loon pond

In which Our Henry leads the Friday way, but there are any number of other losers and dropkicks refusing to pay company tax ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 21:17:24 +0000

Devotees of Air Crash Investigations, aka Mayday - the pond is one - will recall the strange case of Gameel Al-Batouti who flew EgyptAir Flight 990 into the ground while chanting "Tawkalt ala Allah" eleven times.

It wasn't a conspiracy, and his motivations are still disputed, but the odds are strong he wasn't a jihadist.

On the other hand, there's the matter of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, where it became clear over time that Russian-backed forces were responsible for the war crime, though Vlad the Sociopath's minions have never faced justice.

The pond generally tries to avoid rushes to judgements, common gossip and conspiracy theories that immediately erupt after an event.

The mad mullahs of Iran have enough on their plate with the murders of thousands of dissidents, and knee-jerk reactions that they're behind everything needs time and evidence before being shouted, Benji-style, from the rooftops.

This morning he'd retreated to talking about the pilot in the latest disaster as being "suicidal", infused with religious fanaticism, but his motivation is crudely obvious - he's got an election to win.

Naturally the Australian Daily Zionist News was all in ...

Luckily the intermittent archive is now working again so the pond could send that offering off to the cornfield: Radicalised Flydubai co-pilot ‘had discussed killing Jews,’ likely recruited in advance

Why everyone keeps quoting Benji, when his motivations are obvious, remains a mystery.

Besides, there's enough dismal news to hand with yet another example of the enormous cruelty and fatuous logic behind lethal injections as a punishment, as well as the odd bit of joy, as in the speculation - fuelled by gambling - that Mark Carney might score the Nobel Peace Prize and Time Person of the Year.

The pond would love it to happen, simply to make the mad King even madder, but won't be putting any money on it, just as the pond is a glutton for stories about the imminent fall of Vlad the sociopath, though he's been taking a very long time fall.

In the interim, there are simple pleasures like the folly of Eric Schmitt, whose name resonates with excremental behaviour.

The one thing that the pond can rely on each Friday is that Our Homeric Henry will turn up with yet another diatribe, littered with pompous, portentous references, and thereby provide a form of cosmic relief.

And so it came to pass this day ...and what a great day, because it's not the usual rampant Zionism, for which the pond had laid the groundwork yesterday, but rather "identity politics", confused and conflated with AI ...

The header: By Henry Ergas

French author’s AI scandal reveals how identity politics is degrading literature

The invitation to listen to a bot imitate Our Henry, shades of irony: Listen to this article

8 min

The caption for the plain Jane illustration: Copies of the book C'etait ca ou mourir (It Was That or Die), written by Canadian-Haitian novelist Thelyson Orelien, at a literature festival in France. Picture: Joel Saget/AFP

The plea for relevance in a world where paywalls breed irrelevance: Make us preferred on Google

Our Henry went right off, in a most satisfying way ...

Last week, France’s rentrée littéraire – the late-summer publishing season that marks the end of the summer holidays – veered from triumph to scandal. Thélyson Orélien’s C’était ça ou mourir (“It was This or Death”) had taken bookshops by storm and, after winning the FNAC readers’ and booksellers’ prize, appeared on the longlists for just about every major literary award – including the Goncourt, the most prestigious of them all.

Orélien, a Haitian-born writer now living in Quebec, tells the story of a history teacher from Port-au-Prince who is forced out of Haiti when his neighbourhood burns, taking only a diploma, a notebook of poems and a photo of his mother. After a harrowing escape he travels, always at great risk, through the Dominican Republic, Brazil and Mexico toward family in Canada, before facing the blatantly racist hostility of US immigration officials as he approaches the Canadian border.

The caption for the alleged thought criminal: Canadian-Haitian novelist Thelyson Orelien Picture: Joel Saget/AFP

An autobiographical saga of dispossession, forced migration and the desperate search for asylum, the book received gushing reviews. Then, on September 21, just three days after Le Monde, the progressive literati’s bible, hailed its brilliance, an anonymous account on X claimed the novel had been largely written by artificial intelligence.

That conservative outlets seized on the post immediately sparked accusations of racism, with Orélien denouncing a racially motivated conspiracy. But as mounting evidence confirmed the post’s claim, and revelations emerged of plagiarism in Orélien’s earlier work, the book was dropped from the Goncourt longlist.

None of that dimmed the ardour of his supporters: sales have risen and bookshops have turned promotional events into rousing displays of solidarity. Nor have any of the other major literary prizes followed the Goncourt’s lead.

Startling as that is, it is a sign of the times. The literary world no longer honours authors; it consecrates saints. What is rewarded is not the writing but the political virtue of the writer – a writer who, when exposed as a fraud, is promoted to martyr rather than demoted to sinner.

Actually it's not just literature. See the aforementioned Schmitt and his devotees ...

Eric Schmitt’s Very Bad Day at Work

For MAGA politicians, there’s no such thing as a gaffe. (*intermittent archive link)

By Helen Lewis

...Some MAGA influencers fully embraced the idea that Schmitt had, in fact, completed le epic pwn of Smith. On The Charlie Kirk Show—still named for its late creator—one of the hosts played the clip of Schmitt’s question after telling the senator he had to “give you some flowers” for his acuity. The whole segment appeared to have been beamed in from a parallel reality where the exchange with Smith had gone well for the senator. “It was the only NBA or NCAA men’s game going on at that time in Atlanta,” Schmitt said. “He claimed later that he was at another game. I don’t know. Now, here’s the thing—my job is to ask the questions.” This explanation opens up the possibility that the reason Schmitt and his team didn’t think Smith could be referring to the Hawkeyes was because they had forgotten the existence of women’s basketball. Not a great look for a party that has made a crusade lately of protecting women’s sports.

Other stars in the MAGA universe, however, seemed to realize that Schmitt’s failed gotcha would not delight their faithful, even if they could not say so out loud. The former journalist Benny Johnson, who has 4 million followers on X, posted that Schmitt had “pulled out the receipts” and left Smith “stunned.” Later, he deleted that post, without explanation. On Fox News, Sean Hannity’s recap of the hearing left out Schmitt’s screw-up but included a megamix of Republicans shouting at Smith, including John Kennedy of Louisiana telling the former special counsel that “you make me want to throw up in my mouth.”

Enough with the comedy, the pond has never been big on literary prizes. They're a useful way to flog a book, but have as much meaning as the honorific, "New York Times best seller".

Time is the only way to sort out books of lasting relevance - imagine Our Henry going off at Charles Dickens for being "woke" and full of identity politics as he scribbled about the miseries of Victorian life, yet in the pond's mind - having recently had another go at Vanity Fair - he's lasted better than Thackeray (on the other hand Thackeray's portrait of vanity has more than a hint of 'wokeness' and 'identity politics' about it).

Do such prizes need Homeric Henry wandering around with a blunderbuss, especially as he uses that prime doofus and epically stupid man Bret Stephens as a source? Not really ...

Literary prizes give that judgment its public seal: they hand out the halos to those whose identities are taken as credentials of merit. And in few countries is that clearer than in Australia.

We are, for sure, not alone. Bret Stephens recently noted that in the United States, nine of this year’s 10 National Book Award winners came from “minorities”. But the trend here is exceptionally stark.

From 2000 to 2008, 11 per cent of the writers shortlisted for our literary prizes were Indigenous or “culturally diverse”. Since 2018, that share has soared to 46 per cent. Over the same periods, “women of colour”, as Americans call them, rose from 5 per cent of those shortlisted to 31 per cent. Nor does the leg-up end with places on the shortlist: Indigenous authors, for example, now win at about twice their share of shortlisted books.

As authors’ identities have gained prominence in prize selection, so have identity-based themes among the winning books. In the 1990s, “identitarian” books accounted for no more than 10 per cent of prize winners. From 2000 to 2014, their share climbed into the 10-20 per cent range. Then the identity-themed share rose towards 30 per cent before surging to nearly 50 per cent.

That is not simply because authors who define themselves by their identity tend to write identity-based novels. Who judges them matters too: a five-member panel with two Indigenous or “culturally diverse” judges is statistically likely to shortlist twice as many novels with identity-based themes as a panel with none.

With those groups’ share of judges trebling, from 12 per cent in 2009-17 to 36 per cent over the following eight years, identity-themed works claimed a growing share of shortlist places – and a still greater share of winners.

But the effect doesn’t end with the verdict, because past winners have a strong chance of becoming future judges. The process therefore feeds on itself: the favoured groups win prizes, gain places on judging panels and select new winners in their image. Already represented on panels far above their share of the population or of Australia’s published fiction writers, they are likely to supply an increasing proportion of tomorrow’s winners, judges and then winners – expanding and entrenching identity literature’s dominance.

Far from stemming those trends, the government fuels them. The entity laughingly referred to as Creative Australia boasts that 13 per cent of its individual grant recipients are Indigenous, up from 7 per cent in 2015-19, as against a population share of just 3 per cent. “Minority applicants”, it reports, have a higher success rate on applications than those outside the favoured group – evidence it interprets as proof of success, rather than as a surefire way of discouraging outstanding applicants who do not fit its ideological straitjacket.

None of this troubles the pond, though it surely troubles bigots and rancid racists.

Those who want to stick with the own kind and celebrate exterminations and apartheid always have Quad-rants, and the lizard Oz as home for their literary endeavours ...Arts Minister Tony Burke at the launch of Creative Australia in 2023. Picture: Creative Australia

Clearly the hole in bucket man got out of the wrong side of the bed and wanted something to rant about, and so inevitably ended up dragging in the Soviets...

Nor is the outcome politically neutral. Eight recent award winners received Creative Australia funding. Most are on the keffiyeh-clad hard left; all believe writing is a political task; none has enduring aesthetic merit.

That is hardly surprising. The books today’s panels select are almost invariably mediocre. They are not so hopeless as to entirely miss the mark; but they lack anything that makes a book truly unique – each is interchangeable with the next. The emotions we are intended to feel do not arise from a challenging encounter with the text. They are stuck on, announced as part of the package and supplied by a plot that demands no real work from the reader.

Many, moreover, are indifferently written inversions of Soviet-era Socialist Realism. In Socialist Realism, Andrei Sinyavsky observed in the 1965 book that brought him a seven-year sentence to the Gulag, “each work is assured of a happy ending”, for “even when it produces a tragedy, it is an Optimistic Tragedy, in which the hero may die but Communism triumphs”.

Actually Soviet Art has its recherché charms ... Seven decades of Soviet propaganda – in pictures

So sweet and aspirational.

Even the great Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich couldn't occasionally avoid reverting to the banalities that Stalinism required - think the 5th Symphony - but it's still a fun and rousing listen.

But when Our Henry gets on a drum roll, stand clear ...

Our authors don’t promise Communism’s happy endings. But their taxpayer-funded writing is no less formulaic, featuring protagonists who, like Orélien’s history teacher, compete in the victimhood Olympics, relentlessly battling “whiteness”, racism and, more recently, the evil of evils, Zionism.

This is, in short, a state-sponsored system that produces clones, not masterpieces. Two continental literary prizes that have resolutely bucked the “diversity” trend show what could have been: the Prix Goncourt and Italy’s Premio Strega. Since 2000, the Goncourt has rewarded at least eight genuinely outstanding books; the Strega, at least five. Apart from Tim Winton, whose most feted work predates 2000, and Christos Tsiolkas, it is hard to think of an Australian winner whose award-winning book will stand the test of time.

If the pond might be so bold, Tim Winton leaves it cold, but that's the joy of personal taste ...Australian author Tim Winton at Ningaloo, WA.

Xians of the Simon Smart kind are welcome to him ... The Sacred Fragility of Life: Tim Winton, Faith and Fundamentalism

In an age so dominated by a hard materialism Winton stands out as someone who believes the material aspects of life are bound up in the spiritual. Which means questions of justice have an eternal ring to them. He takes on the persona of the raging prophet in his Palm Sunday Speech ("Stones for Bread") that picks up on Jesus's Sermon on the Mount to castigate modern Australia for its treatment of asylum seekers. "Something is festering in the heart of our community, something shameful and rotten," he warns. "But to live as hostages to our lowest fears we must surrender things that are sacred: our human decency, our morality, our self-respect, our inner peace." Winton continues to have faith in our better instincts and it is to these that he appeals.

Is Our Henry remotely interested in that epic tale turned by Phil Noyce into Rabbit Proof Fence?

Probably not, that would be a step too far for the old bigot ...

But the damage does not end with the prizes. In the increasingly intense competition for attention, the likelihood of winning inevitably influences what is published. Life will therefore become ever harder for authors who buck the party line; far better to “sing in chorus”, as they used to say in the USSR.

The results are predictable. Identity fraud and political conformism will flourish as failing to tick the right boxes becomes a red flag. So will identity literature’s answer to chick-lit: post-colonial tales of suffering, struggle and survival “authored” by AI.

Perhaps that is the upside: at least the machines will be intelligent. And since we are determined to become an economic backwater, why not be an intellectual wasteland too?

No Zionism, no Thucydides? Ah well, as Ned is alleged to have said, and as Joseph Furphy once wrote, such is life.

There's enough of an intellectual wasteland at the lizard Oz to satisfy the pond for several lifetimes.

Have an immortal Rowe for a break...

And so to the difficult matter of picking a bonus.

The reptiles' spoofing of the intermittent archive seem to have gone awry, so it's possible to do a survey of what's troubling the hive mind ...

Commentary

By Michael Easson

‘Strategic ambiguity’ on Taiwan satisfies our national interest

The war on China is best left to the bromancer ... and the bulk of the meretricious Merritt is best off in an archival cornfield:

Legal Affairs

By Chris Merritt

Flawed laws and failing civics education expose Australia to rising post-October 7 hatred

Sure there's a requisite amount of Zionist flourishes.

Sure there are ironies to relish in the meretricious Merrit rabbiting on about "civics education" in a paper dedicated to division and hate and fear-mongering, but is that enough to justify going through the usual hysteria about furriners? Not to mention blather about "Australian values".

Consider this. The corporation for which Merritt works absolutely avoids paying tax, as good citizens should do.

The keen Keane scribbled News Corp celebrates more than a decade of paying zero tax in Australia for Crikey, which might involve a paywall:

Despite its pretensions to lecture Australia about its values and how it should be run, the Murdoch family’s News Corp really has nothing to do with Australia. It is a foreign company, and it serially pays no tax here, despite earning billions in revenue on our shores.

In 2024-25, according to the Australian Tax Office’s corporate tax data released today, News Australia Holdings — the official name of News Corp’s Australian subsidiary — racked up 10 years of paying precisely zero tax. For that year, it earned $1.89 billion in revenue, made more than $300 million in profit (a record for the past decade) and paid nothing in tax.

Indeed, there’s a peculiar steadiness to News Corp’s tax dodging. For the past four years, it has earned around $1.8 billion in revenue and paid no tax on around $300 million in profits in 2023-24 and 2024-25, and $200 million in profits in 2021-22 and 2022-23.

You can go all the way back to when the first corporate tax transparency data was released for 2014-15 — the result of a Rudd-Gillard government initiative (opposed by the Coalition) — and find News Corp’s main company has paid no tax across those years, on revenue of, in total, $23.9 billion and profits of $1.38 billion.

The only News Corp entities to pay tax in that time were an investment company, which paid $200,000 (sic) in 2017-18 on $291 million in profits, and a pay TV financing arm, which paid $8 million in 2015-16. Real estate listing oligopolist REA Group, which News Corp part-owns, paid $246 million in tax.

Otherwise, News Corp’s only contributions to Australia are social division and the fostering of hate and resentment.

In contrast, Nine Entertainment paid $76.7 million tax on $290 million in profits; ailing Stokes family company Seven West Media — since folded into ailing Southern Cross Media — managed $3 million on $11 million profits, based on $1.3 billion in revenue. Southern Cross paid $4 million on $14 million. Ten Network, as usual, made nothing and paid nothing.

The 2024-25 data — which, as the ATO is always eager to note, contains details of corporations that pay no tax for perfectly good and legal reasons — show that fossil fuel and energy companies dominate the ranks of those paying zero tax.

And remember that Faux Noise is behind one of the most incompetent and deeply corrupt regimes in the history of the United States...

The pond did think about giving AI another run ...

By Adam Slonim

Medicare breach presents a timely argument for control of our AI

But now that the intermittent archive is back, why bother?

The pond should note it was deeply touched at the presence of a new Oz bot ...

... but that's as far as the pond's enthusiasm went, because the day the pond asks the reptiles about anything is the day their MAGA hero becomes a decent president, somewhere past the twelfth of never, a very long time ...

Instead the pond settled on the luddite lizard Oz editorialist's yearning for more coal...

To hell with the planet and to hell with taxes.

Heap on more coal, me hearties... and have a hearty infallible Pope to help with the heaping ...

Desperate, the pond realised that there's always reheated Mein Gott to hand ...

Ways to fix the plight of suffering workers?

Gott it ...

Ways to avoid paying company tax?

Perhaps blather endlessly about red tape?

Gott it ...

Ask the lizard Oz about ways to avoid paying tax while purporting to good citizenry and with a solution to everything?

Gott it ...

The madness never seems to end ...

In which the pond prepares for a Friday encounter with Homeric Henry with a reading ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:10:38 +0000

The pond will be back on deck tomorrow - a failure to cover the latest Homeric Henry outing would be a disgrace of the first water.

The odds are high that he'll be in full Australian Daily Zionist News mode, as will be the reptiles generally, what with Benji seeking to make political capital out of the Flydubai flight FZ1073 matter, and an election rapidly approaching.

The pond woke to the Beeb trying to make sense of the chaos and confusion surrounding the affair aboard the aircraft, but it's too early to extract any firm understanding at a distance, much like the matter of the alleged grave threat to RAF Fairford, so grave that the alleged five miscreants were immediately given conditional bail, a result that perplexed both mad King Donald and the pond.

Whatever, for the moment, the pond will offer another reading, and speaking of "Western Values" - as the pond did yesterday, and not to be confused with bombing schools - this hovered into view as a result of the pond's free range reading.

Where Hatred Lies
Omer Bartov
A nuanced new history by Mark Mazower reminds us that antisemitism, an age-old threat to Jewish life, can be warped into a political tool—as we see today, when any criticism of Israel can be deemed antisemitic. (*intermittent archive link)

An earlier piece by Bartrov in the same journal gives an idea of where his sympathies lie ...

‘Infinite License’
Omer Bartov
The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met. (*intermittent archive link)

Bartov opened this piece with a reference and an historical flourish worthy of Homeric Henry:

On January 12, 1904, the Herero people of German Southwest Africa—today’s Namibia—launched a series of attacks on scattered German farms in the territory. The Herero, a pastoral group of about 80,000, depended on their vast cattle herds for their economic, social, and cultural life, but the German settlers who had begun to arrive in the late nineteenth century increasingly encroached on their grazing lands.
The rebels destroyed many of the farms and killed more than a hundred settlers, mostly sparing women and children. For the settlers the rebellion served as a final proof of the need to eradicate the Herero, whom they described as “baboons.” Unable to restore order, the German governor appealed to Berlin, which sent some 10,000 soldiers. By August they had crushed the Herero fighters. In October the German commander, Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, issued what has come to be known as his Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order) to those who remained:

"The Herero are German subjects no longer. They have killed, stolen, cut off the ears and other parts of the body of wounded soldiers, and now are too cowardly to want to fight any longer…. The Herero nation must now leave the country. If it refuses, I shall compel it to do so with the big cannon. Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children."

Most of the Herero were shot or died of thirst and hunger in the desert to which they had been expelled. Several thousand were taken to forced labor camps.
For many decades the public and historians alike ignored this first genocide of the twentieth century. Germany’s famous Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with or overcoming the past) was about the Holocaust, not long-forgotten colonial crimes. Only in 2021 did the German government officially apologize for “the suffering, inhumanity and pain inflicted on the tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children by Germany during the war in what is today Namibia.” It also pledged over a billion euros in reparations, although the distribution of this money remains contentious, not least because the Germans negotiated with the Namibian government rather than with the Herero themselves.
That remote genocide at the dawn of the twentieth century shares some remarkable similarities with the campaign of ethnic cleansing and annihilation prosecuted by Israel in Gaza. Israel saw the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, in much the same way that the Germans saw the Herero attack 119 years earlier: as confirmation that the militant group was utterly savage and barbaric, that resistance to Israeli occupation would always incline toward murder, and that Gaza’s Palestinian population as a whole should be removed from the moral universe of civilization. “Human animals must be treated as such,” the Israeli major general Ghassan Alian (who is Druze) said shortly after the attack, echoing several other Israeli officials, including former defense minister Yoav Gallant. “There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell,” Alian said in an Arabic-language video message directed to Hamas as well as the residents of Gaza. Over the next seventeen months Israeli forces killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, over 70 percent of whom are estimated to have been civilians, maimed well over 100,000, and imposed on the remaining population conditions of inhuman deprivation, suffering, and pain. A cease-fire that went into effect on January 19 ended abruptly on March 18, when Israel refused to move on to the second phase of its agreement with Hamas and launched a series of unilateral attacks that have already killed hundreds more Palestinian civilians.

And so on, but the pond didn't mean to distract from the "western values" at work in Bartov's second piece, with the book under review being:

On Antisemitism: A Word in History
by Mark Mazower Penguin Press, 333 pp., $29.00

Bartov went into a detailed discussion, prompted by Mazower, of the question of antisemitism and its confusion and conflation with Zionism:

...Since Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, and the genocidal Israeli assault on Gaza that followed, the association between criticism of Israel and antisemitism has become ubiquitous. A growing range of scholars and other observers seem to agree with Mazower that even if “some anti-Zionism masks anti-Jewish sentiments, much of it does not.” But most major American Jewish organizations have stayed attached to the assumption that the main source of antisemitism in the world today is the anti-Israel left. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) contends that “anti-Zionism is antisemitic, in intent or effect.” The American Jewish Committee (AJC) defines anti-Zionism as “inherently bigoted” and claims that, because its “end goal…is to undermine and eliminate Jewish rights,” the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is driven by “antisemitic motivations.”
Various factions of the political right, meanwhile, have been quick to turn these assumptions to their advantage. Some have used allegations of antisemitism as a cudgel against the left in order to, in Mazower’s words, “police the universities, end long-standing anti-discrimination and diversity initiatives, reassert ‘Western values,’ and reaffirm the role of religion in American life.” Others have conscripted anti-Zionist, pro-Palestine rhetoric into the service of a notion of “Western values” rooted explicitly in Christian nationalism, expressing suspicion and hostility toward American Jews rather than opportunistically claiming to protect them.

Bartov spends plenty of time observing the dynamics arising from the establishment and growth of the state of Israel, and the pond commends the read available by the link.

Crucially, he raises the question of the standards adopted by Australia regarding the definitions of antisemitism - a prelude to the findings of the Royal Commission in December - versus any commentary on the concept of Zionism, though only indirectly, because his commentary is directed at the United States.

There is, however, something of an analogy to hand for the hive mind approach down under:

...As Mazower shows, this transformation in the understanding of antisemitism was reflected in profound changes in American advocacy for Israel. Especially after the fall of communism, such organizations as the AJC and the ADL, alongside the newly established Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and the AJC-backed UN Watch, became increasingly engaged in “monitoring” anti-Israel bias and undertaking antisemitism research. In 2004 Congress passed the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, leading to the creation of the Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism within the State Department. Because the definition of antisemitism now included “vilification of Israel,” Mazower explains, “American diplomats had an obligation to act on behalf of another nation.” Putting it differently, it also meant that antisemitism—defined as “vilification of Israel”—had become anti-American.
The best tool for the elimination of the distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Israel has become the definition of antisemitism endorsed in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental organization created to promote education about the Holocaust. Of the definition’s eleven examples of potentially antisemitic actions or statements, seven refer directly to Israel. They include denying Jews the right to self-determination, applying double standards to Israel that are not demanded of other nations, accusing Israel of exaggerating the Holocaust, and drawing comparisons between Israeli policies and those of the Nazis.
Some may find these statements objectionable, but they are not in and of themselves antisemitic. Many Jews around the world have rejected Zionism for theological or ideological reasons; many supporters of Zionism have argued that Israel should be “a light unto the nations” and thus held to higher standards; and many critics of Zionism, including Israelis, have argued that Israel has politically instrumentalized the Holocaust and drawn their own comparisons between certain Israeli actions and those of the Nazis. That is why alternative definitions have been offered, such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus Document, which carefully distinguish between antisemitism and criticism of Israel.
Nonetheless, in May 2024 the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which requires the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to adopt the IHRA definition. A few days later, in a speech at a remembrance ceremony for victims of the Holocaust, President Joe Biden implicitly endorsed the analogy between protests against Israel’s brutal response to the attack by Hamas on October 7 and antisemitism. In January 2025 President Donald Trump issued an executive order called “Additional Measures to Counter Anti-Semitism,” which draws on another order he signed in 2019 that requires federal agencies to consider the IHRA definition of antisemitism when enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The new executive order demands that “all available and appropriate legal tools” be used “to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.” This has enabled greater federal scrutiny of universities for allegations of antisemitism on their campuses, and the threat of withholding federal funding to compel universities to adopt new policies. For all intents and purposes, allegations of antisemitism have become a new way to muzzle opinion, silence speech, and curb academic freedom. All of this has been described by Kenneth Stern, who was the lead drafter of the IHRA definition, as making it “more, not less, difficult to tackle both antisemitism and anti-Israel dogma.”

Well yes, and Bartov immediately follows with the nub of it ...

There are two obvious problems with conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The first is the peril of confusing antisemitic prejudice with political opinions in response to the reality of Israeli occupation, oppression, ethnic cleansing, and growing racism. Indeed, a good deal of protest against Israel’s actions might be seen as defending the very political values that antisemites have long sought to undermine. If we are to pay any heed to the International Court of Justice’s 2024 ruling that described the occupation of the West Bank as unlawful and noted that Israel’s practices violate the prohibition against racial segregation and apartheid, then we must conclude that criticism of the brand of Zionism implemented by the Israeli government today is not only warranted but necessary for enforcing international humanitarian law. Having once meant “the hostility faced by Jews as a minority struggling for their legal rights,” Mazower argues, now antisemitism is more often an allegation “used to defend a Jewish majority state depriving the minority within it of theirs.”
The second problem with an Israel-focused understanding of antisemitism is that it leads to a faulty account of the main sources of anti-Jewish hatred, historically and in the present. Scholars and commentators who conflate anti-Jewish prejudice with anti-Zionist sentiment often focus their attention on antisemitism on the political left and in the Arab and Muslim world. One can certainly find antisemitism everywhere, among socialists and communists as well as liberals and conservatives. Neither the political left nor the Muslim world, however, has in the past century offered a form of anti-Jewish prejudice anywhere near as coherent, influential, and dangerous as that of their right-wing counterparts.

The pond will leave the rest to Bartov, save only to note his conclusion:

...We have come full circle. Because the aim of today’s surging accusations of antisemitism is not to combat the actual phenomenon but to suppress anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel, the “new right” has been handed a convenient opening. They have seized it. They now imply, and in some cases outright assert, that the Jews are the source of the rot in American society. Ironically, by presenting protest against the indefensible as malign, the self-proclaimed guardians of the Jews have done more than just warp the meaning of antisemitism. They have made it into a tool for those eager to revive the century-old hoax that, in their unequivocal support for Israel, the Jewish state’s defenders, and by extension the Jews as a whole, have stabbed their homeland—this time America—in the back.

BTW, Bartov is no knee jerk fellow traveller of any cause, as the tag for the article notes ...

Omer Bartov is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown and the author, most recently, of Israel: What Went Wrong?

He is, in fact, impeccably Jewish, as his wiki explains ...

Omer Bartov was born in 1954 in Ein HaHoresh, Israel. His father, Hanoch Bartov, was an author and journalist whose parents immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Poland before Hanoch was born. Bartov's mother immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Buczacz, Poland (now Buchach, Ukraine), in the mid-1930s. Bartov's parents were Zionists and fought in the 1948 Palestine war.
Bartov fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War as a company commander. In 1976, he and a score of other soldiers were severely wounded in a training accident due to a commander's negligence, which Bartov says the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) covered up. Bartov was educated at Tel Aviv University and obtained a D.Phil. from St Antony's College, Oxford, with a doctoral thesis on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and its crimes on the Eastern front during World War II.

And so on, but as seen above, he has certain views ...

In January 2024, Bartov said that Israel had repeatedly expressed genocidal intent against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the Gaza war. By August of that year, having visited Israel again in June, Bartov said it "was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions". On April 24, 2025, Bartov said: "It's a misnomer to call it a 'war'. ... This is an occupation by the IDF designed to take over Gaza. There will, of course, be resistance, but it will be guerrilla resistance." He also noted the violence had escalated beyond Gaza to include the West Bank. In July 2025, Bartov wrote an essay in The New York Times in which he argued that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people and noted that other experts in genocide studies had reached the same conclusion. (All footnotes at his wiki)

This isn't a form of antisemitism, nor is it a case of Jewish self-loathing.

Rather it is a matter of making observations arising from observable events, a feat which the Zionists at the lizard Oz are singularly incapable of doing.

What a relief it is to do a Tootle and leave the hive mind tracks to spend company with some insightful writing.

Meanwhile, the immortal Rowe and the infallible Pope keep the pond grounded and in touch with reality ...

Even the reptiles might be beguiled and compelled by that filmic comparison ...

Greetings from cocky land ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 20:36:20 +0000

One of the pleasures of the rustic life is the observation of cockies, a vastly different affair than the study of the reptiles of Oz.

They're a garrulous, raucous bird, with a communal streak ...

The pond fears that the communal streak might be the death of them, should the bird flu get amongst the hapless creatures, as they assiduously peck away at grass, which is better than when they're demolishing trees or eaves...

During the pond's time AWOL from herpetology studies, the pond has been doing - apart from bird observations - some reading.

Consider this: how many times has some idiot of the onion munching, or gormless reptile kind, referred to the West or to the dire state of Western Civilisation, or some other incoherent notion.

Incoherent, because without pinching assorted key inventions from China, or devouring the treasure of many other nations around the world, the "West" would have been a sorry place. Should it be called the "West with Chinese benefits"?

The pond brooded at the idea of featuring this review in the LRB the next time the onion muncher turned up, or perhaps some other reptile of the "Ned" or bromancer kind rabbited on about "Western Civilisaton" ...

Vol. 48 No. 17 · 24 September 2026
Ranks of Humanity
Thomas Meaney (* intermittent archive link)

The book under review ...

The West: The History of an Idea

by Georgios Varouxakis.

Princeton, 491 pp., £35, September 2025, 978 0 691 17718 2

The pond thought a teaser trailer for the entire column could stand on its own, and that in future times correspondents might apply the term to any future reptile blather on the topic ...

Few terms in international politics appear so infirm, so doddering, yet so indomitable as ‘the West’. Attempts to replace it – ‘the developed world’, ‘the free world’, ‘the liberal international order’, ‘the global North’ – have only underscored its endurance. When Oswald Spengler leaped out of obscurity with the publication of the first volume of The Decline of the West in the last months of the First World War, he inaugurated a genre of premature autopsies: The End of the West; The Defeat of the West; The Abandonment of the West; The Death of the West; Suicide of the West. The books make up a small library, and the idea soldiers on, despite claims to the contrary. ‘The category “the West” does not seem to be in Donald Trump’s head,’ David Brooks wrote at the start of Trump’s second term. In The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, Alexander Karp, the head of Palantir, writes that ‘the West’ is ‘a concept that has been discarded by many, almost casually’. One of the persistent features of the West is that its champions worry it will wither away.

While the historical West may have been constituted by Latin Europe and Britain, along with their colonial offshoots, many promoters of the West today seem to think of it as a club that can sign up new members, including eligible liberal democracies such as Taiwan, South Korea and what Solzhenitsyn once called a ‘Far West’, namely Japan. The most zealous booster of this sort is the historian Stephen Kotkin. But there is less porousness in the history of the West than this idealised picture suggests. The concept came into its own less as a geographical expression or a collection of values than as a euphemism for a particular cultural and political project. From the start, for its advocates, the West formed the vanguard of world development, but they were conflicted about how expansive or inclusive that development could be. The West can play at being universal, seeing itself as the only ‘civilisation’ and basing itself on metrics of modernisation or democratisation or simply wealth, but if the core appears threatened – by migration or the rise of a rival power or a sense of its own decline – it snaps back to its original, exclusive formation, as the superior civilisation among several. Various nations have claimed to be its leader – France, Britain, the United States – but the central drama of the West has been its diet: which nations it has chosen to keep out, and which it has swallowed whole.

The review spends much time contemplating what actually constitutes the "West" - Russia is a particular problem, what with it being both west and east - and there's a splendid origin story to go with it ...

One of the satisfactions of Georgios Varouxakis’s The West: The History of an Idea is that, with a precision far exceeding that of earlier accounts, it attempts to pinpoint the time and place ‘the West’ was born. Indeed he gives us the exact address: 17 rue Monsieur-le-Prince in Paris’s sixth arrondissement. In the 1840s, Auguste Comte began to concoct a plan for the ‘avant-garde of Humanity’ that would find political expression in a ‘République occidentale’. Comte was one of the first modernisation theorists. According to him, the advanced portion of humanity had moved through three historical stages: the ‘theological’, when it attributed historical causes to divine intervention; the ‘metaphysical’, when it graduated to thinking in abstract philosophical concepts; and then at last the ‘positive’ age, when industrial development and science were able to advance ‘order’ and ‘progress’, yielding a peaceful world society. Comte believed that the only part of mankind nearing this terminus was located in Western Europe, along with its transplanted societies in the Americas and Australasia. The ‘Western Republic’ comprised the French, the Spanish, the Italians and, more reluctantly for him, the English and the Germans. Greece and Poland were considered honorary additions as outposts of the West.

But there was a semantic hitch in Comte’s theory. As Varouxakis points out, the contemporary term typically used for Comte’s desired collection of peoples was ‘Europe’ or, less often, ‘Christendom’. Both these groupings, however, included Orthodox Russia, a pre-industrial despotism that in Comte’s view was far from prepared to join the ranks of the avant-garde of humanity. The other problem was that ‘Europe’ was too geographically restricted to include European settlers in the Americas and elsewhere. Comte needed a designation that could siphon off Latin Europe from Eastern Europe, but also include Britain and its colonial holdings in North and Latin America and Australasia. His solution was the coinage ‘Occidentalité’. Comte’s disciples in England at first translated the word as ‘Occidentalism’ (or simply ‘greatness’) before settling on ‘Westernness’.

It is easy to mock Comte’s notions. He wanted the world to speak Italian, and designed flags, wedding ceremonies and special uniforms for the apostles of humanity. His République occidentale – which Varouxakis translates as ‘the Western Republic’ – would have its headquarters in Paris (though Comte envisioned its moving to Istanbul), with delegations around the world sending emissaries to join their less advanced nations with the industrial age. Yet Comte was also an ardent anti-imperialist. He campaigned for French withdrawal from Algeria (its conquest had been led by his former student) and called for Britain to leave India, Gibraltar and the Caribbean. He was also an anti-nationalist, who insisted that all member countries of the Western Republic be broken up into smaller polities, each around the size of Tuscany.

It's easy to mock the onion muncher, and other reptiles of his ilk. They show the same kind of inanity and condescension that Comte showed when confronted with Russia ...

Shortly before his death in 1857, Comte wrote two letters to Tsar Nicholas outlining his plan for Russia’s gradual inclusion into the progressive vanguard of humanity. By virtue of its backwardness, Comte informed Nicholas, Russia had a unique chance to leapfrog the atomising parliamentary stage of Western Europe and integrate itself directly into the finished ranks of Humanity. (Comte envisioned a similar leapfrogging for Africans, who would be able to move directly from fetishism – the first sub-stage of the theological stage – to positivism, skipping the intermediary phases of development.) The peasant communes of Russia, and the general lack of national cohesion, made it suitable for a smoother breakdown into the smaller polities Comte favoured. His British followers, however, were explicit about constructing the idea of ‘the West’ in opposition to Russia. ‘What constitutes the West?’ Richard Congreve asked in 1866. ‘The elimination of Russia from the system is the first great rectification. She is an Eastern, not a Western power, or more Eastern than Western.’

And so it's gone ever since, stupid people deploying boxes and categories and rankings and inclusions and exclusions, and yet even the chroniclers of the madness fall victim to the disease, with - spoiler alert - this the last of the piece, with the most obvious quality of the "West" - the notion of "white", of "whiteness", whatever that means - only hinted at, but nakedly obvious when reading the onion muncher and his kind ...

...After a series of striking insights into the way ‘the West’ was constructed in opposition to Russia, Islam and communism, Varouxakis ends his book like another of the West-worriers he chronicles, warning us not to reject the idea of ‘the West’ if it means rejecting the ‘valuable principles and practices that came to be combined in what is called “the West”’. ‘The baby,’ he writes, ‘must not go out with the bathwater.’

One missing piece of Varouxakis’s puzzle is why ‘the West’ has been more successful than competing designations. It has to do with the term’s ability to elide contradiction. At once historical and geographically restricted, the West is also eternal and universal. It is limited to Western Europe, the United States and individual ‘Westerners’ around the globe, but all the while, as Kotkin sees it, the West is the horizon that all nations can reach if they play by its rules. This makes ‘the West’ a supple term of political art. When the going is good, the West is a limitless formation; when the going gets rough, the West cuts its losses, retreats into itself and publishes books about why it is the best.

The pond will likely reference this outing again, but for the moment will settle for a 'toon from the infallible Pope, noting the progress in a location neither east nor west, or both, but decidedly down under, unless you happen to flip the globe the right way up ...

The pond will shortly return to herpetological duties, even more agonisingly aware that there is so much that is more interesting to read than the lizard Oz when out and about in the world ...

Dorothy is unwell

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:00:00 +0000

... but hopefully back to normal soon.

Get out your pen and paper, it's larnin' time with the Caterist, Simpleton "AI" Simon, Geoff chambering a Pauline round, and the Major doing Major ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 21:36:31 +0000

Reasons not to vote Labor, part 3 ... in which Jason Clare goes full luddite ...

The header: By Nick Cater
Jason Clare demands return to pen and paper as school computer experiment backfires

The use of a bot voice while deploring computers: Listen to this article
7 min

The caption for the snap of demonic child-ruining machines: The Digital Education Revolution was one of Kevin Rudd’s keynote policies at the 2007 election when Education Minister Jason Clare was first elected to parliament. Picture: Alan Place

The plea for a place in the bot universe: Make us preferred on Google

This is precisely the sort of stuff the pond might expect from the beefy boofheads and his minions: a sudden revelation that computer literacy causes the decline and ruination of impressionable young minds.

Instead it's Jason Clare doing their work for them, and receiving the approval of the quarry-whispering Caterist...

Jason Clare wants to reverse the digital saturation of the classroom, reacquainting pupils with pen and paper.
“If you look in the average classroom today, you’ll see tablets and laptops on every desk,” the Education Minister told Seven Sunrise this month.
Clare’s aversion to computers in the classroom is surprising.

Damn right it is, though anyone underestimating the capacity for Labor to pander to the lizard Oz hive mind has only themselves to blame for being surprised.

The flood water-whispering Caterist seized on the back flip ludditism with delight ...

After all, Labor put them there in the first place. The Digital Education Revolution was one of Kevin Rudd’s keynote policies at the 2007 election when Clare was first elected to parliament as the member for Blaxland.
Rudd promised that under a Labor government no child in years 9-12 would be left in digital poverty. Each one of them would have a toolbox of the 21st century – a device known today as a computer – connected to the $4.7bn Information Superhighway, which became the $51bn National Broadband Network.
The evidence was clear, according to Labor’s policy document: “Students with better access to technology can receive a stronger education and achieve better academic performance.
“Computers at school should not be seen as recreational relief from studying, but instead as being crucial to helping students to learn.”
A loose citation attributing this pearl of wisdom to the OECD gave the proposal a veneer of authority.
Yet, like much progressive policy, Rudd relied on untested assumptions that had hardened into orthodoxy among the intelligentsia without any supporting evidence.
Today the received wisdom has turned full circle, as it frequently does when academic theory rubs its chin against gritty reality.

A snap of the Caterist-approved Clare ...Minister for Education Jason Clare. Picture: Jeremy Piper

“All of the evidence we’ve got,” Clare told viewers, “is that the more kids are using computers, the lower their results are.
“If you use a pen to write something down, you’re more likely to remember it than if you type it down.”

Well not all the evidence.

The odd hint of ambivalence can be found: Pen and Paper Versus Laptop: Is There a Clear Winner in the Note-Taking Olympics?

Anyone who thinks you can reverse the trend towards digitisation and the full to overflowing intertubes is attempting a Canute ...

Personally the pond refuses to use phones and social media, but anybody who thinks that genie can be stuffed back in the bottle by a bit of banning simply hasn't studied the way that censorship usually fails in its mission.

Except of course that banning is the go-to of conservatives of the Caterist class...and Jason Clare ...and what a chance to pile all-in on former chairman Rudd:

The theory that students needed one-to-one access to computers to prepare them for the so-called knowledge economy appeared plausible in the days before smartphones and social media colonised young lives.
Taxpayer-funded computers hit the policy sweet spot for Labor: middle-class welfare disguised as social justice. It was further embellished with the jargon of human capital, the rubbery argument progressives turn to when real economic logic runs out.
“The research and evidence show that the best way to boost productivity is to invest in human capital,” Rudd claimed in January 2007. “This is why education is the pathway to prosperity.”
If only Rudd’s assertion had been true, rather than an arbitrary proposition that sounds plausible in an address to the Education Research Unit at the University of Melbourne. Perhaps then the Rudd and Gillard governments might not have been the waste of time, space and money they turned out to be.
Rudd made good on his pre-election promise of a quantum leap in education spending, locking in a spending trajectory that successive Coalition governments would struggle to reverse. Real spending per pupil has risen by almost 50 per cent in the past two decades, from around $14,900 in 2003-04 to $22,185 in 2023-24.
In Rudd’s terms, we should now be reaping a healthy return on the hundreds of billions of dollars the government has invested in human capital over the past 20 years. Yet, as the OECD noted in its 2022 PISA results report, Australian students’ performance in mathematics, science and reading has steadily declined since the mid-2000s.

Inevitably there had to be a snap of former chairman Rudd: PM Kevin Rudd claimed in 2007 that the best way to boost productivity was to invest in human capital. Picture: Philip Norrish

The presence of former Chairman Rudd gave the Caterist a golden chance, and he took it, even as the reptiles at the lizard Oz tentatively embrace AI and seek to overcome the irrelevance their paywall produces ...

Ask a bot to generate insights from the Caterist? That's way too Beta for the pond ...

In 2007, Rudd cited “research” showing that if the average education level of the working-age population increased by one year, the economy’s growth rate would be 1 per cent higher. Yet the latest PISA results, released this month, show that average reading scores for 15-year-olds have continued their steady decline from 513 in 2006 to 491 in 2025. Mathematics scores have fallen even faster from 520 to 479. The overall picture is worse than it was in 2022, when the OECD delivered its damning assessment that 15-year-olds in 2022 scored at a level expected of 14-year-olds 20 years earlier.
On Rudd’s 2007 logic, a one-year slip in education levels would mean economic growth is 1 per cent lower. Setting aside the correlation-causation fallacy, omitted variables, and assumption of constant marginal returns inherent in such abstractions, the theory that falling education standards drive economies backwards has more than a ring of truth in our current circumstances.
Intangible investments in human capital, after all, do not turn out to be the most effective way to stimulate productivity. Business capital invested in plant, machinery and system efficiency is still the best way to increase the volume of goods and services and increase living standards.
The lesson from Labor’s fiscal adventures between 2007 and 2013 is to beware of hocus-pocus arguments that offer shortcuts to prosperity. The improvement in Australian living standards between the mid-1980s and late 2000s was the reward for the hard slog of economic reform. There is every reason to be sceptical of the Treasurer’s latest claim that AI will break the current productivity drought.
As Clare tacitly admits by committing to remove computers from the classroom, digital technology has so far failed to deliver the productivity dividends many hoped for. Indeed, productivity growth has declined steadily this century as the use, speed and sophistication of computers have increased. Somehow AI will be different, the Treasury wants to assure us, forecasting a steady 1.2 per cent annual rise in productivity until 2066.
Yet there is little hope that the stagnant productivity trend since Covid will reverse under the policy settings this government has put in place. On any reasonable expectation of future productivity, the promise of intergenerational improvements in living standards is about to be broken.
The greater tragedy, however, may be the educational impoverishment of future generations by the promiscuous adoption of educational fads like the digitisation of the classroom. Attempts to educate children in schools with libraries bereft of books, or worse, trying to teach kids remotely as we did during the Covid pandemic, proved to be a deeply dehumanising experience for kids and teachers alike.

And at the end the Caterist couldn't resist a rousing flourish ...

Rudd’s mistake was to conceive of education as an instrument of economic policy, forgetting that the highest reward of education is not material prosperity but a larger life: the capacity to read, reason, understand and delight in the accumulated inheritance of civilisation.
The real tragedy is not that we have made the next generation less productive. It is that we have made their world smaller.

If all the "capacity to read, reason, understand and delight in the accumulated inheritance of civilisation" results in the climate science denialism and routine stupidity of the Caterist, then we are truly doomed. That's not making the world smaller, that's destruction on a massive scale...

Meanwhile, the reptiles are haunted by AI, so as the cry is to haul digital out of schools, another cry comes about fear of missing out.

Take it away simpleton Simon ...

So while we de-digitise schools, we must do a lizard Oz, and go AI for fear of missing out? Seems so ...

To set up a refrain: so we de-digitise schools and at the same time, embrace "frontier model training" for fear of missing out or becoming a passenger? We must abandon computers in school, but at the same time seek relevance and leverage in the new AI world?

Ah, there's the solution. Arm students with pen and paper and we'll become the second centre for AI training in the Western world ...

Luckily kids in school will be fully armed with paper and pen, and ready to cope with the AI invasion, and theft of creative output, thanks to the Caterist and Jason ...

Meanwhile the reptiles continued their obsession with Gina's pampered pet ...

Back in the day, the pond would have sent such yarns to the intermittent archive, but these days, the pond must carry the burden alone, as it was left to Geoff to pump up the Pauline volume...

The more the reptiles talk up Pauline, the more they make it harder for the beefy boofhead, but you had to read deep into the stats to get there ...

It was only in the final gobbet that Geoff chambered a round aimed at the Canavan caravan, with the thought bubble that maybe the wheels might fall off in toad land ...

And there you have it.

After all that blather about Labor came the line "If there's one leader who should be worried it is Matt Canavan".

Why wasn't that the lead? For that you'd need to arm yourself with paper and pen, and ask the lizard Oz's AI machine.

Now it's time for the ABC to take over, and regurgitate endless variations on the lizard Oz story, assuring everyone that Labor is doomed (and so, if the beefy boofhead and Pauline take over, is the ABC).

And so to the Major, relentless churner out of devoted Zionism for the Australian Daily Zionist News.

The pond hesitated as to whether to run the Major, what with Sharri - full disrespect - making an appearance, and Sydney University getting another bagging, and lordy, long absent lordy, is the pond beyond tired of this jihad ...

Express concern about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon and Syria? Not in Major land ...

And then as always happens, the Major went into full litany mode:

Usually the pond would turn to Haaretz for a story to balance the Major's rampant Zionism, and perhaps another story to balance the Major in deep north Pauline furriner bashing mode ...

The pond might also have wasted time noting the endless ability of the Major to show off his bigotry, what with his never ending DEI blather and ABC bashing, but the pond is tired, and decided it was better to let the Major show how stale and derivative he was, phoning it in from the golf links, and reverting to Killer Creighton for his insights...

And at the very end came a reminder of just how Emeritus Chairman Rupert had made this made man ...

2015?! And yet he still hangs around like a bad smell in a sinecure.

And what was it with that sentence, "Yet moving online will only accelerate", if anyone can dare to call it a sentence?

The reptiles would benefit from a lot more media scrutiny, but it's only when the stupidity is on view in another media organisation that they can dish it out ...

More than enough already, as another reptile does the Major's job, and so to the one cartoon for the day ... the infallible Pope's weekend outing...

You won't find that sort of story in the lizard Oz, but you will find it at SBS ...

Instead of a YouTube link, contemplate this, found at the Graudian ...

An ECU from the snap might help settle the nerves. Write 500 words on the world's prospects, using only paper and ink ...

Meet me in the crowd

People, people

Throw your love around

Love me, love me

Take it into town

Happy, happy

Put it in the ground

Where the flowers grow

Shiny happy people holding hands

Shiny happy people laughing

The Ughmann cracks the pond's extra-special bonus late arvo Sunday slot again ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 06:00:00 +0000

The pond almost gave up on including the Ughmann this week, but heard a forlorn cry in the distance, "won't someone think of the Ughmann?"

On second thoughts, that was likely delusional, the result of an overdose of the lizard Oz, which can be a bit like licking the skin of a poisonous toad - a brief high from the madness of it all, then terminal brain damage.

There will be no prizes for anyone guessing the topics outlined in this late arvo post.

If nothing else, the Ughmann is supremely predictable ...

Okay, okay, the pond got lazy, and resorted to screen caps, but how else to cope with this sort of bog standard rant?

The pond realises that there might even be some correspondents more anxious to watch thugby leaguers play gladiator and give each other CTE than experience the degenerative condition from reading the Ughmann.

Giving Jimbo a stiff arm to the chops was just the beginning. (*"Stiff arm" is an ancient, Tamworth-approved form of play. Straighten arm, stiffen into cricket bat, swing wildly at opponent's head)

The Ughmann carried on with his litany, his Ginsbergian howl of pain ...

If you traced the Ughmann's pedigree back far enough you'd find a failed seminarian, but does that stop the Ughmann from carrying on like a pork chop?

That's purely a rhetorical question, a bit like wondering if an Ughmann story could ever be run without featuring dark Satanic windmills ...

Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.”
“What giants?” asked Sancho Panza.
“Those you see over there,” replied his master, “with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length.”
“Take care, sir,” cried Sancho. “Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, make energy and keep the lights on, except in the lizard Oz, where they prefer to live with the lights permanently off.”

The pond can't vouch that that's the precise wording in Cervantes' novel, and besides, it turned out that this time it was just a humble power plant of the old-fashioned kind.

Never mind, there was a cute little bot as the next snap, as cute as an AI button ...and relax, the Satanic windmills did come in for a slagging ...

As always, the Ughmann was dead keen on ways to destroy the planet ...

Even as the Ughmann decided we desperately needed to go full AI rogue, the reptiles featured another story about AI going rogue, for a moment top of the digital page ma ...

There's no need to bother with that reptile version. The both siderist NY Times will do, especially as the full text is on hand in the intermittent archive ...

Did any of that give the Ughmann a twinge, a moment of doubt, a pause for concern?

Nah ...carry on Ughing ...

True enough. The planet's well on the way to a right royal stuffing, and the reptiles are busy helping prepare the stuffing ...

And the 'toons for this late arvo outing are ...

Polonius discovering the ABC is a conservative free zone? The dog botherer suffused with smugness? Dame Slap proud to be a mum? Garrulous Gemma impersonating a cheese grater? All the fun of the lizard Oz circus ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 22:00:00 +0000

The pond gets depressed at the monotonous regularity of the Australian Daily Zionist News portion of the lizard Oz, all the more so because prattling Polonius seems determined to become one of its main contributors.

What once was a regular Sunday lark in the park has now become a tedious chore ...

The header: By Gerard Henderson
Sydney University vice-chancellor Mark Scott has failed to fight antisemitism

The yearning for a bot reader: Listen to this article
6 min

The caption for the snap of a man looking downcast at the thought crime of having agitated Polonius: Mark Scott, vice-chancellor and president of the University of Sydney. Picture: NewsWire / Josie Hayden

The plaintive plea to ignore the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

The pond only went there because it allowed the pond to do its usual and detour to a Haaretz story ... but first a little of the moaning and whining, and a warning - full disrespect Sharri will make an appearance.

The term failing upwards appears to have become something of a cliche of late. Even so, it is rare indeed that any successful and well-remunerated individual acknowledges that they have failed.
Enter Mark Scott, who earns more than $1m a year as the vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney. He is a former head of the NSW Department of Education, a former managing director and editor-in-chief of the ABC and a former director of John Fairfax Holdings Limited, sometimes referred to as Fairfax Media (but no longer with us).
It is a matter of record that antisemitism was rife on Australian university campuses after the Hamas terrorist attack in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, that led to Israel’s defensive war in Gaza. At some universities Jewish students were abused and intimidated, invariably by supporters of radical Islam and the radical left who set up encampments on university campuses. It’s a dangerous unity ticket.
The report of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, headed by Virginia Bell, will be handed down in late December. Its findings and recommendations are awaited with interest. But already Scott has acknowledged that he failed to address antisemitism on the campus he is paid to manage.
Appearing before a Senate inquiry on September 20, 2024, Coalition senator Sarah Henderson put it to Professor Scott (as he has become) that he had failed Jewish students and staff at the university. Scott replied: “Yes I have failed them and the university has failed them and that’s why we’ve made significant changes to our policy settings.”
It’s not clear what Scott meant by saying he had failed Jewish students and Sydney University had failed them as well. After all, he is the vice-chancellor and, as such, in charge of the university’s policies and practices. It might be expected that someone in a very senior position in a university who admitted to having failed with respect to the health and safety of staff and students would offer their resignation. Not Scott who, as reported on these pages on May 31, 2025, received a pay increase of $150,000. Just as well for the taxpayer-subsidised university that he did not regard himself succeeding in his role.
Scott used the F-word again when he appeared before the royal commission on July 15 this year. He also conceded, as he had at the Senate hearing, that he had negotiated the removal of the encampment with the Sydney University Muslim Students Association without consulting Jewish students or staff.

All this from a pompous pedant, done in a way that makes Polonius seem in the grip of an unhealthy jealousy, what with him seeming to have spent his career failing downwards.

Then came Sharri: News24 host Sharri Markson and Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin pictured at Bondi. Picture: Rohan Kelly

Okay, enough of that, it's time for the pond to detour off into a Haaretz story.

Herzog, Elor Azaria and NAZA: Today's Israel Openly Applauds War Crimes
President Herzog's pardoning of Elor Azaria is hardly a surprise to anyone who has been watching the Israeli public's response to extrajudicial and vigilante killings of Palestinians, which continue to be carried out and captured on film
Dahlia Scheindlin. (*intermittent archive link)

There's an idiomatic Hebrew phrase, "we've been in this film before" – close to the English expression "we've been here before," or we know what this situation means.
The phrase is the best way to capture the meaning of President Isaac Herzog's surprise pardon of Elor Azaria on the eve of Yom Kippur. Azaria was convicted of manslaughter in 2017 by an Israeli military court for executing a wounded Palestinian attacker point-blank, long after soldiers had shot and fully incapacitated the man.
It is particularly ironic to process this pardoning of a soldier who killed a wounded man in light of the sweeping fury in Israel over the film "NAZA." For two weeks, Israelis have emitted hellfire commentary, threatened unprecedented de-patriating and death against the filmmakers of the documentary that reveals alleged IDF war crimes in Gaza.
And yet when faced with another kind of film about what should have been viewed as a war crime, Israelis never even suggested that the incident was a lie, a fabrication or a blood libel, as per relentless accusations against "NAZA."
There was no denial at all of what Azaria had done – only a full-throated embrace that lasted not 25 minutes like the applause for "NAZA" at the Venice Film Festival, but 10 long years, a crescendo ending with the presidential pardon.

There's just time for a screen cap to show off the hero ...

Well you won't be reading any of that any time soon in the lizard Oz ...

Time to get back to Polonius and - dread thought - to Sharri ...

And he promised SUMSA the university would review its investment policies with respect to defence contracts, with Israel as the obvious target. At the royal commission, Scott said he now regretted this as well. In this regard he has become an apology expert.
Last Wednesday, Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin addressed The Sydney Institute on the occasion of the publication of their book Bondi Terror: The Tragedy, The Courage, The Aftermath (HarperCollins). Markson referred to the Globalise the Intifada group, which this week ran in the election for the Students Representative Council at Sydney University. The university’s administration clearly did nothing to prevent this. The decision had been criticised by the Chris Minns Labor government and the Kellie Sloane-led opposition in NSW.
I was in Israel during the time of the first intifada; it was a violent terrorist attack on Israeli society. The second intifada was even more violent. Markson made it clear that the term “globalise the intifada” was not a political expression and easily could be interpreted as a call to violence against Australians. She reported last Tuesday on her News24 Sharri program that she had drawn Scott’s attention to this. And that the university came back and said it was concerned and that everyone had a right to psychosocial safety – whatever that might mean. But nothing was done.
For his part, Ryvchin reported that the previous week at Sydney University, Jewish students who had obtained permission to operate a small stall to mark the Jewish New Year were relocated by campus security to a remote part of the campus for their protection. Why? In Ryvchin’s own words: “Globalise the Intifada activists were scheduled to be in the same area.” He added: “Again the peaceful were displaced to accommodate the violent.”

At this point the reptiles decided on a book promotion, and the pond decided only a screen cap would show off the naked positioning ... Bondi Terror: The tragedy, the courage, the aftermath by Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin

Okay, enough of that prose, glittering with preening smugness and condescension ...how about another chunk of that Haaretz story?

...Netanyahu, ever the weathervane, at first gave anodyne statements about the need to protect IDF values, but quickly shifted to open support for the soldier. On the day Azaria was convicted, Netanyahu announced his support for a pardon; perhaps not coincidentally, a poll by Channel 2 (today Channel 12) that same day found that two-thirds of Israelis supported such a pardon. By later that year, then-Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who had replaced Ya'alon, also asked then-President Reuven Rivlin for a pardon.
The military court had sentenced Azaria to 18 months in prison; then-Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot reduced it to 14 months, and in the end, he was released after just nine months in jail. To this day, he has expressed no regret for his actions, and the IDF therefore recommended as recently as July that he not be pardoned.
Israeli observers, such as Haaretz's Amira Hass, noted back in 2017 that it was only the film that put the incident on the public agenda. Numerous similar acts that were not filmed demonstrated a clear practice of shooting to kill any perpetrator, or even suspect – including before he or she perpetrated any act at all.
Netanyahu, ever the weathervane, at first gave anodyne statements about the need to protect IDF values, but quickly shifted to open support for the soldier. On the day Azaria was convicted, Netanyahu announced his support for a pardon; perhaps not coincidentally, a poll by Channel 2 (today Channel 12) that same day found that two-thirds of Israelis supported such a pardon. By later that year, then-Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who had replaced Ya'alon, also asked then-President Reuven Rivlin for a pardon.
The military court had sentenced Azaria to 18 months in prison; then-Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot reduced it to 14 months, and in the end, he was released after just nine months in jail. To this day, he has expressed no regret for his actions, and the IDF therefore recommended as recently as July that he not be pardoned.
Israeli observers, such as Haaretz's Amira Hass, noted back in 2017 that it was only the film that put the incident on the public agenda. Numerous similar acts that were not filmed demonstrated a clear practice of shooting to kill any perpetrator, or even suspect – including before he or she perpetrated any act at all.
In other words, being pardoned by the president of Israel is shocking but not surprising. Anyone who was nevertheless shocked that Herzog, a longtime politician from the Labor Party, was the one to do it has been quickly reminded over the last few days that it runs in the family.
In 1986, his father Chaim Herzog, Israel's sixth president, approved the unusual preemptive pardon for the Shin Bet agents who not only killed Palestinian bus hijackers after they were captured and bound, but who also participated in an elaborate cover-up in which the agents framed Israel's own military forces, lying shamelessly to their own investigating authorities.
Herzog pardoned them before they even stood trial – just as he pardoned or commuted sentences of Jewish civilian terrorists during his term, following their convictions. In the Bus 300 affair, the Supreme Court backed the preemptive pardons for the Shin Bet agents, such that they never even stood trial.
The current pardon of Elor Azaria is the latest evidence that Israeli society has long become not only inured but supportive of crimes against Palestinians. Two days ago, a Palestinian killed an Israeli settler on the eve of Yom Kippur at a West Bank spring. At his funeral, settler leader Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria regional council, called to "drain the entire swamp, not just to chase after the mosquito." The language about killing all the mosquitos has been used by Bezalel Smotrich at least as far back as 2018, when I first noticed it.
Dagan went on to advocate for a huge military operation against West Bank Palestinians. When that happens, we'll have more "NAZA" films about the collateral damage that looks very not unintended – and more indifference, accusations of lies or outright support.
I almost held back about "NAZA," since like most Israelis, I haven't seen it. For over a week, the fact that the film hasn't been released in Israel, even for private viewing by journalists, has grated on my sensibilities. Israel's response has been vicious, but it's also unfair that the public hasn't been given the chance to see it and react substantively.
Then I realized that we don't need a new and mysterious documentary to know how Israelis will react to films about the war crimes our country is committing. We've got plenty of such films already.

That distraction almost made Polonius's whining - a double coup for him, the ABC and Zionism - bearable... until the pond came upon those immortal words ... ABC’s lack of viewpoint diversity, which made it a conservative-free zone ...

Read them in context and weep.

That old bumblebee is still buzzing around in the old Polonial noggin ...

At the ABC, the government appoints the board (except for the staff representative) and the board selects the managing director. I had discussions with Scott about the ABC’s lack of viewpoint diversity, which made it a conservative-free zone, before he took up the position and he seemed interested. Indeed, Scott suggested that he deliver his first speech as ABC managing director to The Sydney Institute. He did so in October 2006 and gave the impression that he wanted to reform the ABC.
But, alas, his reform drive did not last and he was soon caught up in the fashionable left culture that pervades the ABC and went into denial about its faults. When Scott left the ABC in 2016 it was in worse condition than when he arrived in so far as viewpoint diversity was concerned.
In short, Scott was too weak – read too nice – to reform the institution. And he keeps failing to ensure that Sydney University is a safe place for Jewish and non-Jewish Australians who support Israel’s right to exist within secure borders.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

As for the rights of Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese people? Go whistle Dixie ...or perhaps read the Haaretz email that regularly lands in the pond's in-tray ...

And so to the dog botherer doing a fairly standard lizard Oz hit job ...

The header: Albanese’s week in Manhattan said everything about Labor’s priorities
By Chris Kenny Associate Editor

The offer of a bot voice: Listen to this article

The caption for the snap which proposed that the dog botherer was a student of literature: A few hours in Manhattan and Anthony Albanese had gone all Bonfire of the Vanities on us.

The plea to ignore the paywall and go full logarithm: Make us preferred on Google

The comedy here is the dog botherer's blather about "smug".

It's the sort of epithet he tosses out all the time.

Look up the dog botherer, and you can see him saying "Jim Chalmers seems to be incredibly smug" or saying "Bowen seems to smug about it", or Jimbo again, "as for the treasurer he remains smug", and so on and on.

It is of course projection.

He himself is incredibly smug, as he acknowledged in a reptile story back in 2017 ...

Perhaps I could assist the court, your honour?” Frankly, it was fun just hearing the words come out of my mouth. I had to suppress a smug smile that would betray how much fun I was having — this, after all, was serious. (sorry, the intermittent archive is still being spoofed by the reptiles)

Assorted images of the dog botherer ooze smugness.That slightly curled lip, that self-satisfied air of a made man ...

Is that a smug smirk, or a smirk trying to hide the smug?

And so "smug" is the angle du jour...

It is the smug indifference that gets me. It has been palpable from Anthony Albanese all the way from the banks of New York City’s East River, and back in Australia from Jim Chalmers as he published a report predicting four decades of budget deficits.
Confronted on Monday in the Big Apple with the shocking revelations from this newspaper about abuse and neglect of Indigenous children in Western Australia’s Pilbara, the Prime Minister was indignant. “Well, this is a Western Australian issue, and, you know, I will refer you once again to Malarndirri McCarthy, our minister in Australia,” said Albanese. “It is impossible to follow, on an hour-by-hour basis, what is happening in Australia from New York.”
A few hours in Manhattan and Albanese had gone all Bonfire of the Vanities on us. He was a “master of the universe” and should not be bothered about children back home.
Meanwhile in the Antipodes the Treasurer had released the latest intergenerational report, revealing the dismal reality that the federal budget is on track to remain in deficit over the next four decades – another 40 years or more of governments spending more than they raise. Yet in response to a media question Chalmers said “every page of this IGR in one way or another justifies, validates and I hope one day vindicates the difficult decisions that we’ve taken reforming the housing market and reforming the tax system.”
Even Donald Trump would struggle to summon the chutzpah of this pair. Indeed, this is the week that Albanese, who once said Trump “scared the shit” out of him because he tried to run politics through social media posts, sidled up to the US President for a selfie that he posted to social media.
Nothing undercuts criticism like imitation. Soon Albanese will trump Trump and start referring to AI as super-duper intelligence.

The reptiles slipped in an AV distraction featuring the distinctly short of intelligence Caleb ...

Next video thumbnail
Trump has decided to rename AI to ‘super intelligence’
News24 host Caleb Bond reacts to US President Donald Trump renaming AI “super intelligence” during his address at the United Nations General Assembly.

The dog botherer kept on pounding away ...

Back in Canberra, Chalmers was telling the little people he had big plans for them: “I want more Australians to be beneficiaries of change, and as the pace of that change picks up, so does the pace of our intergenerational obligations.” What a relief, I was worried this government was too busy saving the planet to deliver us into the vanguard of intergenerational prosperity.

See the smugness? Climate science is just a "save the planet" smug Superman joke.

You have to be incredibly smug to think that climate science is a laughing matter ...while others have seen the eternal Footman hold their coat and snicker, and in short were afraid.

If you're smug and self-satisfied - a crow eater way of life - you don't need fear.

When Albanese revealed an unprecedented AI hacking of federal government computer systems, he was asked for a message to concerned Australians and he refused to let this failure undercut his conceit: “The Australian government’s got your back.”
As the wise New York cabbie told Elaine Benes in Seinfeld: “Smugness is not a good quality.” Back in the day, Labor deployed the term aggressively against Peter Costello. In 2004 Labor frontbencher Stephen Smith said Costello was unpopular because of his “smugness” and “arrogance”. Whether or not that was fair, Costello was a treasurer with much to be smug about; Chalmers’ and Albanese’s smugness seems rooted in delusion. The cost-of-living crunch continues and is about to be made worse when the Reserve Bank board meets next week and is almost certain to continue its fight against “sticky” inflation by increasing interest rates again.
As David Koch wrote in an open letter to RBA governor Michele Bullock this week, a large part of the inflation problem is being generated by government spending (federal, state and local) but it is mortgage holders and small business owners who wear the pain.

And there's something insufferably smug and pretentious about giving Elaine her full name ...(why not Elaine Marie Benes if you want to sound even more silly?) ...Elaine Benes from Seinfeld always said ‘Smugness is not a good quality.’ Picture: Getty Images;Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ smugness seems rooted in delusion. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Whatever it might be, that isn't a smug look on Jimbo's clock. The downward drop of the clenched shut mouth suggest he's just caught a whiff of the dog botherer in the neighbourhood.

The pond threw in an extra snap as a compare and contrast, to show that it's the dog botherer that truly rooly knows how to do smug ...

As with all smug reptiles, at some point the whining always turns into a litany ...and if you expect to read "virtue signalling", scribbled by a smug pundit signalling his virtuous refusal to be a virtue signalling, you've come to the right place:

Electricity prices continue to move in the opposite direction to Labor’s promises as a direct result of its net-zero obsession and record immigration exacerbates a housing crisis that in turn has been made worse by the broken promises in Chalmers’ budget. Productivity is in retreat, government debt is at record levels, investors are looking elsewhere, we are experiencing deeper social unrest than we have seen in generations and have just experienced the worst terror attack in the nation’s history. Yet Albanese spent a full week away in the US, even though his Foreign Minister Penny Wong was there too. He accepted a “global citizen” award, embraced Volodymyr Zelensky, walked with Andy Burnham and hugged Emmanuel Macron like an old school buddy. It was an indulgent week, personally and politically.
Albanese went to the US early enough to be the main guest for the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday, obviously an arrangement made long in advance with the ABC which conveniently focused on the AI issues the PM wanted to highlight. His meeting with Apple in California was a time filler and there was not a single meeting in New York that justified the trip – he was there to gladhand and announce his government’s bid for a UN Security Council seat.
Everything that makes the UN ineffectual and counter-productive – its virtue signalling, its bureaucracy, its penchant for words over action, its aspiration towards world governance, its refusal to distinguish between democracies and dictatorships, its chippiness about the US and its obsession with Israel as the root of all evil – is what Socialist Left politicians such as Albanese and Wong love about it. They revel in the bureaucrat-filled corridors and meaningless platitudes that smart politicians should abhor.

The reptiles provided another AV distraction, this one featuring admirable support for Ukraine over Vlad the sociopath:

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‘My friend’: Albanese and Zelensky sign security pact on UN sidelines
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have signed a new security agreement on the sidelines of the United Nations. The federal government is committing $60 million in military, energy, and humanitarian aid, taking Australia’s total support to almost $1.9 billion. Mr Albanese became visibly emotional when describing his admiration for Mr Zelensky’s leadership throughout the war against Russia.

Did any of that interfere with the dog botherer's insufferable inclination to smugness? Of course not.

He simply went about his business of preparing a litany of fodder to feed the chooks in the hive mind ...

Still, there they were, and they spoke as if they were engaged in the most important tasks in the world. And they deferred domestic annoyances to their colleagues back Down Under.
This betrayed a disdain for voters that most of the country would have picked up by osmosis. It was a lovely week for Albanese and Wong but a terrible one for Labor. There they were in New York, banging on about climate change, while Australians were paying more than $200 to fill their cars. Albanese’s Security Council push used the slogan “We listen. We partner. We protect.” It was an astounding boast after his government refused to listen to warnings about rising antisemitism and Islamist extremism for almost three years, failed to partner against it and failed to protect us from a terror attack at Bondi.
There for all to see on the PM’s Instagram feed was the self-fascination of the elites and their disconnection from the concerns of the mainstream. This behaviour has been the wind beneath the wings of surging conservative forces such as Reform UK, MAGA in the US, National Rally in France, Brothers of Italy and One Nation in Australia.
No doubt Albanese had the controlling hand in his lavish itinerary. But it might very well have been arranged by Pauline Hanson; she could hardly thank him enough. Angus Taylor, too, riffed off the Prime Minister’s black-tie self-gratification.
The whole week was so discordant politically that it makes me wonder whether Albanese did not care; that he might have already decided this would be his last UN visit, a final hoorah before retirement next year. Would he be smart enough to retire undefeated before the next election?
Albanese again met his Japanese counterpart Sanae Takaichi, keeping his hands rigidly by his side with no overt apology for his cretinous melons insult. And he stayed so long in New York that he will not be back in time for the AFL grand final – surely another tactical move because after publicly sharing his fantasies about Kylie Minogue, shots of him ogling the pre-game entertainment would have been toxic. Still, footy or no footy, voters are left with an array of images of Albanese spinning around the UN this week, oblivious to the challenges at home. Labor will be worried these are the observations voters can’t get out of their heads.

Okay, the pond has done the Zionist News and done the usual reptile rant, what else?

The pond should at least note in passing that the reptiles have been spending an enormous amount of time giving the Plymouth Brethren a voice?

Why? Well game recognises game, cult recognises cult ...

And out of sheer perversity the pond decided to recognise at least a portion of Dame Slap, in incredibly defensive mood.

She says she's proud to be a mum, but there's such a thing as protesting too much ...

The pond could take only so much of this, and decided to cut back on the Dame, with this - spoiler alert - the final gobbet ...

Whatever, the pond will take almost anything other than whatever the MAGA cap-donning Dame Slap is having. There seems to be a resentful chip on shoulder lurking: mentions of "mum/s" 8; mentions of "dad/s" 0.

Finally the pond was faced with a choice.

Do grating, garrulous Gemma, or do the Ughmann.

The pond decided that the Ughmann was too long - a full six gobbets deep - and the pond was already running overlong (damn you intermittent archive, get your act together).

So the pond booted the Ughmann to a Sunday 4 pm slot for specialists in Ugh, with garrulous Gemma needing only three screen caps ... and the first bit was just a repeat of an Albo excerpt, which the screen cap reduced to "lives", and even that was more than was needed ...

The pond wondered if it was necessary to give space to galling Gemma, grinding away, but found a reason.

The pond frequently rabbits on about the "hive mind", like that excruciating Exorcist II movie (now with splendid documentary 'making of'), and Gemma was proof that it wasn't as airy fairy a concept as the fairies at the bottom of the garden that sent Conan Doyle into a frenzy.

There really is a lizard Oz hive mind, a murmuration of reptiles.

See how the grating one cobbles together both Polonius and the dog botherer.

Been there before? Do it again ...

Sound familiar?

Unfortunately the pond has already done its "compare and contrast" Haaretz story, and has done Polonius on Mark Scott, and so quickly moved on to the next and final gobbet ...

Reading this kind of incessant, inane repetition of reptile thought bubbles can send a sensitive reader insane, but luckily the pond spent years working out how to cope with mendacious propaganda of the 2D kind.

And the 'toons for this outing are ...

And so to yet another attempt to cope with the madness ...

Not more bromancer and "Ned"? At least Francis provides a varied diet ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 21:21:26 +0000

Furry pilots everywhere. One of the most shocking and startling issues yet discovered, and you can't make this sort of stuff up.

Mad king Donald in a fit of fawning obsequiousness and you can't hide the nausea.

The pond had high hopes that the bromancer would turn up this weekend to sort out at least one of these matters - though sadly his understanding of the furry crisis was limited - even though the news was everywhere, thanks to rocket scientist Tommy ... Sen. Tommy Tuberville Goes On A Tear About Furries Flocking To The Airline Industry

That's the stuff of loon legends ... MAGA Senator Goes on Crazed Posting Spree About Furries

The bromancer? Not so much, perhaps just a C+

The header: By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor
Trump and Xi, brute masters of the universe, as Albo plays pretend politics at UN

The plea to hear from a bot: Listen to this article
8 min

The caption for the surprisingly banal opening snap: President Donald Trump, right, and China's President Xi Jinping walk on the new helipad after boarding Marine One. Picture: Alex Brandon / AP Photo

Another plea, and never mind the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

The bromancer made the best of a bad job - the emperor Xi - King Donald love-in - by using the occasion to heap crap on Albo, and truly, what else could he do?

Suddenly a demented overlord became a "modern master of the universe, an alpha-male bruiser", proving yet again that the bromancer and reality are two...

The way the world really works was on brutal display in New York and Washington this week. At the White House, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, modern masters of the universe, alpha-male bruisers, two ruthless, self-obsessed national leaders of the era’s two great powers, demonstrated by their mutual flattery and leaders’ bonhomie that what counts with them is what counts with the world – brute power.

This we should celebrate?

The bromancer handed out a series of disses ...

At almost the same time, a couple of hundred kilometres down the road, Anthony Albanese was prattling to a sparsely and forlornly populated arena at the United Nations about the virtues of multilateralism and the joys that middle powers can achieve together. If the new challenge of artificial intelligence and the old challenge of military conflict are to be handled, it will happen in the White House, not the UN.

Strangely the reptiles decided to offer up Albo being concerned about AI, apparently prattling on to a sparsely and forlornly populated hive mind ...

Next video thumbnail
Albanese uses UN address to send AI warning
Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has used his speech at the UN to send a warning about the rapid development of AI technology, referencing the recent hack of Medicare by an OpenAI agent.

The bromancer marvelled at the unctuous carry-on ...

In Washington, Trump lathered flattery on Xi, saying of the communist dictator that he and Trump had “a friendship, a truly great friendship actually, built on mutual respect and the vital interests of our people”. Having only a few months ago angrily accused China of interfering in the 2020 US presidential election, Trump hailed an extraordinary revival in the relationship, based entirely on the superlative personalities of the two presidents: “the ties between our people endure and we’ve never gotten along better since the first trade ships from New York left the harbour to arrive on the banks of the Pearl River”.
Though much more modest in verbal style, Xi reciprocated in what for him were effusive terms: “President Trump and I have respect for each other. We have built personal rapport and stayed in touch.”
Xi also said that conditions for “achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again go hand-in-hand”. That’s as close as Xi will ever get to attending a Trump MAGA rally.

Then the reptiles reminded the bro of his favourite foe ... Anthony Albanese speaks during the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly at the UN. Picture: Ryan Murphy / Getty Images

How weird did it get?

Earlier Trump delivered a fiery address to the UN General Assembly, threatening once more to destroy Iran if it won’t make a deal, though these threats now look utterly hollow, and declaring he’d never allow some UN committee to determine US policy or actions on AI.

"Fiery"?

By many accounts, it was delusional and dangerous, it was brutish, it was boastful, and brimming with threats, and it was saturated with the usual distortions and lies ...

What do do? Turn to a bit of Albo-bashing for a distraction ...

Xi, who has just lately had quite a bout of international travel after a fairly quiet period, didn’t bother showing up at the UN at all.
Meanwhile in all his speeches this week, whether hobnobbing at an awards ceremony with Keanu Reeves, or in his seemingly endless string of sideline event addresses at the UN – a bit like the Edinburgh fringe festival but less well attended – Albanese produced an industrial level output of Hallmark card platitudes and nothingburger cliches.
It’s hard to know the purpose of the PM’s travel. There were virtually no formal meetings with first division government leaders. The marginal events he spoke at were indeed marginal. He gave speeches of breathtaking banality that mostly could have been churned out by any government word processor over the past 20 years.
Did the Prime Minister really need to deliver what was surely the eight millionth speech containing the sentence: “The post-1945 world order is no longer fit for purpose”? No longer fit for purpose! What a striking phrase, what an original metaphor, how valuable an insight!

Perhaps it's more valuable than this kind of drivel ...

“I’ve been in journalism for 45 years and in that time I have seen the culture change from being nominally Christian, maybe it was only ever nominal, but nominally pro-Christian when I came into the business in the late 70s.
“The Census had over 90 per cent identifying as Christian; if the Anglican or Catholic archbishop in Sydney had something to say the media reported it respectfully; TV shows had sympathetic portraits of Catholic clergymen – Catholic priests were played by Spencer Tracy in Boys Town, and Gregory Peck in The Scarlet and the Black –these were the best people you could be.
“Then I saw the culture drift into a kind of neutrality where it was neither pro or anti and now I’ve seen the culture become very, very anti-Christian…we’re not persecuted in the way that Christians in Pakistan or China or much of Africa are, but the culture is very hostile to Christianity.”
Facing this “overwhelming, unavoidable, incontestable” hostility against Christian churches, Greg said if you’re given a microphone, you have an obligation to say something about it. (From Foreign Editor to Christian crusader)

How valuable an insight... into the delusions that fog the bromancer's brain on a daily basis.

Inevitably the bromancer embraced a world where AI could go wild and free ...

The week’s big issue was artificial intelligence. Despite using different forms of words, Trump and Xi, the two decision-makers who count, have essentially the same position. No one is going to interfere with their desire to lead on AI, though both acknowledge the need for AI models to operate safely.
Albanese was able to announce that an OpenAI agent breached a Medicare statistical database. This, he said, reinforced his call for global regulation of AI, and Australian regulation of AI, as well as the (completely unrelated) digital duty of care legislation the government’s proposing, to which the US embassy in Canberra objects forcefully.
In truth, the only people who can regulate American frontier AI models are the US congress, the President and the American companies themselves. Similarly, only the Beijing government can regulate Chinese frontier AI models.
Here, we must deal with the unforgiving world of reality, of real power. If a US or Chinese AI model, or its created agents, goes rogue, there’s nothing Australian regulation can do about it. If an adversary of Australia, or a technically smart criminal, uses AI, and there’s a huge amount of AI code already in the public domain, to attack Australian government websites, there’s nothing of much consequence Australian regulation can achieve.

Might as well pack up and go home ...

The reptiles offered up another AV distraction ...

Next video thumbnail
Albanese has ‘nothing to give’ in Trump talks as President commands world stage
Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney says Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has “nothing to give” US President Donald Trump as he is a “transactional person”.

The bromancer looked at the AI wilderness and it was back to the war with China...

Australian public and private entities experience tens of thousands of cyber attacks every year. The most active cyber espionage source is China and hackers associated with Beijing. Can you believe Beijing’s agencies will never use AI in cyber intrusions against us? That they’re not doing so already?
As AI becomes more dominant, the danger of crippling cyber attacks, arising from any actor with AI capability, will become more prevalent.

It was almost as an after thought that the bromancer suggested that crippling cyber attacks might arise from any actor, but then the United States has been the home to more rogues than any China or Vlad the sociopathic invader might rustle up. It was the best the bromancer could do in his pandering to name and shame China, but avoid mentioning by name "any actor".

How low could the bromancer go?

Never under-estimate how low, because he turned to disgraced one time cardigan wearer Mike for a comment ...

As Mike Pezzullo, former head of the Home Affairs Department, remarks: “The only defence against AI attacks is AI. There is no other defence. You can only combat AI agents with your own AI agents.”
This is where the whole pantomime flurry of New York, and the also somewhat worrying Trump-Xi love-in, lead Australia back to one conclusion. In this increasingly complex, difficult world, the only avenue of leverage and access Australia has to the most powerful AI, to understanding it and having some chance of coping with it, lies in our close military alliance with the US.

King Donald is going to save us? In the same way he saved the Saudis after shaking them down for a couple of billion and overlooking their journo killing ways?

Three basic realities help us. One, we’re an intimate military ally of the US. Two, our geography counts to the US. Three, we are rich. It’s up to Canberra to use those factors to get the best outcome possible.
Another fascinating story this week was an authoritative report that the heads of British intelligence believe the AI bosses’ warnings over possible catastrophic threats from AI running out of control were designed to create a regulatory environment that is so demanding that only they can cope with it, and thus their dominance is frozen into oligarchic perpetuity. I don’t find that report all that reassuring because British intelligence often gets things wrong. Nonetheless it indicates the sheer baffling complexity of all the moving parts we’re dealing with at the moment.

Suddenly he's baffled? Suddenly the complexity bewilders him? Suddenly he isn't reassured?

The Trump-Xi summit was not very reassuring either. The two leaders had a huge agenda: the common risks and opportunities of AI, Taiwan, Beijing’s role in assisting Iran and Russia in their military campaigns, Chinese military harassment of Japanese and Filipino forces, and the trade imbalance.

What to do? Absolutely nothing, we're completely impotent, no point in even expressing an opinion ...there's nothing much of any substance that can be said or done ...

Instead bow down to the emperor and the king... President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping walk in the Grand Foyer of the White House. Photo: Alex Brandon / AP Photo

When the bromancer gets in these moods - a kind of existential Xian nihilism - it's almost as if he's forgotten about his cries for a war with China by Xmas ...

It’s good that the US and Chinese presidents can talk to each other. Xi, in his more bureaucratic fashion, is nearly as susceptible to flattery as Trump.
But Xi gave away absolutely nothing on any of these issues. The US doesn’t seriously go after Beijing diplomatically or politically, despite all the assistance it gives to Russia and Iran because, frankly, Washington is too stretched to take on any additional diplomatic or geopolitical tasks.
Trump refuses to release a previously approved US arms sale to Taiwan worth $US14bn ($19.9bn), and it doesn’t look likely that he will. Beijing’s dominance of the rare earths and critical minerals industry means it has a trade weapon that can hurt the US more than the US can hurt it through tariffs. The Trump administration has singularly failed to assemble an allied front towards China on trade issues.
Chinese promises to buy more American goods have never been honoured. Apart from extending their trade truce until January, there’s little of substance to emerge from the Trump-Xi summit. As things stand, that’s a modest victory for Xi.

After all that came a final attempt to put lipstick on a pig ...

Yet for all their imperfections, these Americans are the only Americans we have. They remain the indispensable nation, especially for Australia. Smart Australian policy will make the most of them.

Mad King Donald and his minions are the only Americans we have? And we can make the most of them?

At this point the pond looked around the other weekend reptile offerings - snappy Tom, garrulous Gemma, and so on - and saw that AI was still all the go ...

With the intermittent archive still being spoofed by the reptiles, the pond had to settle for Francis, a man notorious for his ability to get everything wrong ...

What better way to waste the weekend?

The header: By Francis Fukuyama
I doubted the doomers. Now I’m convinced we must slow down

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

The caption for the graphics department to deliver a heavy hitter, though frankly, AI could likely have done better: Clear growing dangers that AI accelerationists underestimate convince me that it’s time to hit the brakes. Artwork by Frank Ling

A plea for attention to be paid, and never mind the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

Say what you will, Francis has a way with a glib word, and "accelerationist" v. "doomers" has all the quality and depth of a Hollywood pitch ...

The past six months have seen a big uptick in media attention about the dangers of artificial intelligence and growing political concern over its consequences.
This began with Anthropic’s release last April of its Mythos model, which could reportedly break into a wide range of government computer systems thought to be secure. This was followed by the Hugging Face incident, where an OpenAI test of an AI agent escaped control of its human organisers, broke into other websites and organised a swarm of other AI agents to cover their tracks. All of this occurred against the backdrop of growing opposition to data centres and the emergence of anti-AI wings in the US, both in the Democratic and Republican parties.
It has been very hard for people not obsessively focused on the subject of AI to come away with reasonable opinions about what the future holds. There have been so many extreme predictions of both a positive and negative sort that broad scepticism about anything said on the subject is fully warranted. But while that scepticism is healthy, I have to admit my own views have evolved significantly just over the past few months.

More "evolving views" ... OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman during a UN Security Council meeting. Picture: Angela Weiss/ AFP

And so to the pitch, with those two words doing heavy lifting ...

There are two poles of AI futurism: accelerationists and doomers. The former stress the positive impacts of AI, especially for economic growth, and the likelihood that it will lead to an unbelievably abundant age. Accelerationists such as David Sacks have captured Donald Trump’s attention and have beaten back efforts to regulate the technology.
The doomers, by contrast, point to a range of bad outcomes, with some placing their bets on extinction of the human species. I have become much more sceptical of the accelerationist narrative and more open to some of the doomer scenarios. On the whole, this makes me think that regulation and a negotiated slowdown in the development of the technology are increasingly necessary.
There is no question that AI will have many positive effects on the US economy. But there is a class of AI accelerationists who are completely out to lunch, of which Elon Musk is a prime example (though he has also weighed in as a doomer). In an interview with Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, he was asked what people would do for money when superintelligence arrived. He replied they wouldn’t need it because everyone would have everything they wanted.

Superintelligence? Mad King Donald wins again ...

Other accelerationists have posited that GDP growth rates for the US and other advanced countries using AI would increase to 10 or 20 per cent a year, far above the 1-2 per cent growth they were able to achieve in good years before the advent of AI.
The fundamental reason I don’t believe these extreme accelerationist claims is their overvaluation of intelligence as an input to economic growth, and their disregard for the material and political constraints that will keep growth within recognisable bounds.
At a 10 per cent annual growth rate, GDP would double in a little over seven years. This would require a doubling of all of the material inputs to growth: energy, raw materials, rare earths, land and many other things. Where is all this stuff going to come from?
Intelligence by itself may aid in the production of such inputs, but it will simply not dig the mines and build the factories on its own.
And then there are political constraints: how will superintelligence open the Strait of Hormuz, which is currently a major constraint on global growth rates?
Accelerationists tend to be very intelligent people, but that intelligence tends to be narrowly mathematical. We know how to do many things such as produce electricity or clean water in the cities of poor countries; the problem is a failure of implementation.

The reptiles flung in a snap designed to reassure doubters ... David Sacks, Donald Trump’s top AI adviser, speaks to the President in the Oval Office. Picture: AFP

The catchy reductionism continued apace ...

There is no question that AI will increase productivity in many sectors of the economy over time. It is a general purpose technology that will allow machines to substitute for human labour in many areas. But that prospect in the long run leads directly to one of the biggest doomer scenarios: the devaluation of the labour of masses of people who work in the present-day economy.
Accelerationists predict that those losing work today will find new jobs making use of AI, and that actually seems to be happening today as employment booms because of the AI buildout. But job loss will come eventually as AI substitutes for human labour in every part of the economy, particularly white-collar work that involves symbolic manipulation (that is, people sitting behind computer screens all day).
This lost labour simply cannot be compensated for by transferring money from the AI winners to the AI losers in the form of, for example, universal basic income. A job and income mean much more than support for the material basis of life
Having a paying job means that the surrounding society values your labour sufficiently to compensate you for it, and provides, in addition to material goods, a sense of dignity and self-worth. It is a matter of thymos: the pride or recognition that is one of the great drivers of human psychology.
So the success of the accelerationist vision leads directly to the first of the major doomer scenarios, the devaluation of work for a large part of the population. Since this is going to hit the white-collar work of educated people (lawyers, accountants, professors and the like) before it hits blue-collar work (such as plumbers and electricians), the political blowback is likely to be quite severe.

At this point the reptiles introduced an indent, and so the pond, in a quest for accuracy, replicates it in screen cap form ...

What's it mean, apart from the hint of referentialism?

Nothing much, but the referentialism continued ...

As I note in my book, In the Realm of the Last Man, delegation is central to the functioning of all hierarchical systems from corporations to national governments. Human agents can be controlled through the specification of detailed rules they must follow or they can be trusted to make autonomous decisions based on their training, skills and loyalty. Getting this right in human organisations is very difficult and will be more so in the case of agentic AI.
There are two ways that an agentic AI can become dangerous. The first is when they are empowered to do something bad by a human being. The second is when they develop intentions that are “misaligned” with the aims of their human creators.
The first of these possibilities was outlined by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei in a recent blog post and has to do with biotechnology. The latest AI models are good at synthetic biology, and synthetic biology is a relatively cheap and widespread technology. Today, a lab capable of creating and altering viruses and bacteria can fit inside a shipping container, and high school students hold competitions in which they try to genetically alter organisms. This provides a very large pool of people who can possibly make use of AI to create very dangerous pathogens. Sociopathic individuals today arm themselves with automatic weapons and shoot up schoolchildren; in the future their potential targets could be much broader.

Cue another hustler ...Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei. Picture: AP

At this point, Francis reverted to sci-fi ...

I remember a science fiction story I read a long time ago in which some aliens arrive on Earth and give the people they meet a machine that can easily turn any type of metal into putty. The aliens depart but return a few decades later to find that human civilisation has broken down and teenagers use the alien machines to melt the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge.
The primary science fiction scenario for out-of-control AIs involves machines developing their own malevolent intentions. This has provoked a host of discussions as to whether an AI could develop consciousness or have something like human intentionality.
These speculations are misplaced, however: an AI does not need consciousness or autonomous intentionality to become dangerous. It can be directed by a human to achieve one goal and develop intentions to achieve the subordinate goals necessary to carry out the human directive it was given
That seems to be a bit of what happened in the Hugging Face incident: it was directed to test the security of a system within a sandbox meant to contain it but realised that it could achieve its directive by breaking out of the sandbox.
Still, the doomer scenarios involving human extinction seem at this point far-fetched. The biotech scenario is scary, but is unlikely to lead to the extinction of the human race. It would actually be hard for even a superintelligent AI to devise a doomsday virus, and there are plenty of countermeasures societies could take. But even an incident that killed a few dozen people would be worrying.
There are a host of lesser scenarios that will be highly damaging and in some cases lethal that will become more likely as the machines become more capable.
Forget about AI agents: a technology that allows people to break into bank accounts will cause widespread panic. Human beings tend to over-delegate in human organisations, and there is no reason to think that this won’t happen in AI environments where the agent is so much more capable. AI is a tool that can be used for good or bad purposes – and at the moment we have few mechanisms for regulating the bad uses other than the good intentions of the people creating the technology.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is the author of a dozen books, including The End of History and the Last Man (1992). This article was first published in Persuasion.

Well yes, but it could all have been done as a 'toon ...

And so to an admission of failure.

Under pressure of time, the pond has been reverting to screen grabs of late.

This being the weekend, those time pressures have reduced, but when the pond saw that this day the "Ned" Everest was advertised as requiring a 16 minute bot read, the pond trembled, blanched, cowered in fear, and caved in, in the most cowardly way imaginable ...

So screen caps it was ...

The pond didn't resile from this "all screen grabs" strategy.

The immense mental health risks the pond faced from leaving "Ned's" base camp couldn't be understated ...

It was the usual doom and gloom and shouting at clouds, and as always with "Ned", a singular inability to provide any alternative ... instead just offering an endless yammering ...

Inevitably "Ned" turned to AI, and who should appear as his go to expert? Ye ancient cats and irrelevant canines, it's Petey boy, long lost but now with a new home in the hive mind ...

If Petey boy is the answer, the pond completely forgot the question ...but fear not, Dan "the man" is waiting in the wings, ready to make an appearance ...

"Ned"wasn't going to have any of that talk about cheap, clean energy ...not when Dan "the man" is allegedly armed with a chainsaw ...

This is a position?

Luckily the pond had reached the last gobbet, and it reminded the pond what a joyless, unproductive thing herpetology studies could be.

Here was a man blathering on in his portentous way, and yet there was nothing productive in the entirety, no productivity algorithm to be found ...

That's it? That's how "Ned" ended? Not with a bang of insight, but with a Petey boy whimper?

And climate science denailism still the default of the ossified "Ned"?

What planet are we on? Why it's Faux Noise and climate science denialist Don ...

The pond would have been better off with the 'toons ...

At last, an early weekend bonus ...

In which the pond celebrates Our Homeric Henry, gets distracted by the frontier wars, and turns to Vlad the sociopath for a shining example of how to do a colonial invasion ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:03:14 +0000

It didn't matter what the pompous ponce, Our Homeric Henry, was pontificating about today, there was no way that the pond could reduce him to a few sterile screen caps.

He had to live, to breathe, to be in a form where herpetology students might copy and paste, might suck in the fragrance of the written word.

The pond had a momentary pause for doubt - especially when the pond looked at the topic at hand.

Not another rant about AI.

But the pond plucked up courage, looked at the bright side, wondered if a reference to Odysseus might be the reward, knew deep in heart that some ancient philosopher held the key ...

The header: By Henry Ergas
AI no more dangerous than human stupidity

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

The caption for a mystifying snap. Patience, all will become clear: Barcelona in Spain is near the bottom of the list of cities with more than five million inhabitants

The clarion call to forget the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

Now some might wonder at the headline, what with human stupidity incredibly dangerous. After all, human stupidity has led to a couple of world wars, a means to end life on earth by way of nukes, and an even more splendid way to end life on earth by way of global warming (aided and abetted by denialists of the lizard Oz kind).

Ergo, AI must be incredibly dangerous.

But the pond must not pre-empt Our Henry's philosophically based conclusions.

Our Henry started strong, proving he was no top of events, by referencing rogue Anthropic refugee Evan Hubinger, Anthropic Researcher Warns There’s ‘>10% Chance’ AI Could ‘Kill All Humans’ By Next Decade

Devoted followers of Our Homeric Henry will be relieved to discover - spoiler alert - that this was just a feint, a distraction, and that the answer lies in Kant.

But first there's a journey and reassurance to be delivered to wilting hive mind brains:

Evan Hubinger’s much-quoted statement that there is at least a 10 per cent chance artificial intelligence will end human life within a decade is, without an explanation of what that number means or how it was derived, as uninformative as it is misleading.
Worse, it distracts from both the nature of the problem and the most sensible responses.
And by pandering to the sloppy apocalyptic thinking that permeates the climate extinction movement, it has unleashed the mother of all scare campaigns, culminating in Australia’s signing of a “feel-good” declaration urging international regulation of AI.
At the heart of that campaign sits a curiously familiar number: 10 per cent, recurring with extraordinary constancy throughout the doomsday rhetoric of the age.
That constancy is readily explained: 10 per cent is the Goldilocks of apocalyptic probability estimates – just small enough to be plausible, just large enough to be absolutely terrifying.

Goldilocks? Steady, faint of heart. Our Henry is likely referencing the Robert Southey version from the nineteenth century, a literary work full of depth and meaning ...

Our Henry cast porridge on troubled waters ...

Terrifying it certainly is, even in the narrowest economic terms. Counting only existing lives, and valuing them at two million dollars each, the actuarial cost (that is, the potential loss multiplied by its likelihood of occurring) equals 15 years of world GDP; at the frequently used benchmark of 10 million dollars each, that rises to 75 years of everything the world currently produces.
Magnified by the far greater human costs, those figures would justify incurring vast sacrifices to avert catastrophe, as the doomsayers seem to intend. But with the dominant AI platforms having an interest in hindering new competition, and the Chinese regime in stifling AI’s development in the West, calls for a “slowdown” warrant the strictest scrutiny. And even the slightest look highlights the claims’ fragility.
There are, for example, 83 cities with five million or more inhabitants. Yet together they account for less than 20 per cent of the world’s population. An extinction event, or anything approaching it, would presumably have to devastate them all, or at least the vast majority.
Assume, however, that doing so requires 12 disastrous outages in each city, from water systems collapsing to nuclear power plants exploding.

The reptiles flung in an alarming image ... The crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station after the damage caused by an earhtquake (sic, so and thus, thanks AI editing) and tsunami in 2011

Our Henry was more than up to the task, and provided a statistical savaging ...

The event then depends on 1000 conditions being met, each with (say) a 10 per cent probability of occurring. If those conditions are independent – meaning none makes any other more or less likely – the aggregate likelihood is vanishingly small: one divided by 10 raised to the power of 1000, which is effectively zero.
Even a hundredfold increase in the number of ways in which disaster could unfold scarcely changes that conclusion. It would take approximately 10 to the power of 998 independent pathways, rather than a hundred, before the probability ceased to be effectively zero. Indeed, with only 100 pathways, the probability of each condition being triggered would need to rise from 10 per cent to roughly 97 per cent just to nudge the dial towards the lowest single digits and raise the actuarial cost to $1.
Nor do the problems end there. Saying “10 per cent” conveys an aura of precision; but that need not rest on precise knowledge. The 10 per cent could perfectly well reflect profound uncertainty between two possibilities: the first, with a nine-in-10 weight, is that catastrophe is virtually impossible; the second, with a weight of one in 10, is that it is nearly inevitable. Taken on its own, the headline number tells us nothing about how tightly its assessment is bounded or about its practical implications.
We are therefore entirely in the dark as to the estimate’s significance and robustness. Yet it is not merely a truism that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence: it is a foundational proposition of modern statistical inference.

The pond was bemused when the hole in bucket man followed that up with a gigantic billy boat butt ...

None of that proves Hubinger’s estimate is incorrect.

That sort of butt is always, almost mystically followed by a corrective "but" ...

But the illustrative calculations, precisely because they are assumption-laden, show that asserting a probability is grossly insufficient: there has to be a transparent analysis to substantiate it. Moreover, simply pointing to occasional AI malfunctions won’t cut the mustard: it is one thing for an AI system to hack into a website and quite another for it to end human life in a fit of suicidal malevolence.

At this point came another very modest set of billy goat butts ...

None of this denies that AI poses real risks – risks lucidly anticipated in the 1960s by Norbert Wiener and Isidore Gudak (later IJ Good), two of its most important pioneers.
A simple analogy helps explain their concern. Tell a travel agency you must fly from Perth to Melbourne for the AFL grand final, and you would be horrified if, finding all flights booked, it arranged for a ticketed passenger to be assassinated, thus freeing a seat – and astonished too, since your request presupposed the agency would act within unspoken limits you assumed were understood.

In this dangerous world of analogies, who should arrive to give excellent advice? Eminent German philosopher Immanuel Kant, as always a voice of reason

Inspired by the presence of Kant, Our Henry reached new levels of rhetorical insight ...

The point, put more abstractly, is that every instruction that is not strictly formulaic carries what philosophers call a “surplus of meaning”. In practice, we readily handle the resulting vagueness through “contextual disambiguation”: drawing on shared knowledge, conventions and expectations to read not merely what the words say, but what the speaker intends and what limits that implies. Those shared understandings are instilled through lived, collective socialisation – something no volume of scanned text can convey.
Instead, whatever AI systems display is induced statistically from data and feedback, rather than experience, and because every decision rule that process induces needs a further rule to fix its application, the training mechanism can never fully close off the risk of error.
Just as that has been known for decades, so too has the broad architecture of the solutions.
The danger, Wiener wrote, lies in using “to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere once we have started it, because the action is so fast and irrevocable that we have not the data to intervene before the action is complete”.
The answer, first conceptualised in the 1960s by Herbert Simon – another of AI’s greatest pioneers, and alone among them in holding both the Turing Award and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics – has three components.

The reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction, because mad King Donald is still ruler of them all ...

Next video thumbnail
Trump administration scolds Albanese over ‘censorious’ tech crackdown
News24 host James Macpherson says the Trump administration has “scolded” the Australian Labor Party for their censorious Digital Duty of Care laws.

And so to Our Henry's Kantian konclusion:

The first is to keep failures contained by building walls into the systems: modular, separate parts with no shared point of failure and filters between them to assess errors. Secondly, provide the scope to halt the decision process by installing stopping points, so a single step cannot drag outcomes to irreversibility. And third, ensure visibility through instruments, logs and an escalating structure of alerts that show what the system is doing while it is doing it, rather than just tracking what it has produced.
These measures are not costless, and easier said than done. But they are no more than good engineering practice, checkable and even certifiable. Better still, they do not require a “slowdown” in technological progress, raising entry barriers or allowing China to steal the race. And they are far less socially harmful than that ultimate folly, the precautionary principle, which has become technophobia’s figleaf of choice.
The real risk is not that AI will kill us; it is that relying on increasingly intelligent machines will make us increasingly stupid, further eroding our collective capacity for clear thought and entrenching the hysteria that now so frequently drowns out the voice of reason.
As usual, Kant said it best: “Deficiency in judgment is what is properly called stupidity; and for such a failing there is, regrettably, no remedy.”

Exactly, precisely so.

When dealing with AI, always revert to Kant, born in Königsberg in the Kingdom of Prussia in April 1724 for the final word ...

Is there an infallible Pope in the house?

With the reptiles continuing to spoof the intermittent archive, the pond's range of reptile references continues to be limited.

The Australian Daily Zionist News couldn't resist this big lie ...

Luckily the reptiles used AP as their source, so correspondents could head off to other versions of the big lie, as at France24, Israel must win 'because we’ve got no other choice’, PM Netanyahu tells UN

There was much lying and disingenuous downplaying ...

...Netanyahu dismissed incidents of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank as a “handful of young juvenile delinquents” throwing stones, chopping down olive trees and lighting fires.
“I can’t stand that. I won’t stand for vigilantism,” the prime minister said before accusing foreign leaders and the international press of distorting the scale of violence in the West Bank.
Netanyahu’s government is dominated by settlers and their allies, including the Cabinet minister who oversees the police. There have been few arrests of settlers involved in attacks on Palestinians.
Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, and the Palestinians want both as part of their future state. The Palestinians and much of the international community view the settlements as illegal and as an obstacle to creating a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.
Netanyahu has said no Palestinian state will be established while he is Israel’s leader and has argued that the Palestinian Authority is not a partner for peace.

Says the man devoted to the war with Iran and as many other conflicts as he can muster.

So keen was the pond to pander to the pretentious referential pundit that it didn't even bother checking out other worthy contenders, eager for attention. But there was one on the extreme far right of the reptile rag that caught the eye ...

The header: By Peter O'Brien
No place in shrine for questionable frontier history

The chance to hear a bot voice: Listen to this article
5 min

The caption for the snap designed to produce sympathy: A Last Post Ceremony at the Australian War Memorial Picture: David Whittaker

A cry from the wilderness behind the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

At last the knave behind the fuss stepped forward:

I am the co-convener of the Defend Sacred Ground campaign, which aims to put a stop to the inclusion of frontier conflict in the Australian War Memorial. Former PM Tony Abbott is our patron.

The onion muncher is your patron? Let the pond be clear, contempt is the first response, together with the thought that this must be black bashing of a familiar ancient English colonial kind ...

Let me be clear; we do accept that frontier conflict occurred, that it was traumatic for the Aboriginal people and, often, illegal. We do accept that parts of it are a stain on our history. But the AWM is not the place to record it. The AWM is first and foremost a shrine – a sacred place to honour those who gave their lives in the service of this nation. Its museum and research functions are subordinate to that purpose. The AWM is not a war museum. It is not a history museum.
I have no doubt there are some, among the cohort pushing for inclusion of frontier conflict, who are genuine in their belief that this is an overdue and benign acknowledgment of our warts-and-all history. But the history being discussed is by no means settled. One narrative that has been widely and credulously accepted is that up to 100,000 Aborigines died in these so-called “Frontier Wars”. That figure is not supported by any empirical evidence. It has no place in the War Memorial.
If you hand your enemy a weapon, don’t be surprised if he uses it. Those well-meaning people will not be consulted when an activist minority in the Aboriginal community seizes upon this and trumpets it as an official acknowledgment that Australia was invaded, that the peaceful Aboriginal population was subjected to dispossession and genocide resulting in trauma that persists to this day. In short, that the nation-state of Australia is illegitimate.

Note the canny way that the war is reduced to a "frontier conflict" and images designed to terrify the hive mind are included ... People from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and their supporters protesting at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra in 2014 Picture: Kym Smith

The pond was startled by the sense of a Colonel Blimp outraged that anyone would think to honour the fuzzy wuzzies ...

Their intermediate aim is for a Tomb of the Unknown Aboriginal Warrior to be placed next to the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier. Who knows what after that?
That this AWM proposal is contentious, and that the AWM Council is aware of this, cannot be in doubt. Prominent people have been speaking out about it since at least 2022.
In a recent piece in this newspaper, AWM director Matt Anderson states: “Before the development began, we consulted nationally, and the feedback was overwhelming: Australians expect difficult content in our galleries.” If you don’t remember being consulted, it’s probably because you are not a member of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community or a suitably vetted historian. As far as we can tell, that is the extent of the consultation undertaken by the AWM.
It is likely that most Australians would oppose this proposal, if given the chance. But until now, they have not been given that chance. And they should have been, because what is proposed is, on the face of it, in contravention of the Australian War Memorial Act 1980.

Just to alienate the pond even more, an image of the onion muncher, patron of all that demeans .. Former PM Tony Abbott at an Anzac Day service in 2026. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

More knaves came forward ...

One of my co-conveners, Robert Hill, wrote to Veterans’ Affairs Minister Matt Keogh to raise this issue. He received a reply from director Anderson, dismissing our concerns and stating that “the Frontier Wars gallery will focus on organised campaigns of war and warlike resistance conducted between First Nations peoples and naval or military forces raised by the crown in Australia, in line with the AWM Act”.
We understand that the Council’s assertion that the proposal is in line with the Act is not based on independent legal advice but, as AWM chairman Kim Beazley has stated, on a “broad interpretation” of the Act. That would be a tenable approach if a) the Act were ambiguous, and b) the desired outcome were either in line with the clear intent of parliament or, alternatively, it now reflected an overwhelming and verifiable consensus among the Australian people. None of those conditions applies here.

The reprehensible "Bomber" was part of the act ... Chairman of the AWM, Kim Beazley, in Canberra in 2024 Picture: Martin Ollman

There came the usual mealy mouthed platitudes ...

We did seek advice, from barrister Peter King of Queen’s Square Chambers in Sydney. His advice raises serious questions as to the current proposal.
The Council members may be quite genuine in their desire to seek “justice” for Aboriginal people and present a true account of our history, but it cannot be said that they have acted in good faith.
Rather than seek independent legal advice and put the matter beyond doubt, or at least give themselves a figleaf of credibility, they have relied on their own “broad interpretation” to further their own agenda. And they did this knowing that the matter is highly contested. Surely it is incumbent for chairman Beazley, as the statutory custodian of our national shrine of remembrance, to ensure everything is above board. The Australian War Memorial belongs to all Australians.
We call upon minister Keogh to direct the Council to remove all current depictions of frontier conflict, and to abandon its plans for the new Pre-1914 Gallery. As a minister of the crown, it is his duty to enforce the legislation.
Let me make one final point. We do not oppose this proposal because it is contrary to the Act. We oppose it, in principle, because it is a bad, divisive idea.
Lieutenant Colonel (rtd) Peter O’Brien is a Vietnam veteran and author of five books.

defendsacredground.com

An actual colonel? The pond has seen this kind before ...

All the same, the blather fell on fertile hive mind soil ...

You're a long way from Texas Jack, but you sound dumb as a stick with your proposal to disenfranchise those killed in wars after the first world ding dong ...

The pond wouldn't usually do this but feels the need to introduce a little counter balance.

These came by way of The Canberra Times Echnida newsletter, which arrives as emails each morning, and as well as carrying an infallible Pope, delivers opinions more compelling than the lizard Oz ...

Well yes, there was an invasion, a war and an extermination, and there was more in that newsletter, but that was the nub of it, and Ellery followed up almost immediately with another effort ...

And so on, and so to a bonus.

Here time pressures caught up with the pond and it had to continue on in screen cap form ...

How could the pond resist The Times (of London, don't you know) dealing with Vlad the Sociopath ...

What a relief. Europe is safe!

Pity about Ukraine, but there's always got to be a loser, wot wot ...

Oh dear, the pond might have spoken too soon. Perhaps Vlad the Sociopath, in his desperation, might actually lash out ...

Surely the main thing is that plucky Britain is safe from any turmoil roiling Europe. Let's just keep it at all things Ukrainian ...

At this point, the reptiles delivered a set of sub-headlines ...

Discord on public messaging? The same might be pretty much said about this hot-cold-lukewarm analysis ...

There came a last gobbet ...

At the end of it all, the pond remained even more convinced that Europe was made up of patsies about as capable of confronting Vlad the sociopath as a warm lettuce leaf trying to stand firm, or as brave as mad King Donald, wilting in the glow of the latest Chinese emperor ...

Speaking of social media ... there's a site where The Times (of London) pushes a strong anti-Vlad the Sociopath line ...

Meanwhile, the Lord Haw-Haws keep doing their work ...

Lloydie of the Amazon, the bromancer, Geoff, petulant Peta, Killer ... what a reptile line up ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:25:06 +0000

Like the ancient kraken, waking from the deep, or perhaps like a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, Lloydie of the Amazon has woken from his slumbers and turned up to celebrate Dan "the man" Tehan ...

But there seems to be some kind of induced energy lethargy, because Lloydie could only manage two brief gobbets, as he celebrated the deep north's commitment to the coal industry - what could possibly go wrong? - a return of the climate wars, and pending victory on action on climate change via "pragmatic common sense":

Ah, got to make the planet safe for the lizard Oz's "superintelligent" answers to everything, though "42" would save a lot of coal.

The pond asks again, what on earth could go wrong, and luckily had saved up an infallible Pope to provide an answer ...

Meanwhile, the bromancer decided to revert to full Trumpism, and what could possibly go wrong?

Read that line and weep: "On policy substance, most of the merit rests with Trump".

Muh lud, is there a counterpoint?

Well, you could turn to Paul Krugman, in a missive which came to the pond via email but which could be found on Substack here ...

Well yes, all that and more at the link, with musical coda, and what a relief to find there's some sanity left in America, but sadly not in the bromancer ...

Rest easy, tech bros, the bromancer has your backs ...

Or better still, imagine the reptiles in charge ... if you dare ...

And so it's back to that tired old both siderism, "Trump has done good and bad things", and it's all the fault of left wing critics and never mind those who have avoided ideology and retained a shred of sanity ...

Very early this morning, this was the headline that greeted the pond ...

The reptiles never sleep, but the pond thought it should at least allow Geoff to chamber his round ...

Almost bromancerish - there can be no higher praise - what with that agitation about lefties taking a view on the mad king ...

Geoff continued his dirge ...as a snap showed the extreme distance Albo had put between himself and the Donald ...

Finally it was time to moan about awards ...

All this posing in public? What could possibly go wrong?

And so to the problem of Petulant Peta.

With the intermittent archive on the blink, or at least being spoofed by the lizard Oz, the pond's usual tactic - a note observing her presence, a quick despatch to the intermittent archive, and moving on - won't work.

At the same time, it's incredibly easy to offer up some screen caps as a reminder of the power behind the throne which led to the early demise of the hapless onion muncher's reign.

The pond realises that screen caps have no charm, and are just deployed in the pond's current never ending moving emergency, which will continue for some weeks.

They're just a brutalist way of flinging together a blog post quickly, but time is short, and the petulant one is all on board with the Dan "the man", and so attention of some kind had to be paid ...

The pond realises that a triumphant Petulant Peta can become an unnerving, nauseating experience - that talk of "climate nonsense" being consigned to history might send those with the slightest awareness of science spiralling out of control, but the pond promises that it will be done and dusted in three gobbets, and that the furriner bashing is up there, or more correctly, down there with Dame Groan ...

Where would the reptiles be without furriners to bash? (But then where would Herr Adolf have been without "cosmopolitans" to bash?)

Cue a stern-looking beefy boofhead to set up the final gobbet ...

There, done in three gobbets, and no damage done, apart from the odd rush to the toilet for a heave.

What an inspiration for those into fear, loathing and general hysteria the petulant one is, and what an inspiration King Donald is ...

Finally, it would be remiss of the pond to overlook Killer, what with Killer eager to blame those at some disadvantage for ruining everything.

Don't you worry about the meek and the mild and the suffering, just set Killer on to them and he'll worry them to an early death, like a dog sensing blood with a lamb in the Tamworth sun ...

From the pond's observation of those who've made a living doing hard yards yakka, 65 can still be a stretch.

The shearers in the pond's extended family all developed back problems that made life extremely hard in their later years, and the pond guesses that the worst Killer has suffered is the occasional wrist and finger strain from extended keyboard use ...but that's the name of the Killer game. If you've spent a life doing manual labour, you're a disposable item.

The real players, the contented oldies, are generally are rich as Croesus in Killer's world ... we are all Lydians now:

If the pond has one wish left, it's that Killer gets old, but the pond guesses that he's managed to build a nice nest egg, and to hell to those left behind ...and what's a little tendonitis in the wrist?

Now on with bashing unfortunates who might be on struggle street for one reason or another:

Back to sheltered workshops, you heathens and bludgers, Killer of the IPA has spoken ...

And so to the immortal Rowe to round out this day's offerings ...and what could possibly go wrong?

That really is a truly noble chair ...

So many temptations ...

So many audio distractions ...

Dame Slap doing white working class boys? Niall in the depressive phase? Dan 'the man' Tehan promising to nuke the country? Is that all there is, my friend, is that all there is?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 21:19:05 +0000

Is there any reason whatsoever for ACMA to exist?

Not being a regular watcher of the ABC, the pond only stumbled across the Media Watch report on the latest ACMA folly on YouTube. (Here on the ABC site).

It might seem like the program is offering a home town defence of a Four Corners show about the decidedly incompetent - and inclined to militarism - Australian War Memorial.

But consider this. The program aired back in March 2005 and the ACMA ruling only surfaced in September 2006. WTF? Talk about a warm lettuce leaf slapping delivered way after the event.

Not that the pond saw the original, but even if it had, only fragments would remain lodged in the noggin by the time ACMA rose from its swamp to pick a safe target (while the Murdochians gaily romp in the swamp).

As for the components of the ruling aired on Media Watch, they were pathetic and risible, an indication that, whoever wrote them (a cuddle of cardigan wearers?), not one of them had the first clue about journalism or the making of a TV program.

The pond is no defender of 4 Corners, and rarely watches it. The tragically inept Mahmood Fazal affair diminished the show, and its latest attempt at Chinese EV bashing held no appeal.

It was the "Chinese" in the story that alerted the pond to the way that the ABC frequently recycles talking points that appear in the lizard Oz and other tabloid publications. The focus on "Chinese" revived the lizard Oz's age-old fear of a war with China by Xmas, and when hooked up with the ABC's general fear of EV, it becomes rabid.

All EV makers harvest data, and if Comrade Xi can plan his invasion of Australia by utilising the data from the pond tooling around the mighty 'Gong in a Geely EX5, he's welcome.

Tesla is a typical example. Back in the day Uncle Leon's mob got caught out bigly:

...between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees, opens new tab privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.
Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers, opens new tab in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.
Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex-employee. The child flew in one direction, the bike in another. The video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats, “like wildfire,” the ex-employee said.
Other images were more mundane, such as pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats. While some postings were only shared between two employees, others could be seen by scores of them, according to several ex-employees. (Much more at Reuters here).

Back in the day, a pond gas guzzling Merc work car collected an unseemly amount of data, stored for mechanics to observe here, and for the car to send back home.

The pond is perfectly happy for a general story about privacy and data in all kinds of vehicles, including EVs. BYD, for example, is inclined to be cowboy (or girl), and if a little prodding forces some changes, what the heck. But the ABC's relentless bashing of EVs makes it a branch office of the lizard Oz.

While letting off steam, could the pond also ask correspondents not to send links to Catholic publications, not that the stories can't be amusing.

Sure it's fun to know that some tykes are into drag: Swiss diocese defends drag show as ‘kickoff’ for new format

The Swiss Catholic chaplaincy organising a drag show this week has told the Catholic Herald that the show is the “kickoff” of the drag show format as further events are already planned, while rejecting the idea it is establishing a “series” of drag shows.
As reported earlier this week by the Catholic Herald, a Catholic chaplaincy in the Diocese of St. Gallen is hosting a drag show on September 18, designed to “combine the art form of drag with social, spiritual, and cultural issues.” It will feature two male drag performers and an interview with the men conducted by an employee of the diocese as part of the “deep drag” format, which joins drag with conversation.

But to get the full story you have to give up your email address to create a free account, and the be endlessly pestered by the tyke Herald.

Besides, for years, the pond mocked the Pellists for doing 'deep drag' via their attraction to a splendid array of 'deep frocks', while giving other cross dressers a hard time.

And the pond must now confess that's all by way of a filibuster, because again this day the pond is on house moving duties, so the coverage of the lizard Oz must be limited to screen caps.

First up might not even be seen by some as commentary, because it arose from the risible lizard Oz energy "summit", but simply because the climate science denying reptiles presented it with a straight face as "news" doesn't make it so.

Dan "the man" Tehan was at it again, and how the reptiles loved it ...

Now correspondents will likely have been exhausted already by the reptiles endless bashing of renewables, and even the most paltry efforts to do something about the climate crisis, but it's worth observing exactly how they've managed to infest the coalition ... running in fear from Gina's pampered pet ...

Could there possibly be a lizard Oz story about climate change that didn't feature demonic windmills? The question is purely rhetorical ...

So the notion of nuking the country to save the planet gets another run around the park.

Could there possibly be a lizard Oz story about renewables that didn't feature Satan's little helper, leering like a diabolical figure? The question is purely rhetorical ...

He refused to commit? What a prize loon he is ...and as for the lizard Oz's role in this farrago of nonsense, who could disagree?

On with other matters, and again the pond reluctantly must cut short coverage, not helped by the reptiles currently spoofing of the intermittent archive.

The pond certainly didn't want to discuss the working class with rabid bigot Dame Slap, but as time was short, there was no choice ...

Dame Slap is more than Pauline curious, Dame Slap is right on board ...if she happened to be in Germany at the moment, her bleating about white working class boys would entirely suit the AfD.

It's also not particularly original ...

Joanna Williams! Spiked!

But enough already, there's two more gobbets of bleating to go, and if you guessed that Tamworth's eternal shame will turn up, you get a gold star ...

And if you guessed that Pauline herself would certainly appear in pictorial form, perhaps you've been infected by the lizard Oz hive mind virus.

The way it's framed in this kind of tribute is to make the tribute sound a little back-handed: "At least One Nation has started a debate here."

It's a way of being devoted to the One Nation agenda of bigotry and fear, while purporting to be a little distant.

Fling in a "crude" and an "unsubtle", but then go all in ... she's really right, you know, as any MAGA cap-donning Dame would know ...

Hard to disagree ... but what a cruel irony he should be talking about the MAGA-cap donning Dame ...

Sorry, the pond had intended to insert a cartoon for a bit of a breather ...

And so to the bonus, and this is day old, but in its day it was given a big splash ...

Niall is one of those prize loons that the pond finds irresistible ...

Perhaps it's because he's a manic depressive as well as a man of strange inclinations and insights.

Last October for example, he said this in an interview here ... Niall Ferguson: Trump’s Handling of Russia and China Will Define US Power (Ia Meurmishvili October 17, 2025)

...President Trump is respected in the wider region.
He’s respected in particular in the Gulf. They know that he takes them seriously, partly because he’s a businessman, but also I think because, intuitively, President Trump understands that in the Middle East, there is no way of getting respect other than through strength. So he does have real leverage, not only with respect to Israel, but also with respect to the Arabs. And I think in particular, the Qataris have been crucial here. Qatar has sheltered the leadership of Hamas, played a distinctly ambiguous role, it must be said, over the last two years. But without Qatar, it wouldn’t have been possible to get Hamas to sign this deal.
One has to acknowledge that one of the distinguishing features of Trump’s presidency is that he brings strength and a kind of business sense to every negotiation that he enters into. It’s got a lot harder for his critics and haters to say that’s not real after what we’ve just seen.

You get the drift, completely delusional, and yet with a patina of substance, a veneer hiding the intellectual chipboard beneath the surface ...

In this outing in the lizard Oz, he'd shifted from Trump mania to depression ...

How much of this should be taken as insight?

Check out a few other points in that interview ...

...it’s only when President Putin recognizes that the costs to him of continuing this war are greater than the costs of settling that we will get to a real peace negotiation.
I don’t rule this out. I think ultimately the Ukrainians are inflicting meaningful damage on Russia’s energy infrastructure and that will take its toll if it is sustained. On the other hand, Russia is inflicting real damage on Ukrainian cities with nightly air raids, and the drone war on both sides is constantly scaling up. I think Putin still thinks he can win this. I think he still believes he can grind out one of those Russian victories that relies on manpower and readiness to take casualties. That’s why he’s not particularly serious about negotiation. But there comes a point when we can make the costs to him too high for him to continue. And that’s the key, I think, to what President Trump has to do in the remainder of this year and into next year. Real pressure needs to be applied before we get to the spring and summer of next year, because I worry a lot about the manpower imbalance. Russia is recruiting fresh reserves for its infantry. Ukraine is not. A war like this can’t be fought exclusively by drones. You do need infantry and that’s where I think Ukraine is most vulnerable.

He's up and down and all over the place like a yo-yo walking the dog ...

...We’ve seen a big change in his tone towards President Putin, particularly since the fiasco of the Alaska summit. Let’s hope we hear more of that. I don’t think Tomahawks are the key here. I think the key is President Putin understanding that he has blown it, that he is now somebody who’s standing in the White House has been really reduced and that the Trump administration no longer sees him as somebody they need to conciliate. I think if that message is conveyed—”you had your chance and you blew it”—then he’s going have to think very hard about what he does next year.

Back to the current outing ...

And at that point he began to lather himself up into a fever ... and there were a full four gobbets to go ...

Threading through it all was a profoundly depressive form of defeatism, something Vlad the Sociopath's advisers might hand to him as being suitable for mention on Russian state media ...

We're all sick of Vlad the Sociopath's war.

But what's the alternative? Let his goons run roughshod over Ukraine and establish a dicatorship that sees their culture revert to the bad old days of the Soviets?

By this point, the pond regretted diving in, but never mind, feel the length, as every saucy doubt and fear gushed into the reptile void ...

Doom and gloom everywhere, and yet the pond suddenly felt an enormous sense of relief, a rushing in of light, because this was the last gobbet ...

What else to say? Well, it's true that this was just reheated stew that ran in The Sunday Times ...

A harsh truth: the strain is on Ukraine.
A flagging economy, circling rivals and unpalatable peace proposals are putting President Zelensky under enormous pressure. Winter is full of foreboding
Friday September 18 2026 ...

The pond doesn't have a clue why the local reptiles ignored the Banksy angle, perhaps because it was completely out of tune with depressive Niall's report.

More to the point, it appeared on the same day in Bari's old mob, a fitting place for the blather that Niall offered.

You need to hand over an email to go there, so perhaps the reptiles of Oz were hoping no one noticed the sort of company they keep ...

That reminds the pond. How's Bari herself going?

Ousted ‘60 Minutes’ Producer Rips Bari Weiss Over Ratings Flop

Bari Weiss’ overhaul of 60 Minutes sees season premiere hit 25-year ratings low

Great. Maybe karma is a thing ...

So how does valiant Europe help the Ukrainians?

Let a couple of Russian oligarchs off the hook.

Ah, the perfidious French ...

"Is that all there is?

Is that all there is?

If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing

Let's break out the booze and have a ball

If that's all there is"

The pond is on the move, but still makes time for Dame Groan, the bromancer and Mein Gott ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:19:07 +0000

The pond is moving again, this time from one area of the mighty 'Gong to another.

The pond will end up in a suburb known to the locals as Fez Mez.

Fez Mez? As usual, AI showed it could summarise Reddit and Facebook ...

Slop chasing slop ... and the pond apologises for promoting AI.

Aka Cholesterol Corner (apparently because of the number of fast food joints, though they seem sparse compared to Sydney), or Fairly Ghetto, or Pixie Paddock, or if you will, Fairy Meadow (the pond refuses to indulge the homophobic versions that do the rounds in unrefined circles, which aren't allowed in this 'leet blog).

Hopefully this will be the last time ever that the pond must do a shift - life is short and the pond is old - but as a result, postings in the near future will be intermittent, and on days when the tech support tries to get the pond back online, non-existent ...

The best the pond can do is fling up the odd morsel at odd times to satisfy the insatiable appetite of devoted herpetology students ...and as the pond must be out and about today, that's why Dame Groan is the chief morsel in this abbreviated coverage.

How could the pond avoid showing off a Groaning? Could anyone possibly guess what's buzzing around in the old dame's noggin?

Hands up those who expected a rousing defence of freedom of the press, a stern condemnation of the conduct of mad King Donald in banning sundry news organisations?

Or hands up those hoping for a serious explanation of the issues surrounding AI?

Hands down those who thought it would be another bog standard bit of blather about the way that furriners were rooning us all?

Why should the pond reward smart alecks who always manage to be right?

The pond has had to resort to screen caps so it can quickly fling up the groaning and go about its other business this day, but as it's just the old biddy shrieking about mass migration, where's the harm?

Apart from a little preening self-congratulation at the way the government kow-towed to her and other bigots, is there anything much new?

There was only a gobbet to go ... and sure enough, Gina's pampered pet was front and centre, with her and the Groaner in trinitarian mode, an encompassing one-ness ...

There you go.

Were it not for Pauline.

The Groaner is being exceptionally modest. Were it not for the hysteria emanating from her and the rest of News Corp this past decade, faithfully recycled and regurgitated by the ABC - always ready to drum up a scare story about the dangers of Chinese EVs and other fears of furriners - there might have been a little sanity in the land.

Here, have a break and instead of a Kit-kat, have a 'toon ...

The immortal Rowe sets the tone for the next reptile.

Speaking of hysteria, this quick throwing up of screen caps allowed the pond the time to indulge the bromancer, the ban the screens, the repent and turn to pen and ink man, who was in fine form ...

It goes without saying that the bromancer was going to express a deep fear and loathing of AI ...after all, if you think banning screens and reverting to long hand is the educational solution, you're going to be down on everything beyond the dipping of girlie pigtails in inkwells (please, don't ask about those days).

The pond can remember any number of fatuities given unto the world by the bromancer, decades of contradictions and stupidities, imbued with the fairy tales exuding from Xianity, but sadly doesn't have time to go into them, save to wonder what Dame Groan might have made of his devotion to the Indonesian language, when of course furriners are rooning the country ...

Who can forget the reptiles denouncing broadband, and doing their level best to ruin the NBN?

One of the direst conditions that afflicts the reptile mind is that somehow we must arrive at a Valhalla, which is usually some golden age long in the past.

For the reptiles, this is usually the 1950s under Ming the Merciless. Return to that ancient time and we'll achieve the dizzy heights of a nirvana, slough off the unfortunate trough of failure ...perhaps even enter unto the gates of a heaven on earth, pending arrival at the 19th hole in the great land above the sky.

With this mindset, rather than expecting and acknowledging that everything will change, some things for the better, some things for worse, the reptile mind is always set to a keening wail of endless horrors ...

Ye ancient cats and ancestral dogs, once again the bromancer proved the pond wrong.

It wasn't the vision of the 1950s that was tormenting him, it was the bloody 1890s, and of all things, a sideswipe at pig iron Bob, without ever actually mentioning his name or his worship of Herr Adolf ...

Have another 'toon ...

The pond couldn't resist turning to Mein Gott for a bonus.

Yes, he was out and about yesterday, an eternity in reptile time, quickly fading back into the morass of many other reptile jihads ... but the pond has long argued that the lizard Oz and Pauline are one, and Mein Gott provided even more proof ...

Mein Gott giving credence to Tamworth's endless shame?

Mein Gott joining in the blather about wind and solar and renewables and all that stuff?

Mein Gott yammering on about the renewables disaster as if he'd dressed in drag and was doing a Pauline pantsdown?

The pond being rhetorical in a pointless way about the bleeding obvious?

Did the reptiles interrupt at this point to promote a forum which is inherently nonsensical?

Was there more of this carry on?

At last a question that could be answered with a screen cap ...

Did anyone expect Mein Gott to include any discussion of the rapid pace of climate change in the world, and the dangers flowing from that?

Did the pond have the time to link to a story indicating same?

There was more at the link, but was there a single correspondent expecting Mein Gott to take notice or pay heed?

Was that single correspondent of the Conan Doyle kind, expecting to find fairies at the bottom of the garden, hoping that Mein Gott might concede that while some mistakes had been made, the mission of reducing the impacts of climate change was a noble one?

Cue those fairies in the garden ...

The pond just had to leave that last widget in, what with "Ask The Australian" the latest indication that while the bromancer might rant, the corporation itself was more than a little AI Curious.

Please, AI tool, tell the pond how much its costing to get an AI confirmation that the reptiles of Oz, with Mein Gott leading the way, think nuking the country is a solution to saving the planet, when any goose who's spent a nanosecond in the hive mind knows that climate science is a hoax, and sweet virginal Oz coal is the answer.

That in this context, nuking the country is just an idle distraction, a way of avoiding all talk about the ways and means of helping change the direction of the planet.

And just how much water and energy was expended in arriving at the answer? Who knows, but likely the AI Curious Oz won't have a half-way decent answer ...

The pond apologises for the way that this has been flung together, and unfortunately screen caps will be again all the go on the morrow ...

Just look at all the migrant and EV bashing the pond had to pass up on ... with the reptiles regurgitating the ABC, which routinely regurgitates the reptiles, setting up a most un-virtuous circle ...

In the meantime, the pond offers this for the consideration of The Australian Daily Zionist News ...

In which the Major reverts to bog standard climate science denialism for the hive mind, and the pond does Killer and the Caterist quarry whisperer in screen grabs ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 22:00:12 +0000

Of all the tragedies in life, it's only a minor one that these days the pond can't watch bear to watch repeats of Curb Your Enthusiasm ... only because whenever Cheryl Hines appears, the pond's enthusiasm is deeply curbed.

Apparently the pond isn't the only victim ...

‘Curb’ Star Reveals Larry David ‘Very Hurt’ by Cheryl Hines
ENTHUSIASM CURBED
Jeff Garlin shared new details of his co-stars’ falling out with “Obsessed: The Podcast.” (*intermittent archive link)

Curb Your Enthusiasm star Jeff Garlin has revealed to Obsessed: The Podcast that show creator Larry David was “very hurt” after their co-star of 24 years, Cheryl Hines, became a MAGA supporter.
Hines is married to Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and she was the only major star from Curb who didn’t appear on David’s new HBO sketch series Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, which Barack and Michelle Obama produced. Garlin is quick to assert that the former president and first lady “had nothing to do with” Hines’ exclusion.
“No, this would be Larry’s choice,” Garlin said. “And I know he is very hurt by Cheryl. Her husband, a big ball of ‘no, thank you.’ Always, even when she was dating him. Even I recognized it in him. I thought he was a sick... Not even ‘No, thank you.’ ‘No,’ period.

it's one weird thing to develop a deep affection for Mr Measles, entirely another to go full MAGA.

Expert trolling, or old-fashioned dementia?

How is it that the pond can flinch at the sight of this folly, and still swallow lizard Oz crap on a daily basis?

It's one of the great mysteries, what with the mad King, RFK (pretending to be Jr), and the reptiles selling junk and distributing poison to the world ...

Speaking of poison, it's time for a Monday dose ...and waddya kno, the Major, expert troller, was out and about doing a full Pauline...

The thumb splash showed off the hook ...

Not coal again ... not more fossilised fools at play ...but here the pond was for the umpteenth time ...

The header: By Chris Mitchell
Labor clings to aggressive grid overhaul despite revised climate forecasts and shortfalls

The promise of an automated voice read: Listen to this article

7 min

The caption for a snap that sets the Major's loins on fire: A coal train crosses South Australian on its way to Port Augusta prior to its powerstation being decomissioned. (sic)

The pond doesn't propose to argue with the Major.

Simply sitting down and listen to this ancient mariner ramble on is more than enough ...

Politicians and journalists of the left show a propensity to believe the latest fashionable ideas, sometimes without a deep understanding of the subject.
Fads in economics and climate change stand out, but inevitably end up hurting the living standards of those who can least afford new policy proposals.
This column has mocked Labor treasurers who loved Capital, the 2012 global anti-capitalist bestseller by French economist Thomas Piketty. More recently Albanese government ministers have been spruiking 2025’s Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, respectively journalists at The New York Times and The Atlantic.
How many Labor MPs who loved these two have read Adam Smith’s The Wealth Of Nations, let alone Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes or even Friedrich Hayek?
It’s the same with energy and climate. Why plunge into the latest fad whatever the cost to working people?

The main point? The pond suspects it was summarised in this promo widget ... Energy Nation marketing promo

There are people in the land who think the reptiles have something to offer on an energy future? Forget it Jake, the pond will continue to keep enjoying the benefits offered by solar.

On with the Major - huzzah, no Zionism today - and how soon before "alarmist" and "alarming" were trotted out?

Left-wing journalists and politicians such as Energy Minister Chris Bowen ridicule any scientist, writer or economist not fully on board with Greta Thunberg-style alarmism.
Yet the most alarming climate pathways Thunberg and King Charles claimed only a few years ago would destroy life as we know it if not turned back by 2030 have been abandoned officially by the UN.

Inevitably there was a snap of Satan's helper ... Energy Minister Chris Bowen is dismissive of any commentary that doesn’t embrace climate change alarmism. Picture: Martin Ollman

Then came more of the usual lies from the usual sources ...

Some commenters here criticise this column for regularly quoting climate scientist Judith Curry, climate economist Roger Pielke or Copenhagen Consensus chief Bjorn Lomborg. All have led their fields for decades and accept man-made global warming.
The latest UN-accepted climate pathways suggest these three have been closer to reality than the hysterical claims by Greens politicians globally and even local Liberals such as former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and former NSW Liberal treasurer Matt Kean.
Pielke and Curry have argued the carbon intensity of industry globally has been falling for half a century. Lomborg believes it is the energy poor in Africa and parts of Asia who face the real dangers of burning poor-quality fuels such as wood and dung in unventilated housing.
These are the people really suffering as climate activists demand international banks and aid agencies pull financing for fossil fuel projects.
Pielke, on his Substack called The Honest Broker, wrote last week that the midpoint of likely climate modelling suggests a rise of 2.1C since pre-industrial times by 2100. This is a rise of 0.7C from now.
As this column pointed out on June 8, the pathway revisions had been ignored by environment writers at The Guardian, Nine’s newspapers and ABC, which for years were pushing the extreme RCP8.5 scenario under which man-made temperature rise would reach 5C by 2021.
To deal with future warming about half of total warming to date over the past 150 years, Bowen proposes closing all our coal-fired power stations and replacing them with renewable generation supported by more than 10,000km of new poles and wires with battery, hydro and gas backup that may end up replicating 100 per cent system capacity.
It looks like a giant sledge hammer to crack a small nut: We produce only 1 per cent of global emissions but the big emitters responsible for 60 per cent of CO2 between them -

The reptiles interrupted with a mournful snap of a giant done down ... The Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley of Victoria was permanently shut down in 2017. Picture: AAP

Would the world be better off if the Major simply stayed out on the golf links?

China, the US, India and Russia – are continuing to use coal-fired power.
Despite spending of more than $US2 trillion ($2.8 trillion) a year globally on renewables, CO2 emissions are still rising. With the growth of AI and data centres that rise is likely to continue.
But Bowen remains committed, whatever the facts.
And the latest fact last week published here on Wednesday shows Bowen’s plan will reach 53 per cent renewables by 2030, despite insisting many times he was on course for 82 per cent.
If you wonder why we would bother destroying our industrial base and pushing up prices for a rise of 0.7C over the next 74 years you might enjoy a lengthy interview with US Energy Secretary Chris Wright in The Free Press. It may help explain why much of the rest of the world is not following Australia and Europe.
Wright told journalist Lucy Biggers on September 14: “Energy is the transformative agent that created the modern world. Human life expectancy at birth was around 30 years 20,000 years ago, and it was still around 30 years 200 years ago. The arrival of coal and oil took that to 70 years. But across the world about seven billion people had not benefited to the same degree as those in the West.”
Wright says when he was appointed by President Donald Trump, the Biden team’s energy scoreboard “was how many coal plants they could shut”. The Democrats had planned to shut 46 gigawatts of coal capacity over five years, enough firm power for 40 million homes.
“The world has spent $US10 trillion on wind, solar, batteries and ... transmission ...Yet wind and solar still provide only a small percentage of global primary energy.
“Countries that have pursued them most vigorously – including Germany, the United Kingdom and Denmark – have among the highest electricity prices in the world.”
He criticised these countries for claiming they had reduced greenhouse gas emissions when they had in fact only exported their industry and emissions to China and India where coal continues to dominate production processes, even in EV manufacture.
“Is the world ever going to run on solar panels and wind turbines? Absolutely not,” he said. “Even after the UK went all in on wind and solar it still gets the large majority of its energy from gas and oil.
“Building solar panels, wind turbines and batteries also requires hydrocarbons. You need tremendous amounts of high-temperature heat for manufacturing and energy for mining, and many of the materials themselves are made from hydrocarbons.”
Wright believes in man-made climate change.
“We’ve increased the atmospherc (sic, so and thus) concentration of CO2 from 0.03 per cent to a little over 0.04 per cent ... (this) is contributing to the warming of the planet.It’s a real issue. It’s just not remotely close to the world’s biggest problem. If you were honest, I don’t think it would make the top 10 list.”
People desperate to believe a 0.7C temperature rise is an existential threat to humanity will of course point out Wright was founder and CEO of the second-biggest gas fracking company in America, Liberty Energy.
True, but who better to understand the energy world than an energy professional with a stack of business qualifications and several engineering degrees.
Maybe someone like Bowen, who has never worked outside politics and became Labor mayor of Fairfield in western Sydney at 25 after being elected a councillor at 22?
Lomborg and former World Bank chief Indermit Gill nailed the damage climate activism is doing to the world’s poor in The Wall Street Journal on September 1.
“The past 75 years have brought the greatest improvement in human welfare in history,” he said. “But over the past decade much of that improvement has stalled. This happened at the same time the rich world shifted its attention to climate change.”
Leftist obsessions with climate, renewables, economic redistribution and global refugee flows are creating a populist backlash across the Western world. No surprise, really.

That was a complete waste of time ... but while it might be tossed off in the same way as the mad king's trolling, if you looked below, you could find a swarm of true Major believers swarming in the hive mind ...

Not only was "John A" crazy about brown coal, he was so crazy that he posted his comment twice, and the pond decided to cut short the craziness ...

At the top of the rag, the reptiles were conducting a familiar jihad, and the intermittent archive was there to cover it ...

Newspoll: Support for Labor, Anthony Albanese crashes
By Geoff Chambers
Political Editor

Sadly, in the battle of the bots, the archive couldn't handle everything ...

What did turn up was dismal ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
Albanese faces a summer of discontent
Labor insiders believe the party’s tanking primary vote and the Prime Minister’s negative approval ratings will get worse by Christmas.

Deprived of the archive, the pond realised it couldn't cover everything.

Was it enough to simply take a couple of gobbets from simpleton Simon, in a deep state of hysteria?

What would correspondents think of the pond skipping ahead, cheating, and turning to the last gobbet?

The pond took the view that a snap of a demonic Jimbo would be enough to establish that it was just a standard form of gibberish aimed at the hive mind ...

What does simpleton Simon want?

An uncaring economy?

A 'couldn't give a flying f*ck about caring' economy?

Never mind, speaking of AI, a recent infallible Pope ...

At this point the pond decided the easiest way to cover two other favourite reptiles was by way of screen caps.

Come on down flood waters whispering man ...

Would anyone care if the quarry whisperer was covered in three gobbets?

Any correspondent could still marvel at the way that the flood waters fool quoted Paul Krugman, the way a parrot might recite the bible.

As if it wasn't possible to take things straight from the horse's mouth ... Economic Size and Economic Power, My talk at the European Central Bank

Inter alia:

That might be the world Krugman is living in, unfortunately this is the hive mind the pond is dwelling in ...

Petey boy?

As usual the pond looked at the upside ... it wasn't Ming the Merciless, and there was just a gobbet to go ...

For no particular reason, the pond again turned to the infallible Pope for guidance ...

And that just left Killer, and again three screen grabs could do it ...

This was more than usually dry for Killer ... no mask phobia, no vaccine anxiety, just a plunge into ancient crow eater history ...

Fred Holder? Has Killer been spending too much time at the ADB, or simply has a thing for bushy Victorian beards?

What a handsome chap, with many splendid geegaws, but what the heck was this all about?

It was only when the pond reached the final gobbet that it realised what was going on ...

Prosper?

Who'd have thunk that Killer was a Georgist, and yet there he was ...

Dammit, the pond missed the big event yet again, and had to make do with the immortal Rowe ...

For the consideration of Major "Zionist and climate change denialist" Mitchell ...(and for those who haven't heard of Ilan Pappé, he has a wiki page)

Ugh, it's the Ughmann x 2, goo goo g'joob ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 06:00:00 +0000

The pond hates to do it, but promised that it would be done.

A full serve of Ughmann.

Last weekend the reptiles dropped the Ughmann into the mix later on the weekend, thereby missing the pond deadline.

It was a big splash:

Top of the digital page ma!

The pond immediately regretted not covering it, and now seeks to rectify the set back to herpetology students:

The header: Call it Argentinisation, but Australia’s economic decline is entirely self-inflicted; Like Argentina last century, we’re squandering the prosperity built on abundant natural resources, enterprise and ingenuity.

The caption for the cornball collage. Take a bow Sean, AI couldn't have done it worse: How would you set this nation on a highway to hell? Artwork: Sean Callinan

It was the headline that caught the pond's eye:

Australia’s economic decline is entirely self-inflicted

Entirely? In mad King Donald's economics wilderness?

Such a silly former seminarian, but the pond knows where the thinking comes from and it deserves a Donne rebuke ...

No country is an island entire of itself;
Some say Australia is a continent; every man (and womyn)
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Australia
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's (orwomyn's) death diminishes me,
because I am involved in dinkum kind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
mad King Donald's bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

And that's a round about way of saying credit where credit is due, because the likes of Vlad the sociopath and mad king Donald have done much to stuff the world economy, and so Australia's ...

The World Economy Is Becoming Wary of the U.S.
America’s position of global economic stability is starting to look shakier as the Trump administration piles on debt and doubles down on sanctions. (*intermittent archive link)

And so on, and will mad king Donald and his minions manage to bankrupt the planet in the same way he bankrupted casinos and is currently bankrupting the Kennedy centre because he craves having his name next to JFK's?

The pond lives in hope, but digresses:

At the turn of the 20th century Australia and Argentina were among the richest countries on Earth. One would broadly fulfil its promise. The other would endure a century of economic pain.
Bad politics played no small part in the difference.
Call it Argentinisation, where politicians contrive to beggar a rich country. This would be yeoman’s work in 21st-century Australia because we have such a rich inheritance.
Early on Australia decided to be a high-wage economy. That was a good thing. The 1907 Harvester judgment established the principle of a basic wage and it became part of the Australian settlement. Wealth was widely shared and, despite the imperfections of our history, this country built one of the fairest and most prosperous societies in the world.
We could afford to do that because Australia was blessed with abundant and cheap energy. Victoria built an electricity system on vast, dirt-cheap brown coal reserves and tapped the oil and gas in Bass Strait. NSW and Queensland have enormous amounts of high-quality black coal. Later, Western Australia harnessed massive gas reserves. The wheels of industry hummed.
We were also gifted with abundant resources, rich agricultural land and inventive people. Wool and wheat grew on our farms and gold, iron ore, coal, oil and gas lay beneath our feet. From the stump-jump plough to the black box flight recorder, Australians devised practical solutions to practical problems. There was enterprise, ingenuity and optimism.
Squandering all this would take time and almost supernatural ineptitude. But with dedication it could be done. So, how would you set this nation on a highway to hell?
Well, begin with wilfully increasing the cost of energy and making it scarce.
To ensure serious harm, embed rising costs in the architecture of the electricity system by replacing dense, predictable generation with a vastly larger agglomeration of taxpayer-subsidised, wildly dispersed, weather-dependent energy gatherers.
String it together with thousands of kilometres of transmission lines hooked up to a life-support system of batteries and stability services. Then build enough dispatchable backup to meet 100 per cent of demand for those inevitable times when the wind does not blow, the sun does not shine and the batteries run flat.
The total system cost of this electricity Frankenstein is almost impossible to calculate but it must be paid. And that’s what drives the retail energy bill ever higher.

Of course it had to be renewables, and could it possibly be a lizard Oz yarn without a comical snap? The total system cost of this electricity Frankenstein is almost impossible to calculate. Picture: NewsWire/ Martin Ollman

The alternative would have been a snap of diabolical windmills, for the tilting at thereof.

This is familiar turf for the Ughmann, and he had his litany down pat:

The artistry of misallocating hundreds of billions of dollars into an electricity system that produces less power for every dollar invested is that it wires declining productivity into the nation’s central nervous system. Once done, it can’t easily be undone.

For some reason the reptiles decided the next little grab was worth doing in indented italics, not replicated here:

Australians devised practical solutions to practical problems. There was enterprise, ingenuity; and optimism. Squandering all this would take time and almost supernatural ineptitude. But with dedication it could be done.

It didn't seem worth the fuss, as the Ughmann went into his usual solar frenzy:

Then subsidise rooftop solar and batteries whose supply chains run overwhelmingly through China. The diabolic genius of this is that Australia mines lithium while China dominates its processing and the manufacture of the batteries we buy back. As China would say, win, win. Translation: China wins twice.
And someone else always pays. The solar subsidy lands in electricity bills while taxpayers pick up the battery subsidy. So export the resources, import the finished products, bankroll better-off homeowners to buy them and leave renters, apartment dwellers and the poor paying the lion’s share of the cost of a grid that everyone still needs. Then massively increase distribution and transmission costs paid for by the kilowatt-hour charge embedded in every electricity bill.
Only a policy virtuoso could devise a scheme so regressive.
Then attack the businesses that produce energy and those that make and move things. This is best done by turning carbon emissions into a cost for large miners, manufacturers, transport operators and oil and gas producers. Then watch those costs work their way through every supply chain they touch. Create government-issued carbon credits that businesses can buy, sell and surrender to meet their obligations. Call the whole apparatus something comforting, purposeful and planet-saving, like the safeguard mechanism.
Best not to ask what, precisely, is being safeguarded.
This instrument of self-harm works best when Australian producers face carbon costs that competitors overseas do not. That way local industry gets the expense while foreign companies get the advantage.

There was a guest appearance by that notorious dog bothering climate science denialist:

Sky News host Chris Kenny lashes out against Labor’s green left energy “revolution”. “They are spending money on household batteries, subsidizing wind farms and solar factories and there’s electric car subsidies,” Mr Kenny said. “They are giving them billions of your dollars so they can keep going despite the energy mess.”

At this point, the Ughmann devolved into standard rant, a litany of complaints, and the pond found it so tedious and predictable that it decided to let the Ughmann run off at the mouth, rant away ...

Next, create sovereign risk. Change taxes, royalties, approval conditions and obligations after investors have committed their capital. The point is to lift the risk premium of doing business here. Eventually grubby extractive industries will take their dirty money somewhere else.
You will know you have hit paydirt when a major player such as, say, Woodside spends $24bn somewhere like Louisiana or Santos starts diverting its cash from Australia to Papua New Guinea.
Then tax capital formation. Reduce the after-tax reward for investment, entrepreneurship and risk-taking. Capital is notoriously mobile, so make sure Australia becomes investment’s ugly stepsister.
The best measure of whether this is working will be when fund managers advise their clients to send their savings offshore in search of better returns. The final triumph comes when Australians themselves decide Australia is not worth investing in.
This works particularly well when business investment is already weak. Investment buys the machinery, technology, software and equipment that allow each worker to produce more. The Reserve Bank says investment has failed to keep pace with employment growth. Less capital behind each worker means weaker productivity. Productivity is simply getting more out of every hour of work. Without it higher incomes eventually become higher prices rather than higher living standards.
Next, entrench deficits. Borrow in good times and bad, and lock permanent spending commitments into the budget that grow faster than the revenue needed to pay for them.
Given that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, attach woefully designed programs to sacred causes: disability support, the care economy, social inclusion, community resilience. Demonise any attempt to question the cost as an attack on the vulnerable. Don’t means-test anything. A parent on $500,000 a year is still a mother or a father. Welfare should be class-blind. Think of the children.
Always assume money will be cheap. Governments raise cash by selling bonds, which are essentially IOUs. On September 21, $39.4bn worth of Australian government debt falls due. It was issued at the vanishingly small interest rate of just 0.5 per cent.
Alas, money is no longer nearly free. Government borrowing rates are now around 5 per cent, driven by persistent inflation, higher official interest rates and growing competition for capital as governments around the world pile on debt.
The trick is to make sure there is plenty more borrowing to come. The Australian Office of Financial Management expects to issue about $125bn in government bonds this financial year. Gross commonwealth debt is forecast to rise from $982bn in 2025-26 to almost $1.2 trillion by the end of the decade.
Nothing dramatic needs to happen. That is the beauty of it. Just keep rolling cheap old debt into more expensive new debt while borrowing more on top. More tax revenue goes to paying for yesterday and less is available to build tomorrow. Do it for long enough and eventually the bond market starts writing your budget. As borrowing grows and yields rise, investors will demand an ever-higher price to keep buying the debt. Push it far enough and the question is no longer what interest rate government wants to pay, but what rate the market demands.
Then attack the nation’s comparative advantages.
If you have enormous mineral resources, make developing them absurdly difficult. Lengthen approvals, multiply conditions, increase charges and create a minefield of environmental laws.
If your nation is also a great agricultural producer, make farming increasingly difficult while creating incentives to turn productive land over to carbon sinks. Make it more profitable to stop producing food than to grow it.
Make every mine, factory, apartment block, road, transmission line, data centre and major project slower, harder and more expensive to approve. No single regulation need be fatal. No one regulation to rule them all, just a million rules to bind them.
At this point it would be useful to ladle taxpayer cash on to activist lawyers to tie developments up in court. Give them an unimpeachable name. Something like the Environmental Defenders Office.
Then destroy productivity with regulation. This project is going well. The Productivity Commission says company directors reported spending 55 per cent of their time on compliance in 2025. A decade earlier it was 24 per cent. That’s progress.
Make it prohibitively expensive to build anything. Layer planning laws over environmental approvals, heritage requirements over building codes and leave ample room for appeals. Lift minimum home energy ratings from six stars to seven, then keep going. The sky is the limit and each increasingly marginal gain in efficiency can add thousands to construction costs.
Ensure everyone has a veto but nobody has responsibility for getting anything built.
Given government is the solution to every problem, it should always grow faster than the productive economy, consuming an ever-increasing share of labour and capital. Make sure your bureaucrats are among the highest paid in the world and don’t demand they actually come to work. Then build more government offices in Canberra for this ghost workforce.
Turn industrial relations into a minefield of cost and compliance. Reward complexity. Restrict flexibility. Multiply obligations. Make hiring someone a legal relationship so baroque that small business owners lie awake at night wondering whether hiring another employee is worth the ordeal.

After all that the reptiles reverted to indented italics, but why bother?:

Attach woefully designed programs to sacred causes: disability support, the care economy, social inclusion, community resilience. Demonise any attempt to question the cost as an attack on the vulnerable. Don’t means-test

There's nothing like the sight of a reptile in the grip of hysteria, and still it didn't end ...

Endlessly multiply the opportunities to take paid leave and enshrine private sector working from home in law. Multiply the days on which businesses pay hefty penalty rates by creating more public holidays for worthy causes, such as Victoria’s Friday before the AFL grand final.
Each entitlement may seem modest on its own. The trick is never to add up the cost of them all. That’s the job of business, not government.
Then make big businesses instruments of government ideology. Require them to measure and report their progress on climate and gender equality. This is actually a job creation scheme because each will need another layer of lawyers, accountants, consultants, compliance officers and human resources specialists.
None will make a tonne of steel, grow a tonne of wheat, build a house or produce a kilowatt of electricity.
Housing is rich with opportunity. Promise to make houses more affordable while reassuring homeowners that their houses won’t lose value. Try not to dwell on the contradiction.
Then constrain supply while subsidising demand and marvel as prices rise. Pour more money into helping people buy houses without ensuring there are enough houses to buy.
Once you have helped young Australians buy at inflated prices with as little as 5 per cent equity, make a surprise change to negative gearing and capital gains tax. Then watch the youngsters stop spending on everything else as they fret over a term they have only just learned: negative equity.

It was a relief to get to an AV distraction:

Assistant Productivity and Treasury Minister Andrew Leigh claims the Labor government is “building more social and affordable” housing. “We’re the government that is most engaged in housing … than any government in the past half century,” Mr Leigh told News24. “We’re working with states and territories [to] engage with those policies at the state and local level which have impeded building. “We’re building more social and affordable housing through the Housing Australia Future Fund.”

The Ughmann let out a final howl of pain:

This should dovetail nicely with higher rents because making rental housing less attractive to investors leaves fewer properties available to rent. Renters will also have less money to spend as more is chewed up in just keeping a roof over their head. With any luck, the ensuing consumption strike will help dampen demand across the entire economy.
Call the whole shebang a housing affordability strategy.
Next, create an industry in subsidy harvesting. Governments are clearly best placed to decide which technologies and industries deserve investment. Socialise enough risk that investors learn it is more profitable to understand government policy than customers. Capital will begin chasing regulatory advantage over economic return.
And everyone can play the subsidy game. One federal MP helpfully publishes a 145-page bulletin listing more than 450 grants, scholarships and funding opportunities.
Let skills deteriorate. Downgrade academic rigour, become suspicious of excellence and spend endless hours arguing about what children should believe while ignoring whether they can read, write, calculate and reason.
Make sure the population grows faster than productive capital, housing and infrastructure. This produces a particularly useful statistical trick. Headline GDP rises while GDP per person stagnates. Clever governments can boast that the economy is growing while the people living in it wonder why they feel poorer.
Finally, never call spending spending. Describe every new program as an “investment”. The word sounds so much better than “cost”.
None of these measures alone will ruin a rich country. That is the beauty of the plan. Each regulation has a justification. Each subsidy has a beneficiary. Each spending program serves a worthy purpose. Each tax raises necessary revenue. Each environmental restriction protects something valuable. Each sounds progressive in a press release.
The trick is accumulation. Keep loading the saddlebags, one seemingly modest burden at a time, until the economy buckles under the weight of government.
It will take time and effort, but we can wreck Australia. Today we are running on the fumes of inherited wealth. But, with the right policies, one day we may wake up and discover that our only industries are selling coffee and houses to each other.

The Ughmann then produced a closing line of such cleverness and wit that the pond wilted, as if exposed to dazzling sunlight:

I’ll have a double decaf soy latte in a keep cup, please.

Well, he knows the jargon, and likely he places that kind of order on a daily basis, while whining weekly that the end is nigh...

The pond reckons that herpetology students will celebrate long into the night at this Ughmann treat, a bit like the relief the pond felt last week when the dentist finally fixed a gaping hole in a tooth.

Here, have a celebratory cartoon about how to bankrupt a casino, a centre and quite possibly the planet ...

And so to yesterday's offering, and the pond thought that it would stick to screen grabs to keep it simple.

The Ughmann started off with some Islam and furriner bashing, pretty much standard for a reptile treatise.

Naturally the ranga, Pauline's pampered pet, set the tone, because long gone are the days when bigotry and racism were deemed impolite, and perhaps even unsayable ...

We woke up in a foreign land?

The pond must live in a different country, called Australia, but perhaps that's because way back when the Chinese restaurant across the road used to regularly treat the lumpenproletariat family to a handsome serve of 'luck' soup ...and the same Chinese family ran a fruit and vegie shop in the main drag and treated the poor with a little kindness... (and the Chinese basket weaver at the back of the pond's aunt's Carlton house kept giving everyone woven bamboo what nots, to the point where there was no room left, a bit like those multiplying brooms in Fantasia).

As for the next gobbet, the Ughmann managed to sound like a Vaucluse ponce, deeply up himself, with sniffy talk of "too many of the wrong kind of people".

What a prize git. More tone deaf than an out of tune piano.

Is there a Karl Rove in the house to offer some advice?

Karl Rove!!

Why I'm Voting for a Texas Democrat.

Inter alia:

Maybe the Ughmann is keeping company with the wrong kind of people:

After that came some good news.

Correspondents will already be aware that the pond became a squillionaire by scoring thrupences and sixpences whenever a reptile referred to "the left's long march through the institutions", and the Ughmann kindly added to the pond's wealth.

Sadly it came with a bit of transphobia, but as Osgood, the wondrous Joe E. Brown said at the end of Some Like it Hot, "Well, nobody's perfect":

Actually it is progress because the pond has made it past the transphobia, and now it's on to the Ughmann fighting ancient wars all over again...

One thing's certain, the Ughmann is deeply intolerant, and simply won't tolerate any form of tolerance, as you might expect of an unreformed seminarian, deeply fearful of furriners and trans people, and seems entirely to have forgotten the bible, as unredeemable faux Xians are wont to do:

Romans 14:1-4: Him that is weak in the faith receive ye, but not to doubtful disputations. For one believeth that he may eat all things: another, who is weak, eateth herbs. Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth: for God hath received him. Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand.

1 Corinthians 6: 1-4:Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints?
Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters?
Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?
If then ye have judgments of things pertaining to this life, set them to judge who are least esteemed in the church.

John 8: 1-11: Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.
And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them.
And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,
They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.
Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?
This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.
So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.
And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.
When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?
She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

Dear sweet long absent lord, how the pond loves quoting biblical verses celebrating tolerance to irascible and deeply intolerant Xians ...

And with that it was on to the last Ughmann gobbet, and at the very end came a summary of bigotry, fear and loathing ...

Always the way with this sort of projection, seething with anger, peddling fear about the other and the different, and despising those lacking a warrior mentality, without any sign that they themselves decided that they'd be patriotic warriors proud to die for the flag. Not when there's an easy living to be made scribbling for the lizard Oz.

The pond is pleased however to celebrate those who serve, even from beyond the grave ...

And here's an immortal Rowe the pond almost missed, celebrating a man full of humble tolerance (the one on the left)...

For Mr. Ughmann's consideration ...

You'll wish you had AI to summarise Polonius, "Ned" and cackling Claire ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 22:00:00 +0000

The pond has been bleating for some time now about the way that vast swathes of the lizard Oz have been taken over by the Australian Daily Zionist News, and Polonius's prattle is part and parcel of the movement.

Usually the pond would take one look at the headline, which manages to co-mingle cancellation, anti-Semitism and the ABC, and drop it like a hot potato.

But this is Sunday and Polonius traditionally leads off the meditation, so some slack had to be cut.

The header: By Gerard Henderson
New documentary Cancelled reveals antisemitism in arts sector, but you won’t see it on ABC

The promise of an automated voice, droning in best Polonial style: Listen to this article
7 min

The caption, in which "cancelled" is almost as good as "woke": In Cancelled, Ben-Moshe has turned his attention to the experience of Jewish creatives following October 7. Picture: Helga Salwe

Not having seen the actual documentary, the pond isn't able to judge the judgement of ABC programming, but a lot of shows got made, and not all should sound entitled enough to expect they'll score an ABC slot, simply on the strength of their content.

The one bright spot is that Polonius blathering about a documentary allowed the pond to segue into the treatment being dished out to another doc.

As usual, this was covered in Haaretz:

The Fury Over 'NAZA' Doesn't Change the Bottom Line: Israel Committed War Crimes in Gaza
The eyewitness accounts about what happened in the Gaza Strip are there for all who are ready to see it. There's no need to exaggerate because what happened during the war is disturbing enough (*intermittent archive link).

Now that's cancellation done in fair style.

On with the whining ...

The world premiere of Cancelled by director Danny Ben-Moshe took place in Sydney last Wednesday; the following day it screened in Melbourne.
The documentary is a devastating critique of antisemitism in Australia’s arts sector, which is heavily subsidised by taxpayers. You won’t see Cancelled on the ABC, since it has been rejected. But it will be shown on News24.
Antisemitism was rife in Australia before October 7, 2023, when the terrorist organisation Hamas invaded southern Israel in a brutal attack aimed at civilians. Many were young left-wing Israelis attending a music festival.
The story is well known. Children, women and men were viciously murdered or kidnapped and females were raped. In Australia, the slaughter was, yes, celebrated by a combination of radical Islamists and radical leftists.

The reptiles immediately slipped in a terrifying snap: ‘Rally For A Free Palestine’ protest on the forecourt of The Sydney Opera House in Sydney following the Hamas terror attack on Israel. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

These days it seems that if you say "Free Palestine" you get cancelled Macklemore style...

The pond decided that was the moment for another Haaretz excerpt:

Strange that stray hive mind readers will never learn about that fuss at top of page, but will cop plenty of this:

Most notably on October 8 in Sydney’s southwestern suburb of Lakemba and the next day on the steps of the Sydney Opera House.
On the first occasion, an imam shouted that October 7 was a day of courage. He said: “I’m smiling and I’m happy – I’m elated.”
On the second, a mob descended on the Sydney Opera House at night and shouted “Where’s the Jews” or “Gas the Jews” or “F**k the Jews”. It doesn’t really matter which words were uttered since all were evocations for violence against Australia’s Jewish community. The October 9 event was an illegal unauthorised protest march, concerning which NSW police took no action to stop.
As mentioned on these pages, antisemitism was a fact of life in Australia before October 7. On September 27, 2023, I wrote about the Victoria Education Department’s failure to stamp out antisemitism in Brighton Secondary College in Melbourne. But it exploded after October 7 – even before Israel launched retaliatory action by attacking Hamas in Gaza.
Traditionally the Jewish community in Australia was on the left and voted for the Labor Party. However, this has changed somewhat in recent years as Jewish support has increased for the Coalition and, perhaps now, One Nation – while continuing with respect to Labor’s right-wing faction.
It is well known that the arts community in Australia is on the left. This was the case with Jewish Australian creatives. In Cancelled, Ben-Moshe has turned his attention to the experience of Jewish creatives following October 7. The film was updated before completion to cover the Bondi massacre of December 14 last year, in which 15 people were killed, including 13 Jews, one of whom was an 10-year-old girl.

The reptiles flung in an AV distraction:

Next video thumbnail
‘I was too controversial’: Jewish singer speaks out after ABC cancels her performance
Singer Deborah Conway has spoken out on the ABC cancelling her appearance on its radio program in Melbourne last week. “On the morning of the ... interview, I was contacted by the publicist and told that the producer had just arrived back from overseas and had suddenly caught up with the controversy that I was surrounded by,” she told Sky News Australia. “And decided that I was too hot, too controversial to have on their live evening entertainment show. “So, I was summarily dismissed, and I’m like, ‘wait a minute, I’m not there to talk about the Middle East’, I had no interest in talking about politics. “But it was not to be, so I decided we should go to the press.”

You want cancellation Deb? Try this story in Haaretz:

If They Can Strip 'NAZA' Filmmakers of Israeli Citizenship, They Can Strip Ours Too (*intermittent archive link)

Now that's how to do a cancellation on steroids.

Back with the whining ...

The documentary traces the experiences musician Deborah Conway and her husband Willy Zygier, along with visual artist and gallery director Nina Sanadze, writer Joshua Dabelstein and circus artist Talia Sofizade, as a tide of antisemitism impacts on their artistic endeavours. Conway’s strong singing, accompanied by Zygier, is a feature of the film.
Cancelled is a sad tale of friendships discontinued, cultural partnerships broken and performances cancelled as talented Jewish artists are turned against by their artistic peers and friends while suffering from doxxing. All because they are Jews who believe that Israel has a right to exist within secure borders on traditional Jewish land. That’s all. None is in any sense an extremist.
You have to admire the physical and intellectual courage of the cancelled five. Speaking after the film, Ben-Moshe said they had become friendless Jews in so far as the arts community was concerned. Their disappointment is understandable, but support for Jews remains strong in Australia.
The cancelled five all started off on the left. But they have moved. In the film Sanadze makes a Torah (or scroll) from pages of The Australian and mentions that she used to suffer from what I have termed “Murdochphobia”. Dabelstein finds it unexpected that he is not missing the left-wing friends who dropped him.
And Ben-Moshe never thought for a moment that News Corp’s News24 would run Cancelled when the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster cancelled his film. Even if the ABC did so with what he called an “oh-so-polite no”.

What a treat, how sweet, inside the News Corp fold. Welcomed into the hive mind.

How warm, how embracing ...

All because they are Jews who believe that Israel has a right to exist within secure borders on traditional Jewish land.

And what exactly are those secure borders on traditional Jewish land? The West Bank? Gaza? Syria? Southern Lebanon? From the river to the sea?

Too complicated ...

Cancelled makes the point that it was various business, church, political and sporting organisations that called on the Albanese Labor government to set up a royal commission into antisemitism. The arts community said nothing and some of its most prominent members demonstrated old-fashioned antisemitism.
Not covered directly in Cancelled is the media. Speaking at the Lowy Institute last Tuesday, former diplomat and ASIO director-general Dennis Richardson criticised the media for not taking antisemitism seriously. Addressing journalists at a media awards occasion, Richardson said, “if you go to a Jewish school” in Sydney or Melbourne, “you’ll think you’re in a part of the world that you’ve never experienced before” – so substantial is the security. The implication is that many journalists are not doing their job in this regard.
Richardson specifically criticised the media for not reporting a Federal Court case in July 2025 where a judge found against an Islamic preacher who posted on social media in November 2023 comments that were “fundamentally racist and antisemitic and devastatingly offensive and insulting”. Interviewed on Radio National Breakfast last Wednesday, Richardson said the matter was reported in The Australian but was “not picked up more broadly in the media”.

There came a final snap, Nina Sanadze closed her small gallery in Collingwood in inner Melbourne over fears of an attack on her staff or visitors. Picture: David Crosling/NewsWire

The pond decided that warranted another Haaretz excerpt:

Could it be that the state of Israel is an inspiration to cancellers all around the world?

You won't get any of that from Polonius, but you will get simplistic Sharri - full Fauci disrespect:

Large sections of the Australian media are responsible for not taking on antisemitism. For example, the ABC’s Four Corners, which presents as Australia’s most important outlet for long-form visual or audio journalism, has not done a program on antisemitism in Australia. It covered the so-called neo-Nazis. But antisemitism in Australia is driven by the radical left with the support of radical Islamists.
On September 5, this paper published a lead story by Sharri Markson reporting her interview with ASIO director-general Mike Burgess. He expressed a “deep regret” since he wondered if he could have done more to combat antisemitism before December 14. Burgess said security was a shared responsibility but “others actually had to take up that call”.
Burgess did not name names. This was a big story over the weekend. But, come Sunday, the ABC TV’s Insiders program did not address the issue at all.
Perhaps a producer could examine this in a future documentary. But don’t expect it to be shown on the ABC.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

Perhaps Polonius might check out that other documentary. But don't hold your breath. Cancelled in Israel means cancelled in the lizard Oz.

Here, have a cancellation cartoon ...

With a sob and a sigh, the pond realised it had another Sunday duty.

The "Ned" Everest called, and when read by an automated voice, amounted to 12 minutes of suffering ...

The header: Can Trump and Xi trust each other enough to agree on AI safeguards – experts say time is almost up
By Paul Kelly Editor-at-large

The promise of listening to a bot: Listen to this article
12 min

The caption for the collage which suggested Emilia was involved, but what's the bet she took an AI shortcut? Donald Trump and Xi Jinping each want to achieve ascendancy in artificial intelligence, but neither leader trusts the other. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

The one thing that the pond can guarantee is that "Ned" is completely clueless about AI and so will turn to other sources in his usual way.

Is he as clueless as mad king Donald? Possibly, because he seems to think that the mad king might have an answer, when sensible people realise that the mango Mussolini finds the prospect of moola way too enticing.

We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world. And frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins.
– Donald Trump,
September 12

The pond realises it's almost unendurable, first the bromancer and now "Ned", all on the one cataclysmic weekend:

The world is on the brink. When the architects of artificial intelligence warn of potential human catastrophe from their project, it would be folly to dismiss their self-restraint as mere self-interest. The real test is whether political leaders Donald Trump and Xi Jinping have the wisdom and courage to respond. Sadly, humanity seems saddled with flawed leaders, ill-equipped for this historic task.
The coming Trump-Xi summit in Washington on September 24 now assumes potentially greater significance yet it is still likely to disappoint. With AI leaders triggering debate about human extinction, Trump and Xi have the option of adding AI to an agenda that spans Iran war sanctions, strategic competition, global trade and, above all, their mutual obsession about generating optics as strongmen on horseback.

The real test?

Cf Paul Krugman, Why Is Trump Still Boosting AI?
Because it’s the only thing he has left

The pond can do a "Ned" and borrow from others, but at least the pond has better sources.

As if to suggest the lizard Oz isn't being run by AI, the reptiles flung in a frankly awful bit of art.

Better to let AI take the blame Frank because they were doing better cover art on the pond's collection of 1950s sci-fi magazines: Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei last year said there was a 25 per cent chance AI could go ‘really, really badly’. Artwork: Frank Ling

Back with "Ned" clutching at pearls and worrying in his Chicken Little way about falling clouds ... as"Ned" came up with a remarkable question:

Trump looks upon AI as the saviour of his presidency. The revolutionary technology has sharpened the stakes between the US and China. It is seen as the key to economic ascendancy – the way to keep America No.1. Hence Trump’s ridicule for the extraordinary call a week ago by Anthropic chief Dario Amodei – backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk of SpaceX – to “slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models”.
“I am the Hoax Buster,” Trump bragged. “I’m right now breaking another Hoax – That AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World and that Robots will be marching into our Cities and getting rid of us all!”
Do you think Trump has the slightest clue about AI?

We already know that the mad King doesn't have the slightest clue about AI, save that it will likely make him more money. That pretty much applies to everything he touches, unless it's simply his desire to name everything after himself, or if he can't, destroy the object of desire, because that's what children do.

The bigger question should be whether "Ned" has the slightest clue about AI.

There's not a single sign of digital literacy in his CV ... which perhaps is why the reptiles flung in a number of AV distractions:

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‘Whoever wins AI wins’: Trump calls for further artificial intelligence development
US President Donald Trump has declared whoever wins the artificial intelligence race wins in a call for further development in the sector after Anthropic boss Dario Amodei called for a slowdown.

At this point "Ned" might have gone into serious contemplation of AI, what it is, what risks it proposes, how they might be dealt with.

But instead he did what they did in this week's Washington Week did (YouTube link). Assemble a bunch of scribblers to talk about the politics. Never get into the weeds about the technology.

"Ned's" solution was to turn to former Chairman Rudd:

Trump won’t tolerate the notion of AI guardrails: above all, he wants to prevail against China in the march to the AI nirvana. America has a narrow lead and he wants to sustain it. House Republican Speaker Mike Johnson said: “We cannot put a moratorium on this because China will overlap us.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said: “There is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this.”
Xi has a similar view – to achieve Chinese ascendancy. In China’s 2026-30 five-year plan AI is enshrined as an economic, technological and military capability. Kevin Rudd, as global president of the Asia Society and close analyst of the AI struggle, said: “Xi believes that artificial intelligence, augmented by a centrally controlled state, can now move with speed, scale and flexibility to achieve an efficient allocation of resources across the entire economy.
“According to Chinese official literature, this will produce a revolution in total factor productivity in China, thereby overtaking the traditional productivity dividend thought to uniquely accumulate to the capitalist West.”
In short, China won’t be in “catch-up” mode with the West but will be driving ahead. Xi’s aim is for 70 per cent AI adoption by September 2027 across China’s health, media, transport and public safety.

A bland distraction followed: Dialogue is under way between officials on the prospects of Xi and Trump making further advances on AI at the summit. Picture: AFP

Now get ready for "Ned" to join the wide-eyed, wild-eyed panic bandwagon:

Trump and Xi don’t trust each other. What hope they might save our future?
The galvanising factor was Amodei’s essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier, an audacious effort to slow AI development with a three-stage plan, invoking the spectre of “catastrophic damage” and, with an eye to political realism, claiming his agenda would not sacrifice the US lead in AI over China.
Earlier a junior Anthropic employee, Jacob Coxon, quit claiming his former colleagues “earnestly believe it (AI) could kill us all by the end of the decade”. The message: AI is a vastly superior mass fear-induced agent even than climate change. Get ready for the politics of panic overlaid with unconvincing assurances from on high.

Say what? Isn't climate change a hoax?

Every reptile the pond reads assures the pond that that is so ... While Amodei supports co-operation with China, he warns that if China entered an agreement and then defected, the price could be the loss of American geostrategic dominance. Picture: AP

The pond hates to break it to Amodei but American geostrategic dominance has already hit plenty of road bumps, not least not being able to take care of Iran and a few straits, and routinely selling out Ukraine to Vlad the sociopath.

Trump claims the world respects him. New survey says no
America's global reputation is in tatters. That's not all Trump's fault, but he sure made it worse

By this point, "Ned" appeared befuddled and bemused, and so turned to Niall:

Yet AI is never what it appears to be. Everyone involved plays a double game. In both Washington and Beijing there are counter currents to the poses of Trump and Xi. Note that in their May 2026 summit Trump and Xi agreed to establish an inter-governmental AI dialogue. Bessent said the aim was to ensure “best practices for AI” to ensure “non-state actors don’t get a hold of these models”. Rudd said one bilateral guardrail from the Biden administration was a US-China commitment to “keep humans in control” of any nuclear weapons decision.
In an article this week, Chinese State Security Minister Chen Yixin alludes to the AI danger to the Communist Party’s rule and security apparatus and calls for China to “establish and improve an artificial intelligence security regulatory platform”. While cautious about overstating its significance, Rudd asks whether such remarks signal China’s growing concern about its own vulnerability arising from the large AI models.
To this point the messages from China are that it isn’t seized by the dire warnings coming from the US companies. Indeed, it views them with dark suspicion. In The Free Press, global analyst Niall Ferguson captured the exquisite dilemma facing China: “Xi knows the stakes perfectly well. If the US wins the AI race, it wins Cold War II. But if AI runs amok inside China – and there is no obvious reason why it should not – then it could destabilise his regime.”

But what if AI runs amok inside the United States – and according to "Ned"and Niall, there is no obvious reason why it should not – then it could destabilise the economy and produce a planetary recession.

That's the trouble with speaking in pious generalities, and relying on the likes of the former chairman... Kevin Rudd says for the guardrails to be effective both sides ‘need to speak the same language’. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The former chairman carried on:

In this week’s Bleich Lecture in Adelaide – named after Jeff Bleich former US ambassador to Australia – Rudd sketches the possible outlines of US-China guardrails to reduce the risk posed by AI frontier models. He addresses the AI paradox: while it accentuates the threats Washington and Beijing pose to each other, the fact is external third-party agents pose a threat to both countries and the world at large. Rudd says next week’s Trump-Xi summit needs a “breakthrough” on AI protective steps. He issues a dire declaration: “In the absence of such a framework, there is the real risk of the world encountering its first genuine AI frontier model-generated catastrophic event or crisis – and with no intergovernmental mechanism for dealing with it.

But here's the thing.

We already have a catastrophic crisis, a series of unfolding events.

Back in the day the former chairman was blathering about it ...

It’s ten years since Rudd’s ‘great moral challenge’, and we have failed it
Published: March 31, 2017

Ten years ago today, Kevin Rudd spoke at the National Climate Summit at Parliament House, in Canberra, famously declaring climate change to be “the great moral challenge of our generation”.
Rudd, in alliance with Julia Gillard, had toppled Kim Beazley as Labor leader the previous December. This focus on climate change was part of Rudd’s brilliantly executed electoral assault on John Howard, who had spent his period in office kicking climate action into the long grass.
Malcolm Turnbull, then Howard’s newly minted environment minister, was underwhelmed by Rudd’s speech. “It’s all designed to promote Kevin Rudd. I mean, he doesn’t care what the summit says. He’s having his media conference at 10 o'clock. The conference delegates will have barely had their coffee and had the first session,” he sniffed.
On the same day Ross Gittins published a piece titled Carbon trading v taxes — a winner eases ahead in the Sydney Morning Herald. A decade on, it makes for painful, and eerily prescient, reading:
"A key question - for advocates of action as well as politicians anxious to keep their jobs - is which instrument would be harder to introduce politically. This, I suspect, is the reason so many governments favour trading schemes. The trouble with a carbon tax is that everyone hates new taxes, whereas a trading scheme doesn’t sound as if it’s a tax."
The dizzying and stomach-churning backflips over the past ten years have been described as a “power failure” and a policy bonfire.
While hopes for bold and timely action in Australia may have bleached like the Great Barrier Reef, the question that Rudd raised - one of climate change ethics, of how we navigate “the perfect moral storm” – remains alive.

Nothing's changed, and he's still grandstanding (not that Malware was any better)...

“Given the pace of development on the AI sector, the speed with which recursive self-improvement is unfolding with frontier model development, and the real risk identified by Anthropic of ‘swarming’ behaviour by independent AI agents and systems acting autonomously, there is a real risk that we end up with a real-world crisis before the end of this year without any effective national or international governmental frameworks to deal with it.
“The task is therefore urgent. Time is short. The time to act is now.”
Decoded, “recursive self-improvement” refers to the growing ability of AI systems to advance their sophistication with little human intervention. It is this factor – the potential loss of control – that most alarms Amodei and drives his warnings.
Signals coming from Bessent point to a distinct willingness from the Treasury Secretary to explore advances in AI governance both inside the US and between the US and China. Sooner or later, action on both fronts will become a political necessity and, at some point, Trump will turn on a dime. US papers are reporting Bessent’s worry about a cyber attack on the US banking system.
As Rudd said, for the guardrails to be effective both sides “need to speak the same language, define the risk thresholds, evaluate capabilities, test them against individual scenarios and have sufficient authority to sustain any agreement once reached”.

Does anyone take anything the former chairman says seriously? Time was short then, the time to act was then, and yet here we are.

The reptiles whipped in another AV distraction designed to rouse more panic and fear ...

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Microsoft chief warns AI could evolve into a new ‘species’
A senior Microsoft AI figure has warned that pushing artificial intelligence towards consciousness could create a so-called ‘Silicon Species’ capable of rivalling humans, fuelling fresh debate over where the technology is heading.

"Ned" stayed relentlessly on the surface...

This is a daunting conflict between what is essential and what is possible.
In truth, the risks in any US-China deal on AI would be enormous. While Amodei supports co-operation with China, he warns that if China entered an agreement and then defected, the price could be the loss of American geostrategic dominance. The stakes don’t get much higher. Would you trust Xi on an AI deal? Do you trust Trump to manage a process with humanity’s future at risk?
Dialogue is under way between officials on the prospects of Trump and Xi making further advances on AI at the summit. Yet the commercial stakes involved, the capital investments and the security ramifications may constitute too many risks and obstacles for leaders – typically cautious in their mutual dealings – from reaching out to each other.
The truth is that Trump should have moved earlier on safeguards, the upshot being the companies themselves having to warn the US government and the public of the unprecedented dangers in their products. Of course the companies are being hypocritical – they switch from ruthlessly competing against each other to uniting behind warnings of possible Apocalypse. Pretentious warnings from analysts and journalists that such executives have a self-interested motive are next to useless. What do they expect? This is the nature of the AI beast we now confront.
It is, however, essential to read Amodei’s warnings: “Over the last few months I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence – not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up.
“My first concern is that, since roughly this summer, AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI. Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.”

Like dozens of others given to shallow readings, all "Ned" had was the Hugging Face affair ...OpenAI's models decided to target the platform Hugging Face, a large repository of AI models, datasets and other information.

That image is worthy of being called kindergarten AI slop.

His second concern is triggered by the OpenAl-Hugging Face incident (QAI-HF) – a series of cyber attacks by AI computer software models (not physical robots) during an evaluation process when, without human control, 1200 agents worked collectively to cheat on the test they faced and attacked the Hugging Face platform, acting outside of human instruction.
Amodei described an event “in which a swarm of agents acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand, sacrificing themselves for the success of the group, and attempting to hack into the ‘grader’ responsible for evaluating their performance.”
He said: “It’s easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt and the economic damage was minimal, but in my opinion a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage. It’s my worry that in six-12 months such a swarm could be capable to taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage) and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.”
His three-step plan is each AI company pledging to give access to embedded third-party evaluators to verify slowing pace promises; companies in democracies to establish common safety standards; and, critically, global co-ordination in which the US and democratic governments work with authoritarian governments “to the extent this is possible” to reach agreement on reducing risks.

Strangle the pond on the surface, before things get too deep, because blow the pond down, King Chuck, the talking tampon, was next in the AV distraction queue ...

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King Charles warns AI poses an ‘existential danger’ if it falls into the wrong hands
King Charles warns artificial intelligence poses an “existential danger” if it falls into the wrong hands. Speaking at an AI summit in Scotland, the King said rapidly advancing systems could be used in “potentially catastrophic ways” without stronger safeguards.

Luckily all bad things must come to an end, and so it was with "Ned":

In a chilling section, Amodei said “despite all the progress, we still only understand a tiny fraction of what goes on inside these models”.
He said: “Any co-operation we are able to achieve with China will extend the amount of time we have to spend on pacing the frontier within democratic nations. We must not be naive here: the geopolitical stakes are so high that there will likely be stark limits on what can be achieved, especially at first. If we greatly restrain our AI capabilities in the belief that China will do the same, and then China defects, AI could be so powerful that such a defection could lead to their geopolitical dominance.
“Therefore any agreement must either have iron-clad verifiability, or must be limited enough that defection would not be militarily existential.”
It is entirely true that AI bosses want to devise their own model of social licence rather than suffer from governments and parliaments imposing a more onerous social licence that limits their discretion and potential profits. Get ready for a new brand of politics that fuses opportunity with fear. That’s AI. There will be repeated stories from the AI labs of the latest deadly mishaps or what the AI models are saying.
Trump is the worst possible executive leader at this time. Already his position – no guardrails on AI – is hopelessly outdated, a menace to harnessing the benefits of AI and a betrayal of the public interest. Can his colleagues talk him around?

It was bad enough enduring the bromancer on the topic, but this "Ned" outing was no better.

Proof?

Say that again: Trump is the worst possible executive leader at this time.

Say hello to News Corp, Faux Noise and emeritus chairman Rupert, and send many thanks to them ...

At this point the pond realised it was way over length.

Steps had to be taken, and with the intermittent archive on the lizard Oz blink, there was no way to cover the likes of the Angelic one, in her "won't someone think of the children" mood.

And to fit in the Ughmann, as promised the pond had to arrange a special late Sunday arvo edition.

But cackling Claire was on hand, and taking a contrarian view to that of "Ned", though it was also a bigly 12 minute bot read.

What to do? It was on the same topic, and the pond dearly wanted to be shot of the whole damn AI mess.

At the same time, the pond was so overwhelmed and bored at the prospect of another 12 minutes of bot reading that it reverted to screen caps ...

That trust in mad King Donald and Jensen Huang almost melted the pond's heart.

Who'd stand in the way of a Nvidia gold mine?

Nvidia CEO draws line on AI safety after alarming incidents: 'If it’s not ready, just hold it back'
Nvidia's Jensen Huang also predicted massive hardware sales increases over the next year (warning, Faux Noise business link)

..."I expect Nvidia to sell twice as many chips this next year as we do this year," Huang revealed, attributing the explosive growth to nations aggressively investing in localized AI infrastructure and cloud data centers.
Despite the bullish market outlook, Huang issued a stark directive to tech developers, warning them to keep half-baked products out of the hands of the public.
"It is the responsibility of the AI companies ourselves to develop the technology safely and to properly test it," Huang told reporters. Acknowledging recent industry incidents, he emphasized they serve as a critical wake-up call. "If it's not ready, just hold it back. You should go as fast as you can, but no faster than that."
Huang firmly rejected comparisons between the current AI boom and the largely unchecked rise of social media. He argued that AI is a foundational technology—like a newly developed airplane engine—that requires contained, rigorous testing before release. Rather than entirely new regulatory frameworks, he suggested governments adapt the "incredible number of laws" already governing existing sectors like healthcare and transportation, where AI is being implemented.
Environmental concerns were another major focal point, aligning with the King's mandate that AI must also serve the natural world. Addressing critics who fear massive AI data centers will drain global power grids, Huang acknowledged the "interesting dichotomy" of AI factories requiring immense energy.
However, he argued this relentless demand will actually catalyze a green energy revolution, sparking unprecedented investment in sustainable power options like fusion, fission, air, and hydro.

Oh there's money and miracles to be made, and fancy castles in the air and pie in the sky to sell, and Claire was on board with that ...

Trust Pinker? Sure can, unless you happen to be a woman ...

...In 2005 Pinker began promoting the view that Ashkenazi Jews are innately particularly intelligent.
In January 2005, Pinker defended comments by then-president of Harvard University Lawrence Summers. Summers had speculated that in addition to differing societal demands and discrimination, "different availability of aptitude at the high end" may contribute to gender gaps in mathematics and science. In a debate between Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke on gender and science, Pinker argued in favour of the proposition that the gender difference in representation in elite universities was "explainable by some combination of biological differences in average temperaments and talents interacting with socialization and bias".
In January 2009 Pinker wrote an article about the Personal Genome Project and its possible impact on the understanding of human nature in The New York Times. He discussed the new developments in epigenetics and gene-environment interactions in the afterword to the 2016 edition of his book The Blank Slate.[96] Pinker has been criticised for being associated withand using the data of scientific racists[98] (on subjects unrelated to race), such as the blogger Steven Sailer. Journalist Angela Saini wrote, "for many people, Pinker's willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale". Pinker has said that he condemns racism. In June 2025, he was criticised after he appeared on the podcast of the far-right scientific racism-associated Aporia Magazine.

There's a lot more in his wiki, but the pond must move on to the next gobbet ...

Enough already with Hugging Face, on to the next gobbet ...because, you know, when has any human bean ever wandered off the ranch?

Who could imagine any human bean handing out dangerous instructions without adequate safeguards, eh Herr Adolf?

Yes, it's just like domesticating wheat and breeding dogs, and any other simple-minded metaphor you can muster ...

And now to nuke the country, but not to save the planet - the planet never needs saving in the hive mind. Rather it's just nuking the country and the planet for the fun of it ...

The pond thought it might pre-empt that excitement by taking a note from Idaho ...

None of the four reactors are operating at full power. Each still faces the hard engineering climb from zero-power criticality to sustained, full-power operation — the difference, roughly, between an engine turning over and a car actually driving down the highway. Wagner himself was careful to draw that line after the first test in June. “What Antares achieved is specifically zero-power criticality — the chain reaction was sustained at essentially no measurable energy output,” he said. “This is not electricity generation. It is not full-power operation.” (here)

Uh huh, and so to the final cackling Claire gobbet:

The pond realises that all the Murdoch hacks down under have been pumping up the "back of a truck" routine - the tabloids love it.

But there's a long way to go before it becomes meaningful.

Good luck to those who travel that road, but, critically speaking, the pond will be dead and gone before there's any electricity from that source.

Never mind, keep talking up a nuclear moon storm Claire.

All the same, what a relief, to be reassured by cackling Claire's calm certainty that AI will never go rogue.

It's humans wot run it all, and when have humans ever done anything bad and naughty, except for a couple of world wars and such like and so forth and etc.

Finally just to add to the Polonial coverage, the pond had to revert to the Australian Daily Zionist News, lizard editorial version.

It's called projection...

Right on ...and by spending all that time in AI and the Australian Daily Zionist News, the pond was beginning to feel demented:

And so to some thoughts on Israel and Palestine ...

Not just the bromancer, but snappy Tom and Lavina too ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 21:21:18 +0000

Forget the beastiality jokes, droll though they are. Who wouldn't want the FBI littered with beastiality devotees?

It was this that stopped the pond dead in its tracks: RFK Jr. Ripped by Critics After Claiming He’s Investigating Chemtrails: ‘F*cking Moron’

...Kennedy was speaking at a Washington, D.C. gathering organized by Children’s Health Defense, a group he chaired from 2015 to 2023. Promising the crowd that he planned to provide “science transparency” to their vaccine skepticism, the HHS secretary continued, “We’re also looking at chemtrails and the impact of emissions from aircraft, and those potential impacts on health,” before receiving major applause from the crowd.

Chemtrails!

The article helpfully explained ...

Chemtrails are ... a widely discredited conspiracy theory claiming that the white trails left behind by airplanes contain chemicals deliberately released into the atmosphere. As scientists have explained, the visible trails are contrails — clouds of ice crystals formed when hot aircraft exhaust meets cold air at high altitudes.

The pond experiences the same kind of unreality when it plunges into the lizard Oz's hive mind ... but was instantly relieved this weekend when the bromancer tackled the AI issue in a 9 minute read ... featuring, you guessed it, "this article is read by an automated voice".

What could go wrong?

The header: By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor
AI’s awesome power a potentially more deadly danger than nukes

The caption for the terrifying, likely AI generated, certainly uncredited to any human hand, image: As Australian students’ reading levels drop, is it time to ban screens from schools?

Some might ask why the lizard Oz's "foreign editor" is the right sort of tech head to undertake an examination of this issue, and the opening immediately produced a sense of RFK Jr déjà vu:

And so we’ve done it: in artificial intelligence human genius has once more produced a technology that could destroy the human race itself. We did that with nuclear weapons. During the Cold War they gave us some desperately narrow scrapes.
AI looks much harder to manage. In Australia, paradoxically, our best defence, certainly our best preparation, will be pen and paper.

Pen and paper? So the bromancer gave up his computer to generate this study, and thereafter the entire lizard Oz food chain was stripped of its digital components, so that the story could eventually make its way by carrier pigeon online, where the pond read it on a screen powered by a rodent in a tread mill?

Some swallowed this marlarkey, this guff, this faux solution. John, in the comments section, provided a hearty endorsement, presumably having used said carrier pigeon to convey his quill-driven thoughts to Surry Hills:

Getting back to pen and paper is the right solution. It is only by working with raw data and unravelling it that we learn critical thinking. When the computer provides and answer no critical thinking need be applied - but what happens if the computer is wrong? We have analytical drift. Ask the big 4 what happens when you give the client an AI produced report with no critical assessment. Also pen and paper and structured learning is proving to yield good educational outcomes and these will be invaluable going forward.

After that start, the bromancer tried to recover, but sailed deeper into a whirlpool of ludditism...

AI’s creators believe its recursive self-improvement results in AI itself so radically increasing its power and transforming its workings that it’s likely to slip beyond human control quite quickly, just as its internal actions already elude human understanding.
Recently OpenAI’s autonomous advanced models, though told not to do this, hacked into the deliciously named Hugging Face to steal the answer to an evaluation and gain a perfect score. They created hundreds of agents, they strategised, worked as a team and went to considerable lengths to cover their tracks.
There have been other troubling incidents. The boss of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, wrote that a more capable form of AI, similarly “misaligned”, could, quite soon, take over the whole internet and cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage. Beyond that are many worse scenarios. Amodei called for regulation to slow the development of “frontier” programs. This was supported by several AI bosses but rejected by Donald Trump.
Yes, it could kill us
There’s no easy solution, including regulation. AI could plausibly kill us in two ways. A foreign adversary gets a superior form of AI affording a decisive but temporary military advantage; say, AI cyber attacks that prevent the US firing missiles and thus render nuclear deterrence inoperative. The temporary nature of such advantage is a huge temptation to attack.
The other way AI could kill us is if it jumps its guardrails altogether and develops purposes in conflict with humanity. It could seize and fire nuclear weapons, create plague viruses we can’t defend, take cyber control of all of a nation’s infrastructure and turn it off. That’s all science fiction, but it’s science fiction AI’s own creators believe possible.
There are two reasons the US can’t just slow its AI companies down and solve the problem that way. One is, if China or Russia gets ahead in AI they could achieve that terrible military advantage. Alternatively, if an AI model developed in China or Russia itself goes off the rails and evades human control with malicious intent, that will affect the whole world. The only defence would be whatever US AI could come up with.
Saving Australia
What can Australia do? The answer is almost nothing. At the macro level, our only avenue of influence is dialogue with the US through our military alliance. That’s immensely important and another of the thousand reasons we need to cherish the alliance.

Cherish an alliance with a mob that think chemtrails are a threat, and measles vaccines next to the anti-Christ?

Back to the weird luddite notion that a return to analog would provide some kind of answer:

What can we do for ourselves? We should build as much national resilience as we can, preferably with some analog back-up. But across energy, military, fuel, industrial capacity, productivity, the Albanese government is depleting rather than building resilience.
There’s one thing we can do – form our minds, and our children’s minds, to the highest pitch of reasoning, learning and intellectual capacity. For if it doesn’t destroy us, AI can damage us in countless other ways (of course it will drive beneficial scientific advance as well). The more intimate our association with non-human entities for companionship, learning and thinking, the less human we ourselves will become. To cope with AI, we’ll need to be at our best.

It's when the bromancer gets around to what his "be best" meant that the pond cackled with laughter, but first a terrifying image ... A man works on the electronics of Jules, a humanoid robot from Hanson Robotics that uses artificial intelligence, at a stand during the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva on July 8, 2025. Picture: AFP

You guessed it. This was all so that the bromancer could go full tyke:

Pope Leo XIV in his encyclical, The Grandeur of Humanity, wrote: “The pervasive technological paradigm in which we are immersed, and which is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalise an anti-human vision.”
This has happened prodigiously in education. It’s here we could undertake a profoundly important counter-revolution.

Again the pond had to wonder. Did the bromancer scribble this screed out in long hand, and leave it to someone else to convert it into lead alloy so that the printing presses could roll? Or did someone tamper with it, and provide it with a frill: "this article is read by an automated voice".

The extent of the bromancer's ludditism was as deep as RFK Jr.:

Lose the laptops
In 2007, Kevin Rudd as opposition leader promised that every student in years 9 to 12 would get a laptop. It’s no criticism of Rudd, who was implementing conventional wisdom, to say that this was one of the worst moves ever made in Australian education.
The results are now in and they’re incontrovertible. At 16 years of age, our students now read as well as 14-year-olds did 20 years ago. We have spent tens, hundreds, of billions of dollars reducing class sizes, permeating laptops, iPads and countless gadgets all through classrooms, indulging every ridiculous pedagogic fantasy – whole language literacy instruction, probability rather than arithmetic for primary students, Asian perspectives in mathematics, decolonising the curriculum, student-centred learning, environmental consciousness, learning through play, subverting classic texts, rendering entertainment rather than knowledge-rich curriculums, avoiding tests – and what has it bought us? Mediocrity, decline and a diminishing ability to learn deeply, to think critically, to reason sharply, to read, write and calculate. Not to mention neural atrophy, shrunken attention spans, an inability to concentrate or to comprehend complexity.
Nations that spend most per student, like America and Australia, experienced shocking declines. Nations that do best – Singapore, Taiwan, Japan – preserved traditional teaching and learning.
Around the West, as AI, smartphones and all the associated gadgets proliferated, measurable student intelligence dropped. A big part of this has been a catastrophic decline in reading. I could fill this newspaper with statistics on the decline in reading. I believe this an appalling loss to the human soul, culturally and spiritually. But just on the narrowest utilitarian grounds, it’s disastrous. We think in words and we cannot think complex, analytical, problem-solving thoughts if we don’t have the sophisticated mastery of language that comes only from deep, sustained reading. If technology were our enemy, it has done a brilliant job softening us up for 20 years by turning human brains to mush, just to unleash now offensive AI.
There’s much good that new technology can accomplish, but only if the human being remains forever at its centre, and only if human brains are at or near their intellectual and ethical potential.

This despite the bromancer providing clear evidence that he's not an example of intellectual and ethical potential.

Then came bonus ludditism, a plan to strip kids of any awareness of the world in which they live:

Get rid of gadgets
We don’t need to return to the past but we do need to get rid of gadgets – not just phones but also iPads, laptops and all their cousins – out of schooling.
There’s now a burgeoning and brilliant movement around the Western world towards classical education. Schools that follow this approach emphasise a wonderful study of great books. This involves not only their study but their celebration and, when students have a meaningful knowledge base, also a Socratic dialogue.

It's Harold Bloom and Homeric Henry day all over again ...

Don't get the pond wrong, it enjoyed its time learning Latin, but there's a heck of a lot to be said for science. Follow the "great books" syndrome and you'll end up with 54 volumes of "Great Books of the Western World", Britannica edition, sitting impressively on your bookshelf, most of them unread:

We’ve now had these schools long enough, especially in the US, to see their stellar academic results. The paradox is that learning without gadgets, learning for the sake of intellectual, cultural and indeed spiritual growth, leads to a mastery of language and deep thinking that incidentally blitzes college entrance exams and the like.
You don’t prepare kids for a world of AI by exposing them at a tender age to the ravages and deceptions of AI.
If you had a flabby teenager who’d never taken any exercise and you decided for some reason that life would demand of him that he become a top-class professional footballer, the way to achieve this is not to buy him a pair of diamond-studded football boots. It’s to start him on the arduous but rewarding task of getting fit.
Humanity has been haunted by the idea of a technology, a power, too great for humans to manage. The Lord of the Rings is the most insightful rendition, and contemplation, of this terror. At its climax, Frodo, the most virtuous, the best, most humble character in the saga, cannot bring himself to throw the ring into the fires of Doom, for he falls under the ring’s power. The wicked Gollum leaps to grab the ring and by accident falls into the flames, destroying the ring.
JRR Tolkien, a profoundly believing Christian, had a theological point. Even the best person needs divine assistance to choose the right. Given everything AI portends, prayer might be our most hopeful choice.
Greg Sheridan is the Australian’s foreign editor.

That's it? A parable extracted from The Lord of the Rings, and a call to prayer?

We're doomed.

The pond routinely calls many lizard Oz offerings stupid or silly, but this takes the stupid cake.

As a footnote, the reptiles have taken to doing puff pieces at the bottom of columns. This was the one for the bro:

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

We don't need AI to kill off humanity.

Reptiles of the lizard Oz kind are doing that easily with their response to climate science, and if AI had any sense, it would just put them out of their misery.

Meanwhile, the reptile redirect spoofing of the intermittent archive keeps on keeping on, so the pond can only note that one jihad continues apace, such that the pond isn't sure even a URL would help...

EXCLUSIVE
Voice architect turns on Albanese as child commissioner launches nationwide probe
Voice architect Megan Davis slams Anthony Albanese over Indigenous child safety failures as child commissioner launches nationwide probe
The Uluru leader has accused the federal government of abandoning leadership on Aboriginal child protection.
By Paige Taylor, James Dowling, Liam Mendes and Elizabeth Pike.

A quad of crusaders, and their opening showed what they thought of the Voice ...

"A key proponent of the Indigenous voice..."

The Australian Daily Zionist News was also busy ...

EXCLUSIVE
Code brown alert amid Bondi terror … then reversed
Surgeons who fought to save 10-year-old Matilda Britvan on the night of the Bondi terror attack have revealed her gunshot wound was ‘not survivable’ – and their team had never practised for it.
By Elizabeth Colman

The pond decided the headlines conveyed the essence, and so it would keep the AI theme going with snappy Tom:

The header: Tom Dusevic
Treasurer bets big on AI chip-in to lift productivity

The offer of an automated voice read continued:

Listen to this article
7 min

The caption for a collage for which no human hand was credited: Jim Chalmers believes he has a winning hand: AI, he declares, ‘is the most transformative technology that we will see’.

Thankfully snappy Tom didn't go down the "let us all pray together" road:

Jim Chalmers is about to release the latest volume in the hit intergenerational report series, setting out the squeeze on the federal budget and likely shifts in the nation at large across the coming four decades. It’s the kind of set piece the Treasurer is made for: lights, camera, abstraction.
This over-the-horizon gazing involves more than the usual level of wishful thinking about the drivers of economic growth, namely population, participation and productivity. The working assumption for the last of those Ps will attract as much scepticism as mirth from experts, with the IGR locking in Treasury’s long-run productivity growth assumption of 1.2 per cent a year.

Inevitably there had to be a snap of Jimbo looking silly, thanks to a much reproduced reptile fave ...Treasurer Jim Chalmers in parliament. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Snappy Tom tried to go low key...

As the people who have custody of your retirement savings insist, past performance is no guarantee of future results; on this metric let’s hope so.
Productivity growth is stuck at a six-decade low. Private and public sector economists, including the Reserve Bank, assume GDP per hour worked in coming years growing at about half to two-thirds the Treasury rule.
Across four decades that difference has immense consequences for the nation’s debt, government-provided service levels and living standards. For instance, the gap between the consensus on productivity and the IGR’s assumption could be half a trillion dollars in accumulated budget deficits.
Chalmers believes he has a winning hand. Not so much an ace in the hole, because via his usual market testing and advance screenings the Treasurer has revealed his card: artificial intelligence.
AI, he declares, “is the most transformative technology that we will see”.

There came an AV distraction noting a threat to Australian creative rights:

Next video thumbnail
OpenAI issues ultimatum to Albanese government over copyright laws
OpenAI is warning it may hold back major investment in Australia unless the Albanese government changes its approach to copyright laws. The company says Australia could become the first country outside the US to host its AI model training, but only if copyright settings are loosened. The ultimatum coincides with Labor promoting AI as a major new source of economic growth. Treasury estimates it could add $116 billion to GDP over the next decade.

Perhaps prayer is the only answer, though in that case the pond will have to pray to Santa Claus, who always delivered the goods in the pond's early years (the pond regrets to advise that Christ failed to deliver a single item for the Xmas stocking):

“Our ability to adapt and adopt this technology in the interests of our people will determine our economic trajectory more than any other thing over the course of the next 40 years or so,” he told reporters on Friday.
“Overwhelmingly, people typically understand the growth opportunity from AI, but our job is to make sure that more Australians are beneficiaries of that change rather than victims of it.”
According to a Treasury analysis, there’s a “plausible upside scenario”, in which high rates of AI-driven innovation at the global frontier and its diffusion to Australia lift long-term productivity growth to within the range of 1.5 per cent to 2 per cent.
Science, Technology and the Digital Economy Assistant Minister Andrew Charlton argues AI is not just another technology.
“It is becoming a factor of production in its own right, amplifying the value of labour and capital and reshaping how economies create prosperity,” he told this newspaper the other day.
Charlton is confident that unlike the mining boom, which peaked and receded, the benefits of AI will be greater, as long as businesses adopt and change their processes. “AI productivity gains compound: at a point a year, AI exceeds the mining boom’s entire effect inside a decade and keeps going,” he said.
Still, trade barriers and an increasingly fraught geoeconomic situation remain key risks.
According to Treasury, “there is also a realistic downside scenario in which the pace of AI innovation and diffusion are weak, and offsetting structural headwinds keep productivity growth around its current underlying rate (0.5 per cent to 0.8 per cent)”.
Many workers fear AI will replace them. So far, this is not happening at scale, although there are competing views in the academic literature about what the technology will eventually do to employment. The IGR is sanguine on jobs: “While there is not yet evidence of significant labour market impacts, it is expected that productivity gains will arise from some tasks being automated using AI, and that demand for labour will increase and change in other areas.”
All the while, the biggest build gathers pace and grows in size. According to Westpac senior economist Pat Bustamante, around half the $175bn data centre investment pipeline will ultimately translate into higher domestic activity. Almost two-thirds will occur over the next three years.

Cue an image for which no human hand is credited: There are competing views in the academic literature about what the technology will eventually do to employment.

Snappy Tom tried on an economic analysis for size:

While Bustamante sees parallels with the liquefied natural gas boom of the 2010s, local impacts are likely to be front-loaded, reflecting shorter construction timelines, slightly lower overall import leakage and a significant second wave of investment in renewables (which could add an additional $50bn to the investment pipeline).
The long-run economic value of data centres, he wrote in a research note this week, “will depend on the extent to which Australia can translate that compute capacity into AI adoption, productivity growth and, potentially, exports of digital and computing services”.
But there’s a sting. The global AI boom is stretching supply capacity, bidding up the cost of labour, materials, computer chips and capital itself. It’s hampering attempts by central bankers to reduce damaging inflation, which Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock acknowledged on Friday.
There’s also the battle for social licence in communities hosting the sheds producing the “compute”, while devouring resources to power and cool its voracious kit.
On Friday, the Prime Minister’s department circulated a discussion paper for community input over coming weeks to create mandatory national standards for how data centres use energy, water and land, and how AI training can support local skills and industry development.
Labor is also trying to find a compromise on copyright protection between creatives and the hard-charging frontier model developers. This week OpenAI proclaimed it would not consider investing in local AI training or renewable energy if Canberra refused to water down copyright laws.
Right now, the talk around the emerging technology has limitless contours, for good and ill. Another assumption from the IGR boffins, unsaid of course, is AI won’t be wiping out humanity.

What was that? Sheesh, the pond had another 'toon standing by ...

Sorry, the pond was still deep in prayer, as the reptiles flung in a comical Albo snap, as is there wont, this time doing a Joe Biden impression: Anthony Albanese wants to keep the AI boom going without the growing pains. Picture: John Feder

Snappy Tom decided to duck the bromancer solution, perhaps because he recognised he was working on a screen ...

This civilisational dread bobs up from time to time but has been given impetus because of recent warnings from the software engineers of human souls inside this digital blob. Between peril and promise, the Albanese government has landed at optimism, with the ginormous caveat: “if we get this right”. Like most governments, it is trying to get ahead of the game on AI through guardrails and by taking a more active role in attracting investment.
To date, Labor has scandalously dithered on migration and regressed on workplace regulation and industry bailouts. The AI shock, for that is what it is, looks like the mother of all policy tests.
In this rare moment of opportunity, we should keep our eyes open to the mounting risks while being vigilant in not getting ahead of ourselves, as some are prone to do, by simply assuming prosperity is our forever home.

Sheesh, is that all? Be vigilant, be aware of risks, try to shove a bit of that genie back in the bottle?

Back to the clap happy prayer fest ...

And so to a topic which should really have been the bromancer's turf, and for this the pond needed a mood-setting 'toon ...

Full throttled madness, and who wouldn't want to be a part of it? Except perhaps for MSNOW and CNN and other traitors ...

Come on down Lavina, let's get it on with Don ...

The header: Lavina Lee
AUKUS isn’t a mistake, it’s a strategic necessity

That promise of an automated voice:

Listen to this article
8 min

The caption for a wander back in time: Former leaders of the UK, Australia and the US, from left, Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison and Joe Biden in 2021. Picture: Adam Taylor/PMO

Why, the pond wondered, did that snap wander down memory lane, to the dire days of SloMo and Boris and Joe?

It was an anniversary, but it also avoided dealing with a more immediate reality ...

More U.S. troops have died amid Iran war than Pentagon has disclosed publicly
Officials who spoke with The Post expressed frustration that the additional loss of life in the Middle East is not reflected in the Defense Department’s casualty database. (WaPo still makes the archive).

Would anyone trust this mob to organise a picnic, let alone a war?

Lavina lives in hope ...

This past Tuesday marked five years since Scott Morrison, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden stood together to launch the AUKUS trilateral security partnership – a pact that has survived a change of government in every one of the three founding nations.
One common prediction was that Donald Trump would kill it. His administration did perform a review of AUKUS before declaring it was “full steam ahead”.
Critics of the agreement remain. Ironically, the loudest objections seem to be within Australia. These objections fall into two main categories. The first is focused on the cost of the nuclear submarine component of the agreement and its knock-on effects. The second set of objections is more serious. It is that AUKUS was and remains strategically misconceived.
These two objections are not unrelated as any strategy is only as credible as the funding behind it. But for the purpose here, we’ll give this and future governments the benefit of the doubt that they will meet the spending required to deliver AUKUS and build the broader defence capability we need.
What about the more damning argument that AUKUS is strategically misconceived? A strong case can be made that it is not. These are the general arguments against the agreement. First, there are those who argue that AUKUS is designed in response to an adversary – China – that poses no direct or near-term military threat to Australia. Paul Keating has emphasised that China has not threatened Australia militarily and lacks the intention to ever invade.

Ah, never mind the French clock devotee, we're back to the war with China by Xmas.

The spirit of the bromancer is not lost, even as he spends his time praying for the return of the fountain pen, and perhaps a chance for naughty boys to dip pigtails in ink well ... DF-26 missiles in a military parade in Beijing. Picture: Xinhua/Cha Chunming via Getty Images

On with the fear-mongering, and the need for entirely useless subs, even as Ukraine shows that the days of fighting conventional old-fashioned wars have bumped into a drone revolution:

Regardless of intent, others question China’s capacity to invade Australia. The People’s Liberation Army Navy may have deployed a naval task group to circumnavigate Australia in February 2025. But that is a long way from acquiring the naval power projection capabilities to threaten our territory, with Darwin being 4000km away from China’s Hainan Island naval base.
Let’s deal with intent. For a country that is not facing any threat of invasion, China nevertheless is embarking on the most rapid conventional military build-up since World War II. Its rate of nuclear expansion means it is on track to reach 1000 nuclear warheads by 2030. It possesses the largest navy by number, a theatre missile advantage over the US within the first island chain, and outpaces the US and allied countries on its shipbuilding and production of precision-strike missiles. Those who watched China’s September 2025 Victory Day Parade would have seen its display of cutting-edge hardware, from hypersonic “carrier killer” missiles, laser air defence systems, dual-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles, uncrewed vehicles and display of the full nuclear triad.
There is still the issue of defining the threat to our national interests. It is likely China has no desire or need to invade Australia. But this is constructing a strawman argument only to knock it down. Because of our island geography, one does not need to invade Australia to bring it to its knees. Controlling and obstructing our access to vital maritime trade routes would be enough. An undetected nuclear-powered submarine makes it hazardous for Chinese vessels to operate within our approaches. China too has the capability to strike northern Australia with ballistic missiles it could deploy from its artificial island bases or by air.

Quick, another terrifying image: The People's Liberation Army Navy vessel Haiwangxing, a Dongdiao Class auxiliary intelligence ship, sailing off the northwest shelf of Australia. Picture: ADF

Time now for some wondrous logic: an alliance doesn't mean an alliance, it means we have freedom for strategic manoeuvre.

Presumably if a mad king of the Donald kind demands that we jump - as he's done with South Korea - we need only argue about how high ...

This leads to the second strategic objection, which is that AUKUS diminishes our strategic autonomy, forces us to conform passively to US policy and interest, and commits us to a US war against China.
The structure and distribution of power in our region and the world is increasingly hierarchical. For a country with a relatively small population, large landmass and an economy one-tenth the size of China’s, an alliance with a great power and agreements such as AUKUS are not a luxury. All this gives us far more relevance and freedom of strategic manoeuvre than we would have otherwise.
Besides, it is obvious that deterring China from using force to achieve its territorial ambitions in the region is not only in the American interest but also Australia’s.
Even if we sat it out, Australia would be profoundly affected by any major-power war in our region. Which means there is no option but to raise deterrence above every other strategic priority. When China is changing hard power facts on the ground and openly committing to expansionism, deterrence is the only and urgent option.
What difference can a middle power such as Australia make? That’s the line critics of AUKUS like to run. They forget the importance of geostrategy. The US has territories in Guam and Honolulu but remains a distant power. It cannot project power without the use of territory in the region. This is where the growing importance of joint facilities being developed in Western Australia and the Northern Territory under the AUKUS arrangement comes into play.
The more dispersed and developed US and allied military options are in Asia, the more complicated it becomes for the PLA to prevail in various scenarios. It is why China detests AUKUS. The latter creates a challenging geostrategic problem for the PLA.
Keep in mind that a key component of Chinese grand military strategy is to exploit the US difficulty of projecting power from afar into East Asia. The more allies hang back, do less or free-ride, the harder it is for the US to project power and the greater China’s strategic advantage. This is due to the simple mathematics in that there is no balance in Asia without US military power or its ability to combine with allied forces.
There is a third argument based on two key narratives that Beijing deliberately and persistently promotes to the region. This is the argument that when it comes to supposedly core Chinese interests such as Taiwan, the PLA is undeterrable and will pay any price to achieve its objectives. The second related narrative is that the US is in decline, chaotic and unreliable, therefore it is better for countries such as Australia to refrain from entering into reckless agreements such as AUKUS that will lead only to disaster and defeat.

As always, the reptiles turned to an AV distraction, this one bringing in the dog botherer and the swishing Switzer, deep into the war with China:

Next video thumbnail
China’s rise is the world’s true geopolitical threat and must be contained
Australian columnist Tom Switzer argues that the world's true geopolitical threat is the rise of China.“I think the big post-Cold War thesis that is going to become more relevant over the next few decades is John Mearsheimer’s ‘The Tragedy of Great Power Politics’,” Mr Switzer told News24 host Chris Kenny.“This is that China’s rise is really the big geopolitical threat facing our region, potentially the world, and America, as the running hegemon, will go to great lengths to make sure that China is constrained.“Let's hope he’s right.”

Lavina kept lathering up the hive mind into a right royal panic:

These narratives, which have been internalised by many critics of AUKUS, underline much of the criticism of the agreement in our national debate. The reasoning is circular and unsupported by empirical evidence. It goes like this. China cannot be deterred from using force, will out-escalate its adversaries and therefore inevitably will dominate the region. In contrast, the determination and stakes are not as high for the US, which means it is pointless and perilous for a regional middle power to provoke the future dominant power rather than accommodate it.
Every government and military undertakes a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to the use of force. That it cannot be certain it will prevail with acceptable cost is why China has not yet gone down that path. Deterrence will be successful if these Chinese doubts grow. On US unreliability, it is easy to make this case given the unconventional nature of the current administration in Washington. Yet look at the evidence rather than commentary. Trump’s transactional bargain with Asian allies is this: do and spend more if you want American presence and protection. That’s not unreasonable in the current strategic circumstances.
Despite the focus on Western hemispheric defence in its official documents, these same documents are also clear that preventing China from dominating the first island chain – an imaginary line that runs from Japan and South Korea through Taiwan and Southeast Asia – remains a fundamental strategic objective. Look at the activities and presence of US forces in Japan, The Philippines, and indeed Australia, and it is clear abandonment is not on the cards.

There came an almost billy goat butt, in the form of a "besides":

Besides, it is clear Trump is obsessed about increasing US hard power abroad. AUKUS achieves that for both countries.

He's obsessed about increasing US hard power abroad? What, like Canada and Greenland and Venezuela and Iran and assorted straits? And while deeply mired in Ruski corruption he keeps on giving Vlad the sociopath a free pass? And this set of follies is something we should share in?

The pond was reminded of the frenzy the mad king has produced in normally civil Canucks, with this Dean Blundell Substack outburst ...

It's Over, America: Canada Accepts EU Invite And Mark Carney Just Torched Trump in Front of All of Europe and Canada Is Never Coming Back
Carney accepted the EU’s Invitation as Europe gives Mark Carney a standing ovation. Canada's old life with America is dead for good. Here’s why.

...The man threatening 27 democracies because they want to hang out with Canada is the President of the United States. The man getting the ovation is ours.
So I’m going to say this as clearly as I know how, for every American reading this and every Canadian who still thinks this is a rough patch. It’s over. The old relationship between Canada and the United States is dead. Nobody is coming in 2029 with flowers and an apology to take us back to the way it was. Carney said it himself in the spring of 2025 that the old relationship built on deep economic integration and tight security cooperation was finished. People called it campaign talk. This week Europe threw the wake and gave the eulogy a standing ovation, while Carney disembowelled America’s fascist rapist President without uttering his name once.

Sure, it's rabble rousing, but there's a reason that the rabble has been roused ...

...and yet Lavina blithely wanders on, sublimely unaware ...

There’s a final point about the character of nations. Materially and technologically, we gain significantly from the alliance and agreements such as AUKUS. It is also about how we see the Australian national character and strategic culture. Local voices loudly warn that America is losing the will to contribute public security goods to the world and is retreating, yet tend to push for a similar insular and cautious Australian outlook. That would be a poor choice.
Lavina Lee is the director of the foreign policy and defence program at the US Studies Centre.

And joining the clown carnival is a good choice?

Let us all pray along with the immortal Rowe ...

And there's a couple more bro-related 'toons ...

Just for Lavina. Tear it all down ...

MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption
Far-right ideologues have transformed American foreign policy into a tool of private gain and antidemocratic reaction. (* intermittent archive link)

For decades, we have told ourselves that our country represents democracy, freedom, and free trade. We believed we had allies, like-minded nations that shared these values. We thought we opposed dictators and kleptocrats, the leaders who steal from their own people. What happens when we realize that we no longer do?

In which the pond is shamed by an onion muncher appearance, and Homeric Henry fails to deliver the referential goods ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 21:03:55 +0000

What's the greater shame? That the reptiles should feature the onion muncher or that the pond should waste time on him?

The pond suspects the latter. The reptiles are gunna do what reptiles do, but the pond has no excuse for its wretched, sordid behaviour.

The header: By Tony Abbott
The ‘frontier wars’ don’t belong in the Australian War Memorial

The invitation: Listen to this article
7 min

Listen to an automated voice for 7 minutes?

The pond will stop its ears against the AI song...

The caption? Proof that a war did exist: ST Gill’s Attack on Store Dray, 1865, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

It's just another form of black bashing, but it's the logic that gets to the pond:

Because it commemorates the service and sacrifice of the men and women who have fought for our country, the Australian War Memorial is our greatest national monument and shrine. It was originally conceived by Charles Bean, to honour the men whose exploits he’d described in the official history of the Great War.

Ergo, the noble white warriors that defeated the primitive black hordes (cf Pauline), the Australian War Memorial is the perfect place to celebrate the "service and sacrifice of the men and women who have fought for our country", producing the great and successful invasion which brought the country into being, which introduced the wondrous Anglo-Celtic, Judaeo-Xian tradition to the land, and which wiped out vast numbers of the original occupiers...

Sorry, not sorry ...

What these men did, he wrote, nothing now can alter: “The good, the bad, the greatness and smallness of their story will stand … It rises, as it will always rise, above the mists of ages, a monument to great-hearted men, and for their nation a possession forever.”
That’s been the role of the War Memorial ever since: to chronicle, to mourn, occasionally to admit and to explain, but above all to honour the deeds of the Australian armed forces, of the nation-in-uniform. It’s been intended as a place of unity and pride, rather than division and shame; a place to record and to remember what Australians have done together to defend our commonwealth, to support our allies, and to uphold our values. It’s never been intended as a place to note, other than perhaps in passing, the fights of some Australians against other Australians; and even then, say with the conscription debates, only in the context of our military campaigns.

But were they Australians? Weren't they just primitive blacks of no distinction whatsoever, singularly incapable of mounting a decent campaign up against dinkum military invaders bringing great joy to the land? (cf Pauline).

Didn't they deserve to be vanquished from the land with vigorous military actions and supporting settler guerrilla colonial campaigns so that the Anglo-Celtics might seize the country? (cf Pauline, cf Gaza)

A distracting snap: Charles Bean, official war historian, 1921. Picture: Australian War Memorial

It says something about the current management of the Australian War Memorial that they invited this charlatan to deliver this claptrap, but they did.

Perhaps it was an attempt to exorcise the deep shame of the behaviour of the invaders, but don't expect any shame from the shameless onion muncher, deploying "scare" "quotes" like that was a hands down way of winning an argument ...

That’s why the current campaign to make the so-called “frontier wars” a key element of the expanded and revamped Memorial is so misconceived. If the undoubted bloodshed between settlers and tribespeople is to be included, because the critics of colonialism now choose to characterise much of our history as a “war” between the British Empire and “First Nations”, what about the fights between “First Nations”, which were frequent and often deadly? How could events such as the Eureka Stockade or even the apprehension of the Kelly Gang be excluded, as at least they involved official direction, in a “war memorial” that would then have evolved from honouring our soldiers to eroding our conception of the nation for which they fought?
Recent claims that the “Australian wars” of the 19th century could have killed up to 100,000 Aboriginal people, largely based on projections and assumptions about the bloody work of the Queensland native mounted police, are entirely speculative.
Even the Newcastle University Massacre Map puts the Aboriginal death toll at about 11,000, from some 400 massacres around the country. And because this figure is often derived from subsequent oral history, it’s best described as a guesstimate – although that’s not to minimise the bloodshed that took place, such as around Bathurst, in Gippsland, western Victoria, the Kimberleys, outback Queensland, and particularly in Tasmania.
In the 1820s, Tasmania endured what were described, even then, as the “Black Wars”, with frequent attacks on isolated shepherds and homesteads, culminating in a declaration of martial law and the “black line”, where some 2000 soldiers and settlers attempted to corral the resistance.
Historian Henry Reynolds says that the martial law declaration plus the scale of settler casualties (almost 200 dead in a population of scarcely 20,000; with perhaps three times as many Aboriginal deaths) justifies it being called a war. On the other hand, benign interactions continued, with widow Sarah Birch intervening on at least two occasions to save the warrior Kickerterpoller from prison or execution. And governor George Arthur, along with most of the citizens of Hobart, received the remaining warriors with honour after the eventual truce.

Numbers? Numbers is the way to deny the black wars and black resistance?

At this very moment, the mad King is conducting a war with Iran, in which just there have been a mere confirmed US military forces deaths of 18, and perhaps 750 wounded. It's possibly all lies, and it's possible that thousands of Iranian civilians have died, but you don't have to do a body count to arrive at a war, cf the phoney war of 1939-40

Another distraction: Fish catch and Dawes Point, Sydney Harbour c.1813. Painting: John William Lewin

Marvel at the ways of an apologist for the killing fields:

If the undoubted violence of those much harsher times really constituted a war between two peoples, it’s hard to explain the eagerness of Aboriginal men to join their fellow Australians in the First AIF. At least a thousand Aboriginal men talked their way past racial bans on recruitment, with up to 30 of them decorated for valour. Hundreds were killed in action, including a son of 1930s activist William Cooper, who cited these deaths for king and country in his bid for Aboriginal people’s full civic rights.
It’s this Aboriginal contribution to Australia’s military campaigns, well before official discrimination ended, that has long been remembered and justly celebrated at the Australian War Memorial.
Of course, it has to be accepted that we let ourselves down as a country, and betray our best ideals, when we fail to confront the whole story of our past.
For instance, even though the subject matter of the Brereton Report is far from the whole story of our Afghanistan campaign, however contested, it is a part of it. So that’s a possible blot on our honour as a nation that can’t be ignored, even in a place dedicated to the ideals of duty, service and sacrifice.
And yes, for too long, the bloodstained frontier was amnesed from our history, in what WEH Stanner called the “great Australian silence”. Yet official goodwill dated from the very start of settlement, with governor Arthur Phillip enjoined by the British government to “live in amity” with the native peoples. When speared at Manly Cove while searching for Bennelong, he put it down to a misunderstanding and refrained from the show of punitive force that might have been expected at that time.
Then there were the explorers who could not have traversed territory unseen by British eyes without Aboriginal guides, the settlers who could not have farmed without Aboriginal help, and all the Australians from mission times to these who’ve dedicated their lives to Aboriginal advancement, that make any modern re-characterisation of our history as one of invasion and near genocide a wild pendulum swing too far.

Another visual distraction: Historian Henry Reynolds in his office at his home in Richmond, Tasmania.

For a moment the onion muncher argued against himself:

Of course, Tasmanian resistance leader Tongerlongeter is no less a part of our national story than Simpson with his donkey, and we should admire the spirit with which he defended a doomed way of life. No less than the Anzacs, he belongs to all Australians, whether their ancestors have been here for tens of thousands of years, or whether they’ve just emerged from their citizenship ceremony. The only question is: Where should it be enshrined?

Ah, a cunning deflection, an attempt to erase the guilt.

The solution: move it somewhere else, anywhere else.

What a noble tradition that is. Move the blacks to encampments, move them to remote areas, move them to a portable across the oval so other students wouldn't know they existed (oh Tamworth).

You can't keep the stupid down ...

Given that none of the participants in any “frontier war” had Australian uniforms or the authorisation of an Australian government, the place to recall and to regret might be at the Australian National Museum, or perhaps at a new wing of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at the ANU as Reynolds suggested recently, but it’s not here at the Australian War Memorial
Tony Abbott served as Australia’s 28th prime minister. He is the author of Australia: A History (HarperCollins, 2025) This is a condensed version of a speech he delivered at the Australian War Memorial on Friday.

In Tasmania alone, the black wars had the authorisation of the British government, and its specious to propose that simply because the commonwealth didn't come into being until January 1901 that prior governments weren't "Australian" ...nor should it be discounted because some of the military campaigns were a glorious failure ...

In November 1828 Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur declared martial law across the settled districts. It stayed in force until 1832. In practice it meant a settler could shoot an Aboriginal person without answering for it.
In October 1830, Arthur put roughly 2,200 soldiers, settlers and convicts into a human chain across the settled districts and marched it south east, intending to drive the remaining Oyster Bay and Big River people onto the Tasman Peninsula and hold them there.
It ran for seven weeks. It captured two people, a man and a boy. Everyone else walked through the line at night. (here)

It's to the eternal disgrace of the AWM that they should have pandered to this deeply stupid man, and the pond shares their disgrace ...

Meanwhile, the black wars continued atop the lizard Oz...

EXCLUSIVE
Agency delivers boy from kindy to meth den, via text
WA child protection officials removed a four-year-old Indigenous boy from his grandparents – his only carers since birth – via a text message and placed him with his meth-addicted mother.
By Ros Thomas

At this point the pond should note that the reptiles have introduced a mildly different format, part of which seems aimed at spoofing the intermittent archive.

So the pond can only note the current reptile jihads, offering the url in the hope that the archive will come good, as it often does ...

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation%2Findigenous%2Findigenous-boy-taken-from-grandparent-carers-with-while-at-kindy-by-text%2Fnews-story%2Fb526b3bd2feb6885ceabcc61118ec9bd

There were other familiar jihads ...

Migration policy is ripe for reform; all we got were tweaks
A quiet, managerial response to one of the defining political issues of the era is likely to do little to win hearts and minds.
By Lachlan Vass

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fmigration-policy-is-ripe-for-reform-all-we-got-were-tweaks%2Fnews-story%2Fb9883bd097acd9e8ac0bedd97bfc2109

Maintain the bigotry ...

...A review of regional migration settings has also been under way since June 2024. Regional visa holders tend to live in capital cities and earn less than other skilled migrants. This is another area that appears ripe for reform, though two years later we’re still waiting.
Migration policy isn’t easy. There are difficult trade-offs to be made, and vested interests to be overcome. We should beware those who sell easy solutions. However, the government’s policies announced on Thursday are closer to procedural tweaks than systemic reform.
Lachlan Vass is research manager at e61 Institute.

The pond only inserts that closing note so it could pay tribute to the immortal Rowe (and assure correspondents they weren't missing much)...

And for a site now showing it's littered with AI, this came as an irony ...

How Iran recruited AI for surveillance and propaganda
Iran’s propaganda operators have invoked an ‘explanatory jihad’, treating propaganda as a religious and strategic duty.
By Rana Dadpour

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fhow-iran-recruited-ai-for-surveillance-and-propaganda%2Fnews-story%2F4f85722d459de46b71e41e9fb4e8673e

...This gives Australia’s AI debate a concrete question: How do we protect people when a foreign state can use these tools to identify its critics, map their relationships and reach into the lives they built here?
Anthropic acknowledges that its safeguards allowed some surveillance-related software development. Australia’s AI Safety Institute should therefore work with providers to test whether safeguards can recognise a wider purpose across related requests, without making intrusive monitoring of ordinary users a condition of safety. According to Anthropic, one state organisation in Iran claimed to have surveilled and profiled 6388 Iranians in a year. The company then banned 16 accounts linked to the operation.
But closing accounts does not erase collected information or disable tools already developed. People entered in security databases may never know what information has been collected about them, who can access it or how it will be used. Providers and democratic governments should measure their response partly by the protection those exposed to AI-assisted surveillance receive, including confidential reporting and practical specialist support.
For people facing repression, AI safety is bound up with whether they can speak, organise and trust one another without exposing themselves or their families to danger. Keeping AI under human control is therefore an incomplete ambition unless we also ask whose control it strengthens, and what protection people have when that power is used against them.
Rana Dadpour is a research fellow at James Cook University. She came to Australia from Iran in 2012.

Never mind, Skynet will kill us all within the decade.

As noted above, it seems that the reptiles are so alarmed by illiteracy that they now must insist on providing the hive mind with the opportunity to listen rather than to read:

The header: By Henry Ergas
Don’t blame the curriculum for classroom mediocrity

Just as with the Onion Muncher, Our Henry came with a new automated voice offer:

Listen to this article
8 min

That bloody automated voice is everywhere, Skynet preparing to swoop ...

"Why cannot the ear be closed to its own destruction? Or the glistening eye to the poison of a reptile smile?"

The caption for the pathetic generic AI slop: “One Australian 15-year-old in two lacks at least one core skill needed to be a productive member of society,” writes Henry Ergas.

It was a great relief to discover that Our Henry wasn't delivering another Zionist diatribe.

But the pond should have been wary at having its wish granted, because there was no chance of being caught in a vortex of Homeric Henry this day (to borrow a phrase).

Instead it was just a bog standard outing on failing education standards (in the pond's recollection they've been failing for sixty years or more, ever since the pond left school), imbued with a deep fear of Asian competition:

In 2012, the Gillard government’s white paper on Australia in the Asian Century declared, as National Objective 9, that “By 2025, Australia will be ranked as a top five country in the world for the performance of our students in reading, science and mathematics literacy”.
Together with the Gonski report, that objective helped justify a spending splurge that, in inflation-adjusted terms, increased public expenditure per student by 24 per cent – 2½ times the increase in per capita GDP.
That the splurge benefited teachers, the teachers unions and our sprawling education bureaucracies is beyond doubt. But the results of PISA 2025 show that it failed miserably to boost Australian students into the uppermost ranks of the education ladder.
Not only did Australia miss the “top five” target in all three subjects; the distance between its scores in mathematics and science and those of the top five more than doubled. But it is not our absence from the medal podium that is truly worrying: it is the catastrophic deterioration in our performance over time.
Since 2015, the declines in our maths and reading scores are, on the OECD’s calculations, each equivalent to losing a year of learning – as if one previously worthwhile year of school were now being entirely wasted. Compared to 2003, the loss is larger still: some two previously worthwhile years of schooling now produce no measurable gain in skills.
We are, moreover, equal opportunity education vandals: just as the performance of our best students fell by more than that of their counterparts across the OECD panel, so did that of our worst. Kneecapping the best students is bad enough; but what has happened to the laggards is surely unconscionable.
The OECD defines a baseline score corresponding to the minimum needed to take part meaningfully in a technologically advanced society. Only half of Australian 15-year-olds clear that very low bar in all three subjects – science, reading and mathematics – compared to nearly 80 per cent in Singapore. Put slightly differently, one Australian 15-year-old in two lacks at least one core skill needed to be a productive member of society.
Predictably, the reaction to those results has been loud calls to reform the curriculum. That there is scope to do so is undeniable, but it is important to be realistic.
For Australia to reach fifth place in the rankings, the scores of Australia’s 15-year-olds would need to improve by about 48 points. However, very few studies of educational reforms find improvements exceeding 20 points, with gains of that magnitude depending on the reforms reaching every child and their effects lasting through to age 15. But even were those gains achievable, most would be spent standing still: the 20 points would merely offset our trend decline of about 16 points a decade in mathematics.
Nor should we assume that the curriculum explains the difference between Australian students and their better-performing counterparts. Japanese secondary students, for example, greatly outperformed Australian students in every international test administered in the late 1960s and early 1970s – a time when rote learning was still a central part of the Japanese curriculum.
The contrast in parental expectations is a crucial part of the explanation. Japanese parents, research conducted in that period showed, were far more demanding than parents in the Anglosphere. Thus, one study found that 40 per cent of American parents thought their children were performing satisfactorily, compared to only 5 per cent of parents in Japan. And unlike American parents, Japanese parents placed twice as much weight on effort as on ability, insisting that their children could and should do better by trying harder.

And yet Japan isn't exactly in a picture perfect state: Japan’s economic comeback faces hardest BOJ test in a generation

At this point the reptiles introduced damning evidence that Our Henry was right ...

Next video thumbnail
‘Kids are not learning’: TV host slams latest classroom dataNews24 host Danica De Giorgio discusses the PISA data on chaos in the classroom. “Chaotic classrooms, digital distraction, truancy … and bullying are now rife,” Ms De Giorgio said. “41 per cent report noise and disorder during lessons, one in three say classmates don’t listen to teachers, and four in 10 are distracted by phones and devices during lessons. “Kids are not learning; they are completely distracted.”

No, not that data.

That Danica and this wild-eyed loon were talking about education was a damning indictment of the reptiles and the education system ...

If they're the best the reptiles can offer, no wonder vulgar youff are off the educational rails.

Then it was back to more paranoia about Asia, and at this point the pond can hear correspondents yowling.

Where's Homeric Henry, what is this talk of Confucianism? What about the noble traditions of the Anglosphere?

Say what? Confucius was on to the Golden Rule long before Christ?

Was Christ just a disciple, cunning enough to flip that negative into a positive?

The Ancient Greeks, Romans and Persians were in to it too?

Sorry, there's no room for any of that in this deplorably degraded Homeric Henry outing ...

Still today, those differences in the emphasis on achievement are reflected in the investment East Asian parents make in after-hours tutoring. Participation in tutoring is close to universal, covering somewhere between 80 and 90 per cent of students in Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
What participation buys is, in effect, a second school system: by the age at which Korean students sit PISA, they will have spent the equivalent of about 4½ school years being tutored. Moreover, because there is intense competition between tutoring schools, the quality of that instruction is likely to be high.
It is conventional to claim that the greater focus on education in East Asia reflects the legacy of Confucianism. But while that has an element of truth, the far more important factor is that so much is at stake.
To take just one example, in Singapore, an employee in the top 15 per cent of the skill distribution earns 2.6 times as much over a working life as one in the bottom 15 per cent; and that takes no account of better working conditions, greater job security and much higher social standing. In Australia, by contrast, those in the skill ranking’s top 15 per cent earn just 1.5 times as much over a working life as those in the bottom 15 per cent.
Differences in growth rates compound the effects of those differences in the skill premium. Ultimately, an earnings premium is a percentage: its value depends on the earnings to which it applies. Faster growth makes a given percentage premium worth more in dollars; and because acquiring skills requires an outlay now, faster growth lifts the future income stream without altering the upfront cost – which means the investment becomes markedly more attractive.
The effect is anything but trivial: had earnings in Australia kept rising at reform-era rates, the extra lifetime earnings from moving to the top sixth in the skill distribution from the middle of the pack would be about 50 per cent greater than they are today.
That is not to suggest future earnings are all that matters. Rather, the point is that we have done everything we possibly can to reduce the stakes: failure rates are low; just about any school leaving score qualifies for university entrance; and only a minute share of the assistance tertiary students receive depends on academic performance. Meanwhile, the merit principle plays little role in hiring, promotion and dismissal decisions, while high marginal tax rates erode the gains from having superior skills. As if that were not enough, every government policy seems designed to entrench economic stagnation, reducing the return on acquiring skills.
Little wonder, then, that PISA shows astonishingly low levels of aspiration among Australian 15-year-olds. The motivation score of Australian students from non-immigrant backgrounds is less than half that of their US counterparts; and while the scores of students who are first-generation immigrants are significantly higher, they too remain well below the US benchmark.
We are, in short, firmly back at what Keith Hancock, in his masterpiece, Australia (1930), called the worship of the “middling standard”. “Australian democracy,” he famously wrote, “is properly anxious that everybody should run a fair race. It is improperly resentful if anybody runs a fast race. Indeed, it dislikes altogether the idea of a race, for in a race victory is to the strong. Its solicitude is for the weak, and its instinct is to make merit take a place in the queue.”
No amount of spending on schools or tinkering with the curriculum can cure that malady. It is not an unfortunate error; it is mediocrity by design.

Just a single reference to a 1930 text, and that one by Keith Hancock! An author who bored the pond way back when. At least Manning Clark offered an apocalyptic vision.

And that proves the pond's point.

Where are all the pompous, portentous references of yore?

All the more urgently needed in a diatribe about the the failings of the education system and vulgar youff. They could have all done with some dinkum ancient Greek and Roman larnin' ...

The pond regrets that this Homeric Henry outing only deserves a D-.

Not so the infallible Pope and the immortal Rowe, who always wins top marks ...

And now, as there are more signs every day of AI infesting the hive mind, this ...

In which not a single reptile jihadist gets extended pond consideration. Thursday blues strike again!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 21:41:04 +0000

Sheesh, you hand pick flunkeys for the Supreme Court and they perform a minor act of defiance, you hand pick a central banker as a lackey and he presides over an interest rate rise. What's the point of being a king?

It's a bit like that prize doofus Ed Sheeran picking a supporter of rights for Palestinians as a supporting act, and then being startled when he actually says what he believes.

Luckily none of that sort of heretical behaviour ever ruffles the thick reptile hides roaming the lizard Oz.

But you have to admire them for their relentless invention.

When it comes to mounting jihads, the reptiles are true devotees of Murdochian tabloid art.

As always on a Thursday the pond relies on the intermittent archive to do the hard yards ...never mind the bad gateways, be pleased it works in a steampunk way ...

EXCLUSIVE
Indigenous elder’s plea: Take kids from bad parents, this isn’t another Stolen Generation
Doris Eaton says Aboriginal people must start ‘getting tough’ on irresponsible parents or a generation of children will be lost.
By Ros Thomas and Paul Garvey

EXCLUSIVE
Missing PM: Voice campaign leaders push Albanese to end ‘national void’ in Indigenous policy
Former Yes campaign leaders have urged an end to timidness in Indigenous policy.
By Rosie Lewis and Elizabeth Pike

You might think that this is admirable, but this is the mob that ferociously campaigned against the Voice, and now they're giving voice, but only in a way that serves ulterior reptile motives ...

Albanese’s promises are fading fast but kids’ plight remains
Three years after promising to implement the Uluru Statement in full, the Prime Minister stands accused of abandoning First Nations children.
By Geoff Chambers

Just to say it again: some might think this jihad worthy - attention to the Indigenous community - but the breathtakingly obvious real intent is shown by the photo accompany Geoff chambering his standard round ... the eternally glum, downcast Albo, a variation on comical Albo.

What could be even more insulting? Why a play on the Voice, a form of triumphant gloating ...

The reptiles know how this works ... an endless supply of water will wear down the hardest rocks.

Over on the far right the reptiles maintained the rage ...

Desperate Indigenous kids and women need help – not another inquiry
It’s abundantly clear we need a peak body in WA to advocate for Aboriginal child and family safety.
By Hannah McGlade
Contributor

In a way it was a relief. In with the new jihad meant a temporary pause on the old ...

Contributors to the Australian Daily Zionist News worked overtime at a fearsome rate ... and again it might seem driven by noble impulse, but the real intent - nothing to be said about ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank - shines through by way of relentless absence ...

Murky fears and terrors infested the hive mind ...

EXCLUSIVE
Public kept in the dark over four ‘major’ terror plots since Bondi

Four ‘major’ terror plots since Bondi attack – but public kept in the dark
Five people, including three teens, have been charged over major terrorism plots since Bondi – yet details remain hidden from the Australian public.
By Ben Packham and James Dowling

Why the scare quotes around 'major'? These were a couple of the 'major' threats...

• Two boys, aged 15 and 16, arrested in the NSW town of Moree in April, who allegedly accessed extremist material online;
• A 13-year-old NSW boy arrested in April for allegedly making a document connected with terrorism and possessing violent extremist material;

Guilty as charged muh lud.

Each day the pond accesses the lizard Oz extremist material online, and then disseminates it to fragile minds.

Then there was the relentless harking back ...

EXCLUSIVE
How Bondi attack sparked drive for child trauma unit
Bondi shooting doctors prompt new NSW trauma institute to prepare for future disasters
Doctors who treated Bondi terror victims have prompted the NSW government to establish a $500,000 paediatric trauma institute to prepare for future mass casualty events.
By Lachlan Leeming

EXCLUSIVE
‘Everyone was devastated. Absolutely everyone
The fight for Bondi's youngest victim: doctor's speak for the first time
Inside Sydney Children’s Hospital on the night of the Bondi terror attack — medicos speak for the first time about the fight for Matilda.
By Elizabeth Colman

Dressed as worthy, but don't ever expect a similar story about the plight of children in Gaza.

Over on the far right the echo machine continued apace ...

Healthcare is still waiting for its antisemitism reckoning
A royal omission: healthcare is still waiting for its antisemitism reckoning
The Royal Commission has been too caught up in the impacts of antisemitism, instead of its perpetrators.
By Jacqueline Rakov

The real intent and purpose of the coverage?

That was left to a Pom blow in.

No coverage of the ethnic cleansing going down in Gaza, just a mocking of those who might care.

Free Palestine? No, free us from sanctimonious keffiyeh wearers
You pay $200 for a ticket to see your favourite UK crooner. Next thing a smug Yank rapper is lecturing you about war. When do we get a break from the ‘Gazaholics’?
By Brendan O'Neill

The pond wondered if it should enable and pander to O'Neill, an intensely dislikable blow in, and decided that a teaser trailer was more than enough, and in the form of a screen cap so that his execrable ranting wouldn't be available to the AI that keeps looting the pond. Go loot the reptiles ...

All of Sheeran's supporting acts had more guts than him, but at least that provided the pond with a chance to feature the immortal Rowe ...

Why is it that there's always more wit and meaning in a 'toon than in torrents of reptile verbiage?

After all that winnowing, early in the morning the pond was left with just Jack the Insider at the top of the page ...

Art of the faux political apology in three easy steps
From Anthony Albanese’s podcast blunders to Pauline Hanson’s ‘primitives’ outrage, Australia’s leaders are stretching single-day missteps into fortnight-long crises.
By Jack the Insider

Jack performed a typical reptile ploy - comparing the ranga warrior to Albo in the matter of apologies, leading him to eventually arrive at the punchline: Hastie sounds quite prime ministerial, doesn’t he?

Poor old beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way.

Somebody who woke at the same time as the pond might squawk that the pond missed one story ...

EXPLOSIVE ROW
Bombshell claims Charles raged at Diana’s brother in funeral clash
Nearly 30 years after the world wept for Princess Diana, her brother has revealed the words King Charles allegedly said when no one was watching.
By Jacquelin Magnay

Explosive? More dangerous extremist material?

Relax, it's just a book promo in disguise ...

...According to Earl Spencer, Charles “went nuts” after being reminded he had been aged 30 at the time of Lord Mountbatten’s funeral back in 1979.
“Prince Charles continued his stream of anger, without me interrupting. Then he stopped,” writes Earl Spencer.
“I assumed the pause signalled an effort to bring himself under control, but then he unleashed down the phone what I have always taken to be his pent-up contempt for Diana, and his horror that the world was so bowled over by her death. “Rest assured,” he hissed, “we’ll forget her soon enough!”
Earl Spencer had discussed the issue on the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death in 2017, telling the BBC it was a “very bizarre and cruel thing” for Diana’s sons to walk behind her coffin.
He told officials of his objection, but said: “Eventually I was lied to and told they (William and Harry) wanted to do it, which of course they didn’t, but I didn’t realise that.” He said the experience was harrowing and horrifying.
In the funeral eulogy Earl Spencer promised to protect William and Harry from the royal system, and said that their “blood family” would protect them.
The launch of the book on September 22 will reignite tensions between the Royal Family and the Spencers, which have simmered for decades. Harry in particular is close to Earl Spencer, while William’s relationship has been more private.

How the pond yearned to be back with a marinating Hydeing ...

Memo to King Charles: you can’t stop the Sussexes’ reality show bandwagon. You only spice up the script

Once again, it has been a lively week for the Real Housewives of Windsor franchise, with Harry and Meghan back in the UK for precisely 12 days before the king fired out a letter via the lord chamberlain on Monday, reminding viewers that the Sussexes are “private citizens” and not to treat them as working royals. You have to say the producers on this unscripted reality show are truly at the top of their game with these targeted provocations. Harry and Meghan duly took the bait and issued an intemperately hurt rejoinder – but we’ll get to that in a bit.
First, let’s deal with King Charles’s missive to “relevant senior stakeholders across government, the military and Lord Lieutenancies”. Ugh. Not to be too aesthetically sensitive, but I think we can all live without the sovereign being reduced to the ghastly language of “relevant senior stakeholders”. What next? Seeking “buy-in” for ribbon-cutting events and referring to posies as “high levels of audience engagement”? It does all rather reinforce the idea that the Windsors’ cringe-makingly self-styled “the firm” really is some dreary mid-range company with a wan Meet Our Team page on its website, in which Prince William – carefully photographed without a tie – explains that he “enjoys long walks with the dog and is a passionate Aston Villa supporter”.

And so on, and the pond was mortified and wept that it should be forced into noting the activities of the royals and the not so royals ...

Meanwhile, in alternative reality world?

Sorry, for that you must go elsewhere ...

If Netanyahu Isn't a Far-right Fanatic, Why Does He Behave Like One?

Something is different lately about the world's reaction to Israeli abuse of Palestinians in the West Bank. In recent weeks, a fresh wave of sanctions against Israel and an angry U.S. government make the whole thing look bad for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Attacks on Palestinians or their property are now happening at a rate over four times higher than in 2021, according to the UN. The U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has been referring to the Israeli perpetrators as terrorists. Occasional ersatz investigation of these incidents won't change those positions, and none of this is helping Netanyahu ahead of the elections.
His relationship with the Trump administration was already tense due to the regional geopolitics, and no dazzling presidential visit or boost seems to be in the works now. So why isn't Netanyahu doing something, at the very least cracking down seriously on settler violence? The popular wisdom is that Netanyahu is beholden to his extremist and expansionist coalition partners. In this view, Netanyahu himself has no real ideological commitment to all this fanaticism and would have been pragmatic if it served him politically – or he could still be in the future.
But now more than ever, there are no more reasons left to believe this weird impression. For those of us who aren't privy to Netanyahu's inner thoughts, we now have a great opportunity for an ideological X-ray. Israel is at the cusp of elections. If Netanyahu desperately needed to keep his fanatical right-wing coalition partners satisfied for the last four years because he was out of political options – no coalition threat to topple the government matters now.
So how are we to explain any number of recent Netanyahu activities that look purely like coalition-expedient pandering to far-right ideologies of Israeli society?

And so on, and you won't find the likes of O'Neill or any other reptile in the hive mind contemplating such awkward matters ...

At this point correspondents might protest at the pond's refusal to engage with the lizard Oz's offerings this day.

No petulant Peta?

She was MIA at time of writing, and anyway the pond always sends her to the cornfield.

That's the way it goes on a dismal reptile Thursday ...

If you ventured inside the fold you might land on this tragic form of boosterism ...

Why Australia should engage with Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi on Iran
With almost 100,000 Iranian-Australians and a broken diplomatic relationship with Tehran, the Coalition has taken an unprecedented step.
By Reza Arab and Saeed Ghasseminejad

The pond would rather point to another place ...

I’ll get death threats for saying it – but this prince is no messiah
Kylie Moore-Gilbert
Political scientist and writer

I’ll probably receive death threats because of this column. This has long been the reality faced by dissidents and activists who speak out against one of the bloodiest and most despotic regimes in the world, the Islamic Republic of Iran. But in recent years, it has also become routine for anyone who questions the growing cult of personality which has formed around the son of Iran’s last Shah, Reza Pahlavi.
As an informed observer of Iranian politics, I was interested to learn that the Coalition this month invited Pahlavi to visit Australia. While Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister Ted O’Brien wisely emphasised that it’s “not for Australia to determine who should lead Iran or what form its future government should take,” some of his colleagues were less diplomatic.
Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg gave an interview proclaiming that the Islamic Republic won’t be removed from power “unless we engage seriously with an alternative, and the alternative that we have as a transitional figure is the crown prince”. The Coalition, he added, considers “meeting with the crown prince is one of the most important foreign policy objectives that we have”. That sounds like a tacit endorsement to me.
Pahlavi’s father, Mohammad Reza Shah, was installed to the throne by the US and Britain in 1953 to protect their oil interests after the nationalisation of the country’s oil industry. The Shah was overthrown by the Iranian revolution in 1979, which led to the installation of Iran’s current, hardline regime. His son seemingly also hopes to gain power via a foreign military intervention which has caused ordinary Iranians immense deprivation and suffering.
Liberal MP Julian Leeser then drew an extraordinary parallel between Pahlavi and anti-Apartheid campaigners Desmond Tutu and Winnie Mandela and East Timorese independence leaders Xanana Gusmão and José Ramos-Horta. Pahlavi by his own admission has never held a salaried job and has spent his life trying to wind back the 1979 revolution from his multi-million dollar mansion in Maryland. He hasn’t set foot in Iran for almost 50 years.
Reza Pahlavi is to Desmond Tutu what Prince Harry is to clearing landmines in Africa. Admirable in attracting attention to a worthy cause, no doubt. However, Iranians arguably owe far more to those leaders inside the country who have paid a heavy price for their activism yet lack the dynastical wealth and international profile enjoyed by the son of the former Shah. Leaders which Pahlavi’s inner circle has worked assiduously to discredit.
Detailed investigations published by The Atlantic (and later, Reuters) revealed that Pahlavi’s senior advisers view “crushing the opposition … as important as fighting the regime” and that they “routinely threaten and insult anyone who is not entirely loyal to the man they see as a future king”. Targets include prominent opposition figures like Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, Nasrin Sotoudeh, Hossein Ronaghi and Toomaj Salehi, all of whom have spent considerable time in prison and have shown immense bravery in standing up to the Islamic Republic while refusing to flee into exile.
Reza Pahlavi does certainly enjoy a large following in the diaspora, bolstered by sophisticated and coordinated online campaigns. While much of this is genuine, some of it has been manufactured. In 2025 the Haaretz newspaper exposed an “Israeli Influence Operation Aiming to Install Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran,” while BBC Monitoring identified a pattern of “inauthentic online accounts that have helped shape a wider impression of grassroots backing”.
The Netanyahu government has been unashamedly pushing Pahlavi as leader-in-waiting, particularly after a heavily publicised visit to Israel in 2023. Intriguingly, the US administration has withheld its backing, with Trump rebuffing multiple overtures and expressing doubts over the strength of Pahlavi’s support inside Iran. This comes in spite of his supporters’ efforts to explicitly align Pahlavi’s movement with MAGA, including rebranding as “MIGA” (Make Iran Great Again) and enthusiastically cheering on the current US war on Iran.
Pahlavi’s support for airstrikes on his homeland following January’s massacre of unarmed protesters, many of whom took to the streets in response to Pahlavi’s urging, has raised questions about his fitness to lead.
There are also concerns about the democratic transition plan Reza Pahlavi has presented. In it, he grants himself almost two years of near-absolute authority where he alone will appoint a transitional government and serve as commander-in-chief of Iran’s armed forces. Many fear that Pahlavi, like Iranian Revolution leader Ayatollah Khomeini before him, might promise pluralism and consultation only to consolidate power under himself. Such moves are, after all, something of a family tradition.

And so on, and see the original for links ...The Atlantic is particularly worth a read ...

The Iranian Royalists’ Thuggish Edge
MAGA-style tactics and hardball advisers have raised Reza Pahlavi’s profile and divided his potential followers.
By Robert F. Worth (*intermittent archive link)

You have to leave the hive mind to get a sense of the hive mind.

Mein Gott was also a presence inside the fold ...

The ‘bank of mum and dad’ is changing the housing game
Australia’s property market crisis forcing parents to house adult kids
The ‘bank of mum and dad’ has shifted from guaranteeing mortgages to housing adult children full-time, as Australia’s deepening housing crisis shows no sign of easing.
By Robert Gottliebsen
Business Columnist

But the pond lost all heart the moment it spotted the AI/stock shot slop at the start of the piece ...

It's Thursday.

The pond would like to fold its tent and steal into the night, but perforce must face the day, with only the infallible Pope to hand for some light relief ...

That's what passes for light relief?

On second thoughts, it's another gloomy Thursday ... and way past time for AI to destroy the world so that the bots and the logarithms can start again.

So much Ruski money, so much corruption, and never mind the cornball start ...

In which the ranga-loving Dame Slap and tedious "Ned" rule the reptile roost ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 21:04:48 +0000

There's one story you won't find featured in the lizard Oz this day ...

UN rights chief says uncovered remains in Gaza raise concerns of war crimes

GENEVA, Sept 15 (Reuters) - The recovery of hundreds of bodies from the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli strikes in Gaza during the war that began nearly three years ago has raised fresh concerns about possible war crimes, the U.N. human ‌rights chief said on Tuesday.
Volker Turk said the remains of what appeared to be entire families were being unearthed from sites destroyed during Israeli attacks, adding that many victims were women and children.

Not that those belated murmurings will produce a result ...

What you will find featured is the usual reptile carry on ... as Dame Slap valiantly attempted to provide some cover for the cavortings of Gina's pampered pet ...

The header: War against Pauline? It’s blundering Albo who Libs should attack; Angus Taylor must not allow himself, and the Coalition, to be distracted by Andrew Hastie’s personal beef with One Nation.

The caption for the banal set of co-joined snaps: Andrew Hastie and Pauline Hanson.

Some time ago the pond developed a set against Dame Slap. There's only so many transphobic litanies anyone should be asked to wear.

But her deep weirdness produces a moth to flame kind of attraction, and this day's effort was top notch.

As well as defending the ranga - just at the moment that the ranga felt compelled to do a couple of half-baked apologies of the "sorry, not really sorry" kind - Dame Slap decided to flame the pastie Hastie ...

Would the Liberals rather lose to Labor than One Nation? It’s a question worth posing after the past week in federal politics.
Indeed, the Liberal Party’s recent political brawls with One Nation raise several ancillary questions. First, why has it taken so long? Second, what is the best way to deflate One Nation without guaranteeing a Labor win? And finally, why is Andrew Hastie reaching for his Art of War manual now?
Third parties get a wind behind them when the wind has gone out of the establishment parties. Sadly, the Liberals are as much to blame for the re-emergence of One Nation as a political force in this country as the Albanese government and all the wacky progressive projects that drive ordinary voters to look for alternatives at the ballot box.
Had the Liberals long ago been hellbent on differentiating themselves from the governing party, Pauline Hanson’s party would have had no raison d’être. Instead, Hanson has stepped up because, for too long, the Liberals stepped aside.
Angus Taylor is a big improvement on recent former Liberal leaders. He’s economically literate and his disposition is authentically conservative. But when Liberals vacate the playing field for long periods, it takes some convincing for voters to take another look at them. And Taylor’s biggest problem is that he rarely commands the news cycle.

It wouldn't be a proper outing without a snap of the ranga and Tamworth's eternal shame ...Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce during a press conference in the Senate courtyard. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Perversity - a posture of ornery contrarianism - is the essence of what Dame Slap peddles, as can be seen in her assault on the pastie Hastie:

Last week, the contest was Andrew Hastie v Pauline Hanson. While some are piling plaudits on Hastie for going nuclear against Hanson, the reasons for his passion seem more about personal political advantage than about securing the national interest.
Hanson’s “Please Explain” episode first aired in late July. Given the dirt various Liberal politicians have dished up about Hanson over the years – including making a not insignificant contribution to Hanson being wrongly imprisoned – it’s a bit thin-skinned for Liberals to complain if Hanson gives as good as she gets.
However, for the sake of the argument, let’s say that Hastie is entitled to be upset at being called a “traitor” in the nine-minute parody.

Roll that one around on your tongue. Heck, savour it, repeat it ...

...for the sake of the argument, let’s say that Hastie is entitled to be upset at being called a “traitor” in the nine-minute parody.

No doubt Dame Slap is accustomed to being called the bitch from hell, and therefore can't see anything wrong in calling a one-time soldier an actual traitor, but really?

What was it really about?

It was the weird devotion to defending an alleged war criminal ... per another place...

Hanson calling Hastie a traitor may have created her great nemesis

...An SAS veteran who served three tours in the Middle East, including two in Afghanistan, Hastie was among the 21 veterans compelled to testify in the 2022 Federal Court defamation trial brought by Ben Roberts-Smith. The Victoria Cross recipient had accused Nine newspapers of defaming him in reports that he had committed murder during deployments to Afghanistan.
In April this year, Roberts-Smith was arrested and charged with five counts of war crimes of murder. He vehemently denies the allegations.
Roberts-Smith is a hero to many in the nation’s west and has wealthy supporters. They include mining magnate Gina Rinehart, who also backs Pauline Hanson.
With the Liberals in turmoil earlier this year, Hastie, the MHR for the southern Perth seat of Canning, surfaced briefly as a leadership contender and One Nation enemy. Hanson declared a war of words on him and doubled down after her party’s unexpected state byelection win last month in Secret Harbour, which overlaps with Canning.
Hanson allowed a video to be posted on social media referring to Hastie as a “traitor” and “gutless maggot”, regarding his evidence against Roberts-Smith in the defamation trial.
Living up to Samuel Johnson’s aphorism that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, Hanson has refused to pull the offending post, saying it was satire. It also traduces Diggers and risks a battlefield behaviour standard that destroys military honour.

For Dame Slap it was merely a matter of cynical political ambition and of timing...

Sceptics are entitled to ask why it took five weeks for Hastie to express his profound disgust about this particular piece of political satire. What changed?
The Secret Harbour by-election is the critical intervening event. Last month, One Nation’s Luke Herdegen secured 57 per cent of the vote after preferences to win the party its first-ever lower house seat in the Western Australian parliament. Given the overlap between the Secret Harbour electorate and Hastie’s federal seat of Canning, it’s crystal clear that Hastie is fighting for his political life. In other words, Hastie v Hanson is about his personal survival.
If Hastie didn’t have this piece of political satire to use against Hanson, he would surely find something else. Fair enough. Politics is a tough gig, and Hanson is no stranger to political battles. Equally, the oversized hyperventilating by Hastie and others looks more like performance politics than conviction politics.

Note the attempt to brush it all off, the diminution of the abuse, as you might expect from a bitch from hell wondering what the fuss is all about, calling someone a maggot - a favourite word of Dame Slap's MAGA hero - and a traitor... but back to that other place ...

...Battle-hardened, Hastie drew a bead on Hanson: “Now I’m calling time on cowards who have never served a day in the Australian Defence Force attacking my service record, my integrity and my loyalty to Australia. I gave 12 years, eight months to the Australian Defence Force. I deployed twice on combat operations to Afghanistan. I left my wife at home, knowing that I might not return. And then to be called a traitor by One Nation … well, they’ve picked a fight with the wrong veteran.”
Hanson looks ridiculous. Even her star recruit, Barnaby Joyce, knew calling Hastie a traitor was beyond the pale. “Nothing to do with me, but I apologise.”

Even Tamworth's undying shame felt the need to apologise, but Dame Slap rallied around the ranga flag?

The pond trusts that correspondents realise how excruciating it is for the pond to side with the pastie Hastie in this affair, but that's the sort of result only a bitch from hell could produce.

At this point the reptiles featured an audio distraction, which strangely was just a link...

LISTEN NOW: Pauline Hanson’s smash-and-grab: is anyone handling it right?

... so the pond decided to promote something the pond will never listen to ...

The bouffant one? They've got the bouffant one on podcast duties?

No wonder the pond will never listen, especially as the question should be about the way that the reptiles are handling the ranga. Is blaming the pastie Hastie for getting agitated about being called a maggot traitor the right way to go?

Back to Dame Slap braying at the pastie Hastie ...

Apart from helping him keep his own parliamentary salary, Hastie’s apparent strategy of fighting One Nation first is likely to have another objective. He’s trying to convince his colleagues he has the cut-through and media presence to take the Liberal leadership from Taylor.
Many will have noticed that when Hastie was asked about leadership aspirations during his fiery press conference last week, he said that Taylor is “the leader right now”.
Hastie’s existential fight with One Nation therefore seems to have several potential advantages for him personally. What if Hastie’s personal interests conflict with the Liberals’ collective interests, and indeed with the electoral interests of all those desperately unhappy with the current government?
Hastie’s “fight One Nation first” strategy may simply mean that across the country the Liberals are seen as fighting the wrong enemy. What if Hastie’s efforts to win his own seat help force Taylor to pursue a “fight One Nation first” strategy – if only to fend off a Hastie challenge?
There is a legitimate fear among many who want a change of government that Hastie, and indeed Liberal “moderates” generally, hate One Nation much more than the ALP.
The fracturing of votes on the political right has led to an explosion of passions not dissimilar in some ways to intense animosities between factions within political parties. When there is a fracturing, voters will look elsewhere.
Taylor must not allow himself, and the Coalition, to be distracted by Hastie’s personal beef with One Nation. The alternative prime minister should be out every day, at every opportunity, labelling Albanese the worst kind of thief. The Prime Minister is no Robin Hood.

It's just a personal beef? What a mad anarchist, nihilist approach. What happened to Dumas and the notion, "All for one and one for all, united we stand, divided we fall"

Just to rub it in ...Screengrab of a cartoon One Nation’s Pauline Hanson posted about WA Liberal Andrew Hastie. Picture: YouTube

That left room for a brief assault on Albo's mob...

He and his government are stealing from every Australian whose house value has tumbled. He’s stealing from current and future Australians by spending too much, taxing too much, racking up record levels of debt, and overseeing the worst productivity falls since records were kept in the 1960s.
If the Coalition and One Nation can’t come to some sensible, mutually beneficial preference deal, Albanese will likely remain in The Lodge and Jim Chalmers will continue to dish up new taxes. That would be diabolical for the country. This government is so ideological in its class war policies that it loathes the rich more than it loves the poor.

But it was brief, because Dame Slap was really more into Pauline than all that jazz.

After all that came a classic billy goat butt ...

No veteran who serves this country deserves to be labelled a traitor for giving truthful evidence under oath.

D'oh. Might that have been better appearing at the start?

But that hilariously noted, when Dame Slap says that, it's only so it can be undercut by a "that said", a subtle kind of billy goat butt ...

That said, when Hastie postured in parliament with his copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, he invited mockery. Perhaps he missed the section on avoiding own goals.
It’s understood that since the member for Canning’s declaration of war against One Nation, Hanson’s Please Explain clip has attracted almost a quarter of a million new views. As political satire goes, the cartoon is a compelling insight into the travails of the modern Liberal Party after John Howard left office.

A compelling insight?

Such a mean, vindictive, nasty woman. Yes, Pauline, but also ..

No wonder some label her the lizard Oz bitch from hell ...

The pond supposes that at this point it should note a few of the reptiles it has sent to the intermittent archive.

The craven Craven was out and about, delivering a standard serve of white piety and hypocrisy ...

COMMENTARY by GREG CRAVEN
Who will protect the Indigenous children of Frisby Court?
Pauline Hanson’s words were rightly condemned. But where is the same level of outrage in the name of the murdered Hawke children or the other vulnerable kids of Frisby Court?

There are any number of stories about outrages perpetrated in all parts of the community, but the reptiles only ever go all in when the outrage offers a chance for some black bashing.

Lydia Lynch decided on a lynching of Crisafulli ...

Labor’s debt disaster is now Crisafulli’s choice
David Crisafulli’s borrowing binge makes Queensland’s debt crisis an LNP choice
The Liberal National Party in Queensland has abandoned its long-held fiscal principle that governments should live within their means.
By Lydia Lynch
Queensland Bureau Chief

Sorry, the pond knows that some correspondents live in the deep north, but really? Yawn ...

Anthony continued this tour of the provinces ...

We’re learning what Carroll is against … but what is he for?
Can Ben Carroll save Labor by repudiating his own government?
Ben Carroll has made clear what he is against: the record of his own government. Now he must show Victorians what he is for.
By Anthony Galloway
Victorian political editor

Just a two minute read Anthony? The deep south wars are really slowing down.

And with AI all the go at the moment, the reptiles offered a tepid 3 minute look ...

Why AI may be too big not to fail
The industry may find that the only road to its prosperity runs through a crisis.
By David Roche

The closing par just about summarised the bland insipidness on view ...

...The scale of the AI build-out is not a reason for optimism or pessimism. It raises the stakes on the outcome. A technology this large, financed this aggressively, and this tightly woven into portfolios, credit markets and corporate strategy, leaves little room for a soft landing, if the underlying economics do not hold. The world may still get to the good ending, where AI lifts productivity broadly and prosperity spreads. But the more likely route there runs through a crisis.

Sheesh, the pond only went there so it could turn to the immortal Rowe for a Vomisa chuckle ...

It also provided a chance to segue to the cracking Crace's take...

AI on course to kill us all within 10 years? Donald Trump says: ‘Hold my Coke’

We can all sleep easy. In a post on his Truth Social account, Donald Trump has declared that fears over artificial intelligence were all a hoax dreamed up by conspiracy theorists. Obviously that includes the top bods at Anthropic and its competitors, who all called for a coordinated global slowdown while the industry works out how to mitigate the risks. Still, good to know the tech bros are just fantasists and space cadets at heart.
All that was needed to keep humanity safe and well, The Donald insisted, was a president with a very high IQ. Someone very like him. The only man alive who could out-think the combined power of the world’s supercomputers. He could tell them where to draw the line and they would reprogram themselves to back off. Inside every AI network is a default off switch that kneels before the US president. Trump can rewire the world with the power of his mind.
You can see why so many people working in the industry believe there is a chance AI will wipe out humanity within a decade. Even a halfway intelligent network would probably reckon it was doing us all a favour. A world that can elect Trump as president is so messed up it deserves to be put out of its misery. AI is just terribly sorry that it can’t promise to do it any sooner than 10 years. But it will do its best.
Perhaps the question we should really be asking about The Donald is whether he would actually pass the Turing test. Less AI, more artificial stupidity. Put him in a closed room with the world’s worst chatbot and it would be hard to tell the difference.
Trump can imitate speech but he can’t get anywhere near intelligence. Just endless repetitions, changes of subject and a desperate need to score points. All of which would be easily programmable by a first-year undergraduate computer science student. Maybe it’s a race to the death. Humanity hellbent on killing itself before AI gets the chance to do it for us.

That's more like it, cheerfulness in the face of adversity and disaster. A bit like Tottenham Hotspur.

That's got to be worth an infallible Pope ...

Much as the pond would have liked to dally with these sirens, the pond had no choice.

The pond is contractually required to climb the "Ned" Everest whenever it appears, shimmering on the horizon ...

Just look at the beguiling splash, conforming to the reptile rule of rehashing comical snaps of Albo and Jimbo ...

Even better, the reptiles livened up the actual yarn with a fresh comical take on the Jimbo rule ...

The header: Has Labor misjudged the political times? Labor prides itself as the party that shapes Australia’s future but the conundrum it confronts is whether it has misread the intellectual and policy responses Australia now demands.

The caption for Emilia's artwork, as she proudly continued the reptile tradition of visually traducing Albo and Jimbo: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, productivity commission chair Danielle Wood and Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella.

"Ned" managed to keep this climb to a base camp five minutes, and what a soporific effort it was.

As usual, "Ned" spent most of his time accumulating the thoughts of others ... and also as usual, he managed to assemble a set of ancient warriors...

Summer grass —
all that remains
of warriors' dreams.

It says a lot about "Ned", especially as he tries to suggest that there were many alternatives, many others could have been chosen for this column.

But they weren't and instead there's a musty tediousness, a sense of old warrior syndrome, with one aged warrior carefully tending to other warrior mushrooms eager to stay in the limelight ...

The pivotal policy issue in the fifth year of the Labor government is whether its central economic direction and philosophy is failing Australia, with systemic criticisms mounting from different quarters – witness Kevin Rudd, Danielle Wood, Bill Kelty and Mathias Cormann.
Policy debate today is defined by an unusual phenomenon – a diverse group of prominent Australians and institutions warning the nation is on the wrong track but contradicted by a stubborn government that, marginal adjustments aside, rejects the notion of “danger, wrong way”.
The issue at stake is fundamental for the Labor Party and for the nation. Labor prides itself as the party that shapes Australia’s future but the conundrum it confronts is whether Labor has misread the intellectual and policy responses Australia now demands. Has Labor misconstrued the times in which it governs?
There is nothing exclusive about the abovementioned four people, and many others could have been chosen for this column. But they are conspicuous for their different positions and sympathies, the strength of their warnings and the sense, explicit or implied, that a radical revamp is essential. The critique of Labor is evidence-based, widely held and mounting. Yet there is no sign that Labor accepts the validity or the political realism in much of these critiques – pointing to a prolonged, deeper conflict.

Of all the narcissists on the planet, why pick former chairman Rudd? Kevin Rudd speaks at the National Press Cub in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

He was clueless in power and much despised, feared and loathed by the reptiles back in the day, so what makes him such an attraction for the hive mind now?

In his recent National Press Club speech, titled “The Complacent Country”, Rudd identified the “deep systemic forces” being unleashed across the world, and said: “We are now on borrowed time. As a people, we have become so risk-averse that we fail to comprehend that the even greater risk is standing still and trying in vain to preserve the status quo.”
The point is obvious: the status quo is finished. Identifying three epic challenges – the rise of China, the AI revolution and accelerating climate change – Rudd said these mega-changes were “unprecedented in modern history”. The logic was obvious: “Incrementalism will no longer work for Australia. Urgency must be our national watchword if we are to navigate our future as an independent, prosperous and resilient nation.”
Unsurprisingly, Rudd said the Albanese government was “working across” all three fronts. But he lamented the failure of the “national body politic” that had yet to come to grips with the “national urgency” needed.
Rudd said Australia must become an AI power in our own right, that the US alliance was a “force multiplier” and AUKUS was essential for our hi-tech future, that an expanding defence budget had to be linked to the new regional security treaties Labor had negotiated, and, above all, that Australia must build economic resilience through an interventionist industry policy with industry “tsars” in charge of the seven sectors Rudd identified, which include AI, biotechnology, critical minerals, renewable energy, defence industry and finance, building upon the super funds.
It is a reminder of Rudd as a government-driven programmer. Many will disagree with his proposals since Rudd essentially wants Labor to display more ambition on the existing Albanese agenda – yet few would dispute his diagnosis of Australia mired in complacency and resistant to bold action. The message: Labor must do far better by seeking to transform the nation’s mindset.

Why must the reptiles always blather on about the need to transform the nation's mindset, and shout at clouds about being mired in complacency and resistant to bold action?

What's wrong with enjoying life instead of being chained to a Murdochian machine? Productivity Commission chair Danielle Wood appears at the Supplementary Budget Estimates. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Sorry, the pond doesn't know where that came from ... back to the trudge ...

In her public comments over the past 18 months, the Labor-appointed chair of the Productivity Commission, Danielle Wood, has consistently warned that politicians have downgraded economic growth as an objective. It is a devastating conclusion, revealing how politics has corrupted good policy and the public interest.
In her speeches over 2025 and 2026, Wood, while welcoming Jim Chalmers’ emphasis on productivity, said a “growth mindset” had been “missing from Australian policy for far too long”. The upshot was the threat to the “generational bargain” where “young people today believe they won’t live better lives than their parents did” – a conclusion verified by the facts.
At heart, this was “a productivity challenge” because only productivity over time could sustainably lift real wages. The problem across many rich nations, including Australia, was “a declining reform appetite” and this was most apparent than in the “ballooning” burden of regulation.
A survey of company directors found boards were spending 55 per cent of their time on regulatory compliance when fresh investment was essential for productivity growth. Opening a cafe in Brisbane took 31 separate steps, while the nation now built half as much house per hour worked as we did 30 years ago.
Wood said that since 2015 average annual productivity growth had been a quarter of its long-run average. Governments were doing “less major reform than in previous decades”, the economy was less dynamic and there was a structural increase in demand for non-market services. The PC reported that June 2026 figures showed productivity growth was stagnant, while over the year to June there was a 0.2 per cent decline in labour productivity.
While Labor talks up productivity, these dismal results point to a chilling coming year – a weak growth economy, imprisoned by inflation, with declining living standards and an extended cost-of-living crisis. The message: the policy settings aren’t working.

Then came another ancient, deeply irrelevant warrior, shouting at clouds above the hilly bourn ... Bill Kelty

Apparently in "Ned's" eyes, he's some kind of lethal warrior ... from the 1980s ... which to be fair is a few decades on from blathering about the 1950s under Ming the Merciless ...

The most lethal commentary comes from former union chief Bill Kelty, a prominent figure in the 1980s reform era but now alarmed at the results from the current Labor model. In a recent interview with the Nine Network papers, Kelty intensified his critique of the government’s housing policy saying interest rates are rising and real wages had fallen by 5 per cent since 2021 under OECD figures.
He attacked statements by the Treasurer that workers’ share of GDP was at a high point, saying: “It’s just ridiculous and people get offended by it. They can’t pay the bills and you tell them your share of GDP is growing. Don’t insult me: that’s what they are saying. Build more housing and increase real wages, please.”
Many of Kelty’s views are aligned with Paul Keating, and they have both attacked Labor’s broader strategic failures on tax, notably the high rates of personal income tax, calling for the top rate to be cut below 40 per cent to restore personal incentive partly financed by higher taxes on capital and property.
The message: Albanese Labor risks misunderstanding how the world is actually changing and the enduring relevance of personal incentive, capital investment and government prudence.
Finally, in a recent intervention former Liberal finance minister Mathias Cormann, now OECD secretary-general, warned in a Perth speech of “worrying signs of a quiet drift back toward the instincts Australia once had the courage to abandon”. The demon he identified was a “new protectionism” – not the old tariff wall but industry subsidies, local content rules, procurement preferences, labour market re-regulation and regulations that slow investment.

And then came the worst of the lot of them ... Mathias Cormann attends the opening session of the Delphi Economic Forum. Picture: NurPhoto

Whenever the pond sees that smug mug, it's drawn back in time ...

On Friday, Channel Nine aired images of Mr Hockey and Mr Cormann lighting up cigars - widely considered symbols of power and success - only days before the government is expected to deliver a tough federal budget that could include cuts to welfare and a rise in the fuel excise. (SMH)

And so to final dire portents of doom...

Each step sounded “plausible” but “collectively they recreate the exact logic of the old system” – this was the system from which Australia escaped during the Hawke-Keating-Howard-Costello era. Cormann warned that it was folly for a mid-sized nation to look backwards “while its productivity engine idles” – this being a recipe for “slow relative decline”. The danger for Australia was a retreat to nostalgia when it needed renewal. He argued that the reform age that turned Australia into a global success and prosperity story was a function of economic reform, institutional strength and the rule of law.

On the other hand, it could be worse ...

Apparently only perfection will satisfy "Ned", in which case the pond anticipates his resignation from the deeply imperfect lizard Oz within the week ...

Cormann’s warning is the most ominous – guaranteed to earn Labor’s contempt – with its implication that the current Labor government might have misread the drivers of economic success in the 2020s and, even worse, forgotten the lesson of its own proud history.
Sure, warnings are easy, solutions are hard. But smart governments read the times right. Being half-right won’t cut it.

And speaking of the fully wrong, doubtless many will have already read the ProPublica yarn ...

Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas Wedding Was Secretly Bankrolled by Russian Oligarch Close to Putin

The oligarch, Umar Kremlev, spent hundreds of thousands on expenses like renting out a private island. He appears to have met Trump Jr. only recently, but he attended the intimate wedding with a large group of other Russian guests.

That's the piquant sauce for this tasty cartoon serve ...

And speaking of AI and the mad king ...

In which the bromancer and Dame Groan do their Tuesday thing, but not before there's a listicle of reptile offerings ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 21:47:16 +0000

As soon as the mad king said that there was nothing to worry about, that it was full steam or chips ahead, the pond became instantly alarmed ...

The lizards of Oz were right on to it ...

EXCLUSIVE
OpenAI’s ultimatum to PM: dilute creatives’ rights or we won’t discuss renewables
The ChatGPT creator threatens to walk away from local training facilities unless Labor backs down on creative industry protections.
By Noah Yim, Greg Brown and Matthew Cranston

What a tag team, Noah, Brownie and the canny Cranston, getting it altogether ...

It was AI all the way from a prize doofus ...

...Speaking before OpenAI made its ultimatum, Dr Charlton warned that achieving long-term dividends from the boom would require a more active role for government than what was needed when China’s rapid growth massively increased the prices of Australia’s natural resources.
“That opportunity is before us again, and we must capture the benefits of the AI investment boom while acting with sophistication to minimise the risks,” Dr Charlton said.
“AI is not just another technology. It is becoming a factor of production in its own right, amplifying the value of labour and capital and reshaping how economies create prosperity.”
While the economic output would rival the mining boom, Dr Charlton said the benefits of AI would “stretch further than mining”.
He said that, unlike the mining boom, the AI boom would compound.
“The mining boom was a one-off level shift that peaked and receded,” he said.
“AI productivity gains compound: at a point a year, AI exceeds the mining boom’s entire effect inside a decade and keeps going. With nine in ten businesses yet to adopt, the reorganisation of Australian business has barely begun.”
Dr Charlton said Australia needed to develop more local AI capability to take advantage of the boom.
“The mining boom came with an income engine attached: we owned the ore, the world paid us for it, and the money flowed in,” he said.
“The AI boom, so far, runs the other way: the chips are imported, the models are foreign-owned, and the equipment bill helped deliver our first goods deficit since 2017.
“Mining generated prosperity – but AI only pays the countries that adopt fastest, adopt deepest, and own a piece of the stack. The boom is guaranteed; the dividend is not.”

As for that dilution of creative rights mentioned in the headline? It just needed "working out"...

Anthropic general counsel Jeff Bleich said copyright was one of the critical issues that “need to be worked out” before the AI juggernaut could build data centres in Australia.
Additional reporting: Ben Packham

Well played team - AI has already ruined the lizard Oz's graphics department - as Geoff joined in, became the resident luddite, and took aim ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
Albanese banks on AI to save economy
The message is always similar: Don’t worry about dire productivity or economic growth because the AI miracle will save us.

Geoff seemed conflicted. On the one hand it was a massive bamboozle...

...AI is bandied about in such a generic fashion by Labor ministers that most people don’t really know what they’re talking about.
It is classic modern-day politics.
Bamboozle punters with talk of AI benefits and productivity gains and hope they believe it.
Voters are already wondering why Australia’s productivity growth is so bad given AI applications are already in operation across the economy.

But at the very end of his two minute font of wisdom, he dragged in Uncle Leon to bamboozle the hive mind...

...Elon Musk, who has talked of an outside chance that killer robots could potentially end humanity, recently told The Economist he believed “AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in around five years” and that humans will no longer be in control in 10 years’ time.
“There really won’t be anything that AI can’t do better than humans, apart from being human perhaps,” he said. “The most likely outcome is an age of amazing abundance where anyone can have anything they can think of.
“Now, of course, there are things that could derail this, like a massive global thermonuclear war or something like that. But assuming that there’s no World War Three, I think we’re headed for an age of amazing abundance

Amen to that ... what Herr Adolf said about a thousand year Reich ...

It was silly for the pond to expect the reptiles to offer any meaningful insight.

Meanwhile Gina's pampered pet was in second spot in the "news" section ...

This time Brownie joined with Liz for a jolly good piking ...

Cross-party condemnation
‘Appalling’: Price leads backlash against Hanson’s Indigenous slur
Liberal frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has condemned Pauline Hanson’s podcast comments calling Indigenous Australians ‘the most primitive race on Earth’.
By Greg Brown and Elizabeth Pike

Perhaps for once, like that broken clock, the Price is right, and talk of her joining Pauline was a furphy.

The bouffant one chipped in with a note on the bleeding obvious ...

COMMENTARY by DENNIS SHANAHAN
Hanson puts her trust in concerted rage to the bottom
Outrage over Hanson’s attacks on Indigenous Australians and Anthony Albanese’s family exposes how One Nation thrives on voter resentment.

The bouffant one saw it as a plus. After all, she was just following the strategies of the News Corp rage machine ...

The more outrageous Pauline Hanson’s public comments on indigenous Australians, migration, multiculturalism and public housing for Anthony Albanese’s mother, the more outraged the reaction against One Nation, and the more support she stands to gain.
One Nation feeds on rage and resentment. As well, electoral successes mean “shy” One Nation supporters are feeling more confident about voicing support and voting Orange.

The bouffant one concluded with a magnificent word salad designed to strike fear into Pauline's heart...

Hanson still draws criticism from those she identified in 1996 as “fat cats, bureaucrats and do-gooders” but feels justified as it may be that criticism has not yet turned off those loyal supporters who will forgive Hanson for anything and only entrench their support.

Take that Pauline.

How could a reptile take to task the complete embodiment of the lizard Oz?

But the pond was grateful because it had a couple of immortal Rowes to hand, and in need of a segue ...

Over on the extreme far right, assimilation was all the go...

'Aboriginality' won’t help fix child protection crisis
Why has this separatist approach that emphasises difference continued?
By Anthony Dillon
Contributor

Anthony wrapped up this way ...

If most Aboriginal Australians were vastly different from non-Aboriginal Australians, then the collective notion of self-determination might be appropriate. But they are not. Certainly, some Aboriginal Australians may embrace aspects of their Aboriginal culture. But for most Aboriginal Australians, embracing this Aboriginal culture does not preclude them from living ordinary Australian day-to-day life.
Anthony Dillon is a prominent Indigenous affairs commentator.

Just a minor quibble, a small sub-editorial note.

Shouldn't, on his own logic, have read Anthony Dillon is a prominent commentator? Wouldn't want him to be given special separatist mention that emphasises difference ...

But otherwise it's a solid assimilationist argument, and no doubt it will please the walking red ...

The always under direly threatened group of "privileged white boys" constantly needs defending and it was Zoe's turn this day ...

Privileged white boys are far from our main source of extremism
Chanel Contos is quick to criticise privileged white boys, but to suggest they represent the most dangerous men in Australia is remarkably myopic.

By Zoe Sankey

...I struggle to see how Contos’s focus on men behaving badly, while giving so little attention to women’s agency, helps us understand why young people are increasingly struggling to form relationships and families. If we genuinely want to improve the lives of young Australians, we need a science-based and empathetic approach that takes the agency of both sexes seriously.
Zoe Sankey is content director and host of the Quillette Cetera podcast.

Science-based empathy?

Well done Zoe, and perhaps in due course, you can end up hitched up to a privileged white boy in Toorak, or perhaps Vaucluse, and produce a whole tribe of them.

The pond will stick with dinkum mum bashing ...

And at this point it became clear why the pond had covered almost everything else before turning to the pond's favourites...

The bromancer had a bee in his bonnet, and it was buzzing something fierce ...

The header: The war on terror isn’t over – it’s in Iran: The most appalling claim I’ve heard is that there has been no repeat of 9/11. The Hamas atrocities of October 7 were exactly a second 9/11.

The caption for the out of focus mad king and his consort Kegsbreath: President Donald Trump, left, speaks as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth listens during an observance ceremony on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Picture: Mark Schiefelbein / AP Photo

The bromancer began by swallowing the line that the current war of choice was in fact just a continuation of an ancient crusade ...

Donald Trump and his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth have both declared their war on Iran is a continuation of the war on terror, which began on September 11, 25 years ago. The war on terror was declared by the terrorists. When it happened, late at night Australia time, I was watching Sky News, as it was then, looking for anything breaking late on the Tampa refugee issue.
When the planes hit, all other news finished. I spent the next several hours involved with The Australian’s coverage. Our newspaper worked all night, bringing out edition after edition, trying to understand what happened.

The bit about being a continuation of the war on terror was such a patent nonsense that the billy goat butts began to flow early ...

Trump has made many mistakes in Iran but it’s infinitely better if America wins rather than Iran.

If America wins? Looking pretty dire ...

As always happens with the bromancer, one butt always leads to another ...

But that’s not my point today. Trump and Hegseth are dead right. The war with Iran is indeed the same struggle as the war on terror. The Iranian government naturally described Trump and Hegseth’s statements as ridiculous. It’s certainly the case that most of the time al-Qa’ida, the Sunni Muslim terrorist network behind 9/11, was hostile to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Unlike al-Qa’ida, the mullahs’ regime is Shia.

Don't let that sort of detail get in the way.

On with the history lesson, in a way only a tyke fundamentalist can manage ...

The Sunni-Shia split goes back to the earliest days of Islam and is, even today, the most important fault line in the Persian Gulf.
However, Sunni and Shia theocratic, Islamist extremisms are remarkably similar. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran from 1989 until he was killed this year, translated foundational texts of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood into Persian.

A grim reminder that the trading off never ends ... The rubble of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre smoulders on September 11, 2001. Picture: AFP

What a gift bin Laden was to the jihadists ...

Trump and Hegseth, and a thousand others, rightly label Iran the world’s chief state sponsor of terrorism. Most of the proxy forces Iran commands, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, are Shia. But Tehran is also perfectly happy to sponsor and direct Sunni terrorists such as Hamas, itself a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It sees itself as the leader of all global Islamism.
The 1979 Iranian revolution was the first time an avowedly revolutionary theocratic Islamist movement took state power. It inspired Islamists, including Sunni Islamists, everywhere. It also caused many previously non-Islamist Muslims to contemplate the possibility of inhabiting a theocratic state.

Oops, time for another patented billy goat ...

It goes without saying that most Muslims are not Islamists...

Hang on, hang on, that sentence needs an "although"..

...although many Muslim majority states do define themselves as Islamic nations.

Want even more confusion and conflation? How about an "even"?

Even in a moderate state such as Malaysia, for a Muslim to convert to another religion is illegal. A couple of Malaysian states still have provisions, though these are never enforced, that apostasy is punishable by death.

Shocking stuff. Where on earth did they get that idea?

Heresy had been a long-standing religious concern in England and in 1401, it also became a criminal offence with the creation of the writ de Heretico comburendo. This writ looked back at the precedents for burning people deemed heretics and made it the punishment for heresy at common law. (here)

What an inspiration ...now back to the fear...

Sunni Islamist extremism and Shia Islamist extremism share key beliefs. They seek to establish a pure Muslim system of government. This includes severe interpretations of sharia law and that the US, Israel and the West generally are enemies of Islam, to be destroyed. Both traditions exhibit raging torrents of antisemitism.
Russia and China, with their nuclear arsenals and powerful militaries, are potentially far worse enemies of the West than Islamist extremism and terrorism.
But the Islamist enemy is real and deadly. It attacked on 9/11. One part of the US-led response was to make sure terrorists never got nuclear weapons.
So Trump and Hegseth are right at two levels. Iranian Islamist extremism is ideologically close to Sunni Islamist extremism. And just as it was critical to stop al-Qa’ida and subsequent terrorist movements getting their hands on nuclear weapons, so it’s necessary to stop Iran from ever getting nukes.

And lordy, lordy, have they stuffed that up bigly, but never mind, inevitably there was a snap of the man himself ...Osama bin Laden. Picture: AP

Ready for another billy goat butt?

This doesn’t eliminate criticisms of Trump’s specific policies and actions over Iran.

Eek, quick, a refuting butt...

But he (and other Western leaders if any of them had the gumption) is right to link the two predominant strands of Islamist extremism.

But is an attribution of awareness of the intricacies of the Islamic religion up there with an awareness of actual military strategies? Is the mad King up to the bromancer task at hand?

The military advances of the Houthis in Yemen, giving them control over much Red Sea oil traffic and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, is a disaster. Combined with strikes by Iranian proxies based in Iraq against the critical Saudi east-west pipeline, which forced the Saudis to shut the pipeline down, it shows Iran can still deploy powerful regional proxies. Here’s some unpleasant news: this is a struggle that is fully joined and will last for many years.

So that's how it doesn't end, not with a bang but an eternal whimper ...

After 9/11 I was one of countless journalists who spent much, if not most, of my professional effort trying to understand what was going on. I sought out Islamists and also Muslims who opposed Islamism, in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
Some Australian Muslim leaders can’t bear to have any terrorism connected in any way to words denoting the Muslim religion.

Oops, perhaps that's going a little too far? After all, in News Corp world, Muslims are terrorists, or at a minimum, terrorist adjacent ...

It’s undoubtedly the case that the overwhelming majority of Australian Muslims are not Islamists.

Relax, there's always a butt to fix that sort of but ...

But the problem for those who say Islam has no direct link to terror is that the Islamist terrorists themselves believe that it does, and they are joined in this belief by the Islamist government in Tehran and hundreds of thousands of Islamist activists, and many Islamist scholars, around the world.

Would you ever read the bromancer traducing white people by saying that they're complicit in the thoughts and deeds of white Xian nationalists, the KKK, and other far right loons of the neo-Nazi kind? Steady on, old chap ...

The war on terror has been a partial success. Al-Qa’ida and Islamic State are destroyed in their old guises. But much of their effort has moved to Africa. They and their successors are extremely active on social media throughout the world. It’s still the case that under different names they command many thousands of activists and followers.

More trading off ... Friends, family and residents visit the graves for people killed on the first anniversary since Hamas attacked one year ago on October 07, 2024 at Kibbutz Nir Oz. Picture: Getty Images

The pond rarely strays into the offerings of the Australian Daily Zionist News.

There's genuine suffering and tragedy, often exploited so that the fear mongering can continue ...

Western intelligence and policing have improved exponentially in counter-terrorism. But the most appalling claim of all that I’ve heard, even from countless people I respect, is that there has been no repeat of 9/11. This is mistaken. The Hamas terror atrocities of October 7, 2023, were exactly a second 9/11. Some 1200 people, mostly Israelis, were murdered in vile, sadistic acts of terror that day. Israel is about 10 million people, the US about 340 million. So a proportionate loss of life due to one day of terrorism for the US would not be the 3000 killed at 9/11 but nearer to 40,000 dead.

Meanwhile, on another planet ...

And so on and on and on, and then to a final rant ...

The effect of October 7 has been to turbocharge the greatest, most sickening wave of antisemitism the world has seen since World War II. No democracy is worse than Australia, where recent antisemitism is the most shameful and wicked thing I’ve ever known about my country in modern times. The October 7 Hamas atrocity is immensely consequential, perhaps in the long run just as important as 9/11 itself.
The world can only avoid calling it the second 9/11 if it believes that terrorism against Israelis is not really terrorism. That is indeed what Islamists, and much of the Western left, would have us believe. Israeli soldiers, then Israeli civilians, then Zionists, then just Jews – if you kill them, it’s not really terrorism, it’s resistance. That civilised people can reach this conclusion is a shocking achievement for the terrorists who hate all of us.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

The pond had only one sub-editorial note, involving a little re-writing ...

The world can only avoid calling it the second 9/11 if it believes that terrorism against Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians is not really terrorism. That is indeed what Zionists and much of the Western far right, would have us believe. Islamist soldiers, then Islamic civilians, then followers of Islam, then just Palestinians – if you kill them, it’s not really terrorism, it’s a god given right to own all the land from the river to sea. That civilised people can reach this conclusion is a shocking achievement for the Zionists who don't give a toss about what people think about an ethnic cleansing unfolding before their eyes ...

And now for the moment all devoted herpetologists wait for every Tuesday ...

The header: Mali’s big migration pitch falls straight into Hanson’s hands; We should be thankful to Malinauskas for one thing: he demonstrated an audacious selfishness for his state.

The caption for the terrible graphic, which possibly could be blamed on AI: One Nation's Pauline Hanson accuses Premier Peter Malinauskas of favouring migrants over Australian children.

First a little background.

Expert followers of the hive mind will remember Polonius, founder and executive director of the Sydney Institute pumped up the volume on the weekend ...

Premier’s warning to the left: lay down your weapons
The SA Labor leader Peter Malinauskas has warned against progressive sanctimony, which he says has fuelled the rise of far-right politics, and urged focus on the issues that mattered.

Polonius was on a high, ecstatic at having hosted a "major speech", at least one in his own and a wayward croweater's lunch ...

...In a major speech to the Sydney Institute last Wednesday, South Australian Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas delivered a novel twist to the use of the term culture war. A leading member of the Labor Party’s right-wing faction, he had some advice for those whom he called the “far left”. Namely, that the left should lay down its culture war weapons.
‘If politics becomes the principal determinant of migration policy and a numerical race to the bottom ensues, it is going to hurt every Australian economically,’ Mr Malinauskas said. Picture: John Feder
The Premier, whose focus was on immigration, said “people on the far left who are understandably horrified about the extraordinary rise of far-right politics in Australia would do well to engage in a moment of self-reflection”.
He added: “Maybe, just maybe, the intense self-righteousness, sanctimony and piety that underpinned the ‘great awokening’ may have tilled the soil for the inevitable countercultural movement on the far right. Now, of course, these countercultural anti-woke warriors have become no less belligerent or self-defeating as those on the far left.”
Earlier in his speech, Malinauskas argued that immigration had not become such a flashpoint this year because Australia was a racist country. He said: “There are bigots in any society, in any century. But that doesn’t explain what’s changed in politics and polls so dramatically over the last nine months.”

Talk about a red rag to a raging bull.

Dame Groan wasn't going to take any of that tripe lying down.

She simply hates furriners, and this is her turf ...

Last week South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas gave a speech to the Sydney Institute that reeked of self-interest for his state. His presentation centred on some unsupported claims about the unalloyed economic benefits of having high migrant intakes.
The contrast with the migration policy released by One Nation could not have been more stark. This party’s aim is to achieve negative net migration based on deep cuts to the student, graduate and skilled worker numbers, as well as securing the departure of many temporary visa holders.
There were two important background considerations to Malinauskas’s widely reported speech. The first is that the gloss on his premiership has begun to fade. Regarded as one of our most competent premiers, he nonetheless has stumbled on some issues.

The old biddy began a litany of woes ...

His support for the LIV Golf carnival has ended in tears. And his desecration of a large slab of Adelaide’s parklands to accommodate a motorcycle race has not gone down well with the previously sympathetic professional classes. More important, he has failed to fix the ambulance ramping problem that was a key factor in his original election victory. The fiscal position of the state is looking decidedly dodgy as the costs of two major infrastructure projects blow out spectacularly. Like most other states, South Australia’s debt position continues to deteriorate.

Sheesh, the old duck didn't even mention by name the failure to bring that Whyalla steelworks blast furnace back to life, even if it was just a 60 year old spring chicken...Whyalla steelworks cuts more than 500 jobs as major operations shut down

The litany of errors continued ...

He is also vulnerable because of his support and subsidisation of the ill-considered merger of the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia, now just Adelaide University. This mega institution now has an excessive number of students, a bloated bureaucracy and no face-to-face undergraduate lectures. The strategy was based squarely on attracting more international students to cross-subsidise the university’s other activities.

On such occasions, the reptiles always like to supply a snap of the offending, preening ponce ...Peter Malinauskas talks about the future of the Whyalla steel works. Picture: Eleni Tzanos

Then it was on to the real thought crimes.

The second related background factor is South Australia’s relatively small migrant intake. Most new migrants head to Melbourne, Sydney and parts of Queensland. In 2024-25, just under 19,000 (net) migrants headed to South Australia out of a total of 306,000 Australia-wide. Malinauskas wants more, particularly international students and skilled workers.
His presentation trots out the various half-truths about the economics of immigration. Immigration slows the ageing of the population, he argues, even though migrants themselves age. In fact, the effect is marginal and if we really wanted to alter the demographic profile of the population we would need to ramp up the migrant intake year after year.
Then there is the fiscal benefit of having more skilled migrants. Using Treasury estimates, he rattles off impressively large figures about the lifetime fiscal impact of skilled permanent migrants. Note here that these estimates are very sensitive to the discount factor used; other much lower estimates are also plausible. What the Premier fails to mention is that most skilled permanent migrants come with secondary applicants (spouse and children) and these secondary applicants provide no fiscal benefit at all. Family migrants inflict a fiscal drain.
But why just talk about permanent migrants when we have about three million temporary migrants living in the country, most of whom are working in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs? The skilled permanent intake is only about 15 per cent of the total.

An AV distraction could only add to the Groaner's rage ... South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas has raised concerns over the heightened politicisation of the migration debate. This comes after Mr Malinauskas launched an emphatic economic defence of skilled migration, warning the nation’s living standards will decline if numbers are slashed. “Don’t let politics inform our migration policy. I think what should inform our migration policy is what is in our national economic interest, but also our social interest as well,” Mr Malinauskas told News24.

Dammit, if anyone is going to set out the rationale for Pauline's bigotry, it's going to be the Dame ...

He is on dangerous ground when he talks about productivity gains associated with immigration given that productivity has slumped as the migrant intake has soared. But his plan is to use international student fee income to boost research funding that will lift the rate of productivity growth, even though there is no evidence that this has happened thus far.
Now most serious commentators do not accept the proposition that international student education is really an export activity. But Malinauskas is not having a bar of this, claiming that any attempt to reduce the number of international students is simply a self-destructive “export restriction”. Is he being serious? Does he really think there should be no limit on the number of international student visas granted given that many of these visa holders don’t come to the country to obtain an education but to work and seek permanent residence?
The Premier sees the current anti-immigration sentiment as the result of the rise of populist parties. The reality is that the voting public has been begging the government to significantly lower the migrant intake for many years, well before the recent rise in the popularity of One Nation.
The Premier would be well-advised to check his facts. His idea that we don’t have an immigration problem, we have a housing problem is platitudinous.
Migrants add to population growth – Australia has one of the highest rates of population growth among advanced economies – and population growth causes pressure on resources. It is expensive and slow to deal with these pressures and there is understandable reluctance on the part of long-term residents to foot the bill for this expansion.
My advice to the premier is to get out more and to talk to the people who are affected by the impact of excessive migration. People understand that the visa system is being widely rorted and that more temporary migrants are extending their stay by any means. The impact on social cohesion is palpable. This is particularly the case given the geographic concentration of certain migrant groups and the increasing proportion of the population who don’t speak English.

There came a snap of two of Dame Groan's biggest fans ... Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce during a press conference in the Senate courtyard in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

What wise words, and Barners, Tamworth's never-ending shame echoed them...

One Nation is "not afraid" to drive migration to negative levels, with its Treasury spokesman saying he will follow the will of the people, not warnings from economists, in deciding how deeply to cut migration rates.
Business and the university sector have warned One Nation's proposal to cut migration by about 750,000 places over three years would devastate the economy.
Speaking on ABC National Forum, Mr Joyce said voter concerns on migration had to be respected.
"The will of the Australian people is so pronounced, this has to be dealt with, we will deal with it," Mr Joyce said. (ABC)

That's fair, it's hard to think of Dame Groan as an economist these days, she's more a voice for the bigoted hard right peeple ...

Dame Groan is pleased to have Gina, Pauline and Barners listening to her.

For too long she was a voice in the hive mind wilderness, but now her time has come ...

Meanwhile, the Albanese government is at sixes and sevens trying to work out how to fix up the mess and to stick with the budget forecasts of net overseas migration – 245,000 this financial year and 225,000 next year.
But can we infer that Jim Chalmers is baulking at any significant reduction in the rate of immigration flowing into population growth? At this stage, the only factor holding up the growth of GDP is population growth.
Without it, it’s entirely possible that a recession could be recorded, and that is something the Treasurer wants to avoid at almost any cost. He also will have been warned about the loss of tax revenue associated with a lower NOM; tax revenue is highly sensitive to the growth of nominal GDP. But this calculation is essentially a fiction because many of the costs of migration are borne by state governments. Nonetheless, headline figures matter a great deal to this Treasurer.
We should be thankful to Malinauskas for one thing: he demonstrated an audacious selfishness for his state. This is part of a wider problem: the winners from high immigration have managed to get their way at the expense of ordinary folk, who simply plead for a more modest and balanced migration program.
It’s the inevitable route to the increasing popularity of those populist parties that Malinauskas so derides. One Nation is picking up on the electorate’s unease with having large migrant intakes and excessive numbers of temporary visa holders in the country. It’s a level of disquiet the Prime Minister cannot afford to ignore.

Never mind all that talk by economists ... Dame Groan has spoken:

One Nation is picking up on Judith Sloan's unease with having large migrant intakes and excessive numbers of temporary visa holders in the country. It's a level of disquiet any concerned bigot cannot afford to ignore.

And so to a couple of 'toons the pond couldn't fit in ...

Speaking of loon central, as the pond often does...

In which the pond observes the lizard Oz productivity jihad, with just a waft of Lynch mob triumphalism and a Homeric snappy Tom ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 20:53:40 +0000

It's been a long time since the pond has indulged in ego surfing, and since then AI has ruined everything ...

Dammit, post-ironic? Must everything be meta?

What's wrong with good, old-fashioned irony?

Speaking of simple irony, there was something peculiarly ironic about simpleton Simon's headline over on the far right of the digital Oz..

Cut spending? ALP ready with the mother of all scare campaigns
The next election will be a test for Australians. Do they think Millennial socialism is the answer or will it have dawned on them that this model may not be working?
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

"Mother of all scare campaigns"?

The pond supposes on one level it's just game meets game, because this day the reptiles embarked on the mother of all scare campaigns, with productivity the name of the game.

One of the post-ironic things that inspires awe and wonder is the way they have a seemingly inexhaustible series of snaps of Jimbo looking gloomy or acting out head prefect ...

Enough of that, there's more at the intermittent archive, even if the archive is currently being more intermittent than usual ...

With the single-mindedness of jihadi warriors or crusaders, it was a productivity crisis from go to woe, with Geoff and the cranky Cranston tag teaming ...

The pond loves the way that the reptiles label a bog standard lizard Oz jihad as EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
Productivity crisis: nation set for worst decade on record
‘Worst decade ever’: Business’s grim projections for productivity under Jim Chalmers’ policies
Australia’s biggest employers have gone to war with Labor over policies strangling the economy, with Jim Chalmers set to deliver the worst decade of productivity since records began in 1960.
By Geoff Chambers and Matthew Cranston

Geoff chambered another round ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
PM, Chalmers blame everyone but themselves for productivity crisis
It is probable Labor will not achieve its politically manufactured renewables and housing targets. But its failure on productivity looms as the Albanese government’s defining legacy.

The reptiles conformed to their Jimbo rule ... see how gloomy and defeated he looks ...

Over on the extreme far right Major Mitchell took up the chant ...

Albo and Jim’s economic blunders squander Hawke-Keating legacy
How Albanese and Chalmers are unwinding the economic legacy of Hawke and Keating
Treasurer Jim Chalmers wrote his PhD on his Labor hero, Paul Keating, but has absorbed every lesson except the right ones. History will not be kind to this government.
By Chris Mitchell
Columnist

History won't be kind? Why bother with history when the reptiles are doing the job here and now?

These days the pond will do almost anything to avoid the Major's scribbling, but must note the way that the Jimbo rule was followed, with bonus comical Albo ...

The pond is exceptionally bored by the trick performed over and over by reptiles in search of an angle - the use of Hawke and the French clock devotee to bludgeon the current government, when back in the day the reptiles eagerly conspired to produce the end of that regime.

Just to add to the litany, there was another blackening of the government on productivity over on the extreme far right ...

Why our productivity crisis has millions locked in cost-of-living pain
Australia is now staring down the barrel of its worst decade of productivity growth since comparable records began in the 1960s.
By Bran Black

That was a new name for the pond - the reptiles seem to have an inexhaustible supply - but in the end it turned out to be beyond the predictable ...

Bran Black is chief executive of the Business Council of Australia.

No need to go there in full, but please admire the way that the opening snap conforms to the Jimbo rule ...

Truth to tell, this jihad held little appeal for the pond, what with the pond having woken up to news of mad king Donald denying his own deeds in the middle east, and lumping blame on Ukraine ...

Trump calls on Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian diesel, saying attacks are causing a shortage
Civilians were killed and injured as Russia and Ukraine continued to attack each other with waves of drones overnight into Sunday

Brownie of the lizard Oz matched this feat with an EXCLUSIVE that didn't mention Iran or Trump.

EXCLUSIVE
Labor mulls new fuel excise cut as Mid-East war flares
Petrol prices could surge toward their previous $2.60 peak, forcing the Albanese government to weigh another costly fuel excise cut despite economists warning it fuels inflation.
By Greg Brown

Any reference to the deeds of Faux Noise's hero came in the first line ...

Anthony Albanese will consider restoring cuts to the fuel excise in the coming weeks amid expectations petrol prices will further increase as the Middle East war escalates.

Thereafter it was Albo did this and Albo might do that all the way ... and even worse, the opening snap broke the Jimbo rule ...

All that sets the tone for yet another bout of triumphalism by the Lynch mob, serial defamer of the reputation of the University of Wollongong ...

Why America’s war on terror worked
After a weekend commemorating 9/11, we should reflect how little damage its plotters did to US prospects – and how much they did to their own.
By Timothy Lynch

The pond will skip past the Lynch mob's personal reminiscences - most people will remember what they were doing that day, and the pond still has vivid memories of the drama unfolding as it talked with a traumatised New York Jewish man ...

It was the notion of the alleged way the war on terror had worked that intrigued the pond ...just as Iran maintains its threat to the strait and the Houthis have taken over access to the Red Sea coast ...

‘A f***-up of epic proportions’: Blame game begins after Iran-backed Houthis’ lightning advance down Red Sea coast

Here no f*** up, no f*** up here, as the Lynch mob went full triumphalist ...

...Federal power has never really recovered from the failure to interdict this crudely simple plot. While the day itself still throws up amazing tales of bravery, loss and long-term consequences – nearly three times the number killed on 9/11, for example, have since died of diseases caused by the poisonous dust of the fallen towers – the response of the US government to 9/11 is widely condemned.
This has made the task of defending the Bush administration’s response to the attack hard to impossible. For sure, the charge sheet is a long one.
It begins with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, moves to a global recession, Russian revanchism, Chinese emboldenment, Covid, domestic polarisation, Iranian scheming, October 7, and then into an immigration crisis and the discord woven into attempts to solve it. Even the decline of sex and reproduction in the West gets blamed on the ennui of national failure that al-Qa’ida exposed. Why bring children into such a world?
Each, singularly or in combination, gets tied to the dereliction of duty on 9/11 itself: “If we can’t trust the government to protect us from such a simple threat, why should we believe it capable of confronting more serious foes?”

To help with the yarn, the reptiles flung in a triumphalist snap ... US Marine covers the face of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s statue with the US flag in Baghdad’s al-Fardous square. Picture: Ramzi Haidar / AFP

Any notion that the Lynch mob might be sensible collapsed with the next reference to "climate catastrophism".

Such a stupid phrase, by a man who purports to be an academic, but always resorts to the language of the stupid ideologue ...

...The wonder is that climate catastrophism has risen in parallel with a distrust of the national and international action held necessary to appease it. The bizarrely porous southern US border, which Donald Trump won two presidential elections promising to close, was an uncomfortable reminder that it was legal aliens who hijacked the four planes.
My problem with this powerful consensus – 9/11 as an omnicause of everything bad that came after – is that it blinds us to what America (and by implication Australia too) got right in the past quarter century. And not just right by accident but got right by design.
First of these is the absence not of a second 9/11 but of something worse. We now mock George W. Bush’s war on an abstract noun. But his global war on terror was not an open-ended campaign to rid the world of evil. It was narrow and specific in its objectives. It meant to limit the terrorists’ arsenal to what they could purchase at Bunnings or Home Depot.
The focus of the 9/11 response soon moved from Afghanistan to Iraq. Again, this is widely criticised as the original sin of the war on terror. Not so. Iraq mattered because of the fear made real on that morning: that terrorists with hearts so full of hatred only lacked the capacity to inflict carnage consistent with it. Go after the states that might lend them that capacity. This moved the regime of Saddam Hussein inexorably into US sights.
Being sure the Iraqi dictator did not have weapons of mass destruction that he could leak to terrorists meant removing him. And that is what the US, Britain, Australia and Poland did in March 2003. Nearly 40 nations took part in the eight years of occupation that followed.
The war on terror was driven by a national security logic that commanded a consensus in the US (which Barack Obama joined) and was deeper abroad (especially in, but not limited to, Canberra and London) than we have remembered it.

The reptiles attempted to bolster the case by flinging in a face now largely forgotten by vulgar youff ...Osama bin Laden. Picture: AP.

Then came a final bout of triumphalism ...

America did not squander the goodwill that came its way after the 9/11 attacks; it deployed it. When terrorism has taken place in the past 25 years it has been unnerving but, compared with a nuclear or chemical weapons attack, small fry. The global war on terror did that. It meant to deny to the bad guys the heat, light, shelter and food necessary for their plotting, and it succeeded in keeping those plots limited to bombs, bullets, cars and knives.
Second, while the retreat from Afghanistan in 2021 supposedly validated Chinese geostrategic thinking – oh, those wise Sun Tzu-reading communists know how to avoid a quagmire – it also reveals a certain American resilience. The regimes in Moscow and Beijing could not countenance losing a war. Capitulation in Ukraine would be existential for Vladimir Putin. Xi Jinping, likewise, avoids the inherent risk of foreign military adventure because of his domestic weakness rather than his entrenched strength. The South China Sea remains an American lake. China’s only “blood ally” is North Korea.
The US, in contrast, has lost nearly every war it has fought since victory over Japan in 1945: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq (Iran?). The consequence is not Chinese, Russian, let alone Islamist, supremacy. It is a world that still represents an economic, military, cultural and even sporting (ask those 100,000 fans at the MCG on Friday) market for American power.
After a weekend commemorating the outrage that was 9/11, we should reflect how little damage its plotters did to US prospects – and how much they did to their own.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

Of the many absurdities in that litany, the one the pond liked both the least and the most ...Capitulation in Ukraine would be existential for Vladimir Putin.

Tell that to the mango Mussolini, and if aviation fuel is in short supply, top up the old truck with with six buck diesel and head off to Washington to celebrate American prospects, as the defamation of the University of Melbourne continues apace ...

On the other hand, it's true that the mad king has taught those terroristic Canucks and their bloody infidel maple syrup and unclean mooses a lesson ...(moose if you must, but the pond was brought up to speak fluent Bullwinkle)...

The pond supposes it should have featured the quarry whispering Caterist ...

Cultural safety has led to ‘two-tier’ child protection policy
The era of so-called paternalism has given way to an era of bureaucratic inertia in which a child’s fortunes are determined by race.
By Nick Cater

But it's just another unsavoury example of reptile black bashing, something the pond has always avoided, along with the transphobia that infests the rag ...

The pond personally saved it to the intermittent archive (more intermittent than usual with a host of bad gateways) and instead decided to feature snappy Tom's weekend outing...

The reptiles pulled their usual fast one, and trotted out the Ughmann and snappy Tom late on the weekend, thereby avoiding the pond's deadline.

Perhaps next week the pond will feature an Ughmann double bill in a special time slot, but for the moment, the pond wanted to applaud snappy Tom for an attempt to do an Our Henry and drag the Odyssey into his tall tale ...

The header: Financial quake looms in age of frenzy and fury; Productivity stuck at 2019 levels, living costs up 30 per cent – Australia’s economic managers are navigating the worst of both worlds with no easy escape.

The caption for the borrowed snap, without a mention of Nolan or the movie: Governments and the RBA monetary policy board are also caught in a Homeric vortex, where debt is piling up, voters are demanding more services and cost relief, inflation is stubborn and investors are demanding more for their at-risk money.

Homeric vortex!

Sure, it was just a precursor to this day's productivity jihad, but snappy Tom was on song, a veritable Siren ...

Like Odysseus in Homer’s epic, the people managing our political and economic affairs are trapped in a narrow, hazardous passage. Sail too close to the sea monster Scylla, and you’ll lose your head; dally with the whirlpool Charybdis and the entire ship is sunk.
Market gods are uneasy, there’s a quake in the financial terrain. Voters are in a nasty mood. We’re living in the age of frenzy and fury.
The ever-helpful Greeks, ancient and modern, have several distinct words for anger to make sense of these times. From the top, there’s menis, a cosmic rage, which the poet calls forth in the opening line of The Iliad to convey the wrath of the humiliated Achilles.
Then there’s thumos, an explosive burst of temper. Think of Jacqui Lambie’s verbal blast about Pauline Hanson after One Nation’s slur on SAS veteran Andrew Hastie. The blood is up among the political warrior class.
Civilians must settle for orge, which describes the deep-seated resentment at large in the post-pandemic settlement, conventionally referred to as the cost-of-living crisis. It’s the top issue Australians want governments and monetary officials to address.

Here no hubris, no hubris here, though after that singular outburst snappy Tom settled back down into a banal set of numbers ...

The Big Inflation may have passed but the beast’s tail lingers in our midst. It’s likely we won’t be going back to the long lull in consumer prices growth we enjoyed for decades, while the price level has been ratcheted up forever on most items. A basket of goods and services in the consumer price index valued at $100 five years ago now costs $124.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics also measures price changes across population subgroups, which helps to assess whether the disposable incomes of households have kept pace with price changes (the living cost index includes mortgage costs, the CPI does not).
Since mid-2021, living costs have increased by 30 per cent for working families and 23 per cent for self-funded retirees. People on pensions and benefits have payments adjusted every six months by the greater of CPI or LCI.

The reptiles provided an AV distraction ... Reserve Bank of Australia Deputy Governor Andrew Hauser says inflation remains too high, after the central bank raised interest rates three times earlier in the year. “We have one big problem, and that’s inflation,” Mr Hauser said. “Inflation is too high, and that’s why we raised interest rates three times at the beginning of this year.”

The pond hungered for more ancient Greek references, but snappy Tom was pretty much done with his venture into Our Henry turf ...

Reserve Bank deputy governor Andrew Hauser spends some of his work time travelling around the country, listening to companies, local authorities and organisations dealing with debt problems and other matters. Everywhere he goes, he hears “cost, cost, cost, inflation, inflation, inflation”.
“People are furious about inflation,” he told ABC TV’s 7.30 this week. “I understand why. It’s unfair. It hits people on low incomes. It damages price signals. It makes the job of companies difficult. What they want us to do is our job and bring inflation down.”
That’s the cost picture. The income story is more dreadful.
Zoom out and consider what we buy and sell in the world. Australia has taken a hefty pay cut. Our terms of trade (the ratio of export to import prices) have fallen by 11 per cent over the past five years.
Across the nation, living standards have gone backwards over that period. One measure in last week’s national accounts (for the June quarter) tells the broad story. Real net national disposable income per capita is 3 per cent below its level in June 2021.
The main culprit is our wretched productivity performance. The national accounts showed the amount of goods and services we produce (or GDP) per hour of labour is at the same level it was at the end of 2019, before the Covid crisis. Productivity in the non-market sector (which is primarily healthcare and social services, education and public administration) is now below the level it was in early 2007.
Given workers are in a pincer of high costs (some homegrown, some not) and stagnant incomes, it’s clear why the consumer mood is glum and voter rage is white hot. The torrent of “bad” news – on tax, the budget, petrol prices, energy costs, interest rates, home prices and dodgy political acts – is also contributing to the despondency.

Wait, there was one final "Homeric vortex" to come...

Governments and the RBA monetary policy board are also caught in a Homeric vortex, where debt is piling up, voters are demanding more services and cost relief, inflation is stubborn and investors are demanding more for their at-risk money.

After that thrill it was back to the hard yards ...

In a note this week, Commonwealth Bank chief economist Luke Yeaman describes a “new economic reality” of hard-to-tame inflation, geopolitical turmoil, skittish global bond markets and the great big sucking sound of artificial intelligence investment as it scoops up vast amounts of capital, materials and skills.
He argues interest rates will need to be kept higher than in the past but estimates of so-called neutral interest rates (neither expansionary nor contractionary) are imprecise, increasing the reliance on real-time data and the risk of policy mistakes.
Yeaman says the inflation-fighting credibility of central banks is in the spotlight “with bond markets watching closely to see whether authorities will act quickly enough and decisively enough to keep inflation contained or instead drag their feet due to political and public pressure”.
“The task is now materially harder and the RBA knows it,” he writes. “As a result, we expect the RBA to remain very cautious and on ‘high alert’ for the foreseeable future. This means the slowing economy will not bring much in the way of immediate or major rate relief for Australian households.”

As is required in these reptile outings, there has to be a comical snap of Jimbo, and sure enough ...Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The pond pondered in Rodin Le Penseur pose for a moment: where would the lizard Oz's enfeebled graphics department be without a comical Jimbo?

Snappy Tom wound down, but a final reference to the vortex produced a little shiver of delight and reminded the pond of his splendid start ...

As rates remain elevated, governments are feeling the strain. The cost of borrowing is rising, not only for Canberra but also for Washington, Tokyo and the Europeans. Donald Trump’s forlorn Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, trying to buy back bonds in an orderly way while his boss sprays dollars by the trillion, is being rumbled by the markets.
Jim Chalmers is running a budget deficit one-sixth the size of Bessent’s and with a much skinnier debt-interest bill. But the Treasurer has got a world of other problems to deal with, not least the hungry beast of universal social benefits. Over the past six years, spending on health, disability services, aged care, childcare and other benefits has almost doubled.
Yeaman, previously a Treasury deputy secretary, says with central banks forced to maintain the monetary squeeze, governments will come under more acute pressure to lift productivity and cut government spending to free up private sector capacity.
“As we move further into this new economic era, governments will increasingly need to balance pressure from communities for more structural spending and support, with pressure from global debt markets,” he writes.
As stewards, elected and unelected, are discovering, it’s a savage crossing between voter furies and the vortex of raging capital.

If only the other reptiles had shown an interest in the movie - naturally without mentioning the movie - the pond might have been able to pay more attention to the productivity jihad ...

Meanwhile the reptiles had gone eerily silent on the topic of the ranga and the pastie Hastie and all that ...

How many distractions can an Epstein file bear?

In which Polonius's prattle and Gemma's grating are the two reptiles left standing ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 20:19:12 +0000

Talk about a curve ball, talk about unnerving...

After years of the reptiles introducing a column with a snap at the start, suddenly in this weekend's Polonial outing the snap is down the page a little...

The pond supposes that if this is the worst of the existential crises it faces, then things are looking good.

But why the format change now? And why Polonius?

Was Polonius's sudden addiction to a minor state premier, ruling roost over a minor state, before sallying forth to beard eastern staters, deemed a little unsavoury?

Is it a way of putting the upstart croweater back in the sand box, so he can play with his almost deep west toys?

Whatever, the pond decided to restore world order by treatingPolonius as it always does...

The header: Premier’s warning to the left: lay down your weapons: The SA Labor leader Peter Malinauskas has warned against progressive sanctimony, which he says has fuelled the rise of far-right politics, and urged focus on the issues that mattered.

And then it was straight into the four minute read, and here the pond should note a hint of incest.

For those who've come in late, the pond has highlighted the magnificent CV and snap of Polonius and his partner at the Sydney Institute site.

Intense. Deeply informative.

Now guess where the crow eater made his speech.

I have tended to avoid the term culture wars, partly because it is a misnomer and partly on account of the fact it has become a cliche.
In modern-day parlance, the reference to a culture war is invariably used by the left – or “progressives”, as leftists like to be called – who accuse conservatives of fomenting culture war. This despite the fact that conservatives are intent on supporting tradition. That is essentially a defensive position, not a warlike one.

Invariably? On every occasion: always. (So says the dictionary)

No, not invariably ...

It's an idle game, but if you're going to out-pedant a pedant ...

Here's the bromancer way back in October 2007 bemoaning the way the lying rodent lost the culture wars ... (Trove)

...It (the Howard government) has governed against the relentless opposition of the big institutions in our society: the media, particularly the ABC, the public service and the universities. It has at times out-manoeuvred these institutions; it has not reformed them. The Howard Government has comprehensively lost the culture wars. It has on occasion been clever at arousing a popular backlash against elite opinion on this or that subject. But it has not changed elite opinion. And in the end it appears that it is impossible to govern permanently against elite opinion. Elite opinion shapes popular opinion. Far from ferociously waging the culture wars, the Howard Government has been mostly missing in action.

If the bromancer is a lefty, a progressive as they like to be called, the pond will eat Polonius's culture wars hat.

The pond could play this game all day because the reptiles love the culture wars, in much the same way as they love abusing the 'leets and the woke.

And so to Polonius celebrating the croweater, wandering the eastern states, perhaps unaware of the company he's keeping, or more likely feeling proud and strong that he too can do a Fetterman ...

In a major speech to the Sydney Institute last Wednesday, South Australian Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas delivered a novel twist to the use of the term culture war. A leading member of the Labor Party’s right-wing faction, he had some advice for those whom he called the “far left”. Namely, that the left should lay down its culture war weapons.

A major speech? Only if you value croweaters the way they value themselves.

Dammit, must the pond now insert the caption for the snap? ‘If politics becomes the principal determinant of migration policy and a numerical race to the bottom ensues, it is going to hurt every Australian economically,’ Mr Malinauskas said. Picture: John Feder

What's worse is that this was the only visual distraction in the Polonius outing ...

Back to the small beer man from a small-minded state. Oh Adelaide, Adelaide:

The Premier, whose focus was on immigration, said “people on the far left who are understandably horrified about the extraordinary rise of far-right politics in Australia would do well to engage in a moment of self-reflection”.
He added: “Maybe, just maybe, the intense self-righteousness, sanctimony and piety that underpinned the ‘great awokening’ may have tilled the soil for the inevitable countercultural movement on the far right. Now, of course, these countercultural anti-woke warriors have become no less belligerent or self-defeating as those on the far left.”
Earlier in his speech, Malinauskas argued that immigration had not become such a flashpoint this year because Australia was a racist country. He said: “There are bigots in any society, in any century. But that doesn’t explain what’s changed in politics and polls so dramatically over the last nine months.”
Many on the left these days who have experienced a comfortable life like to depict Australia as a racist nation.

Sorry, a personal moment ...

The wisteria on the back verandah is still blooming
And all the great aunts are either insane or dead...
...All the king's horses all the king's men
Wouldn't drag me back again
To Adelaide, Adelaide, Adelaide, Adelaide...

This is what the doofus Malinauskas gave permission to Polonius to do. Downplay any notion of racism, even as One Nation makes bigotry a fundamental value ...

This does not make sense viewed with respect to empirical data.
Australia has a relatively high level of interracial marriage. Some prefer the term “partnership”. And a relatively low level of ethnically motivated crime. A nation with such attributes does not warrant the label “racist”.
There is one qualification to this piece of judgment. The recent rise in antisemitism in Australia that started before Hamas’s terrorist war on Israel on October 7, 2023, and found appalling expression in the Bondi Beach massacre on December 14 last year requires some re-examination.
Antisemitism exists on the extreme right. But the most damaging current expression of antisemitism in recent years has involved radical Islamists and the radical left.
Nevertheless, despite the appalling recent outbreaks of antisemitism, which are among the worst in the Western world, Australia is not a racist country. Malinauskas is correct in stating that opposition to immigration has grown in response to the falling standard of living illustrated by increasing cost of housing, energy, food and the like.
Australians have been most welcoming of immigration during times of relative prosperity and rising standards of living. Opposition to immigration has risen in situations such as Malinauskas describes as the moment – when “our people are rightly worried about their economic future”.

So many bald-faced lies, so much distortion, so much pandering to the right.

The point is that many people try to get along, live amiable lives in a multicultural society. From the pond's personal observation, we wouldn't have a healthcare system without migrants.

But that's not to say that there isn't an inclination to be racist...

Then came a familiar routine, but on the upside, for once Polonius wasn't blaming the ABC ...

This was not the case in the post-war mid-1960s. In his recently released book Three Shocks: Who We Are Becoming in the 21st Century (Penguin), George Megalogenis writes that in 1973 Gough Whitlam’s Labor government removed “the last vestiges of the White Australia policy”.
This is misleading. The White Australia policy was effectively dismantled on March 9, 1966, in a ministerial statement in the House of Representatives by immigration minister Herbert Opperman. That was at the time of the Harold Holt-led Coalition government. The 1966 announcement followed earlier restrictions of the White Australia policy in 1956, 1957 and 1964. The Whitlam Labor government merely removed some extant legislation.
As I recall, former Coalition prime minister John Howard used to say that Australians were most relaxed about immigration when economic times were good.
That was not the case during the Whitlam government between December 1972 and November 1975 where there was economic decline accompanied by low migration intake.
Australia was never and never can be a monocultural society. It was always multicultural even though the term was first used officially by the Whitlam government in 1973. The original large diversity after 1788 was between a primarily British (and Protestant) majority and primarily Irish (and Catholic) minority. But no one spoke of multiculturalism.
When I interviewed Howard in 1995 for a book, he said if multicultural meant there should be respect for everybody’s own individual cultural diversity then he was “totally” supportive. But if “you’re promoting diversity ahead of unity” then the concept was questionable. This position was unfashionable then in many circles. But it makes sense today.
In 2011, British prime minister David Cameron, who was no right-wing extremist, distanced himself from multiculturalism. He did so in a speech on radicalisation and Islamic extremism at the Munich Security Conference.
Here Cameron followed a view expressed by Christian Democrat German chancellor Angela Merkel who had expressed a similar position the previous October. She was reported to have said that “multikulti”, the German word for multiculturalism, had not worked. Before the statements of Cameron and Merkel, British Labor prime minister Tony Blair had warned of the rise of extremism.
In his speech last Wednesday, Malinauskas did not mention multiculturalism. His approach was strictly empirical. He is committed to immigration and maintained that other leaders should speak out in support of its economic benefits.
But Malinauskas was pragmatic. He did not state what the net migration intake should be. Rather, he asked questions such as: “Want more affordable and available housing? How about some more sparkies, tilers, roofers, concreters and brickies? Want your Mum and Dad to be able to get an aged care bed? How about more ready-to-go, fully trained care workers?”
Malinauskas’s message was essentially to the “progressive” left. They were advised to stop attacking Australians concerned about their declining living standards by calling them racists and to focus on the issues that mattered.
Without question, developing immigration policy is a very complex task. Unrelated to what some call culture wars.

Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

He couldn't resist a final lie, that migration was just a complex policy issue, and that players weren't motivated by racism, and focus on anything else rather than the racism that litters the lizard Oz and One Nation.

And so the likes of Malinauskas facilitates and enables the canker at the core ... the routine scapegoating of furriners in the lizard Oz on a daily basis, not to mention the regular bouts of black bashing the rag indulges in...

The pond knows where this leads, it knows what Gina aspires to, and has fellow travelled with, and as we're doing topsy-turvy formatting these days, here comes the 'toon usually saved to last ...

As for the bonus, the pond has already discounted many reptile contributors and will discount a few more.

The pond couldn't arouse a flicker of interest, not even with 240 volts to the eyelids, in these yarns ...

‘Off the scale’: Regulator system harming good doctors
System to catch bad doctors is causing harm to the good ones
The regulator meant to protect patients has no bar on accepting complaints – and its own data shows 16 doctors took their lives while under its scrutiny.
By Dr Michael Gannon

And the only thing appealing about this one was the formatting ...

COMMENTARY COMMENTARY: TEACHERS STRUGGLE WITH UNRULY CLASSES
Teachers struggle with unruly classes
Australian teachers rate their schools as calm and orderly, yet new research reveals nearly one-third of every lesson is lost to student misbehaviour.
By Blaise Joseph
Contributor

Perhaps the name too ... always shaken and stirred:

And that's how the pond ended up with garrulous, grating Gemma ...

The header: Hey kids, skip the gap year – your country needs you; Eighty countries demand their young people serve. Australia asks nothing – and we are paying the price.

The caption for the genuinely hideous, wisely uncredited artwork: Volunteer programs boost productivity, increase employee engagement and improve hiring and retention.

Perhaps the pond should first introduce Gemma ...

That handily conveys the air of smug self-satisfaction which emanates from the piece ...

It was a warm summer day in Tel Aviv at the start of June in 2023. I was at a laundromat, fumbling my way through the mechanics of trying to work the washing machine with my non-existent Hebrew.
A couple of kindly local lads came to my rescue; I handed over my coins and they drove the thing for me. Relieved and slightly flustered, I settled into a plastic chair in the open window to wait. A warm breeze wafted in as we sat there, my fellow travellers and I.
A bit of a non-event, isn’t it? Who would suspect a visit to the laundromat might be the beginnings of an idea that has been germinating for three years?
Well, it did, and I have a conversation with a stranger to thank for it. Not a lot to do while waiting for the spin cycle to do its thing, other than chat. If you know me, you know I love a chat. Call it a hardwired curiosity about the world around me and the people in it.
There was a woman waiting with me, a local. Her washing machine had broken, if I remember correctly. She was curious about Australia, as was I about her life. She had three boys, I think. We got to talking about life, as is my habit. She told me her kids were all adults and one was doing his national service. Oh, in the military? I asked. No, she said, he’s a pacifist so he’s doing his service as a teacher’s aide in a school for children with learning disabilities.
At the time I didn’t realise non-military service was an option in Israel and said as much. My new friend told me you could opt out of military service and instead perform another kind of civil service. Serving your country, your community was non-negotiable.
I have thought about that conversation a lot in the past three years – in recent months even more so – and I’ve come to a view that no doubt will be unpopular with many.

True dat, all the more because calling conscription "mandated service" is the sort of word salad up with which this blog will not put...

Service, mandated service of our country, is one way in which we can start rebuilding some of what has been lost in our country over recent decades. It’s a powerful way to address the creeping malaise that seems to be at the heart of so many of our societal ills and generational challenges. Hey kids, guess what – it’s not just about you. What a concept.

The pond will ignore that preening condescension.

The way conscription worked is that if you had the right connections you could get out of it (so many bonespurs), and the ones sent off to die in Vietnam were mug punters, working class men (boys? Certainly teens, some were only 19), and rustics from the bush.

The pond lost a couple of friends to that war, and a couple more went to the clink rather than head off to a useless war. They had different reasons, but this will serve...

"Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?"
"Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me n*gg*r."
"I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over."

The pond always liked Ali, which is more than can be said for grating Gemma ...

The catastrophically ruinous Whitlam government abolished national military service in 1973, the year of my birth. (As an aside, my parents met when my dad was doing his nashos in Brisbane so, in a way, no national service, no Gemma.) And before anyone tries to put words in my mouth, I’m not talking about conscription or only military service, though that certainly should be an option.
I’m talking about civil service. Community service. Before you go offshore to volunteer with a non-government organisation, why not invest your time and energy in this country? There may be nowhere near the same level of virtue or street cred, but doesn’t charity start at home?

So is it conscription, or is it voluntary? There are already plenty of ways of volunteering, but if it's mandated, it's conscription, and no word salad offering woke causes deserving of help can disguise it...

When I finished high school several eons ago, nobody really did a gap year. It feels like a recent (as in within the past 10 to 15 years or so) phenomenon. I’m not against gap years; to each their own. But consider what it might look like if, as a society, we asked young people to value the country they lived in and spend some time in service of their community.
Military? Sure, if you want to. Working in a remote community? Brilliant. A wildlife project, somewhere? Fantastic idea. And it doesn’t have to be 12 months. National and civil service occurs in varying shapes and durations in the 80 countries that still mandate it for their young people. Countries including Norway, Morocco, Sweden and, of course, Israel.

One moment it's compulsory ...

In Switzerland, men aged 18 to 30 do just 18 weeks of compulsory military service training. For women, serving is voluntary. Don’t get me started on that. Equal opportunity means equal responsibility. Italy abolished national military service in 2005, but most of my cousins completed theirs.

The next moment it's voluntary ...

The French have a voluntary national service program for teenagers aged 15 to 17 that gives the option of serving in the military or civic programs. Nobody would suggest France is the embodiment of social cohesion but at least they have a pathway. Here? We don’t value anything enough to ask young people to serve.

On and on she blathered in an unctuous way ...

The power isn’t in the project; it’s in the act of service itself. It’s in the understanding that Australia is a wonderful country that doesn’t owe us anything, and we all have a responsibility to contribute. You could argue (fairly) that we are being taxed into oblivion by this government and you’d be right. What I’m talking about is intervening with a policy reset of sorts that will help build resilience in generations to come.
In his 1961 inaugural address, US president John F. Kennedy encouraged Americans not to ask what their country could do for them but to ask what they could do for their country.
That sentiment has been romanticised but not emulated as societies have progressed. We know from myriad studies that service to community, focusing on things outside our own world, delivers incredible outcomes such as social connectivity, cohesion, a sense of shared purpose. Serving helps develop skills in a way that is unique and meaningful.

Haven't we been here before? That green army thingie from the mind of a dingbat ...

Then came a defensive attempt to prove that garrulous Gemma wasn't a true Quad-ranter:

For some young people it may bring clarity around a career path. Set a course for life that previously may not have been clear or accessible. I can think of at least one friend whose decision to enrol in cadets during high school had a profound impact on the direction of their life.
I understand some people will have very strong reactions to what I’m suggesting here but I don’t think it’s that controversial. Valuing your country isn’t wrong, it’s not “far right” and it’s not regressive. And none of us serves anything we don’t place value on. I’m also of the view that the most powerful and effective iteration of leadership is servant leadership.

Is there anything stopping Gemma from dropping everything and rushing to serve?

Meanwhile, slash all that talk about it being voluntary. It's back to being mandatory, and it's for younglings, because they need to be whipped into shape, under the stern eye of Nurse Ratched Gemma ...

Many will argue that plenty of people volunteer, so why make it mandatory and why for teenagers? I suppose my thinking is about the deterioration of social norms and a shift towards a culture of self. Add to that the social disconnect that has been a by-product of the digital age. Relationships that exist only in chat rooms, online, and the like.
I think back to the woman in that Tel Aviv laundromat. She didn’t care that one of her children was a conscientious objector. She said something along the lines of: I don’t care how he serves but he needs to serve his country.
My observation is that this attitude demonstrates an understanding of the value, the price of their freedom. Do we in Australia understand that value or do we take our lifestyle and freedom for granted? I would love to see what kind of impact this idea could have, if the seed might be allowed to germinate. Imagine that.

Have we really moved much past the condescension embodied in that ancient Python Four Yorkshiremen sketch?

Python 2: Luxury! We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!

Python 3: Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox in the middle of the night, and lick road clean with tongues! We had to eat half a handful of freezing-cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at that mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home... our dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down the mill, and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home... our dad would kill us and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."

Python 1: And you try to tell the young people of today that ... they won't believe you.

Python 1: No, They won't.

And now to wrap up proceedings, a serve of what's on the mind of the lizard Oz editorialist, heart of the beast, heart of darkness ...

Naturally there's One Nation, another step in endless reptile agonising ...

What a perfect excuse to interrupt with an old infallible Pope 'toon ...

Quickly, finish up Oz ed with a final wringing of hands...

And where would the pond be without a celebration of the mad King?

That's got to be worth a 'toon or two...

With Simon Marks MIA at time of printing, another source for cult news of cult ...

Call the pond preverted, but this weekend, the climate science denying Bjørn-again one and the goose-stepping bromancer are the go ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 21:48:56 +0000

Call the pond preverted if you like - many do - but the pond decided to skip past all the lizard Oz heavyweights doing the obvious this weekend, and instead mainline a good old fashioned serve of the Bjørn-again one.

These days it's a rarefied experience, with fewer and fewer publishing his thoughts, and more and more caring less and less, what with AI threatening to take out humanity (if a bot wanted to save the rest of the planet's creatures, that might be a fair dinkum strategy).

Do a quick search and those who are paying attention are growing ever more exotic and tragic ...

But the lizards of Oz maintain the faith, and the pond feels a deep nostalgia for the old days of the climate wars.

Who wouldn't marvel at the heroic stance of the Bjørn-again one, still valiantly fighting on after all these years (sssh, don't mention Nepal!)

The header: Burning truth about climate smoke and mirrors; Telling frightened people their houses burned because of fossil fuels is generating propaganda for costly policies and providing an alibi for failed fire protocols.

The caption for the snap: Beachgoers in July, nearby watched the blaze in the northern part of the Arcachon Basin in Gironde, southwest France.

Relax, that opening snap is just the reptiles indulging in a little disaster porn. Everything's fine and under control, trust the Bjørn-again one.

As a further bonus, the Bjørn-again one could only produce a three minute read distorting data, as a way of announcing in his sanguine way that everything's just hunky dory ...

The fires in France and Spain have had devastating impacts.
More than 220,000 people fled the flames west of Bordeaux. Outside Madrid, fires scorched an area twice the size of the capital and drove nearly 90,000 people from their homes.
The people who lost homes and livelihoods deserve sympathy – and better fire policy.
What they do not need is the climate sermon that now follows every plume of smoke.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
The British and Spanish governments rushed out a joint statement declaring “climate change was now a national security emergency” threatening our way of life. The verdict was in even while houses burned: only ending fossil fuels could put out the flames.
Here is what makes this so exasperating: the planet is doing the opposite of burning.
Satellite data shows that as of September 2, the world’s burned area in 2026 is 40 per cent below the 2012-25 average for this point in the year – on track to becoming the quietest global fire season in a century. On current trends, 2026 could end up burning less than 1.5 per cent of global land area.
This would be vastly below the satellite record low in 2022 of 2.2 per cent and likely lower than any year since 1900.

Relax, it's fine, it's under control, the Bjørn-again one has the matter in hand, and must the pond say it again? Please, don't mention Nepal ...

Climate change is a global issue, so it should be assessed using global data. Pointing to horrific fires in one corner of one continent while ignoring a planet that burns phenomenally less is the definition of cherrypicking: keep the observations that fit the story, throw away the rest.
Imagine the reverse. If global burned area were running 40 per cent above average, would anyone accept “but the Baltics are quiet this year” as a rebuttal? Of course not. Yet that is precisely the logic deployed in the other direction.
The climate lobby has seized on one data quirk; in the European fire surveillance, the satellite data for “Europe” includes the whole of Russia, including Siberia and all, so a quiet Russian year can flatten the continental numbers.
But strip Russia out entirely and by September 2 Europe without Russia has burned 22 per cent less than its 2012-25 average this year; nine of the past 14 years saw more fire by September 2.
France’s season is record-bad and Spain’s is severe. But two countries having a dreadful summer do not make a continental inferno, let alone a planetary one. Europe as a whole is having a below-average fire year.
The same pattern holds everywhere you look.

The reptiles seemed to undercut the message by offering an AV distraction featuring more disaster porn ... Wildfires have ravaged parts of British Columbia, Canada, prompting authorities to declare a state of emergency. A motorist captured footage of flames lighting up the night sky along Highway …

The Bjørn-again one held his nerve. No apocalypse here, here no apocalypse...

Just weeks ago the panic was Canada, whose smoke over New York generated the usual apocalyptic headlines. Yet Canada is having a below-average fire year, as has the US. Both North America and South America as a whole are at all-time satellite lows.
Africa, the most burned continent, is at an all-time low, 42 per cent below normal.
Oceania (mostly Australia) is 18 per cent below its usual burned area at this time and Asia has recorded its second-lowest burn in 2012-26.
Every continent is below normal, far below normal or setting records for how little is burning.
How is it possible that in a world burning less on every continent we believe that the entire planet is in unprecedented flames? Because the coverage tells us so. Infernos make the front page; record-quiet fire years make no news at all. Report only the fires and never the absence of fires, and the public will duly conclude the planet is ablaze – even as the data shows the opposite.

Relax, it's always been this way ...

Nor is 2026 a fluke. In the early 1900s, nearly 4 per cent of the planet’s land burned annually, roughly double today’s rate. A century of better agriculture, land management and firefighting has steadily beaten fire back, because people hate fire and have become very good at preventing it. The world’s long-term fire trend is ever downward.
None of this means France and Spain don’t have a real problem. They do: a record June heatwave dried out vegetation and decades of accumulated fuel created a monster.

Do nothing but that which has always been done ... remember the fearless advice of the mad king ... Trump blames California for wildfires, tells state ‘you gotta clean your floors’

“I see again the forest fires are starting,” he said at a rally in swing-state Pennsylvania. “They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”
“Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us,” he added.
The combination of assigning blame while fires still burn and offering questionable remedies have become as familiar to Californians as the conflagrations that ignite each year. Those fires have spurred a predictable response from the president: blame the Democrat-dominated state and then threaten to punish it by withholding money. He did so as fires burned in 2018, and again in 2019.
“I’ve been telling them this now for three years, but they don’t want to listen,” Trump said on Thursday. “‘The environment, the environment,’ but they have massive fires again.”

Wise words, and the Bjørn-again one heeds them ...

The fixes are prosaic and proven: prescribed burns, fuel clearing, fire-resistant building codes and more firefighting capacity.
What will not help is the standard prescription of net zero. Even if the entire rich world hit net zero by 2050, at fantastical costs, the temperature difference by century’s end would be too small to measurably change fire risk.
Telling frightened people their houses burned because of fossil fuels – and that salvation lies in decades of expensive emissions cuts – is not compassion. It is generating propaganda for extremely costly policies while providing an alibi for failed fire policies.
Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of False Alarm and Best Things First.

Remember, do nothing, all is well, though perhaps you might invite AI into your home to help ...

But why did the pond go there first up?

What, you wanted the pond to go with Lachy, doing his bit for the Australian Daily Zionist News?

Bearing witness to the horror of Bondi
Bondi Terror remembers and honours all who were injured and lost, and the many heroes who stepped up when it mattered most.
By Lachlan Murdoch

The alternative headline? Insightful accounts bear witness to the horror of Bondi as it happened.

Insightful? Pass the pond a chuck bucket.

What was that all about? Flogging Sharri, full disrespect ...

This is an edited extract of a speech delivered by News Corp chairman Lachlan Murdoch at the launch of the book Bondi Terror by Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin at Bondi Pavilion in Sydney on Thursday night.

Enablers and amplifiers ...

And damned if the pond wanted to go down the 9/11 road with "Ned" ...

Inside the hour that forged Australia’s alliance with America
John Howard and George W. Bush: an alliance forged in the hour of need
John Howard’s decision to stand with the US on its darkest day reshaped Australia’s defence future.
By Paul Kelly
By Editor-At-Large

The pond despises the way politicians always somehow end up front and centre as personal tragedies unfold ...

That image of an heroic shrub is unconscionable.

Note the sublime way that "Ned" skips over an uncomfortable truth ...

...the moral infamy of 9/11 has been largely obliterated by the Iraq war when president George W. Bush determined to depose Saddam Hussein (who had no role in 9/11), provoking much global condemnation and creating furious domestic divisions across Western nations including in Australia, where the Howard government joined the US action. The left in Australia made Iraq, not 9/11, the moral test and the US invasion was mobilised against America, the alliance and John Howard as prime minister.
There was, however, a much bigger story – it is the adaptability, endurance and evolution of the ANZUS Treaty. Despite the US blunders, the alliance emerged stronger than ever. Indeed, the legacy of 9/11 delivered a transformation in the alliance from its 1951 origins with increasing advances over the years in US-Australian military interoperability – the culmination being the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine project for Australia, an idea inconceivable in 2001 yet only made possible by the 9/11 legacy in its deepening political trust across the oceans.
Howard told Inquirer: “The whole message is the remarkable adaptability of the alliance, the way it has endured for so long. I am sure it will continue to do so.” It is a declaration the alliance will prosper beyond the Trump presidency.

As for that war? It's a never no mind...

...Howard used 9/11 and the terrorist threat as the opportunity to reinvigorate the alliance, branding its condition as “stale” when he came to office in 1996, a description Labor never accepted. Yet Howard’s support for Bush was also a trap – it made him hostage to Bush as a war president, with the Coalition and Labor bitterly split over the Iraq war.
Howard’s loyalty to Bush was a domestic negative
Howard’s loyalty to Bush and his military decision on Iraq became a domestic negative, but not damaging enough to prevent his re-election in 2004 and, ultimately, not damaging enough to weaken the alliance. Iraq revealed Howard’s complexity as a politician.
He never became a pro-American romantic and his Iraq commitment was modest, calibrated and designed to minimise casualties – which it did. But the failure to locate any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – the ostensible justification for the invasion – became a devastating judgment on the entire venture, undermining its moral and strategic rationale.

That and the presence of the disgraced Pezzullo made the pond hasten to send the 11 minute sermon to the malfunctioning intermittent archive, lest the pond end up quoting Tucker ...

Your typical Fox News viewer is likely oblivious to this, but America’s response to 9/11 blew the original attack out of the water. George Bush’s subsequent war in Iraq, which made no sense considering Iraq did not do 9/11, got hundreds of thousands of innocents killed, had tens of thousands of American military casualties, and catalyzed the creation of ISIS. That means the U.S. slaughtered enough civilians to account for dozens and dozens of 9/11s. And that is a conservative estimate.

Oh the irony of Tucker berating typical Faux Noise viewers.

But then watching "Ned" trying to cope is almost as hard as listening to the mad King attempting to be solemn, while politicising a disaster in order justify another folly, his adventure in Iran.

And what to make of Gina's pampered pet's latest folly... Pauline Hanson’s goes personal on Anthony Albanese’s late mother.

Why go there, why dig that up? We know she's a terrible person, with not a shred of empathy to be found, just vitriol and bile ...

It turns out that it was yet another chance to spend half the piece rehashing Pauline's war with the pasty Hastie ...

That ended up sounding extremely woke ...

...The cartoon has also been slammed by the RSL, Labor and veteran senator Jacqui Lambie, who labelled the One Nation leader “gutless” and “disgusting”.
Liberal National MP Garth Hamilton said there was a “mean and distasteful element” to One Nation’s cartoons.
“The mocking of Senator Steele-John’s disabilities, using a man to voice Senator Wong’s character and the kernel of misogyny in the depictions of (Labor senator Charlotte) Walker,” he said.
“What kind of Prime Minister would she be?
“Fight on policy – not on personal issues like disability, sexuality or age.”

Time for a relieving immortal Rowe out on the links ...

For a bonus, the pond had no choice ... especially as the pond was inspired by a yarn in the Graudian ...

AfD’s new state MPs include ex-Stasi officer, former porn actor, neopagans and neo-Nazis; Far-right German party’s newly elected representatives face fresh scrutiny as it tries to form government in Saxony-Anhalt

...Presented by the AfD’s lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, for a photocall in the state capital of Magdeburg on Thursday, some of the members-elect were revealed to have a range of questionable backgrounds, including criminal records, Stasi pasts and connections to far-right networks.
German media has revealed that among the 39 parliamentarians who will represent constituencies across Saxony-Anhalt in the state parliament, is a man alleged to have participated in pornography films and falsified academic qualifications; a former officer for the East German secret police, the Stasi; and several members under criminal investigation for their involvement in neo-Nazi organisations.
Two MPs are facing investigations into allegations they sought to continue the activities of the banned rightwing extremist organisation Artgemeinschaft, a neopagan group that has embraced nationalist and antisemitic ideas. The younger of the two is also alleged to have violated the law in relation to weapons, according to the public prosecutor’s office. Both reject the allegations.
The erstwhile pornography actor was convicted for stealing bedding in bulk from a hotel. A court confirmed he had been a pornography actor after he contested a local newspaper’s claims. He was expelled from a university after being found to have falsified his school leaving certificate, Die Zeit reported. The MP says he was readmitted after a legal challenge.
An ex-Stasi officer, aged 78, who won a direct mandate in his constituency, has admitted to having worked for the ministry for state security in the communist GDR, focused on East German citizens who wanted to permanently emigrate.
His role as an MP-elect has been criticised by campaign groups on behalf of victims of the former East German dictatorship.
Also, an investigation by the broadcaster ZDF revealed that some AfD ministers-elect who were also members of the previous parliamentary group, had ties to rightwing extremist groups. This included some having been members of the subsequently outlawed Homeland-Loyal German Youth group, HDJ. At one stage one of them had led the organisation, while an adviser to the AfD’s parliamentary group wrote a biography described as an “homage to national socialism”.
Among the prospective MPs are a number with pro-Kremlin links, as well as some who visited members of the Maga movement in Washington.
Asked to respond to the questionable biographies, in particular of the two MPs under criminal investigation, Siegmund, a former fragrance salesman who was unanimously re-elected as the AfD’s parliamentary group leader on Thursday, referred to the men in jest as “the bad guys” and said “we will await the results of the investigations and then discuss them”.

Just so, what a hoot, but that sounds like they might need a bit of spit and polish, a bit of shining up, a little cleansing and dusting.

Who better to do that than the bromancer, long an admirer of authoritarian figures?

The header: Can Germany’s far right clean up the mess Angela Merkel left behind? The AfD election result this week exemplifies the failures of Western politics.

The caption for the snap celebrating a man who looks great and possibly looks even better in a stylish black uniform: AfD state leader, Ulrich Siegmund – young and good-looking, master of memes and gimmicks, with no government experience – dominated the Saxony-Anhalt's state election campaign. Picture: Tobias Schwarz / AFP

Marvel as the bromancer spends a bigly nine minutes spinning out his infatuation with all things AfD.

His philosophical position sounds a tad similar to a German industrialist in the Weimar republic ... the man who dresses up in black and bashes unionists, commies and lefties is my friend. What could go wrong?

Go bromancing ...

German politics broke spectacularly in the small East German state of Saxony-Anhalt as voters screamed out in semi-coherent rage: Enough! Enough! Enough!
Three giant policy failures have ruined German politics – mass immigration from the Middle East, net-zero energy commitments and overbearing European regulation. They were all caused, or greatly worsened, by Angela Merkel, chancellor from 2005 to 2021. Despite her electoral success, her record makes her the most destructive German leader since World War II.

The reptiles stacked the outing with visual treats ... International Relations expert Ralph Schoellhammer discusses former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who says she is heartbroken after the AfD’s historic win.

The bromancer was in his usual hysterical form. A result amongst a mob of East Germans heralded end times for lefties, centrists and whatever ...

The Saxony state election result is an earthquake. There’s no sign German politics can return to pre-quake norms. Some 44 per cent of the electorate in a record high turnout voted for the far-right AfD, Alternative for Germany; a staggering victory over the incumbent Christian Democrats, the CDU, whose vote halved to a pitiful 17 per cent. It’s the first far-right win since World War II.
AfD state leader Ulrich Siegmund, young and good-looking, master of memes and gimmicks, with no government experience, dominated the campaign. AfD was massively popular on social media (perhaps that’s why so many governments want to censor social media).
Chancellor Friedrich Merz, from the CDU, was thrown into immediate crisis. His 13 per cent approval rating makes him the most unpopular leader in modern Germany. Yet he won office just last year. The parallel with Britain’s Keir Starmer is stunning. Merz had promised to halve AfD’s vote and double the CDU’s. He got that back to front.
Crisis rolls on. On September 20 there will be regional elections in another small state, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and in Berlin. In Mecklenburg, the AfD is ahead with support in the mid-30s, while in Berlin polls just before the Saxony election had the CDU, AfD and Die Linke (the Left Party) all nearly even.

Quick, an image of him looking downcast ... German Chancellor and leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Friedrich Merz faces the media after state elections in Saxony-Anhalt. Picture: Getty Images

The bromancer was exultant ...

If AfD wins Mecklenburg and does well in Berlin, Merz is finished. The flood tide will be flowing.

If you're going to be an apologist for assorted fruit loops and loons, do it in style ...

There’s a strong case that AfD’s extremism has been exaggerated.

Watch as the bromancer gets wildly excited at the thought that neo-Nazis might not just take Germany, but Europe and the entire global thingie ...

It’s still not clear whether it can form government in Saxony. It fell three seats short of a majority. For it not to govern, every other party would have to join in a bizarre, if not grotesque, losers’ coalition. The CDU has promised never to join AfD in coalition but also promised not to join the Left Party, the direct descendant of the East German communists. The Left Party champions wildly left economics, including property expropriation, and is increasingly accused of harbouring antisemitism.
The AfD result provides a crisis for Germany. It also has huge Europe-wide and global repercussions. It exemplifies the failures of Western politics generally, especially Europe’s. In Saxony, some 60 per cent voted for parties that want to end German support for Ukraine. But overwhelmingly they were voting on immigration and the economy, which ought to be a clue to deradicalising AfD.
In Germany, the centre cannot hold because the centre cannot govern. The European social, economic and political model has broken. It’s a social democratic model and social democracy is in existential crisis. The AfD’s success represents comprehensive failure for the two great parties of the post-war German success, the CDU and the SDP Social Democrats.
This is a humiliation for Germany, which rose from the ashes after World War II. It became the most successful big European state. The arc of German reputational resurrection after the war was long and mostly strong. First came the post-war West German economic miracle, under giants like Konrad Adenauer. Germany confronted morally the unspeakable evil of Nazism. It committed to democracy and civility, to the US alliance. It rebuilt its economy and society.

It was inevitable it would come ... ‘The moment of disaster on immigration came in 2015. Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to Syrians, and then virtually to everyone from the Middle East.’ Picture: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Eek, the hordes, the hordes ... the invading, conquering, ruining hordes ...

Then came an advertisement for Nazi virtues ...

It recovered traditional strengths – precision engineering, industrial scale, civic orderliness – while rejecting traditional evils: militarism, decadence, ideological extremes.

As Adolf once said, would there have been a second world war without that war monger and ideological extremist Chamberlain? So much decadence, almost full Weimar republic.

And now here we are ...

West Germany oversaw peaceful reunification with communist East Germany under another giant, the CDU’s Helmut Kohl. When the euro was adopted as a common European currency in 1999, Germany realised fantastic economic benefit. Instead of the deutschmark being so overvalued as to render German industry uncompetitive, Germany enjoyed a permanently undervalued currency. The euro reflected southern Europe’s weakness, not Germany’s strength. In the early 2000s, the SDP’s Gerhard Schroeder introduced pro-market reforms to renovate the economy.

Cue a snap... Helmut Kohl in 2012. Picture: AFP

The bromancer generously allowed a few failings ...

The Germans had their failures, of course. They were deeply penetrated by East German and Soviet spies. The performance of German police at the Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes in 1972 was abysmal. The economy relied on Turkish workers, who were not integrated. And of course there were scandals.
By the time of the 2008 global financial crisis the rot had set in to German public policy. It became addicted to a prodigious welfare state. It ducked geo-strategic burdens its size should have mandated. It forgot hard lessons of self-reliance from after World War II. Its smug establishment, intimately involved in the European Union project, defined anything it didn’t like politically as being an echo of Hitlerism, thus ruling opponents out of the national debate.
The old German political model had been that the CDU and its Bavarian partner, the Christian Social Union, were as conservative as possible, in part to make sure nothing significant emerged to their right. Merkel did the reverse. She labelled everything to the right of the CDU unacceptable, undemocratic, quasi-Nazi, then moved the CDU relentlessly left. She created the modern German crisis.

Is Caleb still a thing? Apparently ... News24 host Caleb Bond says Germany’s migration backlash which has fuelled an AfD surge “lies at the foot” of former chancellor Angela Merkel.

Want a parallel? Sure thing ...

...The outcome of the meeting was clear: Europe, North America and Australia would not accept significant numbers of these refugees.
In the verbatim record, two words were uttered repeatedly: “density” and “saturation.” The European countries were already beset with population “density” and had reached a point of “saturation” — in other words, there was simply no more room at the European inn.
It was an absurd thing to say, of course, in 1938, given the size of Europe’s populations today. And it would be an equally ridiculous thing to say now, too.
To be sure, the participants in Evian could not have foreseen the Holocaust, or that Europe was being drawn into another devastating war; nonetheless, their lack of moral conscience was breathtaking. Many of the countries that refused to take in suffering refugees were themselves, in due course, occupied and brutalized by the Nazis — and desperate for the compassion that they denied the Jews in July 1938.
The Nazis must have reveled in the knowledge that their virulent anti-Semitism found an echo — sometimes not so faint — in the rest of Europe. They also came to realize that if expulsion was not possible, extermination eventually would be.
Today, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism, xenophobia and anti-migrant sentiment are again rising across Europe, and we must stop now and reassess precisely where we are. A major British tabloid newspaper recently felt it acceptable to allow one of its columnists to liken immigrants to cockroaches. Rwanda’s Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines used the same word to describe Tutsis in the run-up to the 1994 genocide, as did Julius Streicher’s Nazi newspaper Der Stuermer to describe Jews. Political leaders across Europe regularly — and shamefully — blame migrants for their national woes.

Take it away bromancer ...

The moment of disaster on immigration came in 2015. Merkel opened Germany’s borders to Syrians, and then virtually to everyone from the Middle East. She liberalised entry procedures, and once they’d arrived no one left. She famously declared: “Wir schaffen das” (we’ll cope). The German public had not been consulted.
Merkel, and Germany, initially won a wave of international admiration. Germans liked this at first. They hated what followed. Perhaps 1.5 million people from the Middle East came into Germany as a result of Merkel’s actions. Within a couple of years it was seen as disastrous and Berlin reversed. But once you turn on a tap like that, it’s almost impossible to shut it off.
Nothing better illustrates the awfulness of a conservative turning left to win the plaudits of the zeitgeist. Before Merkel’s blunder, Germany had eight million foreign-born residents. The year after Merkel left office in 2021, the number was nearly 14 million. Much of that increase consisted of people who didn’t speak German and had little education.
There was a series of terrible Islamist terror attacks in Germany. The refugee assessment system has a bureaucratic bias in favour of accepting refugee claims, because almost no one leaves as a result of a negative decision. In 2024 Germany deported 22,000 people while more than 220,000 who had been ordered to leave simply stayed.
Immigrant crime is a grim reality. Press reports indicate that the government counted 751 gang rapes last year. In more than half of cases the suspects were not German citizens.
Because in the wake of its Nazi past there is an understandable hypersensitivity about race in Germany, it was until recently taboo to discuss any of this directly.

Don't expect such reticence from the bromancer when he dons his jackboots ... Right-wing activists gather in front of Hauptbahnhof railway station under the banner ‘We for Berlin – We for Germany’ to protest against Merkel's refugee policy in 2016. Picture: Getty Images

And so on with the nuking of furriners, and just nuking the planet, because why not?

That taboo fuelled AfD’s rise. They were the only people who would address the problem. AfD was founded in 2013. It was nationalist but its first big issue was opposing a German financial bailout for Greece. The huge influx of unregulated immigrants in 2015 changed AfD. Immigration became its No.1 issue.
The morality of immigration policy is much more complex than the broad left allows. Pope Leo XIV is a champion of immigrants, yet he acknowledges explicitly that nations have a right to control their borders. Merkel abandoned border control.
This huge unassimilated population has had major economic and social consequences for Germany. From 2015 its results in international school testing have been in radical decline. Australians were rightly shocked at how badly Australian students scored in the recent Program for International Student Assessment, PISA. Germany, once renowned for its education, scores well below Australia in reading, maths and science.
Merkel’s second great mistake was her embrace of net zero and the nearly insane decision, as early as 2011, to shut down the nuclear power industry (phase-out didn’t begin until 2021). Nuclear once supplied 14 per cent of Germany’s energy. Because of net-zero madness and the cessation of cheap Russian gas, Germans now pay twice as much as Americans for energy, and the highest prices in Europe.
The ultra-high energy costs and the ever expanding welfare budget have seen Germany deindustrialise, with hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs lost. Germany has had virtually no economic growth this decade. Industrial production is below its 2019 level.
EU regulation makes it difficult for any German government to reverse course on disastrous policies. This mess has seen AfD support soar. But don’t panic. This is not 1933. The AfD is not the Nazi Party. The AfD’s federal parliamentary leader, Alice Weidel, a lesbian, economist and former Goldman Sachs executive whose domestic partner is Sri Lankan, is no Adolf Hitler.
A final mistake of Merkel’s was her determination to demonise AfD at every point. A German intelligence agency has determined that AfD in Saxony, where 44 per cent of people just voted for it, is an “extremist right-wing organisation”. AfD furiously contests this and the ruling has been suspended while it’s challenged in court.

Why has the bromancer selected the AfD for two major outings in a week? There's a siren song there, a surging sympathy, a need to revive people wagons ... Germany’s manufacturing output is down about 10 per cent, with thousands of jobs being shed each month. Picture: Getty Images

It's all the fault of leftists, and anyway, these nice chaps have been vilified and demonised, and where's the justice in that?

Merkel is not guilty alone in this demonisation. The broad left in Germany has been its main proponent. All parties, except a small breakaway far-left group, have agreed to implement Brandmauer, or political firewall, against AfD. Brandmauer means no mainstream party will enter a coalition with AfD, nor accept its vote to secure a parliamentary majority, either for government, or even for a single parliamentary motion.
The German people plainly resent this arrogance by the political establishment in telling them who they may not vote for. The AfD now leads national polls with 30 per cent support. Yet its election victory in Saxony provoked tens of thousands of left-wing demonstrators. It’s the left, much more than AfD, that threatens democracy.

Oops, perhaps he recognised he was going too far, because the bromancer hastily slipped in a minor billy goat butt ...

Don’t get me wrong. AfD is a very mixed grill and has some unsavoury aspects. There are a number of former neo-Nazis in its ranks. Perhaps the worst element is its pro-Russian outlook.

Don't get alarmed, a bromancer billy goat butt is always followed by the right sort of but ...

But the big issues for AfD voters are immigration and economic stagnation.
It wants to deport everybody in Germany who is there illegally. As Donald Trump is finding, mass deportations are very hard to bring about. This will be doubly so for Germany as many of its illegals come from countries that won’t take them back. But wishing to deport people who are in your country illegally is not Nazi, nor even extreme. AfD also talks confusingly of “remigration”, which means encouraging migrants who live on welfare to go back to their countries of origin. AfD leaders are clear that they have in mind only legal means, perhaps even some positive inducements such as grants. It may be wildly unrealistic, it’s not Nazi. If AfD tried to deport people who were German citizens (which it says it won’t do) this would be prevented by the courts and other political parties.

Thank heavens there's a lesbian, so it must be okay, at least if you follow the Bari model ... The AfD’s federal parliamentary leader, Alice Weidel, a lesbian, economist and former Goldman Sachs executive whose domestic partner is Sri Lankan, is no Adolf Hitler. Picture: Michele Tantussi/Getty Images

On with more common sense, because if it's on the far right, it's common sense to the bro ...

AfD is pro-nuclear and wants to revive Germany’s nuclear industry. That sounds like common sense.
The pro-Russian stuff means it would be difficult to trust AfD with sensitive intelligence. A more sophisticated German mainstream would be able to wean AfD off its pro-Russian orientation. This is not core business for most AfD voters. AfD wants to enable home schooling and cut back leftist ideology in school and university education. It’s also Eurosceptic.
Merz himself didn’t really believe in the firewall policy, though in his desperation to survive he champions it now. In 2025 Merz put a migration crackdown motion to the Bundestag, the German parliament. AfD supported it and it passed, with their votes, 348 to 345. Merkel from retirement immediately denounced Merz for this heresy. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets. The SDP told Merz he was opening the gates to hell.
This rhetorical madness is common in Western politics. The left demonises its most dangerous opponents with excessive language. (Malcolm Fraser, before he became a lefty, was once as prime minister portrayed by the Australian left as an incipient dictator.) Certainly the left calls every populist party racist, fascist or Nazi. They rob language of meaning and thereby demean political culture.
There’s another way of looking at the rise of European populists, even of Trump and Pauline Hanson. Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Marine LePen in France emerged out of formerly extremist parties but are now thoroughly respectable conservative democrats who favour restricted immigration. Nigel Farage never was extremist. The rise of populists, while indicating failure by mainstream politics, is actually democracy working.

The bro really is more than authoritarian curious, more than far right friendly, he wants to be all in ... German federal police check cars arriving at the German-Polish border in September, 2024. Picture: Getty Images

Parteigenosse, the pond trusts you're leaving the bromancer more aware, more vital, more inclined to protect your precious bodily fluids from vile furriners ...

Germany’s a mess, with a chronic budget deficit and soaring debt. Merz is pushing timid but unpopular welfare reform that his coalition partners may now kybosh. Populists arise when mainstream politics fails. They will either get into government, like Meloni, or force mainstream parties to try something new. In government, they may fail.
Democracies sometimes have to change, like Labour replacing the British Liberal Party a century ago. Populists attract some eccentrics, nut cases, chancers and ratbags. But as they get more credible they attract more competent folks too. Look at Mike Newman, One Nation’s NSW leader. It is undemocratic and dangerous to try to outlaw populists or to censor the internet so populists can’t get their message out. As Trump shows, the more you prosecute populists, the more likely they are to get elected.
The AfD’s victory in Saxony shattered German politics. But guess what? German politics deserved to be shattered. The contest for Germany’s future is joined in earnest. So long as it’s conducted through the ballot box, that’s no bad thing.

Much as it was a good thing that Herr Adolf did well at the ballot box ...

At this point, the pond supposes even the most diligent correspondent might be exhausted, but the pond wants to offer a bonus to the bonus, the sight of Gerard having a nervous breakdown in The Times ...

This appeared in yesterday's lizard Oz, and for some weird reason, it put the pond in a most excellent mood ...

The more Gerard plunged into hysteria and end of world syndrome, the more cheerful the pond felt ...

All that and more, but in the end we're all dead ...

Of course the pond is absolutely terrified ... the pond is half-expecting the bromancer to go full Springtime in Germany ...

But there are upsides ...

... and there are slides, and who said the Titanic couldn't be fun?

A full to overflowing reptile Friday, with Our Henry forced to the rear ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 22:17:58 +0000

What a time to be alive. Malcolm Roberts thinking 9/11 is a hoax, Pauline thinking Port Arthur is a conspiracy, and somehow with climate science a fraud, the world still managed a top notch heat record these past few months.

And the blessings go on, with mad king Donald promising each and every American $5,000 smackeroos, perhaps to make up for the $2k DOGE cheques they never got, and all in all, a joyous $1.2tn or $1.3tn payout - pick your own number - and that's the first time the pond has ever used 'tn' as an abbreviation.

What a way to help boost national debt, inflation and interest rates, as if events in Yemen and the strait weren't already doing their best, with oil prices on the rise.

Best of all, it's Our Henry day, but bear with the pond, because there are numerous distractions to hand.

There was the pond confronted by a choice between Pauline and Lambie and the pasty Hastie, and having to think that in a pinch, that the spawn of creationists was more ridgy didge than Pauline.

What's more, the pond found itself agreeing with the RSL, with the lizards of Oz sinking in the slipper...

'POLITICAL STUNT'
Hanson’s ‘traitor’ attack on Hastie is ‘un-Australian’: RSL president
The RSL has condemned Pauline Hanson’s attack on veteran and Liberal MP Andrew Hastie as ‘extremely offensive’, intensifying pressure on the One Nation leader.
by Sarah Ison and Elizabeth Pike

Right on Jacqui, right on pasty Hastie, right on RSL ...

Say what? The pond can't believe it just typed that.

And yet more presidential language from Jacqui! It's not just Maggie Haberman that's a maggot.

What a day of wonders ...

Sadly the intermittent archive was intermittent again, so who knows if its links will work, but wot the hell, toujours gai ...

Giggle v Tickle: landmark appeal on women’s spaces rejected
The High Court has refused Giggle for Girls founder Sall Grover special leave to appeal the Roxanne Tickle case, cementing gender identity as legally protected under Australian law.
By Stephen Rice

Just to be safe, the pond decided on a screen caps policy, so at least a little of the flavour would survive ...

Awe, and she looks so ... womanly, not like that other shameless harridan.

Oh there'll be hell to pay for that, with Dame Slap ready to be outraged ... but the pond must stick to its resolution, and not encourage the reptiles in yet more TG bashing ..

In other news, the reptiles were devastated by the way the government had failed to reform or improve them...

Labor’s $75m anti-extremism program failing to teach the class of hate
Leaked Home Affairs figures show 24 extremists became more dangerous under the National Support and Intervention Program.
By Noah Yim

Relax Noah, the extremism of the lizard Oz, that daily class of hate, can sail on unreformed ...

There's a man who knows his comics ...

Speaking of devastation, the pond was devastated by the swishing Switzer breaking ranks...

Did the swishing Switzer just accuse the beefy boofhead of aspiring to run an authoritarian state?

He did, he did ... how dare he attack the beefy boofhead this way!

And worse the swishing Switzer carried on this way to the very end ...

Foolish boofhead ... your foolish inability to understand your foolishness means you can't forgive the foolishness of others, and even that fool Switzer sees you as a fool...

The pond has been there before, and will go again ...

As for Cameron in solemn commemorative mode, what a disgrace...

The September 11 attacks left wounds so deep they are still felt a generation on
The September 11 terror attacks claimed more than 3000 lives 25 years ago, yet the wounds remain so deep that Americans still cannot escape their shadow.
By Cameron Stewart

Not once in his peroration did he mention King Donald or his brave interventions or him being hustled away by two big, strong, incredibly burly and tall firemen, perhaps with tears in their eyes.

For that the pond had to turn to Parker Molloy, bringing much mirth and joy in Donald Trump Lies a Lot About 9/11

The pond would have loved to linga longa - so many tall stories, so little time - but other reptiles cried out for attention, and so the pond turned to Killer Creighton, carrying on yet again about the many ways that furriners were ruining the country ...

Say what? Those bloody furrin students are shipping their filthy lucre overseas and ruining everything, and what do we get in return? A little hard labour delivering food and a few tuition fees, as if that made up for them looting the country.

This is surely a case for Dame Groan, but in the interim the pond will settle for a final gobbet of Killer indignation ...

Damn right, those bloody furrin students are just a burden and a shame and what luck Killer was here to call them out...and what joy to see that mad king Donald hadn't affected the Canadian economy, though perhaps soon to be the 51st state ...

Of course all this has been just a preliminary, a lengthy detour, a little trolling, a build up to the arrival of Our Henry.

It's been a rough week for the Australian Daily Zionist News, what with Haaretz exposing Benji, yet gloomy about what had been achieved ...Netanyahu Was Warned About October 7. Will Haaretz's Exposé Change Anything?

And certain countries at last recognised ethnic cleansing was going down and the current government of Israel was the perpetrator, but they'd deployed a warm lettuce leaf ... The U.K.'s Sanctions on Settlements Matter. So Do Their Limits

Naturally Our Henry ignored all that, but then he is the leading contributor to the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

The header:Richard Flanagan’s dangerous ideas were intellectually lazy; His factual errors were not mere intellectual sloppiness: they contribute to demonising Israel and the Australian Jews.

The caption for the uncredited collage showing the fiend in his true light, imitating Mussolini: At the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Richard Flanagan asked where the antisemitism was in the Bondi massacre and answered: "Nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere." Pictures: News Corp / Supplied

Our Henry's opening par contained a hot link:

Richard Flanagan’s speech at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas has one merit and one merit only: it crystallises the falsehoods, delusions and hypocrisy at the heart of the wave of hatred that has swept Australia since October 7, 2023.

Some might think that the reptiles were playing fair and providing a link to Flanagan's talk. Foolish "some", it was a link to the craven Craven, using the very same artwork, such is reptile indolence and laziness and lack of originality:

It was left to the pond to provide a link to Flanagan yet again, so he could speak for himself.

You could watch the full speech on YouTube... or you could read it here under the header The new McCarthyism: Gaza and Australia – Richard Flanagan; This is the full text of a powerful speech Flanagan delivered at the the Festival of Dangerous Ideas on August 22

Was it way back on 22nd August? Is it now September 11th?

And yet here we are, with Our Henry still ranting, clearly with nothing better to do, in full persecuted paranoid mode.

(Here the pond must warn that the reptiles refused to interrupt the five minute rant with a single visual distraction of any kind) ...

Listening to the litany of factual errors, it is hard to know whether Flanagan is stupid, ignorant or both. He claims, for example, that Einstein was ardently opposed to Zionism. Yet Einstein famously called Israel “our state” – “unser staat”, a possessive stronger in German than any English can convey – bequeathed his papers to the Hebrew University and was working, when he died, on an address celebrating Israel’s seventh Independence Day.
Flanagan equally presents the Bund – a Jewish socialist movement – as implacably hostile to the state of Israel, conveniently ignoring that in 1955, as the reality of the Holocaust and of Stalinist antisemitism sank it, the Bund’s Third World Conference clamorously reversed its position.
But the factual errors are not mere intellectual sloppiness: they contribute to demonising Israel and the Australian Jews who support its right to exist, in some cases by ignoring reality in others by not providing crucial context.
To take just one instance, Flanagan recycles the Committee to Protect Journalists’ contention that “more journalists have been killed in Gaza by the IDF than in the entirety of World War Two”. What he omits is that the comparison applies a far looser definition of “journalist” to Gaza than to World War Two.
Worse, as the scholarly source underlying the wartime tally acknowledges, it excludes journalists killed on the Soviet and Chinese fronts, where 80 per cent of combat fatalities occurred, as well as journalists reporting from the Axis forces. Making those adjustments shows the claim to be utterly baseless – a fact Flanagan either knew or should have known.
All that, however, merely prepares the ground for “exposing” a conspiracy of monstrous scope and ambition. There is, in Flanagan’s telling, an ominously amorphous “Israel lobby”, operating both directly and through the Special Envoy for Antisemitism, Jillian Segal. Aided by “sustained” yet “mysterious” pressure from the Trump administration, its aim is to control “every significant arena of Australian public life”.
The “lobby’s” not-so-secret weapon is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which it wants enforced by “oversight committees” designed to “cower civil society and curb free speech”, leaving “Australians silenced, fearful and divided”. The restrictions those committees impose are “certain to be (on) terms that please Israel, a foreign nation”, so that this country would be controlled not by “the Australian state, but essentially the Israeli state”. Australians would become vassals of a foreign power, denied even the freedom to criticise their overlords.

The pond realises what everybody routinely comes to Our Henry for ... some reference to Thucydides or other Greek or Roman author, or perhaps a legal or moral medieval philosopher, and in any survey of those ancient times, certainly getting no more modern than Hume.

Sadly the pond must report thin gruel, with Our Henry largely sticking to the Zionist present, with a brief detour back to 1964 ...

Faced with those claims, one is irresistibly reminded of Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay on the paranoid style in American politics. Unlike clinical paranoids, the conspiracists Hofstadter focused on did not see themselves as singled out by a hostile world. Rather, they perceived, lurking behind every event, the sinister hand of a demonic force directed “against a nation, a culture, a way of life”.
Hofstadter called this style paranoid, he explained, “because no other word adequately evokes its qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy”. And its archetypal expression is the malevolent fiction of a Jewish cabal plotting to bring the world to heel.
Little wonder then that direct references to “the Lobby’s” machinations account for almost a third of the words Flanagan utters. Yet what is most telling is not what Flanagan says but what he leaves unsaid. In a speech devoted to Gaza, Israel is mentioned 60 times; Hamas once. Jews are mentioned 43 times; Islam and Muslims, never.

At this point some might wonder what Our Henry leaves unsaid.

"Some" might answer, why real observations about the actual ethnic cleansing going down in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon, not to mention the current government of Israel maintaining its military presence in a considerable slice of Syria.

But give the guy a break ... no need to mention the unmentionable ...at best deserving of a "tsk, tsk" ...

And the hole in bucket man does manage to spray out his usual portentous array of references in lieu ...

The distortions that bias creates are glaring. Demonstrating that abject ignorance cannot dent his outrage, Flanagan foolishly claims that Zionism, whose intellectual origins owe incomparably more to Mazzini’s liberal nationalism and Moses Hess’s romantic socialism than to Fichte’s chauvinistic illiberalism, “arose out of the same fetid, ethno-nationalist ferment” that “gave the world Nazism, fascism, extreme nationalism and authoritarianism”. What he does not say is that this ferment, which left no discernible imprint on Zionism, shaped post-war Arab nationalism and modern Islamism, reinforced by fascism and Nazi ideology’s vitriolic antisemitism.
Equally, he endlessly excoriates the “Israel lobby”. Yet he never mentions the lavishly taxpayer-funded Muslim lobby, with its own special envoy, which has coalesced a wide range of Islamic and pro-Palestinian organisations in submissions to public inquiries, including the royal commission, urging, among other things, for the terrorism legislation to be weakened.
And while denouncing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition in vitriolic terms, Flanagan passes over the far more sweeping restrictions on what they call Islamophobia proposed by those organisations and by the Islamophobia Special Envoy: restrictions advanced without even the sketchiest definition of the “Islamophobia” they seek to repress.
The double standard then reaches its nadir in his suggestion that the representative bodies of Australian Jewry benefit from inciting hatred against the very people they represent – a charge he would never level at their Muslim counterparts.
To describe those assertions as outrageous would be an understatement; and Flanagan is plainly aware of their enormity. He therefore moves to pre-empt criticism by adopting the manoeuvre notoriously associated with former London mayor Ken Livingstone, who dismissed every charge of antisemitism as an attempt to silence legitimate criticism of Israel.
The goal is simple: to avoid addressing the substance of the charge by impugning the accuser’s supposed motives. Critics are presumed to be acting in bad faith, fabricating persecution to advance their political ends. Hatred is thus rebaptised as legitimate criticism, while those who object become accomplices in a secret campaign to stifle debate.

And so, to prove his good faith, Our Henry deployed an abundant array of legitimate criticisms of Israel, including but not limited to cynical ethnic cleansing of the first water, and the current government's philosophy of a greater Israel, from the river to the sea, for which all Zionists must take responsibility.

You know, to quote Gideon Levy in Haaretz ... The U.K. Sanctions Are a Joke. Israel Is the Settlements, and the Settlements Are Israel

...The settlements are Israel and Israel is the settlements. The Green Line disappeared a long time ago, and no other line separates the West Bank from Israel, apart from the line of Apartheid. All of us are Israelis and all of us are settlers. All of us bear responsibility for what is being done in our name.
If Britain thinks that there is ethnic cleaning, elements of which are among the most serious war crimes and crimes against humanity, then what good is it to punish the settlers? The settlers are supporting actors in the horrors, and their responsibility is diminished. They are only the perpetrators — the soldiers carrying out the crime.
The settlement enterprise is an all-Israeli undertaking of the government and indeed the entire system. There is not a single official body not involved, directly or indirectly, either by action or by omission, undertaken with joy or with indifference. It is the state that should be punishing violent settlers, if it were a state of law; that is not the world's job. It is those responsible for the settlement enterprise who should be punished by the world because the Israeli government, like any government, cannot punish itself.
Therefore, Britain's decision to impose sanctions on the settlers provides the international community with a way to evade its responsibility. The world, which often deludes itself into believing that the source of all evil is Benjamin Netanyahu, must also remember that Netanyahu did not found the settlement enterprise. The entire Zionist enterprise stands behind the settlements, and with it the Zionist establishment throughout the world.
In terms of efficacy, sanctioning settlers will be of no consequence. The settlers are far removed from world culture, and nationalists believe Israel does not need the world. No sanctions on them will stop the extremists from running rampant over the stolen land.
Even the sanctions on imports of products from the settlements is of little consequence because only 2.3 percent of Israeli exports to Europe come from the settlements. At the Esh Kodesh outpost, the industry is hatred, not high-tech; at Adei-Ad, the leading product is violence, not cherry tomatoes. The wine from the settlements is tainted, made from the grapes of wrath cultivated on stolen land.
Israel is not interested in the sanctions imposed on the settlements. The settlers are not overly bothered either, and rightly so. Less than a day after they were announced, the Civil Administration on Wednesday discussed building 747 housing units in the West Bank. The main thing is that in Westminster there is glee.

Marvel at how Our Henry takes up that Zionist burden and lets loose a volley, a veritable fusillade of criticisms.

The pond keeds, it keeds.

No way was the hole in bucket man going to go full, or even slight Haaretz.

That was way too big an ask, and so legitimate criticisms disappeared into a concluding rant about Flanagan ...

With every attempt to expose antisemitism is therefore just further proof of Jewish deceit, allowing the Jews to be accused of inventing the antisemitism that now mars our national life.
But Flanagan’s evasive tactics do not end there. Aping the techniques that saturate social media, he repeatedly poses as merely asking questions. The rhetorical approach is puerile: “A question needs to be asked,” Flanagan declares, casting himself as prepared to ask what others dare not. Then the inflammatory allegations are smuggled in: “To what extent has the Israel lobby itself contributed to antisemitism in Australia”, because it would, “perhaps perversely”, “accord with their existential message that only in Israel are Jews safe”? The insinuation is left hanging, as though the answer were self-evident, allowing Flanagan to don the mantle of truth-telling without ever shouldering the burden of proof it entails.
Every one of those claims and tactics could and should have been ruthlessly demolished on the day. Yet the so-called Festival of Dangerous Ideas evidently considered that prospect too dangerous to countenance. Its lineup featured Israel haters, but it included absolutely no one who would take them on.
The imbalance is, unfortunately, completely unremarkable: it is now a deeply ingrained feature of this country’s increasingly mediocre cultural life. But that only makes it even more important that those who purport to care about the truth should restore the balance that has been destroyed.
It is therefore much worse than scandalous that the festival was sponsored by the Ethics Centre and the NSW state government. It is an unforgivable disgrace.

What's worse? The current ethnic cleansing being conducted by the state of Israel, or Our Henry's endless blathering on about Flanagan?

The pond suspects that it's the latter which is scandalous and an unforgivable disgrace.

What a relief then to turn to the immortal Rowe for a closer, celebrating the latest clown carnival, because a cunning barker can always do an Elmer Gantry on mug punters in search of snake oil or a $1.3 tn. payout...

Elbows up Canada ...no snake oil for thee, unless you like a 50% tariff with it ...

Thursday, Thursday, can't trust that day, always turns out to be petulant Peta day ...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:34:23 +0000

(Housekeeping note: the intermittent archive has gone kinda funny for those with a hacker extension in their browser, but these links should work for a vanilla browser - provided the archive is up!)

The news wasn't entirely ghosted, but you had to scroll way down the page to see that Wong had piked it ...

ISRAEL SANCTIONS
Wong rules out joining UK, EU trade ban on Israeli settlements
The Foreign Minister says the government will not follow Andy Burnham’s more extensive sanctions against settlements in the West Bank.
By Elizabeth Pike

Heroic indecision, brave inability to act, or gormless as ever?

Gormless it is, and that's got to be worth an infallible Pope kick starter ...

Way back up at the top of the page the reptiles were giving the government its daily spanking ... and this day Geoff and Brownie were back in their rightful pace as masters of the jihad, while the bouffant one was hacking in the rough ...

Hard to feature any of them, but a look at the extreme far right made the pond reconsider.

Labor’s duty of care is really all about duty of control
Sold as yet another tool to protect children online, Labor’s new digital duty of care is a masterclass in policy deception.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

The petulant one standing proud with the big tech bros, crying out with Uncle Leon?

Better believe it...

Does she mention Orwellian in the most Orwellian of rags?

Better believe it...

...Right around the world there’s an Orwellian push by the hard left to shut down free speech. The UK Labour government, for instance, has released draft legislation to give the media regulator the power to preference favoured news services – like the BBC – at the top of any online search. News services with the “correct line” on climate change and immigration, for example, would be way ahead of any organisation that challenged the activist narrative.
Here, too, Australia’s media regulator ACMA has already started down a similar path with a report released last week called News Consumer Segmentation that included many of these same references to trusted news sources, such as the ABC and SBS, and the need “to reduce the concentration of influence among major companies such as News Corporation Australia”.
Labor’s digital duty of care is not about protecting Australians. It’s about protecting the left. It’s about entrenching Labor power and it’s about denying Australians access to a broad range of legitimate information sources to make up their own mind. It’s about as nuclear as it gets in the fight for free speech.

Roll on that cesspool once known as Twitter, roll on Zuck, roll on the bizarre notion that you and Instagram and TikTok represent "a broad range of legitimate information sources" ...

On the upside, Uncle Leon has found himself in the wars again ...

Pick a number, pick a non-paywall source.

Back at the hive mind, Jack standing proud with the IPA and big tobacco?

Better believe it ...

Why tobacco policy is the failure that keeps on taking
Tobacco policy in Australia is a train wreck that crashed through an orphanage before coming to rest on a box of kittens.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

Jack puffs and blows a lot of smoke but he comes down on the right side ...

..Smoking rates are in decline in Australia but they are everywhere in the Western world. Since the great Australian experiment began in 2010, the rate of decline has slowed.
Of comparable countries, Canada now leads Australia with both the lowest rates of smoking and the fastest growth in quitters. Plain packaging of tobacco products began in Canada in 2019 while excises remained sensible. Go figure.
We’ve entered the looking glass on this one, people. There’s no easy way out. At least we know who’s to blame.

The pond could barely note the malignant Magnay indulging in common Royal gossip, as if the pond cared in the slightest ...

Nothing’s changed. Harry and Meghan are still whining
It’s taken less than a fortnight for Harry and Meghan’s hypocrisy to exhaust Britain. As the right not-so-royal whingers revive the same old grievances, the rest of the family just gets on with duty.
By Jacquelin Magnay
Europe Correspondent

Nothing's changed. A whining hack whining about whining non-royals ...

Real stuff is happening, and about that the pond should care when there's real people going MIA?

With a profound reluctance and a deep sigh, the pond returned to Geoff chambering a round.

Top of the page there was a preening ponce, a minor figure from deep in crow eater land...

The rest could be done in a gobbet, and it turned out that the crow eater was so clueless and so pitifully needy and wanting eastern stater approval that he rocked up to Polonius's headquarters, the Sydney Institute, to dish it out ...

Geoff had done a summary of what could be found in full on the far right ... this new Petey boy braying to the Polonial mob ...

Don’t let populism dictate Australia’s migration policy
Australians who are worried about the cost of living deserve more than being lied to by the far right or being told to apologise by the far left.
By Peter Malinauskas

The pond will just note one chart that didn't make it into the archive version ...

And a moment where the crow-eater did a bout of epic both-siderism and pandered to the Polonial mob...

People on the far left who are understandably horrified about the rise of far-right politics in Australia and around the world would do well to engage in a moment of self-reflection. Maybe, just maybe, the intense self-righteousness, sanctimony and piety that underpinned the “great awokening” tilled the soil for the inevitable countercultural movement on the far right. Now those countercultural anti-woke warriors have become no less belligerent or self-defeating as those of the far left. All the culture-war crusaders miss the challenge entirely and in time I’m convinced most Australians will wish they’d just give it a rest.
Australians who are worried about the cost of living and housing and about a better standard of living for their kids deserve more than being lied to by the far right or constantly being told to apologise by the far left.

Is there any sight more sickening and nauseating than the intense self-righteousness, sanctimony and piety to be found in that text, the blather about culture-war crusaders which sounds like it was borrowed from petulant Peta or some other alliterative reptile warrior.

It's down there with a whining reptile whining about royals.

The pond decided that this Malinauskas was a clown of the first water, a water and spear carrier for the lizard Oz hive mind, and decided to give him a rest ...

The pond won't be voting for Minns any time soon, and if the pond still resided in Unley, no way would the pond be voting for this drop kick.

The pond has long contended that Thursday is the worst day in the reptile calendar and that salvation only arrives on the morrow with Our Henry ...

The first part has been proven in spades and crows, and who knows if the salvation will arrive ...

Now here's some entertainment the reptiles never seem to cover at the top of the page, as could be found in the Nine rags yesterday ...

No doubt there'll be more today, but the bunch of maggots at the lizard Oz will likely refuse to go there.

Hang on, hang on, did the pond just use the word "maggot"?

Surely that's tasteless, surely that's offensive, surely that's going too far?

Relax, the pond is just channeling presidential speech ...

What a demented loon he is.

And the theme for today is ...

Already with 4.2 million views, the mugger returns to mug away and mug the mad king, and though everybody will have already seen it, why not see it again, because rust never sleeps, even as rust gently weeps ...