is clear evidence we’re making progress on destabilising the regime,” he told Sky News Australia. This comes after Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed there were “some fractures going on there internally” in Iran’s leadership circle.

Baker of the WSJ remained resolute in his uncertainty, and his abject lack of confidence in anything:

No fog of war for these seers. They have scrutinised the battlefield from the vantage points of St James’s, SW1, and Hyde Park, 60637, and, like ancient augurs, have divined the outcome: It’s over for the US and Israel, with devastation rippling for years.
There is no less confidence on the other side. Torsten Slok, chief economist at private equity firm Apollo, dismissed the war’s alarming fallout in commodity, equity and bond markets, and said it would “ultimately result in 50 years of stability in oil markets, supply chains and geopolitics”.
Marc Thiessen, a speechwriter for president George W. Bush (whose administration isn’t especially noted for the accuracy of its observations) and now a columnist for The Washington Post, said on Fox News that Donald Trump’s war would go down as “possibly the greatest military campaign … since the American Revolution”. Move over, Dwight D. Eisenhower; step aside, Ulysses S. Grant.
Since rhetorical extremism in the pursuit of persuasion is all the rage, why stop there? Surely someone will soon make the case that Operation Epic Fury is the greatest triumph of arms since Henry V’s longbowmen routed the superior French numbers at Agincourt. Or, according to your taste, it already represents the most disastrous defeat for a major power since the Romans were out-generalled at Cannae by Hannibal.

What a tremendous fudger he is, as the reptiles tried to match his uncertainty in the caption, Rubio says Trump prefers diplomacy but vows strikes if Hormuz stays shut, while analysts warn over chokepoints & Iran vows to keep leverage.

Nothing is but what is not seems to be the best way forward, the way to evade and deflect:

I am not against bold opinion commentary, as you might have noticed, but this level of certainty about a war that is four weeks old and with plainly many more phases to come, is simply unsupportable. As we stand, the outcome isn’t knowable with any level of confidence; it surely rests on events at a tactical and strategic level in coming weeks and months that we can’t know.
It is evident that the US and Israel have enjoyed extraordinary military success in eliminating much of Iran’s leadership and military capabilities. But Iran’s regime has succeeded at a political and economic level – first by simply surviving the onslaught to date and second by exercising its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz.
These are all limited and contingent successes. Again, their ultimate outcome is conditional on the extent to which the US is able to break that stranglehold and either force out the regime or at least cow it into submission. And that in turn is conditional on a host of at this stage unknowable developments: the deployment of ground forces; the contribution of neighbours and others to the shipping challenge.
Some of us who acknowledge our uncertainty may be simply reflecting a larger uncertainty about the wisdom of this war in the first place.
In the same way, to declare now that it is already won or lost is merely to affirm one’s prior and continuing political and ideological prejudices, delivered to an audience that wants to hear nothing else.

By golly, and there was the pond thinking that Donald Rumsfeld had gone on to bigger things. Who knew he'd reincarnate as a WSJ columnist explaining that there are conditional matters that are unknowable. So many unknown unknowns, so little time.

And so to wrap up proceedings with the lesser member of the Kelly gang, also brooding about the war.

The header: Hormuz handover: Trump risks handing Iran a strategic victory: Donald Trump could be forced down a rabbit hole he never intended to enter.

The caption for an image of a king ever more closely resembling a clown: The American operation is on track to achieve a major tactical victory. It will weaken Iran by degrading its missile and nuclear programs while up-ending its political and military chain of command. Picture: Getty Images

Joe could only lather up three minutes, and unlike Baker of the WSJ, he was full of righteous certainty, and full of "musts", with the first "must" opening fire at the get go ...

Iran must not be allowed to emerge from the Middle East conflict with the lasting ability to control the Strait of Hormuz, an outcome that would elevate the regime as the gatekeeper of global energy flows, with the power to trigger a worldwide recession at will.
This would deliver a decisive blow to American power and global standing, exposing the limits of Donald Trump’s unilateralism and his vision of a US less bound by the constraints and responsibilities of a multilateral order under increasing strain.
Yet critics hoping for the administration to have its wings clipped in the fight against Iran as a check on Trump’s “American First” foreign policy revolution stand on the wrong side of history and for a regime that for 47 years has terrorised the world while oppressing and killing its own people.

The reptiles urgently rushed in a man apparently standing on Joe's right side of history ... US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth says if Iran were wise, “they will cut a deal” with US President Donald Trump. “Just one month in, only one month, we set the terms,” Mr Hegseth said. “The upcoming days will be decisive. Iran knows that, and there is almost nothing they can militarily do about it. “Yes, they will still shoot some missiles, but we will shoot them down. “They will go underground, but we will find them.”

See below for a little note on Kegsbreath ... as saucy doubts and fears began to creep into Joe's text, producing more 'mustiness' than 'must' ...

'There is no doubt the American operation against Iran is noble in intention. But every day that passes reveals that Operation Epic Fury risks empowering Iran in strategic terms given its failure – so far – to break the political will of the regime.
Instead, it may achieve the opposite.
The American operation is on track to achieve a major tactical victory. It will weaken Iran by degrading its missile and nuclear programs while up-ending its political and military chain of command.
Yet, the war will be judged on how it changes the strategic calculus in the region.
If the regime survives the US onslaught with control over the Hormuz Strait – one of the world’s most vital choke-points through which one fifth of global oil supply passes – it will have saddled the globe with a dangerous new problem.
Tehran will emerge from the conflict with greater leverage over the global economy and a new revenue stream worth billions every month if it continues to charge $2m for safe passage through the strait.
This is not a tenable outcome.
Yet the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Trump may do exactly this and walk away from the war – leaving Iran in control over the strait.
This is the inverse of the famous warning from then Secretary of State Collin Powell to George W Bush over the 2003 invasion of Iraq: “You break it, you own it.”
Commentators are now characterising the US position as: “We break it, you fix it.”
The fear for Trump is that a mission to secure the Strait of Hormuz would drag out the conflict beyond his six week timeline.
Already the US President is telling the rest of the world the closure of the waterway is its problem rather than America’s.
Posting on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday local time, he said that US allies should “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just take it.”
“You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us.”

Way to go King Donald ... and even petulant Peta seemed a tad worried, Sky News host Peta Credlin reacts to a story by The Wall Street Journal today. “The Wall Street Journal says today that reportedly Trump is open to ending the war without actually reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” Ms Credlin said. “How on earth would that work?”

The pond would usually slip in a 'toon at a King Donald sighting, but perhaps it's enough to recycle that Colbert joke about that sign behind the king looking awfully like the FU Institute ...(what's more it was a google bot safe joke).

And then it was just a doddle to finish off Joe, poised in mid-air, caught up by indecision, perhaps losing his timing somewhat early in his career ...

Senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official and veteran Middle East negotiator told The Australian that a “war of choice has now turned into war of necessity.”
“It’s now a global crisis,” he said. “Fertiliser, helium, natural gas, oil and hydrocarbons are not getting through.”
“The winners right now are Putin and Netanyahu,” he said. ‘The Chinese are somewhere in between. The losers are the Gulf States and the civilians that are caught up in this.”
Already, the US troop footprint in the Middle East has surged to more than 50,000 but any ground operation in Iran would be fraught with risk and the near certainty of US casualties.
Trump could be forced down a rabbit hole he never intended to enter.Miller said it was possible for the US to seize the strait with enough combat power and boots on the ground, but pointed to the experience in Iraq and Afghanistan where America stayed for 20 years in the two longest wars in US history.
He also warned that an attempt to seize or destroy Kharg Island – Iran’s central oil exporting hub – would inflict further pain on the global economy while doing little to weaken the regime’s resolve.
“The picture right now doesn’t look very promising to me,” he said. “Things have been done that no-one ever anticipated. Oil may be over $100 a barrel till the end of the year. And if there’s more damage to oil infrastructure in Iran and the Gulf the price could be higher.”
The military campaign is poised at a delicate moment and Trump faces the most important decisions of his presidency.
If he walks away without clearing the Hormuz Strait he will hand Iran a strategic victory and harm America’s international reputation. But if he doubles down, the options for retaking the strait are fraught with risk and the prospect of a longer and more bloody military campaign.

Looking good ...

And so to that note on Kegsbreath.

The pond simply couldn't resist this note in The New Republic by Greg Sargent ...

Pete Hegseth Just Revealed the Real Roots of His Sadism and Rage

Does God want America to kill as many of our enemies as we can—in as violent a fashion as possible? We have a defense secretary who apparently thinks so.

Inter alia ...

And so on and on, with fundamentalist theocracies on the go, and white Xian nationalism destroying the world, and what better way to celebrate proceedings than with the immortal Rowe ...

That naturally segues into that celebration in the Washington Mall ... with another of the King's thrones on display ...

There was of course a plaque. There should always be a gilt gold lined plaque, and not just on teeth ...

On that Kegsbreath theme ...Bill Kristol remarking on the way he himself once was, proud Iraq war warrior ...

And now for something different ...

In which the bromancer, Dame Groan, and pearls of wisdom are the day's entertainment ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:06:00 +0000

Are you not entertained?

That elegant King Donald design reminded the pond of Topol singing this lyric (slightly modified) ...

I'd build a big tall ballroom with bumps and columns by the dozen
Right in the middle of the town
A fine gold roof with real marble floors below
There would be one long staircase just going up
And one even longer coming down
And one more leading nowhere, just for show ...

As for the reptiles providing entertainment?

Alas, it's not so easy this Tuesday ... with the bromancer out and about ...

At last it's finally dawned on the bromancer that things might be a bit tricky thanks to the deeds of King Donald and his minions, and even worse, encouraged by the chairman emeritus in his folly ...

The bromancer, being a 97pound weakling who always got sand kicked in his face on the beach, is ripe for a Charles Atlas course, and is obsessed with the usual nerdish, weakling stuff which fills up his snowflake whining on a regular basis ...

The header: We’re an energy rich nation that’s chosen to be weak; The Iran war is a full-blown global crisis, a crisis in oil, gas and fertiliser. It devastatingly demonstrates Australia’s vulnerability.

The caption for the triptych of villains: Anthony Albanese, Jim Chalmers and Chris Bowen hold a joint press conference at Parliament House regarding the national fuel security crisis. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

All the bromancer revealed in his four minute ramble is how easy it is to slip slide from his previous blather about a just war - neigh, an Xian white nationalist holy war - into wringing hands about the consequences, and blaming the wrong people for all that's gone wrong, is currently going wrong, and will keep going wrong for the foreseeable future ...

The Albanese government is floundering, as the nation is floundering, in response to the global economic crisis brought about by the Iran war.
Australia looks determined to learn every wrong lesson and make every wrong response.
Make no mistake. This is a full-blown global crisis, a crisis in oil, gas and fertiliser. It devastatingly demonstrates Australia’s vulnerability.
Two ominous new developments suggest this conflict may go on for quite some time. Donald Trump is sending thousands of US marines from several different locations to the region. This may be for negotiating leverage, but it may also mean he plans at least a limited ground operation.
The likeliest such operation would be to take Kharg Island, through which Iran gets 90 per cent of its oil income. That could take weeks and involve massive new conflict. The other big development is the Yemeni Houthis entering the war on Iran’s side.
So far they’ve only fired missiles at Israel and these appear to have been intercepted. But they could easily hit Saudi energy infrastructure, as they have in the past. Worse, they could again strike shipping in the Red Sea, especially the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

How to describe the bromancer?

The pond floundered recently trying to describe Dame Slap's pandering portrait of the beefy boofhead's wife, and so turned to John Hanscombe's recent effort in The Echnida to revive the term "drongo", which was once big in Tamworth, but has fallen out of favour ...

...Hanson was on song again last week, doubling down on her support for Trump, oblivious to the effect the war was having on her own constituency. Oblivious, too, to polling that shows most Australians do not support the war or Donald Trump. Most of us think he's the drongo-in-chief.
Then there was the Coalition call for the government to slash EV and home battery subsidies to fund a cut to the fuel excise. At the very moment Australians are reminded that solar power stored in batteries doesn't have to navigate the Strait of Hormuz and that EVs might be a better idea than diesel-guzzling utes, only a drongo would suggest making us even more dependent on fossil fuels.
The Nationals launched the No Fuel Here platform, encouraging users to report fuel shortages in regional areas. One problem was they had no intention of publishing the data collected, which instead would go to MPs. Another was the fine print saying that by using the platform, users agreed to receive material from the Nationals. In other words, a clumsy attempt at email harvesting from a bunch of drongos. (sorry, newsletter, no link)

Drongo!

The bromancer is exactly that sort of drongo.

Meanwhile the reptiles were offering a distraction from the bromancing drongo, featuring the Greater Israel campaign (sssh, don't mention the ethnic cleansing) ... A woman stands amid Hezbollah flags on March 29, 2026, in the Choueifat area on the outskirts of Beirut. Picture: AFP

The drongo of the moment kept blathering away ...

The Houthis have limited missile stocks but appear to have plenty of drones. Without a navy and without much national infrastructure, the Houthis during the Gaza war provided what US naval commanders described as the most intense naval battle the US had fought since World War II.
The lethality of asymmetric warfare waged by drones has increased exponentially. The disruption to global energy markets could yet get much worse.
Australia’s situation is intensely vulnerable and constitutes a species of the theatre of the absurd. We possess the natural resources of an entire continent, just for us, a mere 28 million people, yet our hallucinogenic, Green-dominated politics has become so self-damaging that we import the vast majority of resources we use.
The Albanese government responds as it does to all national challenges – it will just spend loads more money.
Let’s deal with this at first principles. We’re rich because we export coal, iron ore and natural gas. Some other stuff, too, but those are the big three. Our crippling commitment to the fiction of net zero means we won’t develop any of these resources at home.
We insanely use the money we make from exporting fossil fuels to subsidise hugely expensive non-fossil fuel sources of energy domestically, but then because our economy still actually runs on fossil fuels we import vast quantities of refined fossil fuel.
Thus, we are a diesel economy. We export billions of dollars worth of coal to China. As the Page Research Centre’s brilliant new report, All at Sea: Fuel, War and Australia’s Achilles’ Heel, points out, we could easily make the diesel in Australia but we choose to import it.
China burns hundreds of millions of tonnes of coal a year to make diesel out of coal. We don’t do that ourselves because it produces a lot of emissions.

Ah, the old war with China routine, and never mind that China is taking leaps and bounds to turn itself into that new fangled notion of an electrostate.

Hanscombe was interesting on the origins of "drongo", though it's familiar enough for those who care and easily found online... (with more "d's" here, and never mind the asbestos lady's attempts to ruin the institution) ...

...from stage right, comes another drongo, Clive Palmer. Failing at the last election, he's re-entered the populist political fray with new sickly yellow advertisements. Last time it was the Trumpet of Patriots; this time it's the "New Deal", borrowed from Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era reconstruction program. If at first, second, third or fourth, you don't succeed, try and fail again.
Which takes us neatly back to the origin of the expression drongo. Drongo was the name of a 1920s racehorse which never won a race after 37 starts and became the butt of jokes. A century later and the old slang word has a whole new currency.

Don't think the lizard Oz can match the drongo power of Clive?

Get past this meaningless snap ... A general view of the Port of Kharg Island Oil Terminal, 25 km from the Iranian coast. Picture: Getty Images

...and you can enjoy the drongo powers of the drongo bromancer in full flight ...

At least one Australian company believes it could do it with much lower emissions, but governments won’t go near any research on technology like that because of our net-zero commitments and obsessions.
At much lower levels of emissions, we could make diesel from gas. We are always going to be a diesel economy. There’s no substitute.
We’re already in a mess in this crisis yet the crisis hasn’t really begun. We have more oil than before the war began. But any oil we’re receiving now was dispatched on its long voyage well before this war began. Yet we’ve had hundreds of service stations without fuel and costs have shot through the roof.
This is especially so for artificial fertilisers, which are central to agricultural production and based on hydrocarbons.
The fertiliser itself is now much more expensive. The cost of transporting it is much more expensive. Some farmers, therefore, won’t plant cereals this year.
The whole world is still completely dependent on hydrocarbons. Renewable energy has added to fossil fuels but not made any significant impact in replacing them.
The Australian government’s own Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water website reports: “Fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) accounted for 91 per cent of Australia’s primary energy mix in 2023-24.” The primary energy mix goes beyond just electricity generation and includes transport, mining, agriculture, industry and the rest.

What a hoot. Embedded in the promo for the AV distraction is the immortal line "says expert", and just as you're expecting a real expert, you're served up the bromancer blathering to petulant Peta, two drongos, or numbskulls if you don't want to be dinkum ...

Sky News contributor Greg Sheridan says the US going to war with Iran is an “acute dilemma” with “no easy solution”. “This is an acute dilemma, and there’s no easy solution … Iran has proved itself to be worse than we thought,” Mr Sheridan told Sky News host Peta Credlin. “What other regime has just slaughtered 40,000 of its own citizens, what other regime is attacking desalination plants on which human lives depend in neighbouring states which are non-combatants, what other state has 400kg of uranium, illegally enriched to 60 per cent? ... This is a fanatical, devoted, regime, with an ideology that celebrates suicide.”

The pond had to enlarge that so the "says expert" can be seen.

Anyone can call themselves an expert at the lizard Oz ...

And so to a final word from the reptile expert drongo in chief ... doing the standard reptiles renewables schtick, with a grudging admission that maybe we should make a token gesture towards climate science ... but not too much, because who believes in climate science when we can blow the joint up, thanks to King Donald and the Emeritus Chairman ...

It’s reasonable to try to run a clean environment and even reduce greenhouse gas emissions on a per capita basis. But we’ve decided, insanely, to ape the worst of West European policy in trying to convert to an entirely renewables energy basis. We can’t do it. It won’t ever happen. And we can afford, even temporarily, the grotesque indulgence of it all only because of our exports of raw fossil fuels, which other people then add value to.
The Nationals’ Alison Penfold made the blindingly obvious point in parliament: “If these fuels are important enough to stockpile, they are important enough to produce.” Her Nationals’ colleague, Anne Webster, quoted Geoscience Australia estimates we could have 17 billion barrels of oil we haven’t developed. Our shale oil alone could supply us for 43 years.
Australia is uniquely vulnerable and uniquely culpable for its vulnerability. We are at the end of the world’s longest supply chains. We face many potential choke points beyond the Strait of Hormuz or the Red Sea.
Yet despite our vulnerability, we have among the smallest fuel reserves of any OECD nation. The Albanese government has been in office for four years and has no right to blame this on the admittedly woeful performance of the Coalition government before it. And we have no merchant fleet to move energy. And no defence force to protect it.
Our economic problems are supply problems. We’re perhaps the only nation in the world that could be energy self-sufficient but has chosen not to be.
The opposition, having finally rejected net zero, must campaign furiously on the issue if Australia is to have a chance of preserving its sovereignty.

But the bromancer gave up his sovereignty long ago to an American-owned company, with its Emeritus Chairman encouraging King Donald to embark on a folly.

Of such supine stuff are drongos made...

And so to the Groaning of the day ...

The header: Expect Jim’s ‘reform’ budget to come with some big caveats; Using the false cloak of intergenerational inequality, Chalmers may still decide to push on with his ill-considered changes to tax.

The caption? Yet again the reptiles forgot to tag it, but everyone knows it's the chief villain, the main heel, Dame Groan's bête noire, and the reptiles loved that image of his grim mug so much, you can see it repeated down the page.

This was a standard four minute groaning, and truth to tell, these days the sighing and the whining and the whingeing and the groaning tends to be water off the pond's duck-like back.

The pond really only persists with the Dame because of her cult following ...

The conflict in the Middle East has thrown the preparation for this year’s budget into disarray. Jim Chalmers had been talking it up as the statement that would finally deliver real reform.
He even went to the trouble of classifying its contents into spending restraint, tax reform and productivity. At this stage it looks unlikely he’ll deliver. Using the false cloak of intergenerational inequality, Chalmers may still decide to push on with a series of ill-considered and ill-timed changes to the taxation of capital/savings.
The pressure to be seen as a reforming Treasurer may be sufficient to prevent common sense from prevailing.
One issue that came to a head on Monday following national cabinet was the reduction in the petrol excise rate to compensate households and businesses for the impact of higher fuel costs. Apart from the budgetary costs of doing so, there is also the vexed issue of whether this action would add to underlying inflation when inflation is running well above the annual target band of 2 to 3 per cent. This will make it even likelier that the Reserve Bank will lift the cash rate again before the May budget.
The Coalition pushed for the excise to be cut, suggesting it be funded by eliminating some other spending. The government has not proposed any saving offsets.

Nothing to see here by way of visual distractions ... Anthony Albanese holds a joint press conference at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

There are likely some might care, but this was a siren song the pond had heard too many times.

There was no reason to be strapped to the mast...

Because the excise is a flat tax, the higher price for fuel does not raise any additional revenue. Higher volumes will have that effect, but this surge in demand may not last. There will be additional GST revenue because of the higher fuel prices but this ends up with the states. Some environmentalists have seized this opportunity to call for the elimination of the diesel fuel rebate that applies to off-road use by miners and farmers, in particular. But the purpose of the rebate is widely misunderstood; it is for off-road use only and avoids a distorting tax on tax.
By this stage of the year, the Treasury will be close to finalising many details in the budget, particularly in relation to the domestic and international economic outlook contained in Statement 2, Budget Paper No.1. The final figures in the tables and commentary will have to be delayed to the last minute, although these figures find their way into the estimates of the receipts and payments over the forward estimates.
The Treasurer’s recent interest in spending restraint contrasts with his record as the top money man. When he first took the reins, government spending was $627bn or 24.3 per cent of GDP. This financial year it is expected to reach $787bn or 26.9 per cent of GDP.
And note that these figures don’t include the massive ramp-up in off-budget spending. It’s a wonder Chalmers hasn’t attracted the moniker: Hey, Big Spender. He still likes to quote the meaningless figure of $114bn of savings and reprioritisations the government has achieved. That of course is a gross figure, with actual spending rising by $160bn since 2022-23.
Chalmers also makes the ridiculous claim that government debt is now lower under Labor even as it floats past the $1 trillion mark. Trying to make a pointless comparison with something written down in 2022 in the pre-election economic and fiscal outlook smacks of desperation, although the fact he is not picked up by journalists is also depressing.
According to the most recent figures, the fastest growing spending items in the budget include debt servicing, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, hospitals, aged care, childcare and defence. There will be talk about restricting the growth of outlays on the NDIS, in particular. But without significant structural reforms it’s impossible to see spending being kept below the growth of the economy.

The pond only perked up as Dame Groan revealed her socialist inclinations by endorsing a road tax ...and even approved of employing cardigan wearers to work out the how of it ...

There have been rumours that a national road user charge is being contemplated, which will become more important if electric vehicles increase in popularity. There are technical limits on the ability of the states to do this; it will be up to the federal government to enact such a scheme. But whether the timing would be fortuitous is unclear. The best approach is probably to commission a practical review and to seek constructive input from those most affected.

Pause for an AV distraction ...

Treasurer Jim Chalmers says Australians are paying a “hefty price” for the impact of the war in Iran. “The war in the Middle East is doing a great deal of damage to the global economy, and Australians are paying a hefty price for that,” Mr Chalmers said during Question Time. “What we’ve announced today are additional steps to try and ease some of the pressures that Australians are feeling as a consequence of that war in the Middle East.”

Then Dame Groan could resume by having a go at EVs.

The pond takes it as a sign that EVs are at last taking off, and so the reptiles are threatened.

Again it was formulated in a way cultists would love ... "tax the rich", a mantra the reptiles seem to love in principle, but rarely in practice ...

One policy begging for reform or elimination is the fringe benefit tax exemption for novated leases of EVs. This is one of the most inefficient schemes around; it favours those on higher incomes and is costing the budget billions of dollars in forgone revenue. The cost has more than tripled from earlier estimates, with a figure of nearly $3bn in 2028-29 alone.
Unsurprisingly, interested parties, including those providing novated leases, have been trying to dissuade the government from making changes. But if Chalmers is serious about making real budget savings, this looks like low-hanging fruit. As cheap China-made EVs flood the market, it’s not clear that any form of subsidy is required for potential EV buyers.
There is also the Cheaper Home Batteries scheme that was so badly designed that its estimated costs tripled shortly after it was introduced. At one stage a figure of more than $7bn was estimated as the cost of subsidising relatively well-off households for installing oversized batteries.

Yep, EVs are on the move, and batteries and solar and reptiles of the Dame Groan kind are suddenly socialist...

My advice is to lower your expectations about the forthcoming budget. The reform will be piecemeal and arbitrary and won’t make any material difference to the budget’s bottom line, at least in the short term, but will annoy a group of voters who typically don’t vote Labor.
There will be a few heroic assumptions about reining in spending that won’t come to pass but may impress on the day. Any future economic downside will be the fault of events outside the control of the government, a point Chalmers will be keen to emphasise. Just don’t mention stagflation and falling living standards.

Sadly, the pond finds it can leave Dame Groan's advice parked at the door ... especially as she offered piecemeal and arbitrary advice in a column more dismal than usual ...

Heck, just fang it ...

And now for completists, thanks to the intermittent archive working early this morning, the pond is able to range over reptile offerings with teaser trailers ...

Excise cut a repeat of Covid-era handouts
The inflation dragon was never slayed. Instead, it is now hovering over Australia, blowing fire storms across the regions and cities.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Geoff could only manage a couple of minutes of time wasting...

One thing the pond will note ... on the weekend, the Hume highway was exceptionally quiet ...

Only EVs and a few trucks dared roam the range last Sunday, as the pond discovered this incredibly cute offering in Gundagai ...

So far from home ...

And so to another offering, this one again just two minutes ...

Please explain: Why Anthony Albanese should get on the phone with Donald Trump
A call to the White House is perhaps more difficult than giving away $2.5bn to try to appease the punters on petrol.
By Dennis Shanahan

This is the reason the pond doesn't pay much attention to the lesser drongos on the far right just offering filler for the day.

The bouffant one ended with a word salad ...

...public concern and growing doubts and confusion about the aims and cost of the Trump attack on Iran have led Albanese to publicly complain about a lack of clarity over the US actions, which doesn’t put Trump off side but qualifies the Australian position.
“I want to see more certainty in what the objectives of the war are, and I want to see a de-escalation. So, a de-escalation is in the global economy’s interests,” the Prime Minister said as he added $2.55bn to the budget bill.
Making his position on Iran clear he declared: “I have nothing but contempt for the Iranian regime.”
But, listing the shifting objectives of the US military action, Albanese said “what is going to occur” needs to be spelt out.
The last time Albanese had a “warm” conversation with Trump was on March 10, at 2am, to discuss the fate of the Iranian women footballers who were seeking asylum at the time.
And, although there is regular contact between the administrations there hasn’t been a leaders’ conversation since then and nor has the US yet appointed an ambassador to Canberra.
Given Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong once suggested the then prime minister, Scott Morrison, should just get on the phone to Trump, perhaps the present Prime Minister should do the same, but that’s probably more difficult than just giving away $2.5bn to try to appease the punters on petrol.

As if you can reason with a mad King, or do deals, knowing he lies all the time, and breaks deals as easily as he lies.

The pond got rid of the canny Cranston even more quickly ...

Here we go again … Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers spend their way out of Iran War fuel crisis
The fuel excises cut is a clear signal the budget will include more new spending justified by an attempt at saving the economy from a Covid-style recession.
By Matthew Cranston

Of course the reptiles face a problem in all this, as does the government.

It was the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way wot suggested it, as noted in his Facebook video ...(a link does not endorse Facebook or suggest anyone should visit)

Finally, Labor has taken our advice and halved the fuel excise tax. It’s a step in the right direction, but it raises another big question, why is the Prime Minister always the last to lead in a national crisis?

Awkward, so all the reptiles can do is raise saucy doubts and fears, and conjure up the inflation dragon, and talk of Covid days and such like, while downplaying the way the big spend was something both sides agreed on.

But mention of the beefy boofhead did remind the pond that tucked below the fold were some pearls of wisdom.

The pond usually doesn't pay attention to these pearls, but this one raised some interesting questions for the beefy boofhead ... though it came by way of an attack on the pasty Hastie ...

A class war?

Was the dropper of these pearls of wisdom aware that Dame Groan had suggested ... gasp ... taxing the rich? Or at least the EV/solar rich...

Before the pond could get onto the question of whether the pasty Hastie endorsed Dame Groan's views, there was a visual interruption featuring the usual villains, chortling at the thought of their evil deeds ... Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Then the irritating grain of sand in the flesh kept on ...but what did it all mean?

The pond took it as a sign that the pasty Hastie scored a big hit with his ABC interview, and the reptiles are now in panic mode ...

Or take Hastie’s assertion that America’s Iran war is a “huge miscalculation”: a big call to make at this stage of the conflict.
If this is Hastie’s considered military view, it is certainly worth listening to. But this line has been taken by US isolationists and anti-Trump Democrats who are desperate for this enterprise to fail.

What a classic. Now it's not a war, nor even a special military operation, nor even an excursion. Now it's an enterprise, and no doubt soon will be applying for Pty. Ltd. status.

But do go on ...

And when Hastie declares “multinationals and big business” in Australia “have lost their social licence”, is he backing the left’s view that Canberra’s politicians and bureaucrats should assert more control over them?
Hastie suggests neoliberalism is all but dead. In this regard, at least, he is on a unity ticket with Anthony Albanese and the modern Labor Party, which in the late 1990s under Kim Beazley denounced the Hawke-Keating policy legacy.
Yet if he’s worried about our dire economic predicament and wants to see young people climb the ladder of opportunity, he should be directing his rhetorical fire at the Albanese government’s neo-socialism.
Let’s discard the undergraduate labels and consider what neoliberalism means in practice.
It was the policy model embraced by Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard in this country. It was not an ideological project but a pragmatic one. By dismantling protectionist barriers, deregulating our domestic markets, means-testing welfare and lowering income tax burdens, they aimed to unlock the economy’s growth potential. It was the original abundance agenda.

The reptiles used the moment to try to flog their wares, but the wretched illustration was more than enough to put the pond off ...

PREMIUM
Andrew Hastie's hit-back at Trump
Become a member to access our premium video content

Really reptiles? You can't even get the distracting snap's proportions right, and yet you want people to splurge their shekels?

And so to even more panic:

As the fiscal, regulatory and taxation footprint of government was wound back, the scope for individuals and companies to aim big and prosper increased.
The growing economic pie this created weakened the politics of envy and class division in this country, strengthening our social cohesion and national pride.
And as our economy become more flexible and resilient, our ability to ride out global economic and security shocks increased.
It is no accident that as we’ve progressively dismantled the policy legacy of Hawke, Keating and Howard, the economic and social foundations of this country have been weakened and, with them, our ability to defend ourselves from foreign and local threats.
When Hastie rejects neoliberalism, does he have in mind a right-wing version of the Albanese government, junking net zero but pursuing some other centrally devised vision or plan?
Tony Blair was wrong. In politics, there is no third way. If you demonise the market system, you must by default be a supporter of statism. If Hastie merely means that, in a more fractured world, we should strengthen our national defence force and develop some sovereign capabilities while remaining a market-based economy, that is another matter.
But in that case, the “look at me” neoliberal critique does not have to be made.

What a sublime black and white approach.

The reptiles flung in a final distraction ...

Bondi Partners Senior Adviser Peter McGauran says Shadow Industry and Sovereign Capability Minister Andrew Hastie has the “gift of clarity”. Mr McGauran told Sky News Australia that Andrew Hastie is “an issue” for Opposition Leader Angus Taylor. “He’s definitely getting into areas that are the province of others.”

And there followed one last pearler of alarm...

Hastie is clearly rattled by the rise of One Nation. He is right to challenge a Liberal Party that is in denial about the existential threat it poses. But is he offering a coherent, carefully thought through way forward for conservatives or is he an ideological bowerbird, picking up ideas from wherever he can find them, including JD Vance and the Labor Party?
Perhaps Hastie’s many pronouncements are his way of working out just what he thinks, a bit like a teenager who says they are a socialist one day and libertarian the next. That is not necessarily a bad thing – unlike so many of his peers, Hastie is thinking about the world and responding to popular frustrations, but at some point he needs to find his political due north.
If he wants to be a future leader of the Liberal Party and this country and not just a gadfly at the margins, it needs to be sooner rather than later.
David Pearl is a former Treasury assistant secretary.

It needs to be sooner rather than later?

The pond had thought the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way was pretty safe for the moment, what with Dame Slap writing up uxorious, gushing texts about his partner in life, and the other reptiles sounding all in, but suddenly rattled reptiles are calling for another leadership challenge, and the sooner the better.

Bring it on, there can never be enough entertainment when it comes to prime Angus beef.

Second thoughts, haven't we got enough entertainment already?

Finally, he's not the best talent talking to camera, but compared to the lizard Oz's practitioners of the dismal science, he's not entirely wrong either ...(there's a transcript here for those that find that easier)

In which the Caterist and Major Mitchell are on a war footing ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 21:04:00 +0000

The reptiles are intent on ignoring the real villains for the current world-wide crisis, King Donald and his minions, and those who encouraged him in his folly, such as the Emeritus Chairman ...

Instead there was the chance for a crowing amidst the carnage ...

The reptiles also dropped the pastie Hastie off the front page, and you had to head to another place to read the likes of Hastie’s truth bombs on tax and war will rattle the Liberal Party (*intermittent archive link)

...On foreign affairs, Hastie has gone where no major party politician has gone: admitting Donald Trump’s war in Iran represented a “huge miscalculation”. Hastie proves that one can hold this view at the same time as retaining a disdain for the theocratic butchers of Tehran.
The war would dent American prestige and cast doubt on the president’s judgment, Hastie said, plunging Australia into a new, truly multipolar era in which military and economic self-sufficiency will be crucial.
The effect of Hastie’s interview, which came after weeks of outspoken interventions, will accelerate the conversation about the potential upside of a Hastie-led Liberal Party.

Or you could turn to the source, the ABC, Andrew Hastie says Iran war a 'huge miscalculation' by Donald Trump

Or The Conversation, Andrew Hastie calls out Trump’s war strategy

Where's the bromancer when he's needed to repent and recalibrate? Where's Lord Downer, in his finery, high heels and stockings, ready to explain it all away?

What reptile dared to stand up with the hastie pasty, gone wild-eyed rogue?

None.

Instead it was left to hapless Geoff to chamber a round on the extreme far right ...

Anthony Albanese faces his worst year yet as Andrew Hastie looms as a future Liberal Party leader
There are two big questions that will be answered ahead of the 2028 election: will Anthony Albanese run for a historic third term and will Andrew Hastie make his move on Angus Taylor?
By Geoff Chambers

Sublimely, the chambering managed to avoid any mention of King Donald's war as he contemplated that rogue pasty Hastie...

...Taylor has done a solid job to date.
The Coalition’s primary vote in Newspoll is up, the Opposition Leader has narrowed the gap to an increasingly unpopular Prime Minister and the popular vote for One Nation appears to have plateaued.
The challenge for Taylor and his senior team is to keep out of their own way and ensure they don’t give Labor easy ways out.
The fuel excise policy intervention, which recycled one of Peter Dutton’s election losing ideas, was not needed.
While plenty of Australians would like cheaper petrol, the issue right now is finding fuel.
The Coalition needs to better understand when to intervene and when to not.
The Albanese government is under massive pressure.
Similar to the pandemic, the opposition should attack the government’s mistakes while not providing ammunition for Labor or One Nation.
Despite returning to shadow cabinet, Hastie on Sunday showed he will not be muzzled and will continue to speak his mind on whatever issue he chooses, even if it is contrary to formal Coalition policy.
Hastie’s intervention, which included being open to increasing taxes on the gas industry and clamping down on capital gains tax discounts and negative gearing, will be weaponised by Labor during the final parliamentary sitting week before the Easter break and the federal budget.
Taylor needs to keep his team on the same page.

The oil crisis has magically turned up out of nowhere - likely greenies are to blame - and the team just has to stay solid, and ssshh, don't mention the war.

This was the one disassociated mention of the war in that feeble Chambering ...

The Iran war and its associated impacts will fundamentally alter Treasury’s forecasts and the nation’s economic outlook.

You don't say, Sherlock ...

What a pity you were completely clueless about who caused it, and it was left to the pastie Hastie to bell that cat (yes, even broken clocks ...)

Naturally, the careening, cratering Crater was an astute diviner of the real reasons for the crisis, up there with his analysis of flood waters in quarries.

The header: Labor has turned its back on real victims of this oil shock; The party’s natural constituency is no longer those who drive the economy, but those who interpret it.

The caption for the opening snap? Sorry, there was none. Yet again the reptiles forgot to tag it, but no matter, the gesticulating man looks incredibly sinister and is likely a villain.

Ironies never cease, and reptile mischief makers abound, and so it was that prize blatherer, that "interpreter" braying about "those who interpret it", who spent four minutes blaming everyone but King Donald ...

A minister’s diary clash can tell us more about a government’s true priorities than a thousand scripted answers in question time. Last week, the Energy Minister assured the House that the government had been working tirelessly with state governments and industry to alleviate the effects of the fuel crisis.
Yet Chris Bowen’s decision to skip the last national cabinet to attend informal net-zero discussions with Pacific climate ministers suggests his mind is elsewhere. Bowen prioritised attending an open-ended talkfest about the energy system of the future over addressing the crisis in the energy system we actually have.
As we enter the fifth week of the war against Iran, Bowen maintains that all is quiet on the western front. He says fuel reserves remain strong and more is on the way. Australia’s two refineries “are working absolutely full pelt”, he told ABC Insiders last week. He insists we have the same, if not slightly more, petrol and diesel in Australia than before the crisis began.
Yet his narrative jars with the mood on the Metro filling station forecourt on Hoxton Park Rd in western Sydney, where motorists were lining up last week to top up their tanks at $2.50 a litre.
Bowen calls this panic buying. Yet, with fuel prices rising week by week, others might call it prudence. Motorists are doing exactly what rapid inflation encourages: buying earlier, buying more often and avoiding exposure to higher prices.

Just remember the advantages of EVs, and renewables, the pond suggests, as the reptiles did manage to tag the next snap, Anthony Albanese holds a press briefing about the fuel crisis with Chris Bowen in Sydney. Picture: Jeremy Piper

Inevitably the Caterist was all in on fomenting hysteria, and panic - that's what flood waters in quarries diviners do best ...

On Thursday afternoon in question time, the Energy Minister was challenged about the rising level of bowser anxiety by the member for Lindsay, Melissa McIntosh, who raised the plight of Shane from Penrith.
“The way things are going, I won’t be able to afford to go to work,” Shane said. “It’s either pay the bills and starve or eat and not pay the bills.”
Bowen appeared unmoved. He insisted the government could not be blamed for rising oil prices and referred Shane to the state government app that gives real-time service station prices.
Not for the first time, the Albanese government has fallen into the trap of mistaking the mood in inner-city coffee shops for that of the country as a whole.
In Erskineville, in Sydney’s inner west, for example, public transport and cycle paths are so plentiful that a quarter of households don’t bother to own a car.
Normal life is impossible in the outer suburbs without a car. That’s why three out of five households in Penrith go to the expense of owning two or more vehicles compared to one out of five households in Erskineville.
Nine out of 10 people who travel to work in Penrith use a car. On average, they travel further to work, and a few enjoy the luxury of paying for fuel with a company credit card. The effects of the fuel crisis are deeply regressive. It is punishing the working poor in outer-suburban districts far harder than households with higher incomes in more fashionable suburbs.
The government’s response to rising fuel prices has been to wash its hands of responsibility, blaming international markets and hinting at fuel company price gouging.
There is no evidence whatsoever of predatory behaviour by retailers, nor would there likely be in a fiercely competitive market where a range of independent companies competes aggressively on price.

Roll that one around on your tongue again, and enjoy the Menzies Research Centre flavour ...

There is no evidence whatsoever of predatory behaviour by retailers, nor would there likely be in a fiercely competitive market where a range of independent companies competes aggressively on price.

And so to the wretch himself, thankfully reduced to a screen cap, Menzies Research Centre Senior Fellow Nick Cater says Australians are seeing political figures as taking the public for “granted”. “These revelations about Anika Wells and others in the party,” Mr Cater said. “They think the political class are taking them for granted.”

Time to bash renewables and alternatives such as home batteries ...

Indeed, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s latest weekly survey shows retail margins have contracted strongly since February. In Melbourne, for example, the average retail price of 176.1 cents a litre for regular unleaded on February 20 was 24c a litre, more than the average terminal gate price. Last week, with the average price at 250.8, the retailer’s mark-up was just 2.3 cents per litre.
The biggest price component beyond the Singapore benchmark, which was around $1.07 on Friday, is fuel excise duty and GST.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor’s proposal to halve fuel excise duty for three months would cut the pump price overnight by around 26c a litre. Taylor also announced a 50 per cent reduction in the Heavy Vehicle Road User Charge to assist the transport industry.
The Treasurer will be reluctant to cut revenue, but Taylor has helped him by identifying commensurate cuts: scrapping the electric vehicle fringe benefits tax exemption, slashing green hydrogen projects and freezing the home battery scheme, which offers consumers an attractive 30 per cent subsidy.
In a rational world, these cuts would be uncontroversial. The FBT exemption is transparently a tax cut for the rich, the kind of measure to which the Labor Party would once have been resolutely opposed.
The generosity of the home battery subsidy has made it wildly popular. The cost blew out to $7.2bn in less than six months, triple its initial budget. Once again, it is an example of government largesse to the already privileged: homeowners wealthy enough to install solar panels on their roofs and with enough spare capital or borrowing capacity to bear the upfront costs while amortising the returns over time.

Poor beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, struggling to stay relevant as the pastie Hastie made his play ...Angus Taylor proposed to halve fuel excise duty for three months. Picture: Martin Ollman

And so to a rousing 'oils is oils' climax ...

Handing out any more green hydrogen subsidies would be plain silly when no one in the private sector has been able to assemble a viable business case.
Yet none of these cuts would be easy for Bowen, who remains fixated by the real energy crisis, not a shortage of fuel but an excess of emissions.
Labor once understood itself as a party of material interests: wages, prices, the universal provision of health and education. Its instincts were shaped by the pressures of everyday life, with particular concern for the downtrodden and dispossessed.
Those old-fashioned socialist instincts have dulled. In their place is a politics more concerned with systems than outcomes and the future rather than the present. Its natural constituency is no longer those who drive the economy, but those who interpret it.
The party has become remote – and not a little disdainful – of the people who grow things, make things, import and distribute things. All of which, inconveniently, require energy in real time, not 30 years hence.
The oil crisis gives the government a chance to recalibrate, to acknowledge the limits of current assumptions and the indispensability of hydrocarbons. It is an opportunity that will almost certainly be squandered.

Indeed, indeed ... but credit where credit is due ...

Major Mitchell was also on a war footing ...

The header: Outright hostility to Donald Trump and Israel colours media’s reporting of Iran war; Analysis of the war should not gloss over miscalculations by the US and Israel. Equally, the rush to doomsday pessimism undermines journalism’s credibility.

The caption: Bulk carriers sit anchored at Muscat anchorage in Oman. Picture: Getty Images

The Major spent a bigly five minutes filing and filling his report for the Australian Daily Zionist News, but before beginning, the pond did wonder if that correspondent's suggestion that he matched up with Colonel Blimp was in any way fair ...

Probably not, though that bird skewed the 'mo sample ...

And so to the Major doing his best to defend King Donald, his minions, and above all, the current government of Israel's quest for a greater Israel, and never mind a little ethnic cleansing...

Much of the world’s media seems happy to publish instant criticism of every statement by US President Donald Trump.
The Nine papers in Australia, most commercial broadcasters and the ABC last week reported Iran’s denials that it was negotiating with Trump, based on statements from Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and the speaker of its parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
The Iranians would say that. Several layers of the regime have been eliminated and it is unlikely anyone privately talking to the US via intermediaries would admit to it given what the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps might do to them.
Journalists don’t realise the regime paranoia triggered by Trump’s claims Iran was “desperate for a deal” could actually help the US.
As Mehdi Parpanchi, executive editor at US-based Iran International TV, wrote on Tuesday on Substack, the US President’s statement “is already producing an outcome Trump wants: psychological pressure inside Tehran and calmer energy markets outside it”.
As The Wall Street Journal argued on Wednesday, Iran’s regime had plenty of incentive “to deny, deny, deny and keep markets roiled”.
Yet by Tuesday morning it was already clear Pakistan was involved in brokering a deal with Iran. Egypt and Turkey were helping.
The Gulf states were pressuring Iran. Saudi Arabia’s leader, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the UAE said they wanted the war to continue.

At this point the reptiles slipped in a snap of a journalist butcher, just the sort of man the Major loves quoting, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman. Picture: AAP

The Major kept on with his padding ...

UAE ambassador to the US Yousef Al Otaiba wrote in the WSJ: “We need a decisive outcome that addresses the full spectrum of Iran’s threats: nuclear capabilities, missiles, drones, proxy networks and disruptions to international shipping routes.”
Nine Newspapers’ international editor Peter Hartcher on Tuesday wrote an opinion piece under the headline “Trump has no idea what he is doing”.

Now fair should be fair.

All the links in the next Major gobbet just kept reptile readers inside the lizard Oz hive mind.

There was no link to Hartcher, harumphing Trump has no idea what he's going. Now his hubris has put the world on edge... (*intermittent archive link)

It takes a lot for the pond to admit that the harping Hartcher had a point, but this is was his opening thrust ...

Great powers are prone to great delusions. Vladimir Putin thought he’d defeat Ukraine in three days. The Pentagon believed him. The war is now in its fifth year.
Donald Trump allowed a little extra time for his planned war on Iran. He was confident of defeating the Islamic Republic in four days, according to a credible expert. It’s now halfway through its fourth week.
The war is turning out to be full of surprises for the American president. First, before the war began, his administration assured anxious officials in Turkey that the US-Israeli assault on Iran would be over in four days, says Asli Aydintasbas, a Turkish scholar with the Brookings Institution in Washington.
The administration had convinced itself that if Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei were removed, the entire Iranian regime would collapse in short order: “Trump wanted to carry out a hit-and-run move, and now he is stuck in an open-ended war,” she says.
Trump should not have been surprised. His own peak intelligence adviser had told him not to expect the regime to fall: “A classified report by the National Intelligence Council found that even a large-scale assault on Iran launched by the US would be unlikely to oust the Islamic republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment,” reports The Washington Post.
The intelligence assessment had been informed by a raft of government experts on Iran. It seems Trump consulted no Iran specialists anywhere inside or outside the government.
Bloomberg, however, reports that he was urged by the well-known authority on Iran, Rupert Murdoch, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Iran. Should we be surprised that the president who advised his population to try injecting bleach to cure COVID also did no homework on going to war?

Nor did the Emeritus Chairman do his homework.

Naturally the Major couldn't mention that little tidbit in his summary ...

Hartcher’s points can be boiled down to Trump underestimating the Iranian regime’s military; Trump rejecting US defence warnings Iran could shut the Strait of Hormuz; and Trump treating with contempt US allies who were not keen to send ships to protect the vital waterway.
Hartcher saw the weekend’s revelation Iran had fired two long-range missiles at Diego Garcia, 4000km away in the Indian Ocean, as a reason the US should be cautious. This column reckons long-range missiles and 400kg of enriched uranium are reasons to hit Iran hard.
And what of the potential for success? What if Iran’s hard line speaker can become a leader the West can deal with?
What if the UK and NATO countries do end up patrolling the Persian Gulf, which they need but Trump does not because the US is self-sufficient in fossil fuels?

What if?

That's the best the Major has got while the world goes to hell in a handbasket, and it will take years for the world to recover from King Donald's deed?

What if the Major is a major twerp and a fool?

Fear always spooks markets, and oil shocks produce the most fear. Fear has been driving reporting about the war rather than action in the region, which was actually slowing before an uptick by Israel late last week when a truce looked possible.
The Jerusalem Post has examined the war’s progress and on Wednesday produced an assessment more sober than reporting in Australia and in the US.
Strikes by the US and Israel on Iranian targets have fallen dramatically, possibly to as few as 240 a day, compared with 1000 a day by both the US and Israel in week one.
There is separate evidence Iranian strikes against Israel, and against the Gulf states, have also fallen, probably because Iran’s launch capabilities have been severely degraded.

The way the reptiles work is always to toss in a billy goat butt ...

Analysis of the war should not gloss over miscalculations by the US and Israel.

But that's always so the butt can be refuted ...

Equally, the rush to doomsday pessimism undermines journalism’s credibility and ignores the plight of ordinary Iranians and the Sunni Gulf States.
If Trump derangement syndrome rules in much of the coverage, outright hostility to Israel’s right to defend itself dominates reporting of its war aims in Lebanon, where Benjamin Netanyahu is determined to drive Iran’s Hezbollah proxy from positions south of the Litani River, perhaps even occupying southern Lebanon.

Sadly the Major has a case of Trump delusion syndrome, accompanied by a severe dose of Zionism, and a seemingly endless devotion to Benji ... Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. speaks during a video released on social media. Picture: X

As always, it's the fault of the cardigan wearers ...

In Australia, much of the reporting treats Israel as an aggressor against Lebanon, even though the Lebanese would like nothing more than to be rid of Hezbollah.
The ABC, like Britain’s BBC, is always on the lookout for innocent Lebanese civilian victims but seems unable to find innocent Israelis affected by Hezbollah rockets across northern Israel.
Remember, 60,000 Israelis had to leave their homes in the country’s north for almost two years before the November 27 2024 truce.
Readers may have seen footage of a journalist being fired on near the Litani River on March 19. He claimed he was being deliberately targeted by the IDF as part of Israel’s war on journalists. It made compelling television.
The reporter, Steve Sweeney, is the Lebanon bureau chief of RT: Russia Today. Australian networks that aired the footage did not say the IDF had specifically warned in advance of that date that it would soon be targeting bridges across the Litani for destruction.

So to the Major's source, and here the pond must do a pre-emptive reference to a wiki for CAMERA...

CAMERA is known for its media monitoring and advocacy. It releases reports to counter what it calls "frequently inaccurate and skewed characterizations of Israel and of events in the Middle East" that it believes may fuel anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice.The group mobilizes protests against what it deems unfair media coverage by issuing full-page ads in newspapers, organizing demonstrations,[and encouraging sponsors to withhold funds.
CAMERA's critics have called it an "extreme Israel advocacy group" and said it is aligned with hawkish right-wing viewpoints, pays stipended fellows to write anti-Palestinian articles, and employs smear and intimidation tactics, routinely targeting media and journalists critical of Israel and pro-Palestinian activists on campuses.

Well yes, you don't get more peak Zionist than the Major, so naturally he was all in ...

Camera, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, said on March 23 that a BBC Verify investigation defending the footage as real failed to mention Sweeney used to write for the pro-Hezbollah outlet Al Mayadeen or that cameraman Ali Rida Sbeity used to work for Hezbollah’s Al Manar TV network.
By last Wednesday, Lebanon had decided to expel the Iranian ambassador. Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam on March 2 demanded Hezbollah disarm.
While Al Jazeera sided with Hezbollah against the ban, Salam told Saudi television on March 22 that Hezbollah’s “rocket fire towards Israel had led to heavy damage in Lebanon and undermined the government’s credibility”, the Times of Israel reported.
Trump is no doubt the most mercurial president the US has ever had. Netanyahu certainly has used the latest conflict to build his domestic popularity ahead of an election later this year.
But these facts do not invalidate the desire of the Arab Gulf States, Israel, Lebanon and long-suffering Iranians for an end to the violence the country’s mullahs have spread throughout the Middle East.
Trump on Wednesday said Iran had offered a precious gift, related to oil and gas.
The Times of Israel on Thursday reported Arab and US sources saying Iran had let some tankers pass through the Strait of Hormuz as a sign of good faith.
As usual, Trump had made too much of a gesture that won’t alleviate high oil prices.

The reptiles decided to fling in a snap of King Donald looking a tad the worse for wear ... US President Donald Trump. Picture: AP

The pond seized the chance to slip in an matching 'toon referencing the old louche libertine...

The Major finally wrapped up ...

Don’t be surprised if Trump offers Iran continued oil sanctions relief, counterbalanced by the threat of 5000 US Marines being sent to take over the Kharg Island oil export facility 640km west of Hormuz if a deal is impossible.
On Friday, Trump extended the deadline on threats to destroy Iran’s energy system to April 6. He was trying to appease markets that on Thursday night (AEST) had their worst trading session since the start of the war.
No journalists know if a truce is possible. Negotiations are more difficult because the regime’s leaders are mainly dead.
The WSJ suggested on March 25 the way ahead may be a temporary truce that opens Hormuz but leaves the tough questions about Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and the longer-term arrangements in the Strait for future negotiation.

Don't be surprised?

The only time the pond will be surprised is if the Major ever stops sounding like the Australian Daily Zionist News.

Then we can turn back to other more gilt-edged and important matters...

And so to a few also rans, who should be noted as reptile contributors, not because the pond cares but because they were there on the Monday morning ...

One was Clive ...

Trump can still turn tide of war back in his favour
The coming weeks will clarify whether Tehran opts for de-escalation and survival or continued defiance.
By Clive Williams

The pond was happy to do a teaser trailer for that intermittent archive link ...

Clive counted as his credentials a role in two of the most astonishing US victories in recent times...

Clive Williams served with the US 173d Airborne Brigade in Vietnam, was an instructor at a US Army school, and was an adviser to the US commander in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2012.

Oh well, if it turns out as well as Afghanistan, Iranians will be sure to rejoice.

Clive was keen to see boots on the ground ...

...After weeks of sustained strikes, US forces hold overwhelming superiority in the air and at sea, and the island could be isolated from reinforcement. Timing appears favourable for rapid execution if ordered: Marine expeditionary forces are en route or arriving imminently.
Trump’s established pattern – issuing ultimatums, allowing brief pauses for negotiation or mediation, then escalating – suggests any decision window could arrive sooner rather than later, though recent extensions indicate diplomacy is still being tested.
Success in securing Kharg and its oil, and reopening the Strait of Hormuz under controlled conditions, could deliver a tangible strategic victory for US and allied interests. Importantly, this would not constitute an open-ended invasion or occupation of mainland Iran. It would represent a limited operation aimed at seizing a key economic chokepoint, protecting global commerce, and reasserting deterrence. Iran would retain the option to avert it through timely capitulation or a viable agreement.

Easy peasy ...

Simplistic Simon was also on hand ...

Forget the oil shock, the pond had a SloMo, liar from the shire shock at the next snap ...Scott Morrison was the last PM to cut the fuel excise in response to the oil supply shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Picture: Getty Images

Simplistic Simon quickly began to sound like one of those Monty Python sketches where old stagers tell young pups that things aren't so bad as the days when you got out of your bed at 4 am to enjoy a hearty breakfast of cheap tar. It was a bit of a surprise, given the way that the crackhead Caterist had tried to lather up a panic...

The oil price isn’t even close to the $US147 a barrel for benchmark Brent crude when it peaked in 2008 nor has it yet doubled as it did during the 1979 Iranian revolution in the second oil shock following the OPEC embargo of 1973.
But the context of today’s supply and price shock is different as it’s occurring during an ongoing cycle of pain for households and businesses.
The big story of the past four years that rarely rates a mention anymore is that the domestic economy has grown around 7.5 per cent. This is about the same level at which the population grew over the same period. In other words, GDP per capita has barely moved and GDP per capita has been virtually in recession for most of this period. The only reason GDP per person has stayed the same is because people are now working more hours to keep ahead of their declining standard of living.
The productivity shock across the economy has been profound. In effect, the response from the Albanese government has been to effectively transform a free-market economy to a government-directed one. While living standards have shown signs of finally beginning to lift again – marginally – few people will be feeling it. The current fuel price shock is set to put a torch to that.
It’s true Australia may have lifted slightly on this measure in the OECD rankings; its performance is still about a third of that experienced by comparatively wealthy countries. It is no wonder, then, that for many Australians the surge in fuel prices might feel like the straw that broke the camel’s back. While a temporary fuel price spike is not really a crisis in the same league as those we’ve recently witnessed, such as Covid and the global financial crisis, for many people it may feel like one.

The reptiles kept pumping the gas on the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, Angus Taylor has called for a temporary cut to the fuel excise. Picture: Martin Ollman;Pauline Hanson was the missing element in the 2008 crisis. Picture: Martin Ollman

Simpleton Simon kept spreading oil on troubled waters ...

Unsurprisingly, Angus Taylor has thrown down the gauntlet of a temporary cut to the fuel excise. While Treasurer Jim Chalmers has said Labor won’t go down this route, Albanese has left the door open. There are plenty of reasons why this is a dumb idea economically but equally good reasons that it is smart politically. It’s a well-worn one by Liberal leaders, starting with John Howard, and an easy one to dust off, considering it was part of the Coalition’s failed policy platform at the last election.
Yet precedent alone is not enough because the underlying circumstances now are different. The opposition has the luxury of not having to deliver it, which makes this a political issue rather than a genuine economic one.
While Scott Morrison was the last to cut the fuel excise in response to the oil supply shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it seems we have forgotten the more acute episode just after Kevin Rudd was elected, when the Coalition – this time in opposition – was demanding the same action. There have been many comparisons with today’s experience and that of 1973. But the 2008 oil shock should stand out as the better and more proximate domestic comparison.
There are competing theories on the causes of the 2008 crisis, but the general consensus is that a combination of a cut in supply by Saudi Arabia, a spike in demand from China and rampant price speculation in the commodities futures market saw the price rise to what is still its highest on record, at close to $US150 a barrel.
The cause may differ, but the result is the same. Price shocks at the bowsers. It is estimated that the price rise added almost one percentage point to inflation at the time, which peaked at 4.5 per cent in 2008. A federal by-election was also under way in the seat of Gippsland, with Brendan Nelson leading a demoralised Coalition. Fuel prices were central to the campaign.
Nelson was demanding a cut to fuel excise and proclaiming that fuel prices would be a central issue at the next election. The political dynamic to today’s contest is eerily similar – a fuel price spike, rising inflation, a by-election and a Liberal Party struggling for relevance. With one exception: an absence of Pauline Hanson in 2008.

How dire was this trip down memory lane with the simplistic one? Brendan Nelson and Kevin Rudd had much to ponder in 2008.

That dire, but luckily that was the signal that the final gobbet was on us ...

In a vacuum, what Taylor is proposing and what Albanese is considering would be inflationary. You can almost hear the economists screaming through the double-glazed glass of the Treasury Building windows not to do it. Offsetting the cost with equal or greater spending cuts to other government programs, however, is not. And this is what Taylor is proposing. That those programs he has nominated for a haircut to pay for the $1.5bn cost are those that Labor would never contemplate – such as the EV subsidies – exposes the naked political wedge.
Shovelling money into the economy to favour one affected group, in this case motorists without electric vehicles, while taking money out for others is not an extraordinary concept.
What economists hate, though, is when it becomes so politically tribal that the economics becomes the victim. One side seeks to prop up its own constituency while taking from its opponent’s people.
Had it not been for One Nation, Taylor may not have decided to go down this path as he is now also seeking to get his own people back. Just as Nelson was facing a by-election with fuel as the local concern, so too now is Taylor facing the same battle with a May by-election in Farrer but with a very different opponent.
As economist Chris Richardson has said, Australia has become pretty good at dealing with crises when they arise but appallingly bad at dealing with the chronic problems that cause them.
Enough Australian motorists have seen this horror movie before to know better than to panic. The question is whether there are enough politicians who have learned anything from it.

Did this simplistic analysis have any purpose?

Yes, it served as an introduction to the immortal Rowe ...and the good, gassed-up times ahead ...

Good times down the road for the beefy boofhead, with the sort of grille any reptile would envy ...(the pond denies any resemblance to flying pigs whatsoever).

Meanwhile, in another country ... with a man who confesses he's recovering from a hangover.

By special request, hagiography to the max, Dame Slap grills Dame Beef ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 06:00:00 +0000

That shamelessly deceptive header?

t's a joke of course.

Dame Slap doesn't grill Dame Beef, she waxes lyrical, she swoons at the sight of her, she shows all the passion you might expect in a Heathcliffian romance ...

She is the suck supreme ...

The header: She is Louise Clegg. He is Angus Taylor. She’s not the woman behind the man; Refusing to play the quiet political spouse to Liberal leader Angus Taylor, the constitutional lawyer has one rule: ‘I wasn’t going to shut up.’

The caption for the fetching snap: The wife of new Liberal leader Angus Taylor, Louise Clegg. She’s not the woman behind the man. Picture: Jane Dempster / The Australian

The pond usually likes to offer some critical or satirical commentary, as an add-on to the assorted offerings of reptile swill to herpetology students - a legitimate form of postgraduate study whereby all might earn their PhR's.

But sometimes nausea intervenes, and during the course of this 12 minute read - so the reptiles clocked it - the pond had to rush off to the toilet to upchuck a Technicolor yawn so many times that sensible comment entirely fled the mind ...

The pond even struggled to find the right sort of descriptor. Might it be called a great example of fawning sycophantic scribbling?

Did those few inadequate words sufficiently evoke the experience?

Whatever, no more splendid example of a hagiographic fawning and simpering has found its way into the pond in a long time, and all because a correspondent pleaded for Dame Slap to be given special treatment - and incidentally proving that Dame Slap has a heart as soft and as vulnerable as a marshmallow.

So sweet and tender and caring ...

There is a Bogan River in Australia, of course. It’s in central NSW. On the banks of that river, just before Easter 37 years ago, a couple of country kids shared their first kiss. Not quite kids; she was 20, he was 22. But still, young.
She grew up on a farm near Tottenham, a small town in deep National Party country, west of Sydney, population back then of about 200 to 300 people.
He grew up on a farm near the small town of Nimmitabel, on the Great Dividing Range.
Her mother and father left school before they were 15. The first in her family to go to university, apart from an uncle, she was the eldest of six children, raised in a rowdy Anglican country family not shy about showing emotion.
He was one of four boys, both his parents were university-educated, and family life on their much larger country property was more reserved but equally unaffected.
She is Louise Clegg.
He is Angus Taylor.
Which means the man who wants to turf out the Albanese government is married to Clegg. She’s not the woman behind the man, as the outdated might say of spouses of men in big political jobs. Put it this way, if Taylor has a chance, it will help that he is married to Clegg.
The entire country knows the Liberals and Taylor, 59, elected leader in mid-February, have a gargantuan task on their hands. The Liberal Party copped more than a bloody nose from South Australian voters last weekend. The party lost limbs, recording their worst result. Taylor must confront not just the incumbent federal Labor government but also a nationally resurgent One Nation.

There was an abundance of splendid visual distractions, Louise Clegg and husband Angus Taylor with two of their four children.

The pond was still struggling for the right sort of descriptor.

Would servile obsequiousness do?

And whatever had happened to that much loved character, always determined to instil awe and respect into naughty children?

Sadly MIA, and even worse, the pond discovered in the latest movie adaptation, she was again disappeared and turned into Dame Snap (and even weirder, Kermode liked the movie).

Will anyone remember the grand, lost days of a jolly good slapping?

Never mind ... settle in, remember, this is a bigly 12 minutes, never to be recovered ...

“I’m not very interesting,” Clegg, 57, says a few times before we settle in for her first interview.
Nonsense.
Clegg is fascinating and funny, warm and smart, an astute political observer, thinker and writer. Clegg is also a no-nonsense mother of four, a highly respected former barrister and writer specialising in constitutional and administrative law. She is also a passionate campaigner for grassroots issues in the country.
A fine mind
Clegg speaks her mind – and it is a fine mind – even if that means stirring up the centre right of Australian politics. Last year she took on the so-called national conservatives who, she says, are copying and pasting right-wing American political trends.
“Conservatives in Australia have spent too long being deferential to the left’s cultural fashions. But the answer is not to imitate the left by building our own moralising state. We don’t need American nat-con cosplay – we need confident Australian conservatism: freedom, responsibility, pluralism, thrift, respect for institutions and confidence in ordinary Australians to build their own lives,” Clegg wrote in this newspaper in December last year.
Clegg also took aim at the hankering for tariff-driven protectionism: “The same one-size-fits-all nat-con posture extends to economics, where fawning over America First protectionism does not inspire confidence.”
Taylor read her piece for the first time the day it was published.
“Gus walked in the door and said, ‘That’ll ruffle a few feathers,’ ” Clegg tells Inquirer.
Whose feathers? Taylor didn’t say – and she won’t either. But it’s not hard to imagine.
It was early December, leadership rumblings were reaching fever pitch and some Coalition politicians appeared to be enamoured by American nativist politics, including tariffs and protectionism.
“Then he said, ‘I thought the economic part of it was strong.’ ”
Taylor knows more than your average political leader – including the current Treasurer and Prime Minister – about economics. His background is no secret: awarded the University of Sydney medal in economics, went to the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar doing a postgraduate degree in economics, a highly successful businessman, the youngest person globally to be appointed partner at McKinsey.
It’s Clegg we want to know more about. Did she feel the need to run the piece by her politician husband before publishing?
“No,” she says.
Does she ever run pieces by him?
No, she says, just as fast.
Taylor had responded to only one other of her many published pieces.
“What are you doing?” Taylor said to his wife, after her first piece on the voice was published in August 2022. “It wasn’t accusatory. It was more like: what are you trying to achieve?” Clegg recalls.
‘I wasn’t going to shut up’: Going out on a limb for the voice
Clegg is unusual for many reasons, not least for her courage. She was the first barrister in the country to publicly buck the suffocating consensus of the nation’s legal community that supported the voice. Not many followed her.
“I said to Angus, you’re the politician. You do your thing. I’m a lawyer, I’ll do mine.”

Clegg went out on a limb because she was blown away by the radical nature of the model put forward by Indigenous activists and a small group of self-styled “conservative constitutional lawyers” whose proposal Clegg believed was anything but conservative. It would have entrenched, she says, “inequality of citizenship” in the nation’s founding document.

Another visual distraction ... Louise Clegg at Parkes District Court in 2017. She would later buck the legal community’s suffocating consensus on the Voice. Picture: Supplied

It reminded the pond in a nostalgic way of that onetime severe and stern character, here gone MIA ...

Such a sweet, kindly girl. It must have softened the old grouch's heart.

And yet the pond still struggled for the right sort of descriptor to evoke the experience.

Subservient, deferential, grovelling, toadying?

“I felt if I was to have any credibility within my profession, I had to put up an alternative model. I was totally swamped by people, by lawyers, saying: ‘Louise, keep going.’ ”
The former barrister did just that, continuing to propose a genuinely modest model in stark contrast to the radical one being put forward to Australians in the referendum.
Clegg does a wickedly good impersonation of Tony Abbott as she recalls the former prime minister ringing her to say the choice was binary, yes or no. That’s it.
She and Frank Brennan, a supporter of the voice, became great friends, engaging in entirely civil debates in churches and at other forums. She spoke at her old law firm Clayton Utz – one of the few law firms to accommodate both sides of a referendum debate that involved important legal changes to the nation’s Constitution.
“I managed to get traction,” she says. “But not with the NSW Bar Association. I offered that Frank and I would go to the Bar common room and give alternative views. I didn’t get a response. It was like they (barristers) were all told to shut up. That’s my view. And I wasn’t going to shut up.”
Meeting Angus: ‘He was good looking and worked hard’
Clegg’s feisty intellect was clear early on, even if her parents did not see university as her natural path after school.
“My father was a fundamentalist Christian and he still is. He thought that I’d become an atheist if I went to uni. He said: ‘Why don’t you go to TAFE in Dubbo,’ ” she says. “Until I got my HSC mark, and then he said: ‘Oh maybe you should go to uni.’ ”
The former altar girl did not become an atheist at university but she did meet a man with deep religious convictions. Clegg was in her freshman year when she first met Taylor one night at a pub near Sydney University.
He was more interested in a pretty friend of hers. But the young law student noticed him. “He was completely country,” Clegg says. “From the way he stood that night, to the clothes he wore and the crappy Baxter boots.”

So many visual treasures ... Angus Taylor, 19, on horseback in the Snowy Mountains near Kiandra, leading a group on a five-day horse ride. Picture: Supplied

And while Dame Slap had gone MIA, naughty children were roaming, wild-eyed and excited, and without the hint of a reprimand ...

What grotesque creature had turned up in Dame Slap's place, replacing severity and discipline with wild abandon?

Still the pond struggled to describe this new school.

Ingratiating, cringing, unctuous, oily, slimy?

Would "alkaline" conjure up the texture of wet fingers feeling all soapy and sudsy and greasy?

City boys – including city-born politicians – like to channel a country vibe with their smart RM Williams boots. Not Taylor.
“He was just all country and I was a hardcore country girl. He was good-looking. And he worked hard.”
Both from the country, their respective family lives were different. “We weren’t well-to-do. We didn’t have a big garden, we had a farm, we had a house, and the sofas creaked.”
The Taylors caught trout at their big dam on their sheep and cattle property at Nimmitabel. They weren’t establishment though, Clegg says, laughing as she recalls her husband’s father keeping a gun in the kitchen, daring the police to come for it after John Howard’s gun law reforms. But the Taylors were wealthy, their farms dated back to the early 20th century. Taylor’s maternal grandfather was a senior engineer on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. His parents were university-educated and dinners at the Taylors might include a retired professor of economics.
“That was not your usual country story,” she says. “All the (Taylor) boys went to university, too.”
But Clegg says any notion of the Taylors being toffs is misguided. Most of the boys earned scholarships to attend the elite and expensive King’s School in their later years in Sydney. Their mother, Anne, taught the boys to read and write before they went to the local public school along with 50 other children. Clegg learned early that education and a hard Protestant work ethic drove the Taylors.
“On university holidays, everyone worked, it was straight out to the paddock where we went mustering,” she says. “You didn’t sit around reading books or lounge around doing nothing.”

Oh it was full Wuthering Heights... From country roots to a Sydney pub meeting, a young Louise Clegg and Angus Taylor began their story, united by their rural upbringing. Picture: Supplied

Or maybe full Woman's Day or the Women's Weekly or New Idea?

And still the pond struggled.

Creepy crawly?

O the cunning wiles that creep
In thy little heart asleep!
When thy little heart doth wake
Then the dreadful night shall break.

When Taylor wasn’t on the farm, he was a volunteer ski patroller in the winter or taking groups of riders out on horseback in the summer.
“I was a bit of a party girl. I had been pretty slack. I didn’t even know what a postgraduate degree was when Angus was talking about doing economic honours and he was applying for the Rhodes (scholarship to Oxford).
“I was like, what is that even about?”
Clegg came from a world of different expectations. “I didn’t have an underprivileged background,” she adds quickly. “In fact, it was very privileged because I was surrounded by love.” The boy from Nimmitabel noticed. On a visit to her parents’ home, Clegg and Taylor went for a drive towards a hill on their property.
“We used to drive to the bottom sometimes and walk up. So that day we jumped in the ute.
“Suddenly half my siblings jumped in the back of the ute too. The labrador was there too, along with a kangaroo.
“I don’t think I said much just, ‘Oh, sorry.’ But he knew I was embarrassed.
“He turned to me and said, ‘I have never met a family that love each other so much.’ ”
Clegg says their family looked Catholic, acted Catholic. “We had that feisty Irish republican thing going on.” Taylor’s family was more serious, more cerebral, more conservative.
“That explains one of the differences between us.”
‘A lot of talk about God’
Clegg was drawn to Taylor’s love of religion, too, she says, recalling their early conversations.
“There was a lot of talk about God and what God meant,” Clegg says. “I had never met anyone who was so interested in what it meant to be alive. Angus definitely has a relationship with God; he is a believer. I think it was partly driven by the fact that Gus had just lost his mother. She died at the age of 47 from breast cancer,” Clegg says, leaving behind a husband and four sons. Taylor was just 22.

By now the pond was well past the TMFI stage, both verbal and visual ... Angus Taylor's parents. His mother died at 47 from breast cancer when Angus was 22. Picture: Supplied

And still the pond struggled.

What was better? Gushing or slavish bootlicking?

Not long after, he embraced and was embraced by Clegg and her rambunctious family.
It wasn’t an issue that Clegg had a different relationship with religion. “I love going to church, I love talking about religion and God … but it’s hard for me to get there, to have a relationship with God. I can’t quite get there.”
When Clegg and Taylor were on the cusp of their careers – he was off to consulting firm McKinsey, she was headed to law firm Clayton Utz – Taylor suggested a seven-day horse trek, each of them on a horse, with another horse carrying their packs, through the Snowy Mountains. At night they pitched a tent or bedded down in one of the small huts scattered across the region, crossing rising rivers, trying to stay dry. Though it was late December, there was a bizarre snowstorm.
Was she being tested? No. Her country credentials were established. “He didn’t want to marry a princess,” she says, “and I certainly wasn’t one.
“I cried when we got back to Adaminaby and pulled in to get petrol on the way home because I thought, ‘That’ll never happen again.’ ”
Clegg gets teary only once, for a second, over many hours speaking with Inquirer. She is describing the support Taylor has always given her. “He changed me,” she says, laughing at her tears.
“He was really good for me academically. I worked harder at uni after I met him. He would never take credit for any of it, but he did change me.”
After they married, Clegg, by then the mother of a toddler, decided she wanted to be a barrister. Their families thought it was crazy. “This woman has a young child, she wants more children, why would she go to the Bar?” Clegg recalls.
“Angus was the one who said: ‘You should do that if that’s what you want.’ ”
And she did, topping the state Bar exams in mid-2000 when she was eight months pregnant with their second child.
One of Clegg’s friends said their children must have been the result of immaculate conception. Taylor’s career at McKinsey took him overseas for months at a time. Clegg says she can’t recall him having a single Sydney client.
Even as she was carving out her own stellar new career in administrative law, Clegg decided to do something out of left field. A woman who went to school with Clegg in Tottenham had been convicted for assaulting a man in the local hospital. The community, including her father, was convinced it was a stitch-up. The woman was a fabulously good nurse, Clegg says.
“My father rang me and said, Mary* (not her real name) needs you. I thought, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t get a judge to agree to retry the case.’ I rang my criminal lawyer friends in Sydney and they all said they won’t allow you to retry the case.”
Clegg convinced a judge at the Parkes local court, in central west NSW, to do just that. Months later, the case was retried in a court, in the big smoke, in Dubbo.
Clegg retells the day the verdict was delivered in favour of the nurse. “People I grew up with, friends of my mum and dad, from my class, were sitting in the gallery of the Dubbo court and they were crying. She (the nurse) was crying because she could practise again.”
Four years earlier, Clegg’s husband had entered federal politics. Busy with her own career, and family, Clegg was – and is – an eager campaigner for her husband. Not every political spouse enjoys campaigning. She does.

Still the visual distractions kept coming ... Reflecting on Taylor’s unwavering support, Clegg says, ‘He changed me.’ Picture: Supplied

And still the pond struggled...

Smarmy, wheedling?

Still, families of politicians do suffer. Clegg says she found the early attacks on Taylor tough, especially the ones by Liberal politicians. Taylor was nonplussed. “Now I see them as a badge of honour,” Clegg says, understanding the attackers felt threatened by Taylor’s intellect and business experience.
Around this time, Clegg was also observing the emerging great divide in Western democracies, including Australia, between what English writer David Goodhart called the “somewheres” – people grounded by where they live, tied to their local communities through work and family – versus the “anywheres”: more well-to-do, educated people who work anywhere, their outlook borderless.
Clegg says it was clear that Abbott was channelling the “somewheres” while Malcolm Turnbull was firmly in the “anywheres” camp.
Clegg and Taylor straddled both, but she says they left Sydney’s eastern suburbs, moving back to Goulburn in late 2011, because they are, at heart, country people. She says some of their friends told them not to move their kids back to country public schools. “Angus said: ‘Our kids will be more privileged if they go to Goulburn West Public School.’ ”

A final snap, Angus, Louise and their four children at home on their property near Goulburn. Picture: Supplied

The pond realised it had no alternative.

Only vulgarity could begin to conjure up the experience.

Either soft core, "brown-nosing", or a little harder, "*rse-kissing" (*google bot aware).

And yet even vulgarity was not enough ...

I am in tedious, unctuous verbiage
Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er

Clegg’s political antennae are sharp so Inquirer fired some quick questions at her: What’s the answer for the Liberal Party? “Liberals need to stand up for liberal values,” she says.
“We’re running away from them, shy about them, but liberalism is the only thing that’s going to stop the country going the same way as Venezuela.”
Can the Liberals win back seats held by the so-called teals? “Yes, we can, it’s tough, but we shouldn’t pander to them. Tim Wilson did it in Goldstein,” she says adding that economics is the key, as living standards continue to decline.
Does the Liberal Party have a problem with women? “Absolutely not.” Clegg is adamant that gender politics is overcooked.
“It’s time to restore some balance. Any professional woman like me who’s been raising children will know that when the boys go into the workforce, the young women are better off, they are getting the jobs, they are being promoted before men. Even some teal voters are waking up to this,” Clegg says.
What does she make of the rise of One Nation? “One Nation voters are not ideological. They are grassroots Australians,” she says, returning to her theme of “somewheres”. “They want authenticity and consistency.”
What should the Liberals do about Turnbull when he launches another tirade against his own party? That’s easy, she says: “Simply write him off as being Labor now. He’s no longer a Liberal.”
One final question: why didn’t Clegg go into politics?
“I would have been just another lawyer in federal parliament,” she says. “And the country needs Angus.”
Fair enough. But Clegg is not just another lawyer. Not by a long shot.

Did the pond mention it's been re-reading Vonnegut of late, and is currently on Cat's Cradle as a toilet companion?

“I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of the Perpetual Astonishment”

And with quiet thanks for being perpetually astonished by the reptiles, a quiet prayer of thanks ...

“God made mud.

God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the
sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look
around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly
couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to
think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and
look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait...
To find out for certain what my wampeter was...
And who was in my karass...
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.”

And speaking of sycophants and weirdness and strangeness ...

In which nattering "Ned" and pedantic prattling Polonius give Pauline a go, with sundry other reptiles as supporting acts ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:00:00 +0000

Yesterday's session was probably as heavy as its ever got for the pond ... the bromancer dancing with Pauline, the dog botherer gone snowflake, the Ughmann deep in Marist land ...

And yet any hopes the pond had for a quiet Sunday meditation were dashed by the leftovers that hovered into view, because the song of Pauline continued.

Pauline, Pauline, Pauline
Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of red-dyed (died?) hair
With fish and chips skin and eyes of emerald green
Your smile is like a breath of outrage
Your voice is grating like summer hail damage
And I cannot compete with you, Pauline.

Well it's not Kez - where's the rhyming? - but it is free.

It turned out that prattling Polonius, most ponderous, pompous pundit of all, was all in on Pauline ...

The header: One Nation surge shakes up both sides of politics; Rising support, security fears and shifting voter loyalties signal a deeper realignment that both major parties can no longer ignore.

The caption: Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has surged in support amid voter discontent and security concerns. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Some might object to the pond joking about Pauline's hair colour, but the pond can confirm from personal experience that at her age, the colour comes from a bottle or similar delivery system.

As for Polonius's piece, it had one upside.

That opening snap was the one illustration the reptiles had deigned to offer to break up the text.

And that's about it.

The pond decided to match the style, and let Polonius ramble on until his four minutes had expired, and the pond could reclaim its time:

The South Australian election last Saturday confirms that there has been a dramatic change in Australian national politics during the past six months. This partly reflects a sense of disillusionment in the electorate with the cost of living and security concerns.
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party increased its support throughout 2025. As measured by Newspoll, One Nation’s support was at 15 per cent on October 27-30 and it remained so in late November. By January 12-15, support had risen to 22 per cent and by February 23-26 it was at 27 per cent.
This is a dramatic increase over the holiday season, explainable only by the Islamist terrorist attack on the Australian Jewish community at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on December 14, 2025.
As Gemma Tognini pointed out in her address to The Sydney Institute on antisemitism in Australia earlier this year, what is different about December 14 turned on the fact the attack occurred at a popular public place. Previously, antisemitic attacks in Australia had targeted synagogues, Jewish schools, Jewish-owned businesses and the like.

(No, the pond won't interrupt to note that sly plug for garrulous Gemma and the Sydney Institute, nor comment on Polonial praise for Minns and Malinauskas, which in an alternative world might have made the two state humbugs pause and reflect on their assorted follies).

NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns performed extremely well after the massacre, as did NSW Liberal Party leader Kellie Sloane (who was present at the scene of the crime and assisted in helping some victims). Hanson and One Nation’s recruit Barnaby Joyce made a prominent visit to Bondi in the aftermath of the murders.
As Minns has pointed out, the two young members of NSW Police who were present when the attack started acted courageously and walked towards the alleged gunmen. But there were only two police officers. Many others came later and the gunmen were put down.
When 80-something broadcaster Alan Jones was arrested for historical sexual assault in November 2024, it was reported that 12 police cars attended. In recent times, Jones’s charges have been downgraded from the District Court to the Magistrates’ Court.
The NSW Police Force initially underestimated the risk to the Jewish community on December 14. Many other Australians did likewise. This is no longer the case.
At times Hanson has made intolerant statements about Muslim Australians. But her message about radical Islam has got through to both sides of politics.
It is not clear what will be the final count of the South Australian election. But with around 70 per cent of votes counted, the Labor primary vote is at 38 per cent compared with One Nation (22 per cent), Liberal Party (19 per cent), Greens (10 per cent) and others at 11 per cent.
The Peter Malinauskas-led Labor Party has won an estimated 33 seats compared with the Liberals four, One Nation two, independents four and four in doubt.
The outcome is a stunning success for Malinauskas and Labor, but not without problems. For its part, the Liberal Party remains the official opposition despite some predictions that it would lose all its seats. So, it has a base of support from which to recover.
Writing in the Australian Financial Review on March 23, John Black (a former Labor senator for Queensland) commented: “One Nation candidates with a few weeks’ campaign experience ripped the heart out of the traditional South Australian Labor Party demographic base vote of battlers.” Black added: “One Nation candidates did even more damage to the middle-class urban base vote of traditional Liberal voters, leaving Labor likely winners of every Adelaide seat except Bragg.”
One problem for the Liberals is that they did not receive One Nation preferences. Nationals leader Matt Canavan criticised One Nation for requesting preferences from the Liberal Party (which it received) while declining to do likewise with respect to the Liberals. It’s called a double standard.

In the lead-up to the South Australian election, One Nation SA leader Cory Bernardi said his party wanted to make preference deals a thing of the past. Bernardi (who was a Liberal senator before he quit and established the Australian Conservatives, which failed to take off) should know better. Any decision of One Nation not to preference the Liberal Party or the Nationals above Labor is of assistance to Labor.
Some commentators say a significant number of former Coalition voters (the Liberal Party plus the Nationals) have parked their votes with One Nation due to disillusionment with the Coalition. This may be the case. Certainly the new leadership team of Angus Taylor and Canavan has improved the Coalition’s performance. Nevertheless, One Nation’s support base is not going to shrink any time soon.
After all, One Nation voters have reason to feel alienated from contemporary politics as their standard of living declines. Moreover, many support Hanson’s call for a substantial reduction of immigration and her determination to junk any commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050. And then there is her public condemnation of radical Islam.
On the basis of current polls, it would appear to be disastrous for the Coalition parties if One Nation fails to preference them ahead of Labor. It seems Hanson recognises that such a decision would be counter-productive for her party.
Addressing the Minerals Council of Australia in Canberra last Monday, Hanson said she would be “very happy” to help elect a Coalition government at the next election. She said she would not join a Coalition government but would agree to support it in votes of confidence motions and the granting of supply.
Meanwhile, former Victorian Liberal Party premier Jeff Kennett told Sky News’ The Kenny Report last Monday that he wanted all Liberal, Nationals, One Nation and independent voters who wished to defeat Labor at the election in November “to get together and put the interests of Victoria first”. That is, to defeat Jacinta Allan’s government.
Kennett said, “I am less Liberal than I am a Victorian.”
Already One Nation’s growing support has changed Australian politics, for the moment at least. In federal parliament last Tuesday, Taylor warned that “Islamic extremism” was a threat to Australia, while in Adelaide Malinauskas warned Labor supporters to put the question of “are you for Australia” ahead of appealing to the left wing, many of whom sneer at One Nation voters. Australia is different in 2026 from what it was in 2025.

That was exceptionally tedious, even by Polonius's unceasing quest for banality and for titillating himself by veering off into the thickets of Islamophobia and climate science denialism and furriner bashing..

Even worse, there was not a single mention of the ABC, or its strike, and the shocking way the reptiles had been deprived of ABC content for a day.

At least the dog botherer whined about how he was deprived of his much loved ABC shows.

It's getting so that the old dotard is even forgetting his favourite shortcuts on the keyboard ...

What he needs is a plan ...

What else? Well the pond was facing a dire overload, so it sent the usual flourishes of transphobia off to the intermittent archive, currently working, but who knows when it might next collapse.

There were two offerings, with a serve of garrulous, grating Gemma to go...

Hands off our female experience: Why the unique suffering of women is not ‘up for grabs’
As women’s unique biological experiences are co-opted for the gender diverse, I’m defending science, not fighting a culture war.
By Gemma Tognini

The second offering was even more offensive, purporting to be caring, but making clear that there was not the slightest interest in what had motivated the sibling...

The cost of silencing medical debate on gender
Witnessing a sibling’s transition, I’ve found that medical institutions are narrowing compassion by stifling honest discussion.
By Elizabeth C*

The pond has always given the reptiles' transphobia a pass, and there was nothing in that drivel to change the pond's mind.

The pond prefers to see real men in action, caught in a phallic thrust ...

As usual, the pond seized the chance to avoid Nick ...

We are witnessing the unmaking of class politics itself
As Australia marks 125 years since its first election, the forces that once built the two-party system now appear to be pulling it apart.
By Nick Dyrenfurth
Contributor

A small sample will explain why ...

...Figures such as Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce capture the insurgent mood, but both are products of the existing political class rather than architects of a new one. The question is who – if anyone – can translate insurgent energy into a coherent, durable political project. In other democracies, figures such as National Rally’s Jordan Bardella in France and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hint at what that next phase may look like.
It is why I have argued that Andrew Hastie – drawn from outside the traditional political class, unencumbered by ideological dogma and possessing a measure of outsider credibility – may offer the Liberals their best chance of resisting displacement on the centre right.
The question is no longer whether the system will change. It already has. The question is whether a new alignment – a modern equivalent of the Fusion – will emerge, or whether fragmentation will persist, leaving Labor dominant by default rather than design.
Nick Dyrenfurth is executive director of the John Curtin Research Centre.

The pastie Hastie is what we need, or maybe a Bardella or Meloni?

John Curtin is likely rolling in his grave.

Similarly the pond avoided these offerings, from Brownie and snappy Tom...

Libs give Labor green light for big spend on fuel excise
Angus Taylor has made it easier for Labor to avoid tough choices with a sugar hit that will ultimately make Australians poorer.
By Greg Brown
Chief political correspondent

From oil bump to slump when grave expectations bite
Rising fuel costs and fragile confidence collide, raising the stakes for policymakers as global conflict feeds inflation fears at home.
By Tom Dusevic
Contributor

Relax chaps, it's an Emeritus Chairman approved and encouraged excursion, what could possibly go wrong?

Just get on board with the ship of fools and sail off to the klown karnival ... (is there an Iranian hacker in the haus for the kache of hockey Olympic medallist Kash's klassics?)

The pond also dodged and weaved its way around Cameron's piece...

Two problematic options for Trump as Iran holds global economy to ransom,
Caught in a no-man’s land, the US President is faced with some unpalatable choices. Wisely, he’s leaving his options open.
By Cameron Stewart

The pond did catch a teaser trailer ...

... but then, spoiler alert, skipped to the end of the show ...

...Trump seems to be moving ever closer to what would be a mixed outcome from this war. If he chooses to end it in the next few weeks, he, along with Israel, will have dealt a severe blow to the 47-year-old Islamic regime, weakening its ability to spread terror and to threaten its neighbours. That is a good outcome for the Middle East.
Some will argue that this alone has justified the conflict while others will argue that the damage to the global economy has been too high.
But the president will have failed in his initial aim of toppling the regime or bending it to his will.
He may have set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions but not ended them. And the regime still will be able to repress those millions of brave Iranians inside Iran who oppose it.
What’s more, Iran will have demonstrated its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz whenever it wants to rattle the global economy. And then there is the longer-term economic fallout from the energy price shocks of the past month.
It is too early to say how many of these outcomes will come to pass, but that is the direction in which it is heading. For now, Trump has to make the critical decision about whether to further escalate and lengthen this war through the introduction of ground troops or end it by seeking a negotiated ceasefire that is unlikely to contain all that he wants.
It’s a big decision. And one that will shape his legacy.

Legacy?

Truth to tell, a completely dysfunctional United States is already his legacy to the world, and that legacy was in place the moment he took the throne.

Deep inside the hive mind, Cameron doesn't have a clue, but this is his chance to hit fury road:

Besides, it will all change by tomorrow, as quick as two shakes of a lamb's tail or one King Donald brain cell creating a shower of sparks by accidentally rubbing up against another one ... (man, woman, TV, camel, elephunt)

All that intermittent archiving cleared some room for the lizard Oz editorialist.

As noted yesterday, the reptiles were heavily into their new angle for their climate denialism, which is to pretend that they're caring environmentalists, and these two offerings can be viewed in that light.

The world will never be weaned off coal and gas if the reptiles of Oz have their way, and be damned to the climate and the planet ...

There was also an Oz ed note on Pauline:

All she's doing is touting the sort of white Xian nationalism you could expect from the bromancer, together with the lizard Oz's campaign against furriners, its Islamophobia, its disdain for climate science, and its love of coal, oil and gas.

But at least it serves as a cue for "Ned" nattering on about Pauline ...

The header: One Nation is shaking the system amid volatile new political dynamic; Establishment politics is under massive assault in a nation that is losing its way — but don’t be misled by Hanson’s ‘consistency’ myth.

The caption, which at last gave a credit, to the mighty Emilia and her mighty collage artwork: The ascent of Pauline Hanson, centre, might make One Nation the popular alternative to Anthony Albanese’s Labor in terms of voting strength. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

Stand back. Where Polonius had only one snap, "Ned" was given many visual distractions, and laboured long and hard for ten minutes to produce a mouse, whereas Polonius had managed the feat in just four:

Establishment politics is under assault in Australia. The two-party model and the political class are on notice. The Pauline Hanson One Nation success at the South Australian election has convulsed the Liberal Party but also made inroads into the Labor Party despite its landmark victory.
At a time of living standards stagnation, rising prices and cultural division Hanson has emerged as an iconic champion for an Australia disappearing in the rear-view mirror. She falls outside an increasingly discredited political class, taps into a “feelings” vibe that Australia is on the wrong track, exploits the generational alarm that younger people will be worse off than their parents and channels anxiety around housing, energy and a “lost nation” nostalgia.

Didn't "Ned" read the bromancer's celebration of Pauline?

...it may be that the new duo-leadership of Hanson plus Barnaby Joyce just about gets there. Hanson’s stuttering delivery and Joyce’s many misadventures confirm their anti-politics “authenticity”.
Commentators completely misunderstand much of this. Sean Kelly, an often insightful writer in the Nine newspapers, listed racism as a core appeal of One Nation. With respect to Kelly, I think that’s dead wrong.

Sheesh, instead the reptiles flung in the bouffant one in an AV distraction, The Australian’s National Editor Dennis Shanahan on Pauline Hanson’s decades-long political transformation.

This was a tough "Ned" Everest to climb, with the Chicken Little clucking at clouds exceptionally strong ...

Above all, Hanson constitutes the most potent backlash from the crisis of the Australian system – where both recent Liberal and Labor governments have failed to deliver substantial increases in living standards to wide sections of the public. There is a sense of system failure. The latest Newspoll shows support for the major parties – Labor and Coalition – at a dismal 52 per cent, proof of Hanson’s massive assault.
“The other two political parties have not delivered,” Hanson told The Australian after the SA result. “All they’ve delivered to them (the people) is hurt and pain, instability, no vision for the future, and the people don’t want any more of that.”
Don’t be misled by the ‘consistency’ line
Hanson upends our political model. Who is the real opposition, the Coalition or Hanson? The Liberal Party must urgently wind back her primary vote – yet the better Hanson polls, the more the media elevates One Nation. Don’t be misled by the line that Hanson’s popular surge is because she has been consistent for 30 years. The truth is that Hanson is more formidable today because our nation’s tribulations play far more powerfully into her grievance mantra.
Most of the population has been under economic and price pressures for too long; the urban-rural divide in Australia now runs into a “two cultures” dilemma; immigration is too high and social cohesion is being eroded; the nation is more divided over what constitutes Australian identity; and there is a potent backlash against progressive values, from climate action to identity politics to the assault on traditional Christian-oriented morality.
As One Nation steals votes from the Coalition and guarantees the election of Labor governments, the Liberal Party is mired in tactical confusion: how best to resist Hanson yet work to maximise her preferences.

Note this caption ...Pauline Hanson’s core propaganda line is that Australia is losing its way and she is its saviour.

Now see how that caption is transformed into a bald statement of fact in "Ned's" text ...

Hanson is now winning a degree of legitimacy she didn’t enjoy during 1998, her previous high tide. Among much of the cultural right in this country Hanson is depicted as a cultural heroine, a cult figure known as “Pauline”, an old-fashioned Australian and a battler for her causes. She benefits from the intellectual and political crisis that afflicts Australian conservatism. And the old rules still apply: attacks on her as a racist don’t work, they merely fuel her standing.
“The public have now caught up with me,” Hanson said earlier this week. “They trust me. They trust the fact that I’m passionate about my country. I’m a patriotic Australian and the way the country’s gone and going is not what they want.”
Australia is losing its way
Her core propaganda line cannot be missed – Australia is losing its way and Hanson is its saviour. The economic and cultural tensions vest Hanson with far more traction than at any time in the past generation. Hanson’s success exposes Australia as a fractured nation with its politics being atomised. The trend will not be confined to the centre-right. The two-party model is eroding.
RedBridge director of strategy Kos Samaras told Inquirer: “The post-war political order is dead. The stable system that got established in Australia and many Western countries is now fragmenting. We are seeing politics reverting to a pre-Second World War period, with multiple conflicts, where new movements arise and where the urban-rural divide hardens into incompatible political cultures.”

But it must be true we're losing our way, because the lizard Oz highlighted the way Australia is losing its way

Quick, an AV distraction featuring Tamworth's endless, ineradicable shame ... looking decidedly sleazy, in a way only certain New England men can manage ...

One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce outlines One Nation’s policies. “We’d get rid of the climate change department,” Mr Joyce told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. “In removing the climate change department, we remove so many of the regulations that are a direct impediment to the construction of new oil refineries. “We believe in the construction of new coal-fired power plants. We believe in the construction of new oil refineries. “Part of our national security is having fuel security.”

You see? Tamworth's shame is just repeating lizard Oz editorial policies to the Bolter, himself a firm climate science denialist man ...

This is the monster these reptile Frankensteins have created and now urge on ... while "Ned" clucks away at clouds in his Chicken Little way ...

Samaras says while the Liberals have succumbed to centre-right fragmentation, the Labor Party will soon be under pressure from centre-left fragmentation. He envisages the rise of parallel and competing populist movements on the right and the left but united by a common bond: a burn-down-the-system mentality.
He says: “There’s a large number of people who want significant change in the country, in excess of 60 per cent of all voters. About a third of One Nation voters have this ‘burn the place down’ view.
“When you speak to people who have moved from the Liberal Party to One Nation – they tend to have a trade qualification and live in the outer suburbs or the regions – the No.1 reason they give is rejection of the two-party system. They believe the two-party system has failed them economically.
“For the Liberals to rebuild trust, I think it will take as long to rebuild as it has taken things to fall apart.
“Many of these people now in their 50s were the Howard battlers. When Howard was around they were in their 30s and 40s and felt the Liberals managed the economy in a way that rewarded their hard work. Their thinking was: I work hard, pay my taxes, accumulate wealth and allow my family to prosper – but that contract is now broken. These people feel they have been going backwards and this goes back to the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison period.
“There is an emerging problem on the Labor side, it’s just taking a little bit longer. There are definite signs of a growing appetite for an alternative on the left side of politics. All our surveys show that among Gen Z the green vote is around 30 per cent and among women of that age it’s in the mid-40s across the entire country. In the UK nearly half of 18 to 24-year-olds are open to voting Green.”

And why do vulgar youff think about voting Green? Well they have to try to live on the planet a lot longer than "Ned", or for that matter, Tamworth's enduring shame.

Strategist Kos Samaras warns that Labor is better placed to manage the coming fragmentation; Zohran Mamdani’s victory is seen as a pointer to the potential disruptive power of the youthful left

The pond did appreciate "Ned's" attempt to seem vaguely relevant by dragging Zohran into the mix. The pond had thought he was some bloody socialist from Kenya, or maybe the middle east:

A golden opportunity for populist disrupters of the right
The populist disrupters of the right and left have a golden opportunity because living standards face further attrition. Examine the outlook for the coming 12 months: it is a deadly mixture of foreign wars, a global energy meltdown, higher petrol prices along with higher inflation, rising interest rates, weak productivity, punishing income tax and a housing market locking out younger aspirants, a climate made for assaults on the existing political system.
But Samaras warns that Labor is better placed to manage the coming fragmentation. “Australian Labor has a strong and diverse support base,” he says. “As the political base of the country has moved towards the big cities Labor has been able to secure Bennelong, Reid, Menzies, Deakin and Parramatta off the back of a new working-class and middle-class constituency. The university-educated constituency votes for parties of the left, the Millennials are strong Labor supporters, and the professional working class, teachers, nurses, public servants, is basically Labor’s Praetorian Guard.”

Samaras says these rival movements have “a shared destructive impulse that makes the current moment so volatile and so reminiscent of the 1930s”. He warns that Gen Z is concentrated in the inner cities, among youthful and diverse communities, and that the victory of democratic socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York is a pointer to the potential disruptive power of the youthful left that is digitally connected and comfortable with diversity.

Next up was a man who couldn't even manage a writers' festival:

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas has urged Australians to be “proud” of who they are and has called for every leader to be “patriotic”. “I don’t like the idea of patriotism and pride in our country being adopted or co-opted by only one segment of the political spectrum – it belongs to all of us, all of us as a country,” Mr Malinauskas told Sky News Australia. “I don’t like it when progressives sneer at One Nation voters wrapping themselves in the flag anymore than I like it One Nation voters wrapping themselves in a flag and sneering at a group of people from another ethnicity or faith background. “We should be proud of who we are as a country. I’m patriotic for our country. I think every leader should be.”

Every day the pond says a little prayer to the long absent lord offering thanks for having escaped croweater land, only to then realise it landed in Minns land, and he couldn't manage a writers' festival either ...

Now stand back, more worry about the sky falling, and not because of all the CO₂ ...

In response to Hanson, both governing parties are plunging into reassessment. Victorious SA Premier Peter Malinauskas invoked patriotism and the flag in his novel victory speech as necessary steps to check Hanson’s momentum. “The cultural question must be top of mind,” Malinauskas said. “It comes down to: are you for Australia?” Echoes of this pitch trickled out of the Albanese government during the week.
Malinauskas, a symbol of the once all-powerful Labor Right, warned progressives against “sneering at those who wave the flag or wrap themselves in the flag”. He said patriotism did not belong to any political ideology and that the task today – to combat Hanson – was to get both the economics and the culture right. This is the task of the Coalition under Angus Taylor and Matt Canavan.
As the South Australian election revealed, One Nation cannot command many seats because the preference system works against it. But the actual vote shows One Nation at 22.5 per cent and the Liberal Party at 19 per cent.
Devastating damage looms
Hanson’s lead over the Liberals constitutes a threat to centre-right politics unprecedented since World War II: that Hanson might become the strongest party on the right of politics. That would locate Hanson as the popular alternative to Albanese Labor in terms of voting strength, an outcome for Australia that would do devastating damage to our public policies.
Hanson shakes the cage in which we have consigned our history. She exploits the contemporary division over Australia’s identity, notably the progressive mantra that Australia is a morally flawed project, the product of a 1788 invasion, blighted by racism, sexism and patriarchy, legacies yet to be fully purged and that contaminate our national icons from Anzac Day to Australia Day. Such thinking is now deep-seated in our cultural institutions and deeply resented by many people.
There was always going to be a fierce backlash against this progressive moralism. The tragedy is that it seems to be centred on Hanson. For years the Liberals have failed to mount a broadbased persuasive view on Australian identity, apparently uninterested in the task.

At this point the reptiles tried to sucker the pond into a premium price point ...

PREMIUM
Former Australian of the year leads controversial chant at protests
Become a member to access our premium video content

Pay to watch the reptiles bash Tame when the pond can watch Benji perform ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank for free?

Nah ...

Meanwhile, the independent Scanlon Foundation Research Institute’s findings in the latest 2025 report make chilling reading. It finds only 34 per cent or one-third of people take “great pride in the Australian way of life and culture”, that only 42 per cent “strongly agree that maintaining the Australian way of life and culture is important”, and that only 46 per cent have “a sense of belonging in Australia to a great extent”. The results show that generational differences are widening; younger people have less sense of belonging in Australia and show less support or pride in the Australian way of life.
Australia increasingly cannot get things done because it cannot agree on issues and cannot agree on its national narrative.
What the Liberals must do now
The Liberals need to project a more relevant and vibrant view of Australian identity – a patriotism both strong and inclusive, as distinct from their episodic forays into this endeavour. They should adopt the formulation championed over the years by Indigenous leader Noel Pearson and developed in his 2022 Boyer Lectures.
Addressing the question of who we are and who we can be, Pearson saw our identity in three stories. First, the spiritual inheritance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples over 65 millennia, the First Nations of this continent. Second, the British institutional inheritance arising from January 26, 1788, in terms of the rule of law, parliamentary government, the English language, British and Irish people, convict and free, leading to Federation. Third, the “diversity in unity” from the migration program showing that people with different roots can live together, making Australia an example to the world.
For Pearson: “These three stories will make us one: Australians.”

Pearson's willingness to perform humbug for the reptiles never fails to astonish the pond, but then he's either a glutton for Voice punishment, or he likes to see his snap in a "Ned" column ... The formulation championed by Indigenous leader Noel Pearson brings together the past, present and future. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

The pond just had to separate this next line out because it might be good for anyone wanting to have a go at stand up, as celebrated in Is This Thing On?

Over the years Labor has shown no interest in this formula. Liberals have periodically engaged, notably Tony Abbott.

Killer line. It could help generate laughs if you could put this up on the screen behind you ... (warning, you'll be confronted by a shameless plug for his book by the shameless hustler)

There you go Noel, that's the company you keep.

To get any closer you'd have to be Viktor Orbán and have a healthy budget for wandering indigent former PMs ...

And so to a toad hack who can never be persuaded to shut up ...

But the Liberal Party has never formalised its commitment. It should embark on that process, unless the party is now so broken it cannot agree. The Pearson formula has three immense merits – it is a true account of our story; it is readily understood by most people; and it offers a strong and inclusive Australian identity. It brings together the past, the present and the future.
Putting One Nation into a governing frame
Former Queensland premier Peter Beattie, who fought Hanson during the peak of her powers in Queensland, told Inquirer: “This situation today is totally different to 1998 when I faced her. There’s now a movement on preferences. The Liberal Party is courting her gently, and if they enter a deal to exchange preferences that will be an entirely new political dynamic.”
Beattie highlights Hanson’s statement this week that she would be “very happy” to use her numbers to help elect a Coalition government, that she would always preference the Coalition before Labor but would not be part of any Coalition government.
This is a potentially critical statement, if it sticks. It puts a vote for One Nation into a governing frame. It has the potential to promote One Nation as more than just a protest vote. Hanson, in a cunning move, is saying that a vote for One Nation can assist a change of government – a statement that is contrary to the arithmetic and political reality since votes for One Nation weaken the Coalition vote and therefore assist Anthony Albanese to get re-elected.
Beattie says: “This is a major change for her. She’s usually hated the Coalition almost as much as she hates Labor. But if she is prepared to say this, I think psychologically that makes a difference – people could vote for her with more confidence they might actually change the government.”

Good one, tedious, tiresome toad.

Keep talking her up, and soon all your wishes and desires will be consummated...Former Queensland premier Peter Beattie says the movement on preferences makes today’s situation very different to 1998. Picture David Clark

Luckily, after that, the Everest peak was in sight ...

That would be an illusion. But it would serve the Coalition in an important way – to maximise the preference flow from One Nation to the Coalition, and that is a vital requirement. Beattie is pessimistic about the ability of a Liberal Party revival in its own right. “The teal seats are gone and any chance of getting them back is delusional,” he says. “I can’t see the Liberal Party coming back under its own force. Its credibility is too low.”
How Labor could exploit this
But Albanese Labor is ready and waiting to exploit any closer ties between the Liberals and One Nation. That would gift Labor’s election campaign with the slogan: “A vote for the Liberals is a vote for One Nation.” This pitch would be powerful in urban seats, threatening the Liberals, and it would offer the teals the chance to expand their numbers.
Meanwhile, the Labor-Greens preference model is stronger than ever. Voting analyst Antony Green in his election blog shows that at the 2025 federal election Greens party preferences went to Labor at an extraordinary 88 per cent – a Greens vote is almost equivalent to a Labor two-party preferred vote. There is no way One Nation preferences to the Coalition will come anywhere near this level.
The Hanson party polled 6.4 per cent at the 2025 election but this had erupted to more than 25 per cent in the latest Newspolls. Hanson was elected to the Senate in 2016, re-elected in 2022 and in 2025 secured a team of four senators. Whether Taylor and Canavan can cut back her high primary vote remains to be seen.
But economic pressures, cultural divisions and the tactical skills of Barnaby Joyce mean One Nation’s vote will remain far above its 2025 election level.

Barners, Tamworth's enduring shame, is the answer?

B*gger it, the pond entirely forgot the question ... (*google bot friendly)

The revolt against the two-party system has deep roots – but looking at its beneficiaries only a foolhardy optimist would think this is good for Australia.

So the lizard Oz is full of foolhardy optimists? A whole pack of them titillated and tempted by the shift to the far right, wherein they have always resided.

And somehow that's a turn up for the"Ned" books?

But it will be be a boon for their climate science denying agenda and they can cluck away about Pauline while assiduously recording and reporting all her talking points, which she gleaned from reading the lizard Oz, and the Murdochian tabloids and watching Sky Noise down under (still no rebranding?) ...

Luckily, no matter how often the pond returns for a kicking, it can never forget that first kick ...

And so to news from America, a day old, but surrealism never ages as a genre ...

It's too much, but here's the time when the bromancer, the dog botherer and the Ughmann walked into a reptile bar on the weekend ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:27:00 +0000

After the bromancer's recent outing, in which he deemed mad King Donald's Iran excursion a "just war", with all the gravitas of a medieval theologian, the pond was incredibly anxious to see where his next missive might take us - perhaps into the white Xian nationalist holy war turf favoured by medieval crusaders?

Tossing aside all distractions, the pond rushed to the read, with a snail-baited breath, and was incredibly disappointed ...

The poor lad could only manage a bout of flag-waving nationalism, though attentive readers will note that every so often the "white" and the "Xian" aspects of the new age of authoritarianism bubble to the surface.

The header: Nationalism trumps globalism. Ask Trump, Farage, Hanson and voters; Loving your country is natural and good. It’s the left’s hatred of Australia and America that is sick.

The caption for the flag-waving designed to stir Pauline's cult: Children wave Australian flags in Sydney for an Anzac Day march. Picture: Mark Evans / Getty Images

Ah, we're back in the days of I love my country, I salute the flag, I honour the Queen and I promise to obey her laws, and for a bigly five minutes get stuck in the ancient corridors of Tamworth Public School, as the bromancer does his salutin' thing.

And see how the "dead white male" pops up in the very first gobbet:

Nationalism is clobbering globalism, all over the West, all over the world, even in Australia. The process is dramatically accelerated by the war in Iran and the resultant energy crisis.
Nationalism explains the huge One Nation vote in South Australia. It’s also the only way to interpret Peter Malinauskas shrewdly reading a Henry Lawson poem as he claimed victory. Now which voters do you think might be attracted by Lawson? The Greens? Inner-city academic lefties? Mmm.
Not only is Lawson a dead white male, he was an avatar of old Australian nationalism. In a poem the South Australian Premier didn’t quote, My Land and I, Lawson wrote: “The parasites dine at your tables spread … But we heed them never my land, my land, for we know how small they are … as we gaze on a rising star.”
All over the West, nationalism is rising. This demands serious analysis. Two big mistakes are to think it’s an irrational response by a deluded electorate or that it’s inherently wicked.

Naturally the reptiles had to feature Pauline, the bromancer's new guide to all that's right and true and just: One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson at Parliament House on Tuesday. Picture: Lukas Coch /AAP

After that visual flourish, the bromancer tried a little billy goat butt:

None of this is to argue Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is a good vehicle to express legitimate Australian nationalism.

But he didn't really mean that butt.

He was all in, he was full Pauline, and not even in drag ...

Australia will be best served if the Liberal and National parties get a shot of adrenalin and revive, communicating everything good in patriotism and nationalism. Both major parties need to do this. Malinauskas quotes Lawson. Nationals leader Matt Canavan urges us to “manifest a hyper Australia”. Even Anthony Albanese borrows Tony Abbott’s “Team Australia”.
The oil and gas shock from the Iran war demonstrates nationalism is a rational response to the failure of conventional Western politics. We can no longer rely on economic globalisation and markets to deliver “just in time”. We’re going to have to pay serious money to stockpile stuff, from oil to weapons. We’re going to have to pay even more to subsidise producing critical stuff in Australia.
Conventional globalisation sees us reduced to a quarry, a farm and a high-cost services economy. But geo-strategic realities mean following that model makes us gravely vulnerable. We’ve deindustrialised to a monstrous extent. Energy costs, universal welfare, prohibitive taxation and medieval industrial relations have made us a wildly expensive country to do business in. We need to solve all that. But in the short term we’ve got to pay for stockpiles and production. That’s if we’re nationalists, loving our nation, defending its right to independence, agency and, ultimately, survival.
There are other ways nationalism answers contemporary policy failures. Geo-strategic reordering means the US alliance, while still vital to our security, is looser and less absolutely reliable. So we must be more nationalist, ready to fight for ourselves. Militarily, the Albanese government shows no sign of that, instead voluntarily embracing eurosclerosis socially, economically and militarily.

The alternative? European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s visit marks a step change in EU-Australia security ties. Picture: Getty Images

Can't have any of that eurosclerosis.

The alternative? Embrace your inner Vlad the Sociopath, go full King Donald, imbibe a bigly dose of Kegsbreath ...

Nationalism works socially, too. There’s a collapse of order on the streets, and of morale, among young people particularly, who take their own lives in shocking numbers. Nationalism propels a society to look to its own traditions for resources of meaning, solidarity, morality. Nationalism is traditionalism. In a good society, or one that was once (mostly) good, traditions contain great wisdom (including openness to incremental change).
Nationalism answers identity politics dysfunction. Here’s a key paradox. Democratic nationalism, for all its nation-specific patriotism, is universal within the nation. If you’re a true Australian nationalist, you love every Australian.
Nor is nationalism wicked or immoral. Extreme nationalism, like extreme anything else, is wicked. Extreme nationalism gave us Nazism, extreme egalitarianism gave us communism, extreme Islamism gave us the ayatollahs’ theocracy. But loving your nation is as natural as loving your kids.
This has always underlain the Western tradition. Christianity is a universal religion open to every human being, but that universalism doesn’t cut against particularly loving your family or your nation.

It almost goes without saying that the bromancer would be infatuated by the worst pope of recent times, but the bromancer will say it anyway, what with him being an Xian nationalist ...

Pope John Paul II, the greatest recent pope, emphasised the natural goodness in attachment to nation. The Jewish and Christian traditions believe God first revealed himself to a nation, the Jewish nation. Nationalism is an engine of much Western politics today and partly explains the victories of Donald Trump, the poll lead of Nigel Farage and the sudden rise of One Nation.

Is it wrong to point out a theological nicety here?

Actually the Jewish god is not the Xian god, because Xians are inclined to trinitarianism (only a few cling to the unitarian heresy), and so Christ is meant to be god, or at least a third of god, which no sensible Jew (or atheist) could ever believe.

So the god that revealed himself to the Jewish tribe (according to its wiki, the modern idea of nations began around the sixteenth century) was certainly not the Xian god.

And speaking of god, here the gods of two cults ...US President Donald Trump and Nigel Farage at a MAGA rally in 2020. Picture: Brendan Smialowski / AFP

The bromancer is clearly infatuated by these cults ...

Generally, nationalist movements need a figurehead with long-established nationalist credentials, someone preferably who suffered a bit for their convictions, who unashamedly puts their nation first and who people could imagine leading a government. Trump and Farage satisfy these criteria.

They do? Is what's happening in the USA at the moment leadership? Or a demonic narcissist enfeebled by dementia at the head of a cult?

The bromancer sees Pauline as joining this choice leadership team ... apparently the more you stumble blind drunk into a gutter, the more authentic you seem.

That's why there's so many authentic leaders at Maguires pub in Peel street ...

Hanson falls down on the last, but it may be that the new duo-leadership of Hanson plus Barnaby Joyce just about gets there. Hanson’s stuttering delivery and Joyce’s many misadventures confirm their anti-politics “authenticity”.
Commentators completely misunderstand much of this. Sean Kelly, an often insightful writer in the Nine newspapers, listed racism as a core appeal of One Nation. With respect to Kelly, I think that’s dead wrong.
A YouGov poll this week had One Nation on 27 per cent support, just behind Labor. Among Millennials, One Nation actually came in first, with 30 per cent. Neither 27 per cent of Australians nor 30 per cent of young Australians are racist. Not one speck.
Here’s another thing. If centre-right parties are at all smart, migrants and their children will be among the strongest nationalists in their adopted nations.
I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing both former British prime minister Rishi Sunak and the current Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. Both are profoundly English, deeply in love with all the good things of England. Sunak told me how much his parents admired Margaret Thatcher, who always stood up for people like them.

Dear sweet long absent lord, for a brief moment there, the bromancer put down his racist glasses, as the reptiles went all in on the new bro cult, Pauline Hanson’s stuttering delivery and Barnaby Joyce’s many misadventures confirm their anti-politics ‘authenticity’. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

And so to the bromancer going full King Donald for his final flourish of floozies:

The theme song at Trump rallies is God Bless the USA, a mournful though sweet country and western elegy, which says: “There ain’t no doubt I love this land, God bless the USA”.
This should not remotely be seen as especially right wing or objectionable. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the most important progressive politician in the 20th century, in his 1940 presidential campaign used the much more treacly God Bless America as his theme song. That song was written by a Russian Jewish immigrant, Irving Berlin, while he was serving in the US Army. Berlin loved and cherished the USA.
Once upon a time the left had the wit, and moral substance, to proudly proclaim their patriotism. Woodie Guthrie, on the far, far left, wrote his famous lyrics: “This land was made for you and me”. This song itself was later attacked by the dreary, woke, identity-politics mavens. Didn’t Guthrie realise this was stolen land? Didn’t he know the US was illegitimate from the start, just as the left grotesquely refers to “so-called Australia” on land “that was never ceded”, as though there’s something illegitimate about Australia and its 28 million people?
The left and Islamists make common cause because they have a common enemy – our nation, our civilisation. Millions die in Sudan but no leftist says a word about it because you can’t easily attack the West over Sudan. The left doesn’t hate suffering or injustice – it hates the West.
For years I went round Southeast Asia visiting Islamist extremists. Certain Western books and authors were always on their book shelves – Noam Chomsky, John Pilger etc. Islamists rejoiced in Western testimony that nations such as Australia and America were evil.
But you know what? God bless Australia, this land was made for you and me.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

What to say? Ain't my god, and he can stick his blessings.

He gets worse by the week, as the world heads towards the rapture ...

And so, before proceeding any further, please permit the pond to pause and see where this celebration, this Chairman Emeritus approved and encouraged excursion, has landed the country this weekend:

Oh that can't be good ...

And now, before turning to the dog botherer, the pond just wanted to mention yesterday's Weekly Beast, as always essential reading.

Murdoch mastheads at odds as sexual assault survivor speaks up about The Australian’s podcast

Delicious stuff, all the more so because the pond never wanders off its narrow lizard Oz path to follow the reptile podcasts, desperate attempts to keep up and be relevant, like back in the day when they took to blogging for a few years.

That tale of internal feuds was followed by an even more delicious observation, ABC strike fires up Sky.

And who was the star there?

...Chris Kenny, whose signature move at Sky has been to attack the ABC, was outraged that his favourite shows were off the air.
Although Kenny derides ABC content as “green left”, he was furious that the strike was “depriving us of our normal services” and he called for presenters, who had told viewers they were going on strike to demand better pay and conditions, to be sacked.
Kenny also made sledges, including: “They’ll probably never rate higher.”
For a 24-hour news channel that regularly calls for the ABC to be privatised or de-funded, Sky spent a lot of time talking about how much viewers would miss. One reporter told a presenter, Peter Stefanovic, that “viewers wanted to tune in to watch the news at seven” but had to settle for Hard Quiz. One headline said: “ABC viewers forced to watch comedy reruns.”
The reporter said: “This morning, when viewers wanted to tune in to the ABC Breakfast show, well, they instead had to watch the international coverage from ABC’s UK affiliates, BBC.”
The shadow communications minister, Sarah Henderson, was given a lot of airtime to say the strike was a “disgrace” but also appeared to back the important work the ABC does: “There has never been a more important time in this country when we need ABC journalists and other content makers to be out in the field informing Australians.”

So the strike was worth it, if only so the pond could experience a weekend irony overload.

And now maestro, a blaze of trumpets puh-leaze as the dog botherer enters from extreme far right stage:

The header: Inside the warped world of the manosphere and its war on real masculinity; As the father of four sons, this topic is personal and imperative.

The caption for the astonishing collage, a major artwork, which outrageously contains no credit for its creator (AI?): Louis Theroux with Harrison ‘HSTikkyTokky’ Sullivan in a documentary that explores the force that not only draws men into debasing themselves and others for money, but women such as Bonnie Blue.

The pond regrets that the dog botherer started out by mentioning his sons because it reminded the pond of an admirable outburst by one of them, now in Junkee's archives...

,,,Chris Kenny is my dad. On one of the Sky News political analysis programs he hosts, he has replied to the Chaser joke, lamenting that if his children were ever to Google his name in the future, this is the kind of filth we would stumble across.
Heaven forbid.
Kenny is a staunchly neo-conservative, anti-progress, anti-worker defender of the status quo. He is an unrelenting apologist for the Liberal Party. He was one of Alexander Downer’s senior advisers at the time of the Iraq War. He’s been known to argue for stubborn, sightless inaction on climate change. He spits at anyone concerned with such trivialities as gender equality, environmental issues or labour rights from his Twitter account on a daily basis. Recently, he characterised criticism of the lack of women in Tony Abbott’s Cabinet as a continuation of the Left’s “gender wars”. He is a regular and fervent participant in The Australian’s numerous ongoing bully campaigns against those who question its editorial practices and ideological biases. The profoundly irresponsible, dishonest, hate-filled anti-multiculturalist Andrew Bolt has recently referred to Kenny on his blog as “a friend”.
And it’s a jokey picture of a bestial embrace that I should be afraid of discovering online?

Sorry, that never gets old for the pond ...

Louis Theroux’s documentary Inside the Manosphere was my first venture into this world of toxic masculinity. It was at once disturbing and laughable.
Disturbing because this cesspit of ignorance, misogyny, antisemitism and violence is being piped around cyberspace into the formative spaces of our teenage children. Laughable because what is being passed off as masculinity is, in fact, immaturity. It is boyhood on steroids, bravado without wisdom, ego without self-awareness, and muscularity without compassion or respect.
Inane, materialistic and shallow, this social media phenomenon may be helping to shape the views of millions of impressionable teenage boys. Even worse, it mirrors and feeds off a grotesque view of womanhood promoted by Bonnie Blue and others in the OnlyFans world.
In the enlightened world of Western liberal democracies, in countries of unprecedented wealth and knowledge, we are seeing a digital retreat to the priorities of the cave dwellers, where nothing matters beyond the law of the jungle, where might overpowers right and greed sweeps aside human dignity. The serious question posed by many is what this tells us about modern masculinity.

Here the pond should disclose that the pond has seen the Theroux documentary, which is pretty typical Theroux and done in his usual style (the pond enjoyed his one on Scientology more).

It doesn't reveal anything new to anyone who has spent any time tracking the toxic outposts of extreme far right thinking in the USA...

What's remarkable is how out of touch the dog botherer manages to sound, but that's probably because he only exists in a lizard Oz/Sky Noise down under (still no rebrand?) bubble.

Amazingly, the reptiles actually provided a link to this Instagram, but as clicks only encourage the beast, and as you have to give up either your email or your Facebook or some other way to feed the machine, the pond won't be following suit, and instead just offers a screen cap:

It's a measure of how desperate the reptiles have become that they provided a link which offered a way out of the hive mind.

To its sorrow, the pond was stuck with the dog botherer:

For me, as the father of four sons, this topic is personal and imperative. My first two are now men in their 30s; digital natives who graduated to adulthood, thankfully, before the influence of social media was strong (it was one of my older sons who put me on to this film). Soon my younger boys will need to navigate a complex digital world populated by the toxic manosphere and other insidious influences.
Many boys their age around the world are following the likes of Andrew Tate, Harrison “HSTikkyTokky” Sullivan, Justin Waller, Myron Gaines and “Sneako”. What they get are demeaning and brutal depictions of women, sex and relationships, as well as conspiracy theories about satanists and Jews running the world.
They also receive affirmation that their red pill* awareness allows them to see through mainstream information. And it is all gift-wrapped in crass materialism. (*Derived from the movie Matrix, apparently, where a red pill delivers such awareness.)

The reptiles interrupted with memories of ancient times, Stills from a YouTube video created by Nathan Pope that criticises influencer Andrew Tate. (Sic, so far as the pond could see, there was only one still, with no signs of a gallery, and natch without any link to YouTube content)

Theroux's documentary is already out of date.

And even the most recent trend has been and gone - see Will Gottsegen's piece in The Atlantic, What Was Clavicular? The internet’s most famous looks-maxxer is far more pernicious than he may seem. (*intermittent archive link)

The point of course is that all this is more than extreme far right adjacent. It's the full quid ...

...Clavicular’s rise is pernicious. The baseline concern with an influencer who takes a hammer to his face and says hateful things is that he is in some sense encouraging other people to do the same. Last month, a couple of fans came up to him during a livestream, and one shouted “Heil Hitler.” Clavicular tried to dismiss the comments as “cringe,” but he quite obviously set the tone. I have some authority here: After I left a note outside his parents’ house requesting an interview for this story, Clavicular shared my contact information online. As a reporter who covers the internet, I am used to being harassed—but I had never experienced so many direct violent threats, and so much virulent anti-Semitic hatred, as I have since then. The looks-maxxer insult “subhuman” kept coming up, as did the word mongrel. (A spokesperson for Clavicular declined to answer my questions.)
The bigger concern with Clavicular is not that he is encouraging a generation of young men to take extreme measures to change their looks. It’s that because his antics are so ridiculous and his videos so entertaining to a certain crowd, he has allowed more coherent and dangerous ideologies to hitch a ride on his movement. The far-right manosphere has seemingly taken every opportunity it can to tie itself to Clavicular. Tate joined him on a stream last month to lift weights and offer advice about how Clav should handle his newfound fame. Jon Zherka, an adjacent influencer, recently likened him to a “younger brother.” Last week, Fuentes called him a “prophet” for exposing the cynical reality of modern dating—a core part of Clavicular’s appeal among this group.

Well yes, and that's why the pond erupted with laughter at this dog bothering line ...

A Guardian review of this documentary suggested the manosphere was all old news. Yet while I had read references to Tate and the manosphere before I had not seen any of it, so all this was new to me.

FFS, talk about completely clueless ...

This is your world ... this is the bromancer pumped up, fully jacked up like Dwayne Johnson in The Smashing Machine ...

This is Faux Noise, Murdochian fantasy land pushed to its obvious outcome ...

Theroux’s examination of this social media microclimate likely will be the first exposure for millions of parents, which can only be a good thing.
Driven by the monetisation of social media followings, these macho influencers seek to humiliate others, sometimes obscenely dressing up their stunts as campaigns for moral rectitude; for instance, condemning the online promiscuity of OnlyFans women while deliberately exploiting their online “clout”. This highlights an age-old hypocrisy as they boast about male “body counts” while trashing women for similar behaviour.
Their online posts can resort to violence – anything to generate clicks under the guise of “coaching boys how to be f--king boys, not soy boys or gimps”. The claimed ideological motivation of reclaiming clearly delineated gender roles of the past is revealed as a ploy rather than a philosophy – the only true motivation for these influencers is money, anything to amass the wealth they love to display.

At that point, another example of detachment from what's going down popped up courtesy of unlovely meter maid Rita ... (still no rebrand?)

Sky News host Rita Panahi is shocked by Matt Walsh’s comments after OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky’s death. “The billionaire owner of OnlyFans, Leonid Radvinsky, died earlier this week after a very private battle with cancer,” Ms Panahi said. “Matt Walsh slammed Radvinsky. “He said that the man dedicated his life to peddling smut and poison. Now he's dead, and his only legacy on this Earth is filth. What a waste of existence.”

Please, catch up ...

It's what passes for civil discourse in the world of Rambo ...

And yet the dog botherer stayed completely clueless...

Yet their pursuit of cash pollutes the minds of the impressionable. “Most women in the world are not like my mum,” Sullivan says after being challenged by his mother, Elaine. “Most are thick.”
“Call me racist, call my misogynist, call me homophobic, call me a scammer, I’m all those things,” Sullivan says. But none of this matters, he says; it is all “clip-farming”. Pinned by Theroux to stand by a declaration he would disown a gay son, Sullivan says, “That’s not homophobic.” And his clips saying “F--k the Jews” gets a similar dismissal: “Does that mean I’m antisemitic? No.”
War is peace. Ignorance is strength.
Sullivan feigns concern about kids as young as 13 watching his clips but he shuns responsibility. “That’s the parent’s fault; that’s not my fault.”

By this point, the dog botherer had begun to sound seriously snowflake, completely wet, someone who spends too much time watching the ABC, or even worse ... Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller in Adolescence, a drama designed to raise awareness about boys going to dark places on the internet. Picture: Netflix

Come on man, stay strong, be hard, get a grip ... remember this is your world, this is the bromancer's Xian state in action ...

The dog botherer began to sound like he was having some kind of anxiety attack ...

For all the technological know-how, you get the sense we are hearing from people a stage or two back in evolution. “It got called toxic,” Justin Waller says, explaining his take on the demise of masculinity. “And you mix that with feminism, we’ve asked women to become men, you know men build, invent and maintain society, that’s a fact you know.”
Theroux’s documentary is compulsory viewing and exemplary filmmaking. He draws conclusions eventually, but his method is weighted towards introducing his subjects, gently prodding and allowing them to reveal themselves – enough rope.
Last year the fictional drama Adolescence drew global attention to the potential psychological and physical harm generated by the manosphere and its social media influencers. Teenage boys are being encouraged to channel their adolescent insecurities and curiosities into a hateful version of masculinity that objectifies and resents women.
There is nothing new, sadly, about violence against women, crimes of jealousy, date rape or bullying. The salient question is whether social media influencers are intensifying these tendencies and normalising such behaviour.
Does the primitive bile they spread not only take teenage boys down an antisocial path but also expose young women to increased risk of sexual violence and mistreatment? The answer is obvious, one must beget the other.

At this point the reptiles tried another flourish of relevance ..

It was an actual working link to the trailer on YouTube ...

It was as if all that talk about attitudes to women was some kind of dreaming ... as if the dog botherer was completely unaware of the smashing machine, where men and women smash each other sh*tless, or where they pound their faces sh*tless in the quest for beauty (google bot approved)

Is the dog botherer completely unaware that a UFC event is being promoted in the White House grounds to celebrate 250 years?

Apparently he is...

The characters Theroux introduces proudly promote “one-way monogamy” where their “wives” must remain faithful while husbands pursue other women and even bring them home to the marital bed.
“I’ll show them a picture of Kristen (his wife) immediately,” Waller says about his dating exploits, “and go straight for the threesome.”
In the manosphere women are shamed as dumb and innately dishonest by men with underdeveloped cerebrums and overblown biceps. These blokes make millions of dollars and live in fancy apartments with full garages and empty bookshelves.
They idolise Donald Trump, and the US President dips his lid to their audiences. In their endless, vapid and offensive posts, racism rears its head, especially the worst kind of conspiratorial antisemitism.

At last, some recognition ... this is what Faux Noise has given unto the world ...

Delusions of grandeur ...

Still, in a way, this documentary is reassuring. Sure, it exposes an evil influence, another pocket of social media we need to be wary of so we can help our children avoid it or make the right judgments about it.
This underscores why the Albanese government’s world-leading teenage social media ban has such widespread support. The aims of the ban are almost universally supported, even if we doubt the effectiveness of mere laws to protect our children.

Perhaps also the nationalisation of News Corp in Australia?

The pond keeds, it keeds ...

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has recorded a video message for Australian teenagers, calling on them to make the most of the social media ban. The video will be played in classrooms across the country this week, ahead of the social media ban, which comes into effect on Wednesday. “Make the most of the school holidays coming up … spend quality time with your friends and your family, face to face,” Mr Albanese said.

The dog botherer kept trying to cope ...

The reassuring aspect of Theroux’s examination is that this is all we are dealing with, a dark corner of social media, not a realignment of gender relations or a serious philosophical movement. It is a parasitic industry that seeks to profit from selling old prejudices in contemporary ways to young minds.
The manosphere influencers have nothing to say about real masculinity. In fact, they reflect its antithesis; they are examples of what we get when true masculinity goes missing.
As Theroux teases out, these charlatans are sad cases who seem to have lacked proper male role models of their own. They have the minds and morals of confused boys, trapped in the bodies of men.
Study after study across Western liberal democracies shows that without fathers or strong male role models, young men are more inclined to fail on many levels. The manosphere influencers are not failing financially but they are failing at life and looking to take others with them.
Waller proudly boasts that he will not bathe his daughter or change her nappy. These infantile beasts know nothing about being a real man.
Greed drives them to share extreme behaviour in search of money, and young minds idolise their superficial success. It is the instant fame and fortune of the social media world that is the problem here, not any philosophical journey.
The same force that entices Blue to boast she had sex with more than 1000 men in a day also draws these men into debasing themselves and others for money.
Bad people have always done horrible things, but social media amplifies their exploits and distorts their imaginations.

At this point the reptiles offered up the most wretched AI image to accompany the caption, Almost seven in 10 Australian men aged 16-25 are regularly engaging with masculinity influencers, according to a study from The Movember Institute of Men’s Health. Picture: Getty Images

It might have been handier to note that AI distortions can work both ways ...

And so to final thoughts ...

The answer for our young people must be in real relationships with real men and women. Mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, teachers and coaches, the sort of people most of us were fortunate to grow up around, and with whom we try to surround our children now.
Nothing, probably not even the government’s social media ban, can prevent our children from encountering the worst aspects of social media’s brainless digital sewer. But if they are surrounded by properly functioning adults, in real and loving relationships, we can hope to arm them with the intelligence and sense to resist these putrid enticements.
Perhaps it comes back to the simple point of respect, a quality all too lacking in many aspects of modern society. Respect is more important than money or fame – respect is what we should want for ourselves, those we care about and most everyone else. Respect for women, men and for ourselves. The digital world dispenses with respect in favour of fame, which is why we need organic relationships to keep respect in pride of place.
Masculinity undoubtedly involves strength, sure. But also empathy. It demands courage but also compassion. The less we see of these attributes in the digital world, perhaps the more we need to embrace and display them in the real world.

Yeah, yeah, talk to the News Corp, white Xian nationalist bromancer hand ...

Put it another way ...

And now, before proceeding to the Ughmann - the pond doesn't like it, but it has to be done - a note on the ongoing campaigning about renewables...

Luckily the intermittent archive was working this day ...(no guarantees)

EXCLUSIVE

‘We’re the guinea pigs’: fury at shocking scale of green energy dream
Inside the massive Central West Orana renewable energy zone stands a memorial so macabre even the Greens protested. Locals say it’s just the start.
By Christine Middap

INQUIRER
Why plug-in hybrids are a costly mistake for most Australian drivers
Car tech sold as a happy medium between petrol and electric has a dirty secret.
By Stephen Corby

Once again the reptiles diligently worked to ensure that Australia had no way of coping with current and future oil shocks ... but it was Stephen Corby that particularly got the pond's EV goat with this summary:

...So what is the answer, and are you supposed to just buy a good old new petrol-burning car and let the manufacturer suck up the fines? Well, yes, if you’re a particular kind of motoring enthusiast and you demand performance, loud noises and fun from your car.
But the sensible choice, I’m afraid, is still a hybrid, just not a plug-in one. I call them dumb-dumb hybrids; the kind driven by almost every Uber driver with whom you’ve ever shared an overly perfumed car interior.
Toyota (which I believe is a Japanese word meaning sensible, or an antonym for exciting) is the brand most famous for using a hybrid technology known as “parallel” in most of the cars in its busy showrooms, including the Camry, Corolla and RAV4.
In these hybrids, the magic simply happens without the driver having to do, or think about, anything differently.

Um, no. The sensible choice is a straight EV, and even more sensible, avoid Toyota, which plunged big into denying EVs were a thing, or would ever become a thing, and went hybrid, and were left standing by the Chinese-government EV revolution.

The magic of driving past petrol stations at the moment is magical (though the pond will admit that having conversations with extended family members who persisted in driving diesel can be a bit strained).

Why did the pond get agitated? Because Steve himself belled the cat earlier in his piece:

...Not long ago, I borrowed a Hyundai Kona EV for six months and, by becoming a sun worshipper, I managed to run it for that entire time at effectively zero cost (as long as we don’t discuss the price of my solar panels and EV charger).
This required me to be slightly anally retentive about when I charged it, and I’m entirely sure that if it were my own car I just would have lazily plugged it in overnight at times and paid the bill, but because there was a story in it I was fastidious.
And because we were using the Kona very much as a second car (my wife wanted to buy it in the end, but I pointed to around 50,000 reasons with a dollar sign in front of them why we would not), and it was regularly delivering more than 400km off a charge, I would often go more than a week without having to charge it at all.
And here’s another piece of practical advice: EVs – at this point and with our limited, and limiting, charging infrastructure – make an excellent second car. Anyone buying an EV as their one and only family vehicle is being what I would call “brave”, in the same way Sir Humphrey Appleby used that term on Yes Minister.

There you go, typical mansplaining, with the EV only suitable for the wifey, a line straight out of the manosphere, despite the dog botherer telling the pond that sort of attitude was problematic.

Trust Steve's wife, and look around and there are plenty of cheaper and better cars than Kona to be found (and the pond says that having had a Kona in the house for several years), and forget all the blather about range anxiety, unless you happen to drive to Broken Hill every alternate weekend.

And no paddles are to hand to get you out of paddling up sh*t creek to a manosphere cave (*google bot safe)

And so to this day's final offering.

The pond could have turned to grating, garrulous Gemma, or to "Ned", rabbiting on about Pauline yet again, but there's nothing like the Ughmann, unreformed seminarian and climate science denialist ... especially as he was the one featured at the top of the lizard Oz early in the weekend ...

The header: Stagflation’s return: the wolf at Australia’s energy door; Stagflation now looms over suburban Australia, yet there is a question almost no one in government or the bureaucracy seems willing to ask.

The spot for the place where a caption would have accompanied the astonishing opening illustration, but for some reason, no credit was given, and so the creator (AI?) of this amazing artwork went uncredited.

Okay, the pond admits it. It's too much.

The bromancer, the dog botherer and the Ughmann? It's worse than a bad joke walking into a pub, and this pint takes a bigly seven minutes to swill.

But what choice does the pond have?

Now stand by for undiluted Ughmann, and in the usual way, he begins by reverting to ancient times and his life in the Catholic system:

In February 1977 the new economics teacher at Marist College in Canberra decided to make a dramatic entry.
He strode into the fifth form classroom, picked up the chalk and scrawled one word in capitals across the top of the board: stagflation.
He underlined it and turned to explain. This was a new economic concept, designed to describe our times, when high inflation and high unemployment collided. The word was an inelegant blend of stagnation and inflation, and it was a child of the 70s oil shocks.
Why?
Because oil was not just another commodity. It was the master resource that made and moved economies. When the flow of oil was constricted, the price surged and raised the cost of almost everything at once: transport, manufacturing, farming, plastics and food. Prices rose everywhere because the cost of the lifeblood of the modern world had spiked, and the shock ran down every artery and vein.
The constriction of oil supply also slowed the world’s heartbeat. Households had less money to spend after filling the car and paying the bills. Businesses faced rising costs, shrinking margins and weaker demand. Investment stalled, production slowed and jobs were lost.
Economists had long assumed there was a trade-off between inflation and unemployment, captured in a neat model called the Phillips curve. The oil crisis delivered both together. Growth weakened, unemployment rose and inflation surged. The real world broke the model, as it so often does.
Everything old is new again
With the third Gulf war raging, everything old is new again and a word not discussed outside universities in nearly a half-century is coming back into vogue. The threat is real. The toxic cocktail that could breathe stagflation back into being is being mixed again.
Jim Chalmers did not invoke the term in his speech to business economists this week but all the elements were there.
The Treasurer told the audience the oil price was up 80 per cent since the start of the war, “adding upward pressure to global inflation, interest rate expectations and bond yields, while international equity markets and sentiment more broadly have fallen”.
“It means the prospect of inflation peaking in the high 4s or even higher this year is very real,” he said.
The world’s economic heartbeat is slowing and Australia’s already anaemic growth will weaken further. The longer the oil clot lingers, the greater the damage.
“Treasury estimates that GDP would be 0.6 per cent lower in 2027 and even by 2029 would still be below where it would have been without the conflict,” Chalmers said.

The pond has done enough interrupting, so here's the Sky Noise down under interruption (still no rebranding?)

Independent analyst Evan Lucas warned Sky News has warned that Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ inflation prediction may be an underestimation. Mr Lucas predicts that “a 6-7 per cent headline inflation figure is definitely on the cards”. “The replenishment isn't there at the levels we need to see it,” he told Sky News Australia. “The cost of fuel in the March read will be astonishing”.

The pond swooned at the astonishing artwork, as the Ughmann carried on ...

On a flying visit to Australia, International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol warned world leaders had yet to grasp the scale of the damage done to the “vital arteries of the global economy”.

Here the pond must note another astonishing attempt at relevance, with the reptiles inserting a link to this tweet ...

Presumably some stayed at X to romp with Elon, but the pond ploughed on ...because there's something curiously appealing in the Ughmann's doom-saying, fear-mongering scribbling ...

Why this time is worse
Birol says his agency calculates that the shock from the Gulf war outstrips the twin oil crises of the 1970s, combined with a cut to gas supplies bigger than the one that followed Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The world has lost about 11 million barrels of oil a day, roughly one in every 10 it consumes. And 140 billion cubic metres of gas have evaporated, the equivalent of stripping a major industrial economy’s entire supply out of the global system.
Some of the damage is structural because, in its fight to survive, Iran has bombarded the energy assets of its neighbours. More than 40 oilfields, gas plants and export terminals across the region have been hit.
Even if there were a swift end to the third Gulf war, the world is a long way from turning its oil and gas tap back to anything approaching normal.

And yet all this was Emeritus Chairman approved and encouraged ... Plumes of smoke and fire rise after debris from an intercepted Iranian drone struck an oil facility, in Fujairah, United Arab Emirates, on March 14, 2026. Picture: AP

Of course the Ughmann seized the chance to celebrate oil and gas, and to downgrade any idle chat about renewables, EVs and such like ...

Despite the military dominance of the US and Israel, the choke point of the Strait of Hormuz is effectively controlled by Iran. Trade through that waterway now depends on what the bloodied, battered but still unbowed theocratic regime will allow. Even if an agreement to open it were reached tomorrow, trade would take months to normalise.
But you cannot export oil and gas you do not have.
The Economist reported this week that Brent crude, at $US112 a barrel, is 54 per cent higher than before hostilities began. Gas prices in Europe are up by 85 per cent and the damage will not end when the shootingstops. Ships are in the wrong place, insurance has been shredded, production has been cut and refineries that have gone idle cannot be flicked back on like a light switch.
Why recovery will take years
Restoring energy flows is a long industrial relay. Gulf producers must bring damaged or idled output back online. Tankers must be willing and able to return. Refiners in Asia and elsewhere must restart plants that have been starved of crude. None of that happens quickly. Some liquefied natural gas plants, such as Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex, will take years to recover. Even under the best case, The Economist says it could take around four months for markets to regain some semblance of normality.

Another example of the fine work by King Donald, as approved and encouraged by the Emeritus Chairman ... Qatar Ras Laffan complex has been heavily targeted by Iran and will take years to recover. Picture: @sentdefender/X

Now let's hear it for oil and gas ...

Each day Australia wakes up to the reality that oil and gas do far more work in our economy than most people realise. Rising costs are already feeding through to everyday goods. Building materials are climbing sharply as the price of oil-based goods rises. The spike in transport and production costs are moving through the food chain and that will soon be felt at the checkout.
That is how a war in the Gulf turns up in suburban Australia. Not just at the bowser but in the cost of building a home, fixing a pipe or filling a shopping trolley. Hydrocarbons are everywhere; if they do not help make a good, they move it. When their supply is choked, inflation spreads like wildfire.
The pain could get a lot worse. The biggest risk is that the steady flow of more than two vast oil tankers a day is interrupted. If that happens, Australia would be forced into fuel rationing, as others already have. So far the chain has held but the links are straining and the longer the crisis lasts the greater the risks that one will break.
It is worth repeating that it is a national disgrace that a generation of politicians, of all colours, has allowed this country to reach a point where 90 per cent of its liquid fuel is imported. Worse, they assumed the supply lines would never fail and allowed fuel reserves to fall to barely a month’s cover. That is not misfortune. It is an abject policy failure.
We were warned.

And here's what King Donald, with the approval of the Emeritus Chairman, has achieved ... Bulk Carrier Belray near the Strait of Hormuz, March 22, 2026. This critical choke point, now effectively controlled by Iran, poses a significant threat to world energy supplies and leaves Australia’s fuel security exposed. Picture: Getty

Now stand by for more tedious memories ...

We were told this would be fixed
When I left the ABC in 2017, the first story I filed as political editor for Nine News was that Australia was in breach of its obligations to the International Energy Agency to hold 90 days of fuel reserves. My new bosses were a bit bemused by my energy obsession but they humoured me.
I don’t claim credit for the insight. I was persuaded by the argument of a man I had come to know well, former fighter pilot and retired air vice-marshal John Blackburn.
In 2014, Blackburn wrote a report for the NRMA warning that Australia’s fuel reserves were running on empty. This fossil-fuel rich island nation had lost the capacity to produce and refine its own fuel. We had become dangerously dependent on imports, with reserves so thin we were counting tankers at sea as part of our stockpile.
Then, as now, 90 per cent of the liquid fuel that keeps this country running came from overseas. We were told the problem would be fixed by 2026. Clearly, it wasn’t.
Coalition and Labor governments have tinkered at the edges of a solution because the real fix was too expensive, too difficult or too politically inconvenient. The threat always seemed so distant. Now the wolf is at the door.
When the smoke clears, the world will reorder its energy priorities, just as it did in the 1970s. Energy security will again become the central concern of governments everywhere.
The danger for Australia is that we learn the wrong lesson and waste this crisis. The early signs are disturbing.

You mean, get off oil and gas, turn to solar and wind turbines and other forms of renewable energy? Not on your Ughmann nelly ... The Gulf war’s impact reaches suburban Australia, not just at the bowser. Picture: Getty

Time to double down on the addiction, time to embrace the disease and forget the cure ...

The response now taking shape is to double down on an electricity system built on intermittent generation, backed by storage, in the belief that electrifying everything will deliver security. It will not. It risks replacing one vulnerability with another and building a single point of failure into the nation’s operating system.
If that system fails, everything fails with it. And maybe the people who are building this system should ponder whether it is wise that so many of the components in its nervous system are made in China.
The big choice facing Australia now
There is a question almost no one in government or the bureaucracy seems willing to ask. What is the relationship between the kind of energy an economy uses and the productivity it can sustain?
For two centuries growth has been built on dense, reliable energy, first coal, then oil and gas. Now we are shifting towards sources that are diffuse and intermittent, and compensating with vast spending on storage, transmission and backup. That makes the system more complex, more expensive and less predictable.
Is it just coincidence that as this transition has gathered pace, productivity has stalled and costs have risen? Or is there a link we are refusing to confront?
Australia has a choice. It can use the advantages it has in coal, gas, uranium and, potentially, oil or it can squander them.
Yes, the world will become more efficient. Yes, more vehicles will be electric.
And yes, there is an opportunity to expand the mining of the critical minerals that underpin that shift.
But the immediate reality is that the world still runs on hydrocarbons and will for decades to come. With major suppliers of oil and gas shut down there is a clear opportunity for Australia to fill the gap, to strengthen our own economy, and to build security and resilience against future shocks.
We should be producing more energy, not less. We should be expanding exports of coal, LNG and uranium. We should be building nuclear power plants. We should be exploring for oil and developing the capacity to turn coal and gas into liquid fuels.
Above all, we should ensure that this country never again finds itself so exposed.
The lesson is not complicated. The world runs on the dense energy of oil, coal and gas. Ignore that, and the real world will blow up your operating model.
I was a bad student, but Les Roberts was a good teacher. I’d like him to know that, in at least one lesson, I was paying attention.

The Ughmann might think he was paying attention, but he's as completely clueless as the dog botherer and the bromancer, as they drove to the bar...

Now here's what the pond would have liked to be writing about ...

We’ve Stopped Noticing That Trump’s Cabinet Meetings Are Completely Insane

Inter alia...

Here is a partial list of subjects covered by the President of the United States at Thursday’s cabinet meeting:
The obliteration of Iran’s navy. The TSA shutdown. A woman killed in Chicago. The Federal Reserve building renovation. The cost of Sharpie pens. Venezuelan oil revenue. King Charles’s cancer. Gavin Newsom’s self-reported learning disability. Cognitive tests. SCOTUS. The Kennedy Center. California high-speed rail. NATO’s failure to send ships. A thousand-dollar pen that didn’t write. The prime minister of the United Kingdom. Caravans. Sanctuary cities. The 25th Amendment. A joint venture with Venezuela. Drug smugglers who don’t watch television.
That was one meeting. Ninety-eight minutes. A wartime cabinet briefing.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: if a transcript from this meeting came from the government of Brazil — or Hungary, or any country we cover from a comfortable critical distance — we would not file it as a cabinet meeting. We would write about it as a document. We would ask what it reveals about the man producing it and the institution that has formed around him. We would use different words.
But we don’t use different words for Trump. We stopped a long time ago, so gradually that I’m not sure anyone made a conscious decision to stop. It just became the way the job gets done.

And again ...

Trump Spends Over 5 Minutes on the Cost of Sharpie Pens in Bizarre Cabinet Meeting Riff

And in that spirit ...

And in the dog botherer spirit let's hear it for the women doing their best to look good for the bros ...