In which a bout of Killernomics makes the mid-arvo cut ...

 

As well as being a killer klimate scientist, Killer Creighton is a killer at economics.

The pond's favourite example of his killer ways came recently, a slow burn, what with a $40 billion bail out offer to Argentina a suitable follow up to Killer's killer economic advice...

Even Jewish space laser Marge had some thoughts...

Why is a president who pledged to put “America first” handing a $40 billion bailout to Argentina while quadrupling Argentine beef imports to undercut the price of beef produced by U.S. ranchers at the same time his tariffs have destroyed U.S. soybean sales to China, thereby enabling Argentine soybean farmers to sell to China instead?
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has absolutely no clue.

Marge just needed to look to Killer for answers...Jim Chalmers should ignore the ‘gurus’ and look to Argentina for economic tips, The economists warned against President Javier Milei’s plans, but he proved them wrong

As Killer, a recent convert to socialist planning, can explain, it's all good:

...American ranchers have been helped by tariffs on Brazil, which have indeed driven beef prices up—much to the consternation, of course, of American consumers who buy beef. (Not that Trump himself was thinking about this when he put the tariffs on Brazil in the first place, which were explicitly intended to punish the country for having the gall to prosecute the crimes of another old Trump buddy, former President Jair Bolsonaro.)
The whole situation is remarkably ironic. Trump claims that the entire reason he is taking so many pains to bail out Argentina is because of his deep appreciation for Milei’s free-market overhaul of the country. Meanwhile, in the very same breath, Trump grumbles that ranchers aren’t properly appreciative of all the ways he wants to do distortionary micromanagement of the American economy. And Milei, the global avatar of economic libertarianism, is gladly extending his hand for the bailouts. If the enormous gulf between Milei’s stated free-market beliefs and his own love for central planning has ever even occurred to Trump, you wouldn’t know it from his posts. (Bulwark)

And where's the harm? It's not as if the disunited states can't afford it...

The U.S. national debt has surged past $38 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, just two months after surpassing previous forecasts to reach $37 trillion in August. This means the federal debt rose by $1 trillion in a little over two months, which the Peter G. Peterson Foundation calculates is the fastest rate of growth outside the pandemic.
Michael A. Peterson, CEO of the nonpartisan watchdog dedicated to fiscal sustainability, said this landmark is “the latest troubling sign that lawmakers are not meeting their basic fiscal duties.” In a statement provided to Fortune, Peterson said that “if it seems like we are adding debt faster than ever, that’s because we are. We passed $37 trillion just two months ago, and the pace we’re on is twice as fast as the rate of growth since 2000.” The foundation’s analysis attributes the acceleration to a combination of deficit spending, rising interest costs, and the economic drag of the ongoing government shutdown. (Fortune via Yahoo)

All good, so long. as Albo keeps sending billions to help with the bail out.

And so the pond deeply regrets that Killer's latest examples of his stunning economic insights had to wait until a mid-arvo slot to appear, but then the pond has many regrets.

The pond regrets that it failed to note King Chuck's attempt to pray away the Prince by praying with the anti-Christ, a deplorable follower of Satan consigned to hell long ago by Henry VIII ...

...and the pond also regrets not being able to spend time with the Sydney Daily Real Estate News, as noted by a correspondent, perhaps planning an acquisition of a harbour-side mansion for a cool $80 mill or so, and in the process catching some essential Murdochian arcana, ‘Feared, respected and disliked’: The private powerbroker who has Lachlan Murdoch’s ear...

Sadly the answer lies in the archive... 

...but of all the regrets, the pond most regrets its kavalier way with Killer,.

The pond doesn't resile, because the deciphering of Our Henry's laws, and the decoding of his gnomic references to philosophy and history, will always take precedence on a Friday.

But the pond does regret, and on the principle that better late is better than never, on with another dose of Killernomics ...

The header: Why US and Australia are rethinking free market economics amid China tensions, Donald Trump’s fetish for trade surpluses and his implicit elevation of production over consumption have been treated with contempt by policy elites.

The caption for that image of dung-dropping King Donald, perhaps pointing to his latest demolition job: US President Donald Trump makes an announcement in the Oval Office of the White House.

Killer spent some four minutes, so the reptiles timed it, updating his timeless Milei insights...

“Potato chips, computer chips – what’s the difference?” Stanford economist Michael Boskin quipped in the early 1990s when serving as chair of George Bush senior’s Council of Economic Advisers.
It was a neat apercu for the rosy economic orthodoxy that prevailed in the final years of the 20th century as the world celebrated the End of History. Now the free market, and what economists call “comparative advantage”, would decide which nations produced what as trade barriers fell. It shouldn’t matter where chips of either variety were made as long as GDP was increasing.
Thirty years later, Boskin’s comment looks rather silly. It turns out there was a massive difference: sophisticated manufactured goods that require a highly skilled workforce – especially those with potential military applications – confer economic and military might on the host nation.
That’s why the US government is frantically, if so far unsuccessfully, trying to stimulate more advanced semiconductor production on home soil.
The new rare earths deal inked by Australia and the US in Washington this week, which commits the two governments to invest billions in projects to mine and process these minerals that are critical to a wide range of industrial and defence applications, is yet another example.
It comes amid the escalating US-China trade war, which is supercharging an economic philosophy rethink in the US.

There can never be enough King Donald in a Killer piece,  US President Donald Trump greets Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the White House in Washington.

Naturally Killer took a benign view of King Donald's policies, especially as they outraged the 'leets ...

“Adam Smith may have won the battle of ideas, but his record is rather more mixed in the war for the minds of policymakers,” Harvard economist Dani Rodrik points out in his new research paper, What the Mercantilists Got Right.
Donald Trump’s fetish for trade surpluses and his implicit elevation of production over consumption have been treated with contempt by policy elites, as his administration pursues an aggressive mercantilist program.
But they far better reflect how successful nations have behaved, at least in the cases of Japan, China, Korea and Singapore. These countries have enjoyed the most rapid economic growth in human history largely through avoiding free trade.
“In view of China’s phenomenal rise in recent decades, some might even claim we are now living in a world that is increasingly the product of mercantilism, yet again,” writes Rodrik.
Asian nations have been more pragmatic in their economic policies, seeing the genius of Smith’s invisible hand as a tool rather than a religious edict – and one that works best domestically rather than internationally, where nations still compete. As China’s most reforming leader, Deng Xiaoping, once put it: “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it’s a good cat.”
Rare earths are not remotely rare, but China wisely invested in their production and processing, ultimately giving it a whip hand in global trade negotiations. In fact, most countries have them, but they are expensive to extract. Knee-jerk free-trade dogmatism might have blinded us to the value of earlier economic insights.

How weird can Killer get? Why he even shed a tear for the pastie Hastie ...

Everyone came down on Liberal MP Andrew Hastie like a ton of bricks recently for lamenting Australia’s loss of a car manufacturing sector. However unlikely its return, it is nonetheless worrying that Australia’s manufacturing sector is now proportionately the smallest in the OECD as a share of GDP, at just 5 per cent.

The reptiles introduced an AV distraction, The federal government celebrated a trade policy win, claiming vindication after tariffs were expected to rise to 20 per cent but have instead remained at the 10 per cent baseline. University of Melbourne Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Michael Wesley told Sky News Australia, “Trump is prepared to use tariffs as a coercive instrument … I don’t think any country on that list should relax". “It shows you what a new world we are going into, where the two largest economic powers in the world by a long margin are each prepared to use economic coercion against other countries. “It’s a major shift for Australia that has been invested in free trade for a couple of generations.”

Naturally expert klimate science Killer also popped up ...

Ridiculously high energy costs, courtesy of the government’s obsession with replacing reliable energy with intermittent power, are mostly responsible.

The pond wondered whether the obligatory Killer mention of Kovid could be far behind ...

But could Australia ever have become part of the world’s semiconductor supply chains had Canberra realised the emerging importance of the sector in the 1970s? Tiny Taiwan did it through massive STEM investment, and it has paid off.
It is no longer fashionable to argue manufacturing is special, but even Adam Smith once argued manufacturing, along with mining and agriculture, were the ultimate sources of wealth, because they are physical products of enduring value.
“(By contrast) the labour of … the sovereign … the whole army and navy, churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of every kind; players, buffoons, musicians, opera singers, opera dancers, etc, are all unproductive labourers,” he wrote.
In other words, Smith would have been aghast at the modern-day fawning over our booming publicly funded “care economy”, which some politicians appear to ludicrously believe is equivalent to our mining and energy export sectors. At least the NDIS employs people in Australia. Federal and state governments are now subsidising electric vehicles made in China at rates per car much greater than they ever provided to Holden, Ford and Toyota.
It’s a tribute to Australian farmers that they have thrived with relatively little support, but all of the world’s major nations still shovel hundreds of billions of dollars a year in subsidies to their farmers.
It’s almost as if the quaint ideas of Smith’s French contemporaries, the Physiocrats – who saw agriculture as the sole source of wealth – still resonate with the instinct to protect farming, even if they, like Smith, would never have endorsed subsidies.

On cue came an image of the hastie Pastie ...Andrew Hastie MP during Question Time. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Lordy, long absent lordy, he does look pasty ...

Meanwhile, Killer was in to gold in a big way ...

Gold offers another stark lesson. As it rockets past $US4000 ($6150) an ounce, recall that Australia and Britain smugly sold off their official gold reserves for a few hundred dollars a generation ago, betting on the triumph of fiat currencies. That’s looking a less certain bet today, as China and Russia amass gold at record rates.
Like semiconductors or rare earths, gold was dismissed as just another commodity, with many ignoring its strategic role as a hedge against currency crises or a tool in global power plays.

Indeed, indeed, and the pond looks forward to emerging from its bug out with a plentiful supply of gold, which the pond will exchange for gold, what with actual food likely to be in somewhat short supply... (strange that Killer didn't mention crypto as another guaranteed way to keep that food flowing into the bug out bunker)

And so to Killer wrapping up his economics guidance...

None of this is to deny the remarkable power of the free market to supercharge living standards over time, not to mention the political freedoms they tend to promote. But a more pragmatic approach to trade might have put the US and its allies in a better position as they face off against China.
As Rodrik concluded: “Market competition and the division of labour are powerful engines of prosperity. But unleashing them often requires unorthodox policies and the guidance of the state.”
As in most areas of life, it’s better to behave in response to the world as it is, rather than as it should be. Even Smith noted exceptions to what became free trade – “defence is of much more importance than opulence”.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

The pond isn't so sure about that. 

Isn't the ostentatious display of opulence the way forward in the disunited states?

After all, what's the point of life if there's not a place for the pigs and the farmers to get together, have a good chow dow,n and mebbe a dance or three on the graves of the poor and poor old knackered Boxer?

And so to a killer klimate bonus, courtesy of grumpy Garth ...

The header: Why it is time for the Coalition to work with unions on key policy battles, What Labor fears the most is that the rumblings in its unions against net zero and mass migration spill out into open rebellion.

The caption, celebrating the way that "s" gives strength to Sussssan and guarantees Casssh on the knocker, Shadow Foreign Minister Michaelia Cash and Australian Liberal Party Opposition Leader Sussan Ley arrive for a press conference in Perth.

Some correspondents might wonder why the pond bothers with poor old Garth, sent out to stitch a pearl out of a sow's ear, but the pond never tires of reminding punters that it has a big plunge and a lot of skin in the game in its bet on the lettuce ...

Besides, Garth could only lather up a 3 minute read, so the reptiles said, and he did much to help the lettuce towards the finishing post ...

For the first time in modern Australian history, unions are not the natural enemy of the centre right of politics. This peace may not last and the Coalition certainly doesn’t need to be friends with the unions, but it’s time to admit that on the issues of net zero and mass migration we are quite aligned.
Yes, we have overbearing IR legislation in Australia that is strangling our productivity. Yes, we’ve seen state Labor governments in both Queensland and Victoria dragged into the gutter by unions that went too far.
However, the destructive impact of both net zero and mass migration on our economy far outweighs the negatives of union overreach.

The pond has heard of stretches, and this stretch was quite a sight, but Garth at least achieved the most important thing, a snap of himself in the lizard Oz ... Garth Hamilton arrives at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / David Beach

Garth seized the moment for a little personal bio, which is just as well, because the pond confesses that Garth hadn't really featured on the pond's radar ...

I grew up on construction sites and made a career in the mining industry. My criticisms of poor union behaviour are not drawn from text books. I never worked as a staffer so my views on how the world works were formed outside the world of institutional politics. I know how bad union behaviour can get but I have also seen the benefits.
If you are genuinely protecting vulnerable workers from unsafe conditions or exploitation, that’s God’s work and I have no problem with it. I have seen unions stand up as mines forced ridiculous rosters and conditions on good, hardworking Australians. I have seen the big corporates shift their riskiest work to contractors who exist outside their safety statistics and union representation. I have seen it all and played my part in it.
But in that grey area, where employer and employee meet, there has always been the goal of good jobs with good pay. We all wanted to see work done.
What brings together bosses and unions is much more than the nature of their work. What brings us together is the desire for a better life. We deploy our capital and our labour because we seek a better life for ourselves and our children. We are each willing to make compromises because we can each trust that what underwrites our commitments are our shared hopes for a better tomorrow.

The pond understands why Garth is grinding on. It's been a tough week ...

...Which brings us back to Sussan Ley and her initial response to the Washington meeting. Expectations for the meeting were about as low as it was possible for them to be. So after its widely hailed success, what did she say? That Rudd’s position was untenable and that he had to be recalled. It was a call so distant from the reality of what had happened that it was hard not to wonder if the opposition leader had been watching another press conference in a parallel universe.
Proving the point, former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott and current Liberal backbenchers Jane Hume and Andrew Hastie – both of whom are no friends of Ley, admittedly – contradicted the current opposition leader and praised the outcomes (and the Labor government) within 24 hours.

Poor Garth, and then the reptiles lumped him in with a serve of Rita, unlovely meter maid, reminding the world yet again of the work of the pasty Hastie as wrecker in chief, Sky News host Rita Panahi has urged the Liberals to “seize” on the immigration debate because much of their platform is “centred around” it. “We’ve got some principles being shown in federal politics,” Ms Panahi said. “Andrew Hastie has stepped down from his role – he doesn’t feel like the portfolio is what it should be because the immigration debate is one where the Liberals should be seizing upon it because it goes to so much of their platform. “Everything from cost of living to the issues of the so-called culture wars is centred around that. “For them not to seize this opportunity and to have a clear differentiation, a clear policy that they can stand behind, I can understand why Andrew Hastie had stepped down.”

The pond gets it, gets why Garth was triggered ...

Garth did his best to appease the hasty Pastie by bashing furriners, always a safe haven for splitters seeking common ground ...

Both net zero and mass migration present a direct threat to those hopes.
With every smelter and refinery that shuts down, more capital and labour shift away from Australia. With every day of mass migration, house prices push further and further up, making a good wage less able to support homeownership.

Indeed, indeed, and the pond knows just what should be done ...

Now wipe that spittle from the cakehole, and carry on ...

As BHP withdraws investment from Central Queensland, it is simultaneously doing deals with the Trump administration to start a new mine in Utah. Promises of a lower regulatory burden have been cited as a driver as Donald Trump’s dumping of net zero reaps early rewards.
In Brisbane the income required to buy at median house prices is now above $170,000. How can this have any outcome but to drive the unions hands’ at the negotiating table?
Worse, we have built an economy that needs mass migration to stave off recession, and in doing so have killed off jobs in the very sectors that once gave Australia and the unions their strength. When the Liberal Party abandons net zero – and I promise you it will – we open ourselves up to the centre right and centre left of this great country who are suffering the worst of net zero’s harm.
The nation is very open to this conversation, with recent polling showing an even split between those who want to keep net zero and those who want to dump it. More importantly, a quarter of the nation, even after years of propaganda from the far left, are unsure.
Those Australians, the centre of the bell curve, want leadership. We will, in time, give it to them.

The pond did enjoy that "in time", but is that "in time" required for a new coming, some rough beast slouching towards the leadership? Andrew Hastie MP during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

A final regret ...

As the climate has been mentioned, the pond deeply regrets not making a BOM joke ...

The pond shared those preferences ...

And so to Garth's final passionate outburst, with astonishing news that caught the pond by surprise. 

Apparently Bob Hawke is dead. 

Who knew, and truth to tell, the pond wouldn't have had a clue if it hadn't been for grumpy Garth's truly great outing...

Ending mass migration has much greater support among almost every demographic measurable. Its impact on housing is both understood and accepted.
What Labor fears the most is that the rumblings in its unions against net zero and mass migration spill out into open rebellion. The unions know that Chris Bowen’s policies will hurt their members and many Labor members have raised those concerns privately.
In 2017 the CFMEU campaigned against the Labor candidate in the seat of Toowoomba North because she was against the expansion of our local mine. It was a rare outbreak of the tensions that live within Australia’s labour movement.
In 2018 Andrew Hastie stood beside striking workers from resources giant Alcoa and told them that in the Coalition government’s rush to renewables, their jobs had been sacrificed. Conviction becomes him.
Old Labor – Bob Hawke Labor – is dead. The Labor Party that put jobs first is gone and the next Liberal prime minister will have taken up that space. We will distinguish between unionists and union members, seeing the latter as simply Australians with jobs and treat them as a part of our natural constituency.
Garth Hamilton is an LNP member of the House of Representatives.

Not that the pond has any money riding on it - the pond's money is all in on the lettuce - but reading Garth, the odds of a second Labor term just shrank dramatically, and now might be the chance to lay a little money, because if Garth gets more chances to write for the hive mind, you'll have to put down a hundred to win a single dollar.

And now how to end, and what to do with an infallible Pope not exactly germane to the matters under review?

Heck, run it anyway, with the proviso that if some relevant matter turns up in the hive mind, the pond might well run it again ...

Oh wait, it was relevant ... the pond at the start had expressed regret at not drinking at that pub ...

... though the entertainment sounded great ...

Ah never mind, there's always that other epic distraction, praying away the Prince ...

In which there's a little hot gospel to hand before the hole in bucket man makes his regular Friday appearance ...

 

It's always good to see the reptiles at the lizard Oz reduced to the childish name-calling level of the pond, and this day the gormless Garvey set the pace at the top of the "news" (the pond always uses the word loosely when referring to the lizard Oz)...

Luckily this EXCLUSIVE was in the archive ...

EXCLUSIVE
Disinformation, Chrisinformation: Now it’s missing information
Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen and his department have defied the Senate by refusing to release critical net zero advice despite orders to do so.
By Paul Garvey

What  with that wordplay available, the pond will simply note the usual, simplistic, childish demonising snap that led the way, the kind of image-making you'd expect from the most base of Murdochian tabloids, a kind of News of the World down under...

The reptiles always like to stack the odds, cook the books ... and even worse, that wretched obsession with Gough, almost as dire as their worshipping of Ming the Merciless, keeps burbling along, though these days it's just part of a relentless promotion of ancient Troy's latest tome ...

EXCLUSIVE
How Albanese is embracing Whitlam’s legacy while aiming to avoid his mistakes
Launching Troy Bramston’s book Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New on Friday, Anthony Albanese will reflect on how the anniversaries of the Whitlam government are intrinsically linked to his own.
By Geoff Chambers and Richard Ferguson

They needed two reptiles to conjure up an EXCLUSIVE book promo?

Over on the extreme far right, Killer Creighton made yet another appearance, while Garth continued the reptile net zero jihad ...

More of them anon, as Henry, hole in bucket man supreme, made his regular Friday appearance, and there was an odd appearance by a couple from the Philos Project.

The pond can't recall ever seeing representatives of this mob before in the lizard Oz, but the website, Philos Project | Christian Advocacy in the Middle East | Nonprofit, gives a clue: A community of Christian leaders who advocate for pluralism in the Middle East.

That immediately triggered raising of hairs on back of neck, but the pond is always up for anything when visiting the hive mind, especially when it offers a distraction from Our Henry..

The header for the four minute read: This is the age of the mega-influencer ... It will only get worse from here, We live in an era of digital populism, where the loudest voice, the sharpest aesthetic, the most charismatic personality and, tragically, the most convincing and creative misinformation wins.

The caption for the truly hideous collage, and please remember that the pond only transcribes: Ultimate Creator Challenge with Focal House Productions Belle Blahova , Curtis Walker and Kristen Sorrenson in front of the cameraÕs. Pics Adam Head

The pond always carries the sounds and sights of Burt Lancaster's Elmer Gantry in its head when this sort of blather hovers into view, especially when it begins with talk of an "epistemological crisis":

We are living in the late stages of an epistemological crisis. In our modern, AI-powered era, the very idea of truth – what it is, who has it, and how it’s accessed – has collapsed in on itself.
People no longer know what to believe, not necessarily because they are less intelligent or more cynical than past generations, but because the structures and institutions that used to help people make sense of the world are all but gone.
What remains is a kind of digital populism of the mind, where the loudest voice, the sharpest aesthetic, the most charismatic personality and, tragically, the most convincing and creative misinformation wins. This is the age of the mega-influencer. It will only get worse from here.
The mega-influencer is a new sort of figure. For years, major broadcasting networks would platform individuals we referred to as “pundits”. They would offer commentary on current events, even when most of them did not possess some real expertise over their subject matter.
We tuned in to them because we were glad that someone was caring about the issues we too cared about, or because they were quite adept at interviewing people we were interested in hearing from. Punditry, of course, was not a great way to learn about the world, for it outsourced thinking to someone else. But punditry was a staple of our media world, downstream from the “public intellectuals” of the latter half of the 20th century.
With pundits, though, there were limits. There were editorial boards, producers, a basic set of standards about tone and fact. The pundit could speculate and stretch, but they still generally operated within the gravitational pull of something we might call reality and objectivity. Not always, but often.

Well there's a category error there, right from the get go, as if the lizard Oz hive mind was a haven for something anyone might call reality and objectivity. Not always, just never...

The reptiles then interrupted with a purportedly witty visual distraction ... “How I realised AI was making me stupid.” Illustration by Jason Schneider.

Oh dear, best get back to the matter at hand, though to be fair, that image, fresh from an advertising manual, matched the level of insight the text offered ...

This is no longer the case. The mega-influencer owes nothing to a newsroom. They answer to no editorial standard and report to no institution, though many of them have nefarious, often foreign, backing. They are self-made and self-verified. They are the platform. And, unlike the pundit, the mega-influencer is not just offering commentary.
They’re offering gospel, an all-encompassing system of thought, a worldview that absorbs every fact, event or controversy, and spits out certainty. The mega-influencer acts as a god in this manner, declaring something into existence just by its mere utterance. There is a religious dimension to the rise of the mega-influencer.

Ah there you go, they managed to wangle "gospel" into the verbiage, together with "religious dimension", because members of one cult are always eager to call out other cults ...

Then came a splendid variation:

What we are witnessing is the triumph of postmodernism’s long campaign against objective truth. 

So much better than the usual reptile talk of the long march of the left through the institutions. 

Here, worship of transubstantiation can be transformed, into a trinitarian way, into the idle worship of "objective truth", miracles and resurrections included ...

Beginning in France in the latter half of the 20th century, postmodernism taught that grand narratives were tools of oppression, and claims to truth were veiled exercises in power. The line between authority and authoritarianism was blurred completely.
There can be no more history, just a variety of “histories” that are all worth equal weight. While the postmodern impulse was mainly a feature of the left, we’ve seen its embrace now on the right with the rise of the mega-influencer, who borrows its tools and language almost to a tee.
In that vacuum of ideas, people turn to loyalty. They pick their influencer like they would a team or a tribe or their preferred detergent and, from that point on, everything that comes out of that influencer’s mouth is taken as fact, insight or prophecy. No one asks about sources. No one tracks citations. The mega-influencer becomes the source. And when this happens at scale, with a little push from AI, we don’t just lose access to the truth; we lose the very idea that truth can be accessed at all.
In this world, ideas have scant value. Eric Hoffer, probably the greatest philosopher on the nature of mass movements, commented in his vitally important work, The True Believer: “The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the single-handed defiance of the world.” It is frightening how well that captures the nature of the mega-influencer.

Phew, what a relief, for a minute there, the pond thought the pair were going to break out into the usual Xian blather ...

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

Instead the pond got Hoffered ...

It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.

At this point, the reptiles offered an AV distraction, but as it featured a fundamentalist Xian influencer, perhaps it was to be expected that the reptiles would want to spend quality time with Rita, meter maid, Pro-life Influencer Savannah Craven Antao discusses how political violence is on the rise amid the assassination of Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk. “It’s always a concern that each time I go out … if they see me out on the street, are they going to try to do something as well?” Ms Antao told Sky News host Rita Panahi. “I cannot be fearful … they turn to violence when they can’t step up to a microphone and have a conversation.”

There it was again, the bizarre notion that Kirk was offering a conversation rather than a cult...

And so on to the final stretch ...

This is a profound moral and spiritual problem. When people lose the ability to discern truth, they become susceptible not only to error but to evil. The mega-influencer may not wield institutional power, but they shape the public imagination. And in a world where narratives seem to matter more than facts, the imagination is where wars are won and lost. If we want a way out, we will have to do more than flag posts and videos. We’ll have to relearn the old ways: reading slowly and closely, checking sources, sitting with ambiguity. We’ll need to turn off X and open books. Most of all, we’ll need to remember that truth is not a vibe, not a trend, not something you “feel in your gut” because your favourite account said it. It is something to be sought, wrestled with, earned. Until that happens, the age of the mega-influencer will march on. With it, the confusion, the false prophets and the fraying of whatever common world we still share will continue.
And perhaps, in the long arc of things, that very confusion will be what drives people back to something that has deep roots. The endless novelty, the deception, the noise – eventually, it exhausts and torments the soul. Already, people are starting to look elsewhere: toward what is old, rooted, firm and proven.
There exists within man a craving for something that is not transient and ephemeral. It’s time to tune out the mega-influencer and tune back into the hallowed habits of thought that the digital age has eroded.

As for what exists within "woman"? 

Who cares, remember they're just a spare rib, a bit of useless bone ...

Discredit where discredit is due ...

Phillip Dolitsky is strategic adviser at The Philos Project. Luke Moon is executive director of The Philos Project. This article was first published in Engelsberg Ideas.

The pond has to confess a feeling of disappointment.

 Right there at the end there was a real opportunity for a bit of bible thumping, amid the talk of "hallowed habits of thought", but the pair fudged it. 

Oh there were plenty of hints, the talk of "false prophets", and the "torments of the soul", and "long arcs", possibly leading to the rapture, but in the end the pair were surprisingly timid in their feeble attempt to influence the hive mind ...

Still, it was a welcome distraction from the hole in the bucket man, offering one of his standard diatribes as an avoidance strategy...

The hysterical headline, crying freedumb, heralding a full five minutes in company with Our Henry: Violent pro-Palestine mob takes gutless leaders for a ride, Free societies are under no obligation to tolerate the intolerant – still less to accommodate the Islamists and the far left’s passion for violence.

The caption: Police are seen during an Anti Fascist protest in Melbourne. Picture: Luis Enrique Ascui

Before embarking on the read, the pond would like to congratulate Our Henry for his most excellent ability to distrac.

Even the reptiles couldn't help but notice, with the couch-molester making the subject matter right, fitting and proper for the hive mind  ...

‘Very stupid’: JD Vance blasts Israeli politicians of West Bank annexation vote, JD Vance blasted as ‘very stupid’ Israel’s vote on legislation to annex the whole of the West Bank, as Washington warns it will jeopardise the Gaza peace plan

There's no end to the malevolence, and there's no end to Our Henry's ability to avoid such awkward activities...

Birmingham may be half a world from Melbourne but hatred knows no borders. Last week, faced with Islamist threats to incite a riot, the British city barred supporters of the Maccabi Tel Aviv Football Club from attending next month’s match – a move championed by independent MP Adnan Hussain, who declared that mere outrage was “not enough”.
In Melbourne, Victoria’s Free Palestine Coalition seemed intent on proving his point: its masked, keffiyeh-clad followers turned words into violence, attacking police who were simply protecting an entirely peaceful March for Australia.
That Islamists, who are responsible for 86 per cent of terrorism-related deaths in the West since 2000, glorify violence is no revelation. Nor is it news that the far left has long shared that appetite for destruction. From the Russian Zemlya i Volya (“Land and Liberty”) of the 1870s, which exalted “the dagger, the revolver, and dynamite” as “the revolutionist’s most effective means of persuasion”, to today’s Antifa mobs, the lineage is unbroken. Now, as Islamists and the far left converge, their methods are spilling ever more brazenly into Australian streets.
That contagion of rage reflects a deeper transformation. The far left has ceased to be a movement with an encompassing social project; it has become a loose federation of incompatible identity factions, united only by shared hatreds. Having no overarching vision of a better future, its members find common purpose in fury – using vitriol and protest as both the glue that holds their movement together and the fuel that drives its radicalisation, each confrontation testing how far the boundaries can be pushed.

The pond realises why our Henry is ranting so ...

And so on, as the reptiles dressed in the notion that being anti-fascist was somehow a problem, and perhaps when you consider the text output of not so young Republicans, perhaps it is ... Police are seen during an Anti Fascist protest in Melbourne. Picture: NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui

The reptiles could have stuck in a snap of actual fascists ...

Never gets old, but our Henry cleverly manages to avoid actual neo-Nazis ...what with him being exceptionally quick off the mark to sort out people on the simplistic basis of "friend of Israel" or "enemy of Israel" ...

At the same time, the intellectual tone of left-wing theory has hardened. The inexorable rise of “left Schmittianism” captures the shift. Inspired by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who reduced politics to a fight to the death between “friend” and “enemy”, it treats annihilation not as politics’ greatest failure but as its apotheosis.
Today, with Schmitt’s leading left-wing heirs – Giorgio Agamben, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Zizek – idolised in universities, a generation is being taught not argument but enmity.
It is not a long journey from that mindset to the killing of Charlie Kirk and the wave of leftist glee that followed. Whatever one thinks of Kirk’s views, his “prove me wrong” challenge embodied the spirit of rational contest. Whether or not he knew Aristotle’s peirastic dialectic – the disciplined testing of controversial propositions by examining their consistency with shared premises – he practised it instinctively.

Moving past the obligatory Aristotelian moment, has Our Henry got the Schmitt cart before the extreme far right horse?

The Nazi Jurist Who Haunts Our Broken Politics
A contempt for compromise. An expansive vision of executive power. Both owe much to Carl Schmitt.

Well yes, if you wanted a truly Schmittian regime, look to turd-tossing King Donald, the couch molester and their minions ... unless perhaps you looked at the current government of Israel, doing its best to disrupt ... per Haaretz ...

While at Haaretz, why not have a read of Gideon Levy? Just to see how they do it in the gulags ...

...or you can just stick with Our Henry's usual mumble jumble of philosopher word salads...

Yet as Sperone Speroni (the Renaissance humanist who rekindled Aristotelian debate) warned, the peirastic dialogue depends on there being premises both participants can endorse. Once that common ground disappears, persuasion – in which “although the sought truth will not spring out openly and entirely, we shall inevitably witness some of its sparks, because truth by its nature always shines” – all too easily gives way to coercion.
The great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber drew a related lesson: as they stare into each other’s eyes, genuine, face-to-face dialogue forces the participants to recognise their shared humanity. It is precisely that recognition today’s extremists resist.
Like their Islamist allies, the radicals who dehumanise opponents shun dialogue because it drains the hatred that sustains their politics – and, echoing Lenin’s contempt for “reactionaries”, they believe that “There is only one answer to reaction: smash its face in!”.
The question is why we let them get away with it. There is, they contend, an inalienable “right to protest”. But no such right exists. What the law protects is the right of peaceful assembly – a right that, since its initial development in the 19th century, has always been subject to stringent limits designed to prevent disorder and safeguard the public.

Inevitably the reptiles flung in a snap of a truly terrifying radical, one who has reduced Melbourne to fourth spot in the world's most liveable cities, Premier Jacinta Allan speaks at a press conference at Joan Kirner Womens Hospital. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Our Henry continued on his referential way ...

So when the Free Palestine Coalition claims that “police denied thousands the right to protest”, what it is really seeking is the right to deny the rights of others, suppressing their freedoms of peaceful assembly, association and expression. Since October 7, that has been the method of Islamists and their leftist fellow travellers: threats, intimidation and disruption deployed not to defend liberty but to extinguish it.
Yet a free society is under no obligation to tolerate the intolerant, still less to bow to their ultimatums. The purpose, and primary justification, of the rights of assembly, association and expression is to sustain constitutional democracy and the pursuit of truth. Menaces and hate-fuelled campaigns only undermine that purpose; violence destroys it.
That is why John Rawls – perhaps the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century – argued in his canonical A Theory of Justice (1971) that “an intolerant sect has no title to complain” when it is denied a liberty it would deny to others. To indulge such bad-faith claims is not an act of fairness but of surrender, aiding the very project that seeks to dismantle the freedoms others may rightly expect and demand.
Repeated often enough, those acts of surrender amount to what US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson – no one’s idea of a reactionary – described in Terminiello v City of Chicago (1949) as “a formula for converting constitutional rights into a suicide pact”.
That danger is no abstraction: it is exactly what we are witnessing. From conferences and conventions to universities and cultural institutions, the leftists are imposing their views and defining the scope of allowed freedoms. For instance, without having the honesty to admit it publicly, Curtin University has resiled from an exchange agreement with a leading Israeli institution after its student union threatened to shut the campus down.

Then came a final snap, Police Commander Wayne Cheesman

And so yet again, Our Henry managed to avoid the thugs being given free rein ...

Blessed are the cheesemakers, because there's not many peacemakers to be found... but how clever of the hole in the bucket man to once again avoid all that disgraceful carry-on ...

Even more shamefully, governments are giving the thugs free rein. Following Sunday’s riot, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan promised legislation empowering police to “deal with people who are cloaking themselves under masks to perform violent acts under the cloak of a protest”.
What she failed to mention is that Victoria’s Unlawful Assemblies and Processions Act 1958 already grants sweeping powers to control rallies, remove masked participants from designated areas, seize potential weapons, and ban the display of “any banner, emblem, flag or symbol calculated to provoke animosity between subjects of different religious persuasions”.
The problem is not a lack of authority but of will: a government quick to crush anti-lockdown protests now shrinks from confronting Islamists and leftists, no matter how dangerous they become.
As for the Albanese government, it has done nothing to deter publicly funded institutions from capitulating to leftist coercion. Displaying cowardice in the face of reality, it has shied away from answering straightforward questions: Why should taxpayers underwrite organisations that deny basic rights to those the far left targets? Since when does giving extremists a veto over who may speak, assemble or associate serve the purposes public funding was meant to advance?
The violence in Melbourne is not an aberration. It is the symptom of a society that by tolerating the intolerable is cutting its own throat, with Victoria leading the way. The “red fascists”, as Jurgen Habermas called them, may have swapped jackboots for keffiyehs, but their contempt for freedom is unchanged. If we will not draw the line, they will finish the work our complacency began.

How freely Our Henry flings around "fascist" as a term of abuse, while ignoring the many fascistic deeds, thoughts and activities that parade around him in the governments of the United States and Israel.

And speaking of that, time to celebrate a little destruction with the immortal Rowe ...

And just for fun, it seems an update is required...

In which Killer kontributes a klassic serve of IPA-themed klimate science denialism...

 

The pond had quite given up on the reptiles this day, but then Killer came to the rescue with a klassic serve of klimate change denialism, to which the reptiles gave a bigly Killer mid-day splash ...

So there could be a late arvo post, featuring Killer and an even larger version of his kornball klimate themed kartoonish artwork ...

The header: US report dismantles Albanese’s climate alarmism – and the ‘consensus’ behind it, A group of eminent scientists has called out widely used climate assumptions – the basis for decarbonisation plans – in a landmark report that claims extreme weather isn’t worsening and models predicting catastrophe are vastly exaggerated.

The caption for the exceptionally delusional image contributed by the usual stock sources: A new climate report challenges extreme weather event claims and the sources behind it. Sources: iStock. Artwork by by-studio

Sad to say, Killer's effort is as feeble as that pathetic use of AI, but to be fair, Killer poured heart and IPA climate science denialist soul into his eight minute rant, explaining that it was all just fear mongering, and he had just the right impeccable gaggle of climate science denialists to prove it ...

At the 2025 Bush Summit in Ballarat, Anthony Albanese defended his government’s increasingly radical plans to decarbonise the Australian economy by invoking the science.
“The science told us that climate change was real,” he told a sceptical crowd in September. “And we are seeing more extreme weather events, and more intense weather events.”
Fearmongering about climate change has become more difficult in the wake of a recent report by the US Department of Energy titled A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate, aimed at the educated layperson.
The report dares to question the alarmist narrative: the costs of climate change are far less catastrophic than assumed, extreme weather events have not become more frequent or severe, climate change models have proved a poor guide to changes in the weather, and even US unilateral sacrifices will have little discernible impact on global outcomes.
The report’s credibility lies not only in having the institutional imprimatur of the world’s most powerful government but in the intellectual pedigree of its authors: John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer. Each is a veteran of climate debates, with decades of work in atmospheric science, climate modelling or economic analysis.

That gaggle of names will be very familiar to devotees of climate science denialism. 

Just take that last one, Roy Spencer, to be found at Skeptical Science back when that was a thing ...

And so on, and the pond isn't going to go through all the names, it's sufficient to note that Killer, in a classic denialist strategy, denies that the deniers are denialists ...

The authors are not “deniers”. They concur with the mainstream that greenhouse gases “exert a warming influence on the climate and weather”, a long-established theory first postulated in the late 19th century. But they dispute the attribution of most or more than half of the 1.07C of global warming since 1850 to human activity, contrary to most other government agencies.

That in turn is a classic denialist strategy, a purported moving of the posts from pure denialism to lukewarm denialism, as the reptiles slipped in a snap,  Anthony Albanese at the 2025 Bush Summit in Ballarat. Picture: Mark Stewart/NewsWire

Killer is an old IPA hand at this sort of killer klimate change kastrophism refutation (that's more "k's" than even a hooded racist might need) ...

Such a claim does not allow sufficiently for natural climate change, which has varied throughout history and long before humans could have been a factor, influenced by changes in solar activity. The authors find it implausible that such “natural external drivers” have had essentially no net impact on the warming since 1850, which is a core assumption of analysis commissioned by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
For instance, the sharp increase in global temperatures in the past decade could be explained by “a significant reduction in planetary albedo since 2015, which has coincided with at least two years of record global warmth”. This refers to a decline in the fraction of incoming solar radiation that is reflected back into space rather than being absorbed by the planet.

How many times must these ancient and hoary distractions be trotted out by the IPA's acolytes, in much the same way that they reaffirmed the innocence of big tobacco in days gone by?

Perhaps at least once a week ...

The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age of the 17th and 18th centuries are two better known examples of climate change that cannot be attributed to humans. Others include a period of global cooling between 1945 and 1976, known as the Grand Hiatus, which included a 0.3C drop in ocean temperatures between about 1968 and 1972.
The notorious “hockey stick” chart, showing a rapid increase in global temperatures, hinges in part on the Great Pacific Climate Shift of 1976-77 – a natural climatic event closely associated with long-term cooling and warming phases. The shift in 1976 was the start of a period of accelerated global warming.
“When the Great Pacific Climate Shift is accounted for in climate attribution analyses since 1950, 40 per cent or more of the warming in the second half of the 20th century is attributed to natural internal variability,” the report states.
The data suggests such attribution is ridiculous: hurricanes in the US show “no statistically significant trend since 1920”, and only one of the 10 strongest on record to make landfall has occurred in the 21st century, the authors point out. Severe tornadoes have exhibited a “noticeable downward trend in the number since 1950”.
While the IPCC reports focus on temperature extremes since 1950, a longer record shows heatwaves and droughts were most pronounced in the “Dust Bowl era of the 1930s”.
“The overall reduction in numbers of both cold and hot extremes over the past century indicates a climate less prone to extremes,” the authors conclude, noting that many of the worst extreme weather and climate events in US history occurred in or before the first half of the 20th century.
The alarmist narrative around rising sea levels is not supported by observed data either, and relies on highly speculative modelling. Globally, sea levels have risen on average by little more than 20cm since 1900, or by “about two stacked pennies a year”.

The likes of Killer of the IPA will never stop with their killer denialism, as the reptiles slipped in another snap, The decline in the extent of Arctic sea ice stopped in 2007. Picture: News Photo - iStock

Ah, who can forget the days when Akker "Billy Bunter" Dakker, little Timmy Bleagh, the Bolter and others in the corrupt News Corp stable made fun of "poley" bears and laughed and snickered gaily at  their possible fate, while fighting a valiant rearguard action to keep the world hooked on tungsten light bulbs (and never mind the inefficiencies involved).

Actually the bears are still doing it tough, no thanks to climate change... (the research behind a paywall here)

And actually that decline in Arctic ice hasn't actually stopped, it has slowed down, cf. The Graudian in August 2025 ...

And that's the klassic IPA Killer cherrypicking kaper ... and correspondents are invited to choose their own favourite cherry pick, as Killer carried on in his very own, imitably IPA, denialist way ...

You know, like the way the weather, the seas and whatever have been changing from time immemorial, so relax, nothing to see here ...
Global sea levels have been rising (and falling) since time immemorial. The most recent cycle of rising sea levels began “during the period 1820-1860, well before most anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions”. As for all the popular angst about the supposedly vanishing ice caps, the decline in the extent of Arctic sea ice (around the North Pole), which had been observed since 1980, stopped in 2007. And around the South Pole, the IPCC concedes, “there has been no significant trend in Antarctic Sea ice areas from 1979 to 2020”.
The Prime Minister’s reference to extreme weather is not even sustained by the IPCC. Of the 33 categories of “climatic impact-drivers”, the technical term for the manifestations of changing weather – such as the frequency and severity of landslides, snow, hail, wind speed, and sea levels – human behaviour, for example through emissions, has had a statistically reliable impact (with a high degree of confidence) on only five, and these did not include droughts and floods, which is what Albanese probably had in mind.
Even if the extreme weather events had become more common or severe in a statistically meaningful way, attribution would be next to impossible given the massive variability of such events.
“There are only about 130 years of reliable observational records that can be analysed statistically,” the authors write.
It is a little disconcerting to learn of the so-called ARkStorm of December 1861, which “dumped nearly 10 feet of rain in parts of California and submerged the entire Central Valley for weeks under as much as 15 feet of water”.
Untangling the contribution of humans to climate change among numerous known and unknown confounding factors is a herculean task and not one that should inspire the sorts of definitive conclusions that dominate the public debate.

Climate models have attracted a level of reverence in the public mind they do not deserve.
The several dozen that underpin the doomsday forecasts out to 2100 and beyond, that keep the public fearful and supportive of radical decarbonisation agendas, have “shown substantially more warming than the (actual) observations since 1979”, the DOE report authors write. In the early 2010s, the IPCC produced a range of potential trajectories for carbon dioxide emissions into the future, from which temperature increases could be inferred given various estimated sensitivities. The most extreme, known as RCP8.5, implies nearly 5C of warming from 1900 to 2100.
This speculative, low-probability, high-emissions scenario represents a “worst case” future trajectory. Yet “some 16,800 scientific papers published between 2010 and 2020 used the RCP8.5 scenario, with about 4500 of the articles linking RCP8.5 to the concept of business as usual”.
Perhaps the most provocative part of the DOE report focuses on the possibility that global warming and increased carbon dioxide in the air could be beneficial, a point barely addressed by the IPCC. Between a quarter and half of the Earth experienced a beneficial “greening” between 1982 and 2011, owing to the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the air.

Killer kompounded this klaptrap with the frequently peddled notion that actually heating up the planet is a jolly good thing ...

A 2021 National Bureau of Economic Research study found carbon dioxide “emissions had boosted US crop production since 1940 by 50 to 80 per cent”. Another study, from 2023, found a “warming climate would yield positive benefits for French agriculture that were between two and 20 times larger than had previously been estimated”.

The pond has been down this path many times before, starting back in the days of "Lord" Monckton, Ian Plimer, and their reptile acolytes, such as little Timmy Bleagh and Dame Slap, and the only novelty is to observe the shifting strategies, amending denialism into soft core dismissal, and even proposing that it might all be terribly good stuff, per the caption for the next snap, Humans even could benefit from higher overall temperatures, given extreme cold is significantly more lethal than extreme heat. Picture: Harold Postic / AFP

Just got to love that sullen, saturating heat. Soak it up, kourtesy of Killer Kreighton ...

The only thing that the pond will note is that while the Emeritus Chairman was responsible for truly despicable things during the great hacking disaster shown in The Hack, even greater crimes have been committed by his minions in shredding democracy into an authoritarian disaster in the disunited states, and routinely encouraging columnists of the Killer and cratering Caterist kind to flood the digital ether with climate science denialist claptrap.

As they did with a murdered girl, so they help to murder the planet ... with the hypocrisy running deep at a corporate level ...

So much piety it makes the pond want to give a Technicolor yawn ...

Nauseating really, their corporate hearts (and profit heads) are really with Killer and the IPA ... which explains how on the one hand, they can be preaching the virtue of achieving net zero emissions, while on the other, devious, deeply hypocritical hand, they're allowing space for Killer's IPA emissions, dressed up as supposedly benign blather about it all being jolly good for planet and human beans and poley bears and all the rest, and dragging the ratbag Riddster - how far and how low he has fallen - into the show to dress up the Reef yet again ...

After all, plants and animals evolved under much higher levels of carbon dioxide in the past. Drawing on the work of Institute of Public Affairs adjunct fellow Peter Ridd, the DOE report demonstrates that concerns regarding the impact of higher water temperature and decreasing pH on the Great Barrier Reef are unwarranted. Recent data shows coral coverage on the reef has surged across the past decade, rather than declined, as many people mistakenly believe.
Humans even could benefit from higher overall temperatures, given extreme cold is significantly more lethal than extreme heat, a fact on which the IPCC has been silent. Public policy expert Roger Pielke Jr noted, as highlighted in the DOE report, that “losses per weather disaster as a proportion of GDP have decreased by about 80 per cent since 1980”.
The final sections of the report underscore the pointlessness, not to mention the extraordinary cost, of even the US taking drastic action to curb greenhouse emissions, which at best would elicit “undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate”. For instance, eliminating the entire stock of US combustion engine cars and trucks, an unrealistic eventuality in any case, would “retard the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere by a year or two over a century”. For context, the US is responsible for roughly 13 per cent of the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions.
The DOE report also reviews economic arguments, pioneered by William Nordhaus that the costs of seeking to aggressively reduce emissions are far greater than the costs of climate change, even assuming that global emissions control can be co-ordinated at no cost.
Proponents of climate change alarmism have swiftly condemned the report. They accuse the authors of cherrypicking, misquoting peer-reviewed research, “and a general dismissal of the vast majority of decades of peer-reviewed research”.
Where does this leave the interested citizen who does not have the time to read the academic literature? It is difficult for a good-faith lay observer to arbitrate between these competing claims. One seemingly larger group of scientists gravitates towards the catastrophist narrative, while another suggests the threats are exaggerated.

Discredit where discredit is due, as the reptiles kontinued to konsort with Killer of the IPA by doing a promo ... Adam Creighton's article Good Reef!, which will appear in the forthcoming issue of the IPA Review.

Now that's a classic bit of reptile pandering to the IPA ...

And so to the final Killer gobbet, and how kould it possibly be a Killer piece without the Kovid konspiracy entering the konversation?

Science is not democracy and the Covid pandemic, for one, illustrated starkly how wrong “consensus” experts and their models can be. Unfortunately, unlike Covid cases and deaths, predictions of climate disaster decades into the future are conveniently immune to real-time verification.
I always paid greater attention to scientists who spoke up against a consensus because of the significant professional and social costs they incurred. They must truly believe their arguments.
In contrast, supporting a mainstream narrative confers benefits rather than costs, suggesting at least some proportion of scientists would choose not to speak out against, or indeed actively support, a catastrophist narrative.
Moreover, the political dimension of climate science cannot be ignored. It is obvious the catastrophist narrative requires massive government regulation of households and business. Those inclined to more powerful and intrusive government for philosophical reasons, who tend to congregate in government agencies, might promote the mainstream narrative because of this, rather than for scientific reasons.
The eagerness with which some agencies have sought to fearmonger is telling. For instance, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in May had to publicly withdraw its so-called Billion Dollar Disaster publication, which attempted to show severe weather events were becoming more costly. It failed to normalise the series properly for changes in population exposure and wealth, which would have demonstrated in fact the opposite trend. It stretches credulity that someone in an agency of highly educated people hadn’t understood this.

As for Killer's credentials in science, let alone climate science, and his many peer-reviewed studies, and his epic field work? Showing his cosmic understanding in a way that ineluctably highly educated people fail to understand?

The pond keeds, might as well listen to the crickets.

And so to a final discredit where discredit is due ....

Adam Creighton is a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs and a former economics editor and Washington correspondent for The Australian. This is an edited extract of his article Good Reef!, which will appear in the forthcoming issue of the IPA Review, available online in November.

Is there any upside to killing time with this IPA Killer? 

Well it allows the pond to draw attention to the work of Peter Kuper, A Cheerful Conversation with Peter Kuper: Insects, Ink, and the End of the World, new to this blog...