In which the pond does its duty and covers Killer Creighton and Our Henry, but succumbs to climate heresy and the need for a little mad King comedy ...

 

Retreating, collapsing glaciers? 

Could that have anything to do with the disaster? 

Could climate change and global warming be involved?

Surely not. The pond has faithfully learned the lessons of the lizard Oz team. The Great Barrier Reef is in top notch shape, and so is the weather everywhere.

Sure it gets a little hot at times, but back in 1908 it was very hot, and there was a flood. QED. Climate science is a religious cult.

As for the world's climate, is there really such a thing?

Trust the Beeb to offer up heresy ...

Collapsed glacier likely caused devastating Nepal-Tibet floods, scientists say

Even worse, the pond came across this further down, and began to wonder if the science found in the lizard Oz resembled the science of Ken Ham's young earth creationism...

And so on, and what a relief to turn to Cameron's 'top of the digital page, ma' coverage of the disaster ...

Fresh flood warning for Himalayas as search continues for 34 missing Australians
Nepal’s disaster authority has issued a new alert for the Himalayan border region, as the death toll from Wednesday’s catastrophic glacial flood climbs to 389, and 34 Australians remain unaccounted for.
By Cameron Stewart and Elise Williams

... and find this as the sole mention of climate ...

Experts warned that rescue ­efforts could be hampered by the threat of a second flood in the region. Qianggong Zhang, head of climate and environmental risks at the Kathmandu-based Inter­national Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, said: “With a blockage still lodged ­upstream on the Nepal-China border river, authorities warn a second flood may occur.”

And it was the same for the earlier version saved to the intermittent archive.

How about the story immediately below that one, another Cameron effort, written as an evocative colour piece, far from the site of the catastrophe?

INSIDE STORY
Seconds to flee: From Himalayan trek to a tsunami of terror
A global tragedy unfolded faster than anyone could run or think. Dams, power plants and bridges were swept aside in moments.
By Cameron Stewart

Here Cameron excelled himself. Not a single mention of "climate" or "change" or any of that folderol, just a brief mention in an accompanying graphic that "a collapsing glacier may have caused the flooding"... (not in the archived version, but hinting at a climate heresy that will likely remain a mystery to the hive mind) ...

The pond will wait patiently for the lizard Oz explanation that this disaster had absolutely nothing to do with climate change, and in the meantime looked to the infallible Pope for a comment ...

The pond then looked over on the extreme far right and found the usual jihad in play ...

Blaming Aboriginal culture for harm to kids lazy and wrong
Departmental administrative failures, unreturned phone calls, and systemic barriers are preventing willing Indigenous grandparents from caring for kin.
By Megan Davis
Contributor

The pond personally saved that offering to the intermittent archive so it could get on with Killer Creighton's contribution, but what a disappointment it was.

The header: Struggling workers watch their money sustain super rort;With forced savings robbing workers of purchasing power, giving Australians the choice to take 3 per cent as wages is a no-brainer.

The caption for the tired artwork wheeled out by the reptiles again: Senators Pauline Hanson and Andrew Bragg have reignited national debate over Australia’s 12 per cent compulsory superannuation rate. Pictures: News Corp/iStock. Artwork: Debbie Schipp

The pond's disappointment and sense of déjà vu began with the recycled illustration. 

The pond thought it had seen it before, and did a visual search, and discovered it had been used in at least one dog botherer story ...

The pond hates to use AI - just a little power and five drops of water used up in a question and the next thing you know glaciers are collapsing in Nepal - but it's everywhere ...

If even AI, dopey most of the time, feels tired and bored and suffused with ennui, imagine how the pond feels.

And that sadly was the only illustration the reptiles deployed in what turned out to be a standard IPA-driven attempt to destroy superannuation.

The pond stood back, the offering being on a par with Killer's Covid fear and panic about masks and vaccines ...

Whatever their personal differences, Pauline Hanson and Andrew Bragg have two admirable things in common: a willingness to speak their minds and the confidence to question one of the great sacred cows of Australian politics – compulsory superannuation.
It’s really no surprise they’ve been attacked. More than $160bn in wages and salaries is siphoned into super accounts every year, generating roughly $34bn in annual system-wide fees. In short, it’s the biggest racket in the country.
Those fees, equivalent to about half the defence budget or the entirety of Victoria’s health spending, may not be counted as taxes, but they might as well be. They sustain a vast bureaucracy that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Most of the $3 trillion in APRA-regulated funds is actively managed when much of it should be sitting in ultra-cheap indexed options, which are conveniently buried in the fine print.
Now, more than ever, the case for reform is overwhelming. Workers are being forced to save too much during the years when they most need that money – to buy a home, raise a family and enjoy life while they are still young enough to do so. The so-called working man’s paradise has increasingly become an economic purgatory, where purchasing power is steadily eroded by higher taxes, inflation and forced saving. Amid the biggest fall in living standards in a generation, the least we could do is give people the option to save a little less now.
Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry – the last truly exceptional and independently minded economist to hold that office – concluded in his 2009 tax review for the Rudd government that the compulsory saving rate should remain at 9 per cent. “This strikes an appropriate balance for most individuals between their consumption opportunities during their working life and compulsory saving for retirement,” he wrote.
That judgment has been vindicated in spades, yet it has been ignored by both major parties, too lazy or too beholden to vested interests to resist the inexorable rise to a ridiculous 12 per cent.
The government itself knows the rate is excessive. In its 2020 Retirement Income Review, Treasury found that when retirees die, most leave behind the majority of the wealth they had at retirement. Members who died had left about 90 per cent of the balance they held at retirement. In other words, retirees tend to live off the income from their assets, not the assets themselves.
Treasury also projected that aggregate death benefits would rise from around one dollar in every five paid out by the super system in 2019 to around one in every three by 2059. That is an absurd outcome. It suggests Australians could enjoy a better quality of life when they are young without materially sacrificing their incomes later in life.
Henry also made a devastating point about the public finances. The system, he said, is a “net cost to government even over the long term”, puncturing the common claim that forced saving somehow saves taxpayers money. As he put it, the loss of income tax revenue from the various concessions would not be fully offset by higher super tax collections or lower Age Pension costs. Put plainly, all other taxes are higher than they need to be because of this system.
There is also a serious governance problem. Big super funds now control almost 40 per cent of the Australian sharemarket, creating an unelected parallel government that votes on company direction according to environmental and social fashions the vast majority of members are unlikely to care much about. As Bragg asked in his National Press Club speech, why tolerate all this complexity when “there is no public finance benefit and minimal personal benefit”? Even “minimal” may be generous.
None of this will be easy to change. Compulsory super is one of the few policies that unites the two most powerful vested interests in the country: the union movement and the finance sector.
But if there were ever a time to push for reform, it is now. People rightly feel poorer. Yet the Prime Minister has been boasting that super could become a “national asset that can be used more appropriately”, while the Treasurer said in 2023 that he hoped to maximise its potential through “greater investment in our national priorities”.
And what exactly does that mean? Five per cent of your retirement savings tipped into Snowy 2.0 or Melbourne’s Suburban Rail Loop? Of course, allowing workers to withdraw their super balances in full would be unwise. The resulting wall of cash, eagerly leveraged by the banks, would wash into the housing market and drive prices even higher.
But workers should at least be allowed to opt to receive three percentage points of their gross income as wages instead of having it funnelled into super. That would be entirely their choice. It would harm no one else. It is their money, their employer would not care, and it would not cost the budget a cent. If anything, the reverse is true. Australia is the only developed country with a means-tested pension sitting alongside a massive compulsory, privately managed, defined-contribution savings scheme. Rather than congratulating ourselves on how clever that makes us, we might pause to ask why.
Hanson and Bragg deserve credit for reigniting a debate that should have been raging for years. It’s is more than can be said for the dozens of seatwarmers in the upper house. Senators, with their long terms and broad state constituencies, are meant to speak plainly and challenge orthodoxies, not merely parrot party lines. That is what we pay them for. And there is no bigger issue on which to do it than super.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

What else did you expect from Killer of the IPA? Full Pauline, full Bragg, full on destroy super, and all will be well in IPA land, and the sooner we can reduce the country to the sort of impoverished poverty rife in the United States, which keeps grey nomads chained to work into their eighties, all the better for the IPA's sponsors.

And now to a moment the pond regrets:

Alas, that means even fewer reasons to resort to the other rags.

With that farewell done, the pond turned to Our Henry's outing with a deepening sense of regret. 

There surely must be better ways to waste time early on a Friday morning, with the stench of real disaster infesting the nostrils...

The header: The ‘implied freedom’ is a recipe for violence; Parliaments are obviously imperfect but that is no excuse for courts to take over their role – and make a mess of it.

The caption for the snap designed to terrify the hive mind: Weekly demonstrations adjacent to St Mary’s Cathedral and the Great Synagogue have raised concerns over worshipper intimidation. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Damian Shaw

The pond had wanted to cut straight to the chase with Our Henry, never mind any of the other reptiles competing for attention, but then discovered that the hole in bucket man had wasted a five minute read on legalisms worthy of Dame Slap, and all for the purpose of repressing dissent and protests about the current genocide going down in Gaza and the West Bank.

Has the old codger lost his ancient Thucydides-inspired mojo?

There's the odd flicker here and there, but his contributions to the Australian Daily Zionist News suggest an increasing persecution complex, with layers of paranoia ...

For almost three years, Sydney’s Catholic Archbishop Anthony Fisher has watched the same scene unfold, week after week, outside St Mary’s Cathedral. Anti-Israel protesters gather in Hyde Park blasting incendiary slogans, some blatantly antisemitic, “through highly amplified megaphones, often pointed directly at the cathedral doors during Sunday liturgies”.
Worshippers, the Archbishop told the Samuel Griffith Society last Saturday, have felt sufficiently intimidated to take other routes or attend services elsewhere.
Fisher’s point is not that political protest should disappear from our streets. It is that a protest that may seem tolerable viewed on a single Sunday assumes a very different character when demonising slogans are incessantly repeated in the park adjacent to the Great Synagogue. And what may be acceptable in times of civic peace can destroy civic peace itself in the wake of a murderous antisemitic attack.
The NSW government has twice tried to meet that danger. In March last year it restored to police the power to move protesters on near places of worship; in October, Lees v State of New South Wales struck that legislation down. After Bondi it acted again, and acted decisively; in April, in Jarrett v State of New South Wales, the Court of Appeal struck down that legislation too.
In doing so, the court exposed a fundamental defect in the “implied freedom of political communication”. Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1997), the doctrine’s authoritative restatement, confined the freedom to political communication “necessary for the effective operation” of representative government.
But the formula contains an ambiguity. If the emphasis is placed on “necessary”, it establishes a constitutional minimum: the political communication without which representative government cannot function. If it is instead put on “effective operation”, as the courts have tended to do, the inquiry changes. The question is no longer whether representative government survives, but whether it works as well as it could.
Once courts ask that question, they require some ideal of representative government against which legislative provisions can be assessed. Thirty years of litigation have not resolved the conundrums that poses. Indeed, things have gotten to the point that Steward J has called the doctrine “very wrong” and “just not sustainable”. Yet amid the doctrinal rubble, the implied freedom’s purported reach has continued to grow.

There was just one other snap for the outing, and the caption suggested an AI summary had been employed to expose the paranoia in Our Henry's thinking... Commentary argues the High Court’s implied freedom doctrine undermines parliament’s ability to maintain public order during emergencies. Picture: AAP

 Say what? parliament’s ability to maintain public order during emergencies. 

Pure Trumpism, that call for public order and the cleansing of the streets ...

Jarrett crystallises that growth’s consequences. The legislation under appeal was enacted barely a week after 15 people were murdered at Bondi. It allowed the police commissioner, with ministerial concurrence, temporarily to prevent public assemblies: 14 days at a time, 90 days at most, and only after the terrorism legislation had first been enlivened.
The court invalidated the scheme. Representative government, it held, “entails acceptance of the potential for disharmony, incivility and disruption that is part and parcel of democratic intercourse”. The state’s contrary argument – that in the aftermath of terrorism, when divisions have escalated into violence, a community may require a measure of civic calm – was dismissed as involving “a particular conception of civic life” at odds with the Constitution.
But what makes the court’s conception any less “particular”? Nothing in historical experience, democratic theory or the Australian Constitution says that representative government requires tolerating the virulent conflict the court embraced.

The pond did pause to note Our Henry's attempts to invoke his grand days, when a heavily thumbed book of quotes was always beside his parchment, as he laboriously copied out sage insights by hand with quill and ink ...

That the court’s approach is arbitrary is unsurprising – and so is the chaos into which the doctrine has descended. The quest for a Platonic ideal of “representative government” against which to measure legislation is intellectually absurd. No such ideal exists.

And Plato wasn't the end of it, but it took a couple of pars to get to the next one ...

Rather, representative government is exactly what philosophers describe as an “essentially contested concept”, whose proper form is a matter of legitimate political disagreement. Yet in Jarrett, parliament’s conception was treated as a political preference while the court’s was elevated into a constitutional truth.
Having thus conjured up its preferred version of what representative government entails, the court then turned to the emergency context. It accepted that the legislature “perceived that community tensions were running high”, and that assemblies might place the community at risk – but held that a terrorist attack “does not make it any more constitutionally permissible” to impose those restrictions.

The next reference was feeble. Might not Our Henry have noted that it's mainly later historians who reference "statis" as a condition, or so the word's wiki suggests ...

However, since antiquity, political thought has recognised the danger the Greeks termed stasis: political antagonism gradually hardening into hatred and hatred then escalating into violence. Democracies cannot be required to await the crisis; they need powers to meet emergencies by law, bounded in advance and strictly limited in time. This scheme easily met those criteria, yet it was knocked back. The court went even further. Quelling political communication “in the interests of protecting another part of the community from a sense of unease or threat (not associated with any proximate physical threat)” is not, it held, a legitimate purpose.

The old rogue really does want the cops out in the streets for a laura norder campaign of the first water:

But murderous violence, such as that at Bondi, does not erupt out of the ether. It breeds wherever a small community is repeatedly demonised and cast outside the moral restraints that prevent disagreement descending into barbarism. That is why, as Fisher insists, the “cumulative effect” matters: repeated protests can impose an “unreasonable burden on the lives and freedoms of others”.
By its nature, that harm is neither proximate nor necessarily physical. Yet on Jarrett it cannot itself justify restricting political communication until the blood, or its immediate threat, runs on the sand and the streets. And because the court held that the vice “lies in the purpose for which the power has been conferred”, rather than in the means by which that purpose was pursued, no amount of redrafting can allow the state to fulfil its utmost duty: to allow all citizens, including Jews, to live, work and pray in peace.
All that is worse than an error; it prevents democratic institutions from performing functions the Constitution entrusts to them.

At last there came a reference to Aristotle...

Freedom, security, social cohesion and equal civic participation cannot be reconciled by formula. Balancing them requires what Aristotle called phronesis: practical judgment, the characteristic virtue of the statesman because it must accommodate competing goods and values as circumstances change. Making those ever-shifting judgments is, in a system of representative government, exactly the task of democratic legislatures.

The pond was inspired to rush off to the word's wiki, and sheesh, Socrates was the first cab off the rank ...

As for Our Henry's thesis?

Nah, not really, give the pond the High Court most days of the week, and the final gobbet did nothing to sway the pond from the notion that demonstrating about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank is a useful enterprise ...

Their responsibility is not to enthrone one freedom above all others; it is, as Fisher argues, to order common life so that all citizens can enjoy the “goods and freedoms necessary to flourish together in community”.
Legislatures can get that balance wrong – but they are accountable to voters and can correct mistakes in the light of social change and practical experience.
By arrogating that role to themselves, courts undermine the institutional division of labour on which representative government rests. Even worse, they expose the community to dangers it should not be forced to bear.
It would, however, be a mistake to blame the NSW courts. The mess is the inexorable result of a doctrine that lacks any limiting principle. The Constitution empowers courts to protect its specification of representative government; it gives them no authority to engage in a quixotic search for democratic utopia, much less to turn the Constitution into a suicide pact. A High Court that ignores that distinction can only destroy the freedom it exists to defend.

The reptiles even went as far as providing a link to the old codger's paranoid cultivation of a sense of crisis ...but not, of course, any sense of crisis involving Gaza and the West Bank, or the ongoing bombing of countries bordering on Israel:

Henry Ergas’s “The implied freedom of political communication and the present crisis” is available at https://www.ruleoflaw.org.au/programs-lecture-2026-ergas-implied-freedom.

After all that, the pond felt the need for a little light relief, and it came via the lizard Oz's stablemate, the WSJ ...

Opinion Unruly Republic
JD Vance Is the GOP’s Obama
He and the former president have much in common. And both disdain Republicans.

And so on, and desperate, richly comic times, and there goes JD ...

...Mr. Vance likes to tout his youth (“don’t hate me”), but he was old enough to follow the news in the 2010s as Mr. Obama attempted to turn U.S. policy away from Israel and draw Iran into the community of peaceable nations. Mr. Obama, too, liked to contrast his practical and interest-based approach to that of his ideology-driven predecessors.

With few exceptions, though, Mr. Obama limited his scoldings to members and administrations of the other party. At the core of Mr. Vance’s message is the repudiation of views allegedly held by both parties, especially his own. In Brewer, Maine, this week, the vice president described that bipartisan “consensus” again, though the caricature has a conspicuously Republican shape to it. What places like Brewer “really needed, they told us”—no prizes for guessing who “they” were—“was just to juice the short-term profits of a few big corporations, that we needed to open that border and prioritize foreign workers over our own citizens. They would cheer on the corporate raiders as they slashed headcount and shifted all those businesses either to foreign countries or brought in illegal aliens to employ.”

Leave the policy argument, if you can call it that, to one side. The lines reveal a man so contemptuous of views different from his own that he can’t be bothered to understand them. Now ponder a future GOP headed by such a person. Mr. Obama at least respected the party he led.

Now there's a country rich in internal wars, splitters, schisms and schismaics.

Mad king Donald is also a reliable daily source of rich comedy.

There's the renaming of the lake, which suggests that the demented mango Mussolini has regressed to childhood, and the level of a primary school bully ...

And there was this ...

White House Roasted After Embarrassing Canada Fail

Luckily the CBC could help out with that one.

Elbows up Canada ...

In which the pond offers plenty of links for dedicated herpetologists, but proposes this is another dud reptile Thursday ...

 

After a flirtation with the dangerously "woke" deceased songbird - so much talk of loving the world and doing good and gay rights and black lives matter - the reptiles had another chance to take a walk on the wild side with the death of Tim Curry.

What with a hint of the gay, the trans and the exotic, the reptiles could have shown they knew how to do Jim Sharman's walk.

Instead they dropped poor old Tim way down the page, with a piece borrowed from The Times:

OBITUARY
Rocky Horror’s Tim Curry dies aged 80
Tim Curry played the transvestite Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show with an erotic villainy that inspired cult fandom.
By The Times

It seems a bit of cross dressing is good enough for your average dinkum footballer, but might be too much for the hive mind.

Sheesh, and the pond had wanted to boast it had been to the Grand Old Opry and not just at the wretched new theatre but at the Ryman Auditorium, heart of Nashville. You can take the pond out of Tamworth, but you can't take the Tamworth out of ...

Instead, for a lead, the reptiles went with the Nepal flash flood and a gif of disaster porn...

But no need to cross the paywall for that story, it can be found elsewhere, even if "Briton" takes the place of "Aussies" ....

After that, the reptiles reverted to their usual wretched standard form of a propaganda sheet, boasting of their triumph in inducing an attack on dangerous furriners ...

EXCLUSIVE
Labor to unveil migration crackdown targeting students, visitor visas
Amid pressure from One Nation, the Albanese government is finalising sweeping changes focusing on international students, visitor visas and onshore applications.
By Geoff Chambers and Noah Yim

The pond has to be indefatigable in labelling Geoff as indefatigable, but that's because he seems to have a first mortgage on double barrelled appearances at the top of the digital news, ma ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
Can Labor pull off its 'tough on immigration' act?
When Labor’s final migration package is released next month, expect more of a feather duster than the big stick One Nation and the Coalition have advocated.

It's posed as a question, but Geoff and his shottie have already determined the answer ...

...As The Australian revealed this week, the Australian Border Force is finally pursuing unmanned drones to keep watch over the country’s vast ocean approaches.

Yet while monitoring illegal fishers and people-smugglers is vital, the Albanese government must impose greater authority over the country’s visa rules, have the courage to remove illegal overstayers taking advantage of Australia’s generosity and stop the rorting that has dominated sections of the traditionally lucrative international student market.

The Australian Zionist Daily News was also busy ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘Job not done’: Bondi families lead royal commission cry
Bondi bereaved, Holocaust survivors call for extended antisemitism inquiry
Holocaust survivors, Bondi victims’ families and former prime ministers have joined calls to demand the inquiry be expanded, concerned by its failure to call vital witnesses.
By James Dowling and Elizabeth Pike

Even as the Royal Commission announced the last public hearings and the date for the delivery of findings, discreetly after the anniversary of the massacre, the reptiles were still bleating for more. 

This handily sets them up for an extended bout of rage and pique in December when the findings and recommendations were announced.

Over on the extreme far right there was more ...

What kind of country will my grandson inherit?
As the royal commission ends, Australia too faces a moment of decision.
By Yehoram Ulman
Contributor

Petulant Peta also joined in the wailing.

The pond usually tries to avoid the petulant one, and this guaranteed it ...

Bondi’s dead deserved a forensic inquiry
Not only is this royal commission one of the shortest in history but the elephant in the room, radical Islam, barely had a look-in.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

Division, hate and fear and loathing, it's the staple diet for the monoculture hive mind ... and it was enough to make the pond personally entomb the petulance in the intermittent archive.

As usual, as a form of balance, at this point the pond usually turns to Haaretz to wonder what sort of country the residents of Gaza and the West Bank - and Israel generally for that matter - might inherit...

Netanyahu Guards Pointing Assault Rifles at Beachgoers Shows How He Sees Israeli Civilians

And again ...

A Moderate Arab Leader Spoke of A Palestinian State. Israeli Politicians Didn't Listen to a Word

Sheesh, what a depressing read that one was.

If you went beyond that screen cap, you copped this ...

At his party's convention on Saturday, Abbas spoke of the need for collegial cooperation among the Arab parties. Notably, he talked about joining the coalition and the government – as in taking ministerial portfolios, something Arab parties have traditionally declined to do.
He then uttered the supposedly fireball words: "The Palestinian State exists and is standing; all the world recognizes it except the U.S. and Israel. God willing, they will recognize it. This is the kind of peace," he said, waving his finger at the audience with gravitas, "that will guarantee the end of the conflict, the end of the occupation, and achieve reconciliation and peace between the Palestinian people and the Israeli people."
The horror. Under his leadership, the United Arab List has more than lived up to the model of the perfect Arab citizen that Zionist Israelis say they long for. His party has embraced political integration. He considered crossing lines from the opposition to join Netanyahu's coalition long before Benny Gantz put out embarrassing ads about breaking through the pro- and anti-Netanyahu blocs (to be fair, Gantz did cross those lines for a unity coalition in 2020 and got burned).
Mansour Abbas led the first independent Arab party to join an Israeli coalition in 2021, putting the occupation on a back burner. He withstood endless debate and much criticism in the Arab political community for breaking taboos; he also earned a core voter base worth about five seats and gave voice to the consistent majority among Arabs who want an Arab party to join coalitions.
Most recently, he broke with the Islamic roots of the party and wooed a mainstream Jewish lawmaker from the heartland of centrist Israel – Yoav Segalovitz, a former senior police official – to consider joining his list of candidates. In other words, Abbas is a leader.
The pragmatic, accommodationist yet confident personality of an Arab political leader sends shivers through the ruling fanatical right wing. They really need Arab politicians to be radical Palestinian nationalists whom they can accuse of being ISIS or Nukhba, to prop up their flaccid polls with fear. Instead, Abbas insists on looking like a cross between Santa Claus and a teddy bear. Like nearly all Palestinian citizens of Israel, Abbas also has an impeccable record of having nothing to do with terror.
No matter – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rhetorical firing squad went to town on him for daring to mention peace, reconciliation and a Palestinian state. This is not unlike Netanyahu's 2011 fit against then-U.S. president Barack Obama for the crime of stating that a two-state solution would be based on the 1967 borders (the Green Line) – a great big duh.
Not even a nation
Netanyahu's current tirade included tired slogans that a Palestinian state would be controlled by Iran, or that it would be a "terror state," in the words of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Minister of Annexation (my designation) Bezalel Smotrich tried to bully the opposition parties into disavowing Abbas and declaring their support for his plan to build up E1 once and for all. That's the strip of land outside Jerusalem cutting off the West Bank from north to south, seen as a death knell for a Palestinian state. Pretty much everyone ignored him.
This anti-Palestinian-state screed followed on the heels of last week's statements by David Yosef, Israel's Chief Sephardi Rabbi, that the Palestinian "rabble" is not even a nation and never will be.
But Netanyahu's primary target was not actually Abbas; it was his greatest opposition challenger at present, Gadi Eisenkot. "The price of a left-wing coalition with the Muslim Brotherhood has once again been exposed," said Netanyahu. "These are the partners of Eisenkot ... who boycott Likud voters but welcome supporters of [Arab party leader Ahmad] Tibi." Netanyahu has been doing this for months, hoping to rally anti-Arab hatred to drive voters toward the far right and prevent such a dastardly coalition.
Here is where things got exciting: Eisenkot seized the moment. He boldly called Netanyahu's bluff and said yes! You're right, you incompetent, criminal, boomer loser. I see all partners for a better Israel as my political partners; I see all citizens as equals and embrace an optimistic future of cooperation instead of corruption. Your leadership brought disaster.
Palestinian statehood alongside Israel will release Palestinians from decades of misery, while liberating our children and grandchildren from the curse of being occupiers and improving Jewish-Arab relations here in Israel. I support that future of peace and reconciliation that Abbas, my future partner, courageously embraces.
I, Dahlia, also have a bridge to sell you. What Eisenkot actually said could not have been more disappointing for anyone still hoping for a leader. He simply parroted the line Netanyahu has been saying at least since 2015: "There will be no Palestinian state."

No wonder the pond prefers to do the walk with Tim ...

As for the rest of the extreme far right in the lizard Oz, it was equally depressing ...

Jack the Insider decided to take a snort in the nostrils ...

The Swans scandal strips bare our nation’s cocaine addiction
Australia’s huge appetite for cocaine exists in a chicken and egg paradox.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

But how are footballers going to enjoy a little cross dressing and stripper times without a snort?

Throw in another contribution to a standard reptile jihad ...

Protecting Indigenous kids can’t always be the government’s job
Some Indigenous leaders are making it harder for child protection workers to do their jobs.
By Patrick Parkinson
Contributor

And that was about it ...

The pond has assembled the links - personally arranged a number of them - and dedicated herpetologists must arrange time for some private study.

No chance to celebrate comedy items, though there were plenty to be found ...

White House Called Out for Embarrassing U.S. Map Mistake (*intermittent archive link)

Elbows up Canada ...the pond has dealt with loons for decades, and now it's your unfortunate turn.

No chance to wonder about AI and the fate of the planet, no chance to celebrate the workings of the NT and Queensland governments, as the infallible Pope and more generally, Wuerker did ...

The pond apologises for its lack of interest in the lizard Oz offerings this day, but did do a deeper dive into the lizard Oz editorialist's offering.

It's no recompense, some might construe it as a bloody insult, but the pond was reminded yet again that Thursdays have always been the bleakest day in the reptile calendar...

The lizard Oz editorialist continued the current reptile jihad, and pretty much summed up all the pond had ignored above...

They really are busy setting up the final report and its recommendations for a slagging, and endless Xmas hysteria.

The lizard Oz editorialist also continued a much loved jihad, attacking the government on matters economic ... 

Sure, it's framed as a "challenge" but in the land of the jihadists, this government has been a failure, is a failure, and will continue to be a failure, except in the matter of gambling reforms, where they have done just what the football mob and the Murdoch tabloids wanted them to do.

Finally, there was a rousing call to arms, even as the pond had noted, courtesy of Haaretz, the way the current government treats civilians ...

Once again Wilcox entered this dangerous territory ...

The pond guesses that at this point she doesn't have much to lose, even as she reminds the pond that her departure will produce a loss. 

Here's hoping she finds a new home and fresh enthusiasm for the many tasks still at hand, including the need to wander into dangerous territory ...

Depressing times, depressing days, how the pond hates Thursdays ...

It's way past time for a bit of ancient kink. 

Poor Jim Sharman, not only did he get dudded on a share of the profits, it also overshadowed all his other achievements ... (one of the pond's favourite moments in life was when it secured a painting Jim had been eyeing off).

Shed tears with the bromancer, or shed tears at reading "Ned"? It's a teary sort of reptile day ...

 

On its road trip across the United States, the pond fully intended to get to Dollywood, and drove up the road to the main entrance, only to discover it was closed. 

It was a bitter disappointment, and the pond's only Dolly anecdote. The pond did make it to Gracelands, and took away the lesson that you can never have enough TV sets ...

It's a measure of Dolly's place that for a nanosecond the lizard Oz abandoned its sundry 
top of the digital "news" jihads to go all in on Dolly ...

Agreed, it was a lot of borrowed plumage, from the likes of The Times and AFP, but at least they had a go...

No need to bother with the reptile coverage, there were tributes all over the place, and outside paywalls...

Just below all that however, the Australian Daily Zionist News went about its usual business ...

EXCLUSIVE
Top brass issue plea to extend Bondi royal commission
Antisemitism royal commission a ‘lost opportunity’ without an extension: security chiefs
Thirty of Australia’s most eminent national security leaders, including former governor-general David Hurley, say the inquiry could be a ‘lost opportunity’ unless urgently extended.

By James Dowling

The reptiles want it to go on forever, an endless treasure trove of daily Zionist news.

For news of a fanatical religious zealot at work you had to head off to Haaretz...

Down below that the lizard Oz added other jihads to the day's offerings...

Eek, is that the poodle?

The indefatigable Geoff was at it again ...

EXCLUSIVE
PM, Treasurer face internal unrest, as business chiefs slam mediocrity
The Business Council of Australia has warned Anthony Albanese that Australia’s ‘mediocre’ global competitiveness ranking must be urgently reversed as Labor MPs voice internal budget concerns.
By Geoff Chambers and Sarah Ison

In the full header, the reptiles made clearer their targets ...

Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers face internal unrest, as business chiefs slam mediocrity

Could it be that the reptiles manage to label so many stories as EXCLUSIVE because nobody else can be fagged to join their assorted crusades?

As usual Geoff wielded a double barrelled shottie and chambered another shell ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
Business leaders flirt with Labor after being dumped by conservatives
Union leaders don’t blanket Coalition governments with compliments when the conservatives are in power. They go for the jugular. So why is the Business Council love-bombing Labor?

The pond felt the urgent need for a bit of relieving business humour ...

Go sandgropers.

Just as tiresome as the chambering Chambers was Dame Slap, raging over on the extreme far right ...

The merit myth: Labor’s public service hiring policy is a joke
The Albanese government is making a mockery of the merit principle within the Australian Public Service.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

The obvious irony is the entirely meritless Dame Slap rabbiting on about merit, but the only thing to note here was the way that the reptiles traduced a fine Brit sitcom, as if trading off on that made Dame Slap less of a prat ...

The day the humourless Dame Slap manages to match Yes Minister will be the day she resigns from the lizard Oz.

She's in the intermittent archive, personally placed there by the pond for any stray masochist, though perhaps they should try the Percy Grainger solution and get a nice bit of birch for their daily flagellation fix ...

It's difficult to imagine anyone being more tiresome and more humourless than Dame Slap, but Linda somehow manages it ...

My search for justice in the Higgins saga is at a tipping point
I will enter mediation with the government ready to resolve the case on fair terms. If that’s not possible, I look forward to going to court.
By Linda Reynolds
Contributor

For the love of the long absent lord, just go away.

Still making it all about "me, me, me", as if she's the one that was raped.

It was with particular relish that the pond personally stored her in the intermittent archive.

Fortunately, as he often does, the bromancer turned up to save the pond's day. 

(Would he adopt the new argot of referring to Lake Ontario as Lake America?)

The header: Will Donald Trump walk the talk on Iranian sanctions? The US President bombed Tehran while letting it sell oil abroad – now he is betting the toughest sanctions ever imposed can force open the Strait of Hormuz.

The caption for the snap of the gesticulating mango monster: US President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday (AEST). Picture: AFP

The pond has taken particular pleasure in the way that the bromancer of late has seen the scales fall from his eyes, his hopes dashed by his Faux Noise kissing cousins' preferred authoritarian leader ...

Can Donald Trump possibly do to the Iranian regime – namely compel it to reopen the Strait of Hormuz unconditionally – by economic sanctions what he has signally failed to do by military strike?
First, it’s the right tactic for the US. A maximum economic boycott, sanction and blockade of Iran should have preceded military action. For most of the time the US was bombing Iran, it actually allowed Iran to continue exporting its oil, apparently out of a desire to minimise disruption to global energy markets.
Now, Trump says, he will impose the toughest economic conditions on Iran ever seen.
The critical question is whether Washington can get Iran’s most important trade partners – China, Turkey, Russia and the Gulf states themselves – to enforce the US sanctions regime.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared: “Let there be no ambiguity as to the position of the United States. An economic engagement of any kind with this murderous regime will expose those responsible to the full reach of American power.”

To help out the hive mind, the reptiles introduced a graphic so that the readership wouldn't replicate the ignorance of Americans in vox pops when asked a geography question ...

The bromancer kept trying to talk up the notion that the mad King had hit on the right tactic, and - even more risibly - that Bessent had left a shred of personal credibility:

It’s noteworthy that the White House got Bessent to make the announcement. He and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are the two cabinet secretaries with the greatest personal credibility. Though passing all the Trump loyalty tests, the two rarely speak in the hyperbole-charged MAGA Trump dialect of often hallucinatory exaggeration and wish fulfilment.

Is that the same loon who joined mad King Donald in doing battle with the bond markets, perhaps even sending in the military?

...Bessent’s bond market intervention is a signal that “Washington is increasingly uncomfortable with soaring long-term borrowing costs,” said Axel Rudolph, the chief technical analyst at the investing and trading platform IG.
Bessent’s attempts to battle the financial markets are ironic, as he worked alongside Soros when he beat the Bank of England and forced the pound to crash out of the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992.
That drama, which became known as Black Wednesday, showed how hard it is for a government to defend a currency when investors believe it is overvalued.
But despite that experience, Bessent took part in a joint operation with Japan to prop up the yen earlier this month – seemingly to prevent Tokyo selling US bonds to fund yen purchases.
“The irony of the guy working for Soros and Druckenmiller who broke the Bank of England back in 1992 pretending that you can do FX intervention alone, and lastingly defend a currency, is just amazing,” Adam Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute and an expert on the Japanese economy, told the Financial Times earlier this month.

But the penny had to drop and it did so quickly, with a "nonetheless" billy goat butt ...

Nonetheless, the plain truth is the Trump administration, for all its bellicose bluster, has a very feeble record of enforcing so-called secondary sanctions; that is, sanctions against third nations that trade with the primary subject of the sanction itself, in this case Iran.
Although Trump likes to wield economic instruments of state power, this circumstance exposes his own distinctive weaknesses. Sanctions that are meant to cripple a nation should be a very rare policy effort. They work much better if they are multilateral rather than unilateral.
An earlier president, a George W. Bush, say, would have brought a formidable posse of allies with him in the Iran operation. Trump instead insults and alienates allies, often imposes absurd tariffs on their economies, and then is surprised that they are slow to respond to his calls for support.
Trump’s general proposition, that the US has done the lion’s share of security work and allies such as the European NATO members and Australia, are, if not free-riders, certainly not pulling their weight, is true. His demand that US allies do more on defence is thoroughly justified. Australia is among those doing very little, notwithstanding the AUKUS agreement.
And it was certainly a mistake for some European allies to prevent the US even using its own military bases in Europe to conduct the initial campaign against Iran. Even the Albanese government, no profile in courage by any standard, nonetheless in contrast to most of the Europeans gave in-principle support to the initial US operation.

Insults allies? Oh come now, surely not ...

Sorry, at this point the reptiles actually dropped in another geography lesson, with little pop ups, though the pond could only be bothered with one example ...

The bromancer wended on down his gloomy path ...

Still, it’s an absolute failure of Trump’s to persuade allied opinion, much less international opinion generally, either to support the military campaign or now to support the sanctions campaign.
Trump has discredited many of these economic instruments through his promiscuous, chaotic and endlessly changing deployment of them. The Wall Street Journal is surely right to label the tariff slugfest Trump has initiated with Canada, for example, as “the dumbest trade war in history”.
Because Trump never abides by a trade deal for more than a few months, and is always wanting to reopen any deal, engage in new threats, impose new tariffs, international actors, allies and adversaries, have grown very wary of putting any faith at all in any trade arrangement, even a sanctions arrangement, that Trump proposes.
Moreover, Trump’s wildly gyrating rhetoric on Iran, his near constant alternating announcements of peace at hand or the biggest military offensive since World War II – neither of which has ever eventuated – has destroyed Washington’s credibility on Iran across the board.

At this point the reptiles introduced an image which was perhaps a metaphor for mad king Donald, as well as for the lizard Oz and the bromancer, raging at clouds... Project not found

The pond has every confidence it would have been as tedious as the previous two geography lessons ...

Adversaries are not intimidated, allies are not inspired.
Even more important, it’s clear that Trump, for the moment at least, cannot coerce Beijing to do, or refrain from doing, anything. Trump imagined a brutal US-China trade war, which he thought he would quickly win because the US is a bigger market for China than China is for the US.
Instead, Beijing achieved “escalation dominance” by cutting off supply of rare earths and critical minerals that, with astute strategic planning, it had developed a near global monopoly in. Many of the weapons Trump has used against Iran depend on Chinese critical minerals. Since the critical minerals episode, Trump has ceased making any threats against China at all.
All the way through the Ukraine conflict and the Iran conflict, Beijing has flouted any US sanctions and provided critical trade, money and technology to both Iran and Russia.
Far from subjecting China to secondary sanctions, Trump has not even made this a significant issue in the bilateral US-China relationship. Similarly, Trump is once more courting North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Kim too flouts all American sanctions without adverse consequence.
For all that, the Iranian economy is certainly a desperate mess. It may be that at some point Tehran seeks an accommodation, even if the US-led sanctions are not watertight. But the Iranian government is now more hardline and determined than before Trump began his military operation.
It still looks likely this messy impasse has a long way to run.

Relax bromancer, there are new wars to be fought, and what a triumph they are. 

How long since anyone mentioned the Epstein files, as opposed to trying to work out the one night Melania stayed over in the White House in the last year?

A friend sent this clipping from Zuck's ravaging of minds:

At this point the pond should note the presence of the swishing Switzer, another reptile the pond personally consigned to the intermittent archive.

After Tampa: How Australia became the model for border protection
What all the critics underestimated was how important deterrence of unauthorised maritime arrivals would become to the integrity of Australia’s immigration settlement.
By Tom Switzer
Contributor

The pond had no time for his nonsense, because he failed to explain how the integrity of the Australian system managed to allow in the likes of the floodwater-whispering Caterist and Switzer ...

The pond also knows what he's trying to do ... reassure punters drawn towards Gina's pet, but how can a ponderous, pompous drongo inclined to drivel match the immortal Rowe and Golding?

And so to the bonus.

Instead of the swishing Switzer, the pond turned to the man most likely to fulfil the pond's ambitions for its correspondents ... to make them so bored and so appalled that they resolved never to read another reptile emanating from the lizard Oz...

The header: Too punitive, too weak: our free speech dilemma; Section 18C is a bad law that has many defenders. But defending a bad law only guarantees social dissent.

The caption for the two snaps: Pauline Hanson and Mehreen Faruqi.

"Ned" arrived late to this reptile jihad, as he often does, and then spent a bigly five minutes bloviating on the right of reptiles to insult minorities and deploy the race card with impunity, Bolter style:

Free speech in Australia is trapped in a damaging legal bind – it is both too punitive and too weak, locked in a maze that damages our society, with politicians, parliaments and judges apparently unable to settle on urgently needed improvement mechanisms.
Pauline Hanson is moving towards centre stage. She seeks leave to appeal to the High Court, having been found by the Federal Court to be in breach of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, and if the case proceeds the High Court will rule for the first time on this provision. It follows years of fruitless political dispute about section 18C.
Consider the disreputable condition of the country on free speech. Hanson’s comment that Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi should pack her bags and “piss off back to Pakistan”, while impolite, is deemed to be illegal in Australia; while pro-Palestinian demonstrations demanding the elimination of Israel “From the river to the sea” along with calls to “Globalise the intifada” – encouraging the murders of Jews – are permitted and apparently beyond the reach of our laws. A good and decent society is broken under such inconsistency and hypocrisy.
How we got here is a complex story. How we escape is equally complex but must begin with recognition of our dilemma.

What a fatuous attempt at both siderism, what a typical Australian Daily Zionist News ploy.

At the heart of "Ned's" blather? The usual images designed to terrify the hive mind: A Pro-Palestine demonstration marches through Melbourne’s CBD. Picture: David Crosling

"Ned" kept up an incessant whining and moaning, in a bid to outdo Linda:

Section 18C is a bad law that has many defenders. But defending a bad law only guarantees social dissent. Sadly, it is an article of faith for the Labor Party. The law proscribes race-based speech likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate”, with its critics saying the bar is set far too low. Former Liberal attorney-general George Brandis branded the provision a “grotesque limitation” on free speech and invoked George Orwell to say it was a device to channel how people thought. The Abbott government arrived in 2013 determined to reform the provision. It had plenty of intellectual support.
Former NSW Supreme Court chief justice Jim Spigelman said: “The freedom to offend is an integral component of freedom of speech. There is no right not to be offended. I am not aware of any international human rights instrument, or national anti-discrimination statute in another liberal democracy, that extends to conduct that is merely offensive.” He said “offend” and “insult” impinged on free speech in a way “humiliate” and “intimidate” did not. Former human rights commissioner Sev Ozdowski said a threshold at “offend” was too low and contributed to distrust.
But Labor was unmoved and crushed Tony Abbott’s reform. It branded the proposals a surrender to racism and racists. Labor made the debate about racism, not free speech – a winning play. The Abbott government, hindered by its political ineptitude, had no chance. As prime minister Abbott beat a retreat, with public opinion, the ethnic lobby and many Liberals forming a tidal wave of opposition.
Claims by right-wing ideologues that Abbott had “chickened out” were nonsense. Abbott lost in the parliament and with the public, and nothing has changed to this day. There is no way the parliament will reform section 18C. Any effort by the Liberal Party or Abbott to reignite the issue these days would be blind folly.

As if defending the onion muncher wasn't bad enough, the reptiles flung in a couple of wild cards ... Former Attorney General Senator George Brandis; Retired NSW Supreme Court chief justice Jim Spigelman

How desperate is it? "Ned" has to defend that tired old racist trope about furriners needing to pack their bags and piss off back home, the sort of lowbrow humour and vicious personal insult you might find in a pathetic blog when talking about the likes of the swishing US Switzer and the quarry-whispering Pom Caterist:

But events have given Hanson a fresh opportunity. After Queen Elizabeth died, Faruqi, in a classic insight into the Greens, said: “I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples.” An angry Hanson responded: “Your attitude appals and disgusts me. When you immigrated to Australia you took every advantage of this country. You took citizenship, bought multiple homes, and a job in parliament. It’s clear you’re not happy, so pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan.”
Having lost two cases in the Federal Court, Hanson said she was going to the High Court to protect free speech. Abbott was supportive. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke was true to form: he played the race card: “If the Liberal Party thinks there should be more racist things they’re allowed to say, tell us what they are.”
But constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey criticised the Federal Court and has raised doubts about the constitutional validity of section 18C, saying the treaty on which it relies, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, does not seem to include the low-level conduct that 18C outlaws. The treaty deals with far more serious offences. Constitutional lawyer Louise Clegg said in The Spectator last month she believed the High Court would invalidate section 18C.
A victory for Hanson would be a remarkable event, securing the victory the Coalition had long unsuccessfully sought. Hanson would become a political heroine. It would be a devastating blow for Labor – being exposed for running repeated campaigns attacking the critics for promoting racism only to finish up humiliated by relying for decades on a provision found to be unconstitutional.

And of course the reptiles would be right on board, because how sweet it would be to add new layers of racism and bigotry to their unrelenting campaigns about furriners, Islamics and the like. 

Catholic fundamentalist bigots of the onion munching, mother England worshipping kind would have a field day ... Liberal Party Federal President Tony Abbott

"Ned" decided to echo the Nazi card ...

Of course, none of this may happen – yet the stakes are high, legally and politically. Meanwhile, at the Samuel Griffth Society conference last week, Federal Court judge Ian Jackman said the nation’s current crisis over social cohesion and antisemitism should provoke an “intellectual stocktaking” and a revision of the High Court’s 30-year-old implied freedom of political communications.
Jackman argued that contemporary judges, notably the NSW Court of Appeal, influenced by the “implied freedom” judgment, were stopping parliaments, notably the Minns government in NSW, from enacting laws to better protect the Jewish community and the wider public. He stated the obvious: that Australia is now “a severely fractured and divided society” far different from the Australia of 30 years ago when the High Court handed down this judgment.
“It would not have occurred to Australians in the 1990s that other Australians would abuse their freedom of political communication to publicly intimidate and vilify Jews,” Jackman said. “The idea that that might have taken place on the campus of the University of Sydney for weeks on end was simply unthinkable. Back then, we associated that behaviour with Nazi thugs in the Germany of the 1930s. There are many, probably the vast majority, who regard it as their democratic duty to stand against this hatred and wickedness and, if they can, to stop it.”

Actually muh lud, if the pond might be so bold, back in the 1930s, a reptile hero thought that Adolf was the really great man of the century, doing great things ...

Still no news of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, a kind of modern times Kristallnacht?

To bring the pond down, the reptiles flung in a snap of the beefy boofhead, though seeing how despondent and bemused he looked did restore spirits a little ... Angus Taylor during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

To cap it all off, "Ned" had the cheek to talk about damaging the best interests of "our society", while scribbling for a rag that's part of a foreign-owned empire that has done its very best to debase public discourse, not least by mounting relentless jihads on anyone who has the temerity to disagree with them...

Yet efforts by the NSW parliament to limit public assembly for a temporary period in the aftermath of a terrorist attack were denied by the court, which said preserving social cohesion in this matter was not a constitutionally legitimate purpose. The reality today, nine months after the Bondi massacre, is that the NSW government and parliament are not able to apply the curbs and limits they want on demonstrators who openly promote antisemitism and advocate violence against Israel and Jews.
Jackman delivered two strong messages. First, that this change in Australia’s life should drive the High Court into a “prompt reconsideration of the proper limits to our general freedom of political communication”; and second, that the appropriate branch of government to determine those limits is the parliament, not the judiciary. He said some people might admire the “dogmatism” of the High Court but the parliament had “wider and deeper sources” of information in terms of gauging and acting on the risks to the public. These included advice from the executive, the police and multiple viewpoints.
After 30 years it is unrealistic to expect the High Court to abandon its “implied freedom” doctrine but Jackman has made a convincing case for a revision to this doctrine and for the judiciary to recognise the balance between freedom and protection is essentially a political decision, best made by parliaments, not judges. Until that is accepted, misplaced and outdated views of freedom will damage the better interests of our society.

Actually, it's perfectly easy to point out things in a polite way, as shown by the immortal Rowe ...

What a reference to the pond's favourite painting, seen many a time on many trips to the NGV ...

Sadly the reptiles downplayed the fuss, apparently on the basis that there's no point in exercising freedom of speech unless that freedumb conforms to the usual reptile jihads about the endless sufferings of big business.

See if you can spot a grim-faced "Ned" in the crowd ...he's old enough and grey enough ...

And now a little quavering, wavering Dolly, worthy of a lived Tamworth experience ...