A few 'toons to fill in the break ...

 

The pond's on a break, but couldn't resist this evocation by Matt Wuerker of cartoonists past ...

Wueker himself isn't beyond the odd historical allusion ...

Beyond the ancien régime, the pond still enjoys the evocation of mythical critters as a way of bashing real ones ...

And here's a couple of matters the pond is pleased to be taking a break from ...

The pond heads off for a break in a blaze of western civilisational glory, with Our Homeric Henry failing his Greeks test ...

 

As this is the pond's last post for a little while, and - it goes without saying - also the day that Our Heroic Homeric Henry strides on to the scene - the pond wanted to end with a "western civilisational" bang, not a woke whimper.

What better inspiration than liddle Marco's speech in ancient Greece, echoing ancient Greek wisdom down through the ages to arrive at a corrupt Kimberley and a mad king irritated because only he can do corrupt in his court.

For those coming in late, or those who've already forgotten, liddle Marco delivered what he imagined was a presidential speech, designed to launch his 2028 bid, and orchestrated against a carefully chosen backdrop, though he could have achieved the same effect by staying in Washington and using a green screen:

The pond won't bother to link to the speech - it's easily found, and it was meretricious tosh and revealed liddle Marco to be a tone-deaf twit - but the pond was agog at the notion that Our Henry might rise to the challenge and demolish Marco.

Certainly others did ...

Marco Rubio is promoting troubling ideas about ‘western civilization’
Ted Widmer

...again and again, Rubio wandered back to a precarious theme, that history is decided by “great men” who defy adversity and conquer lesser peoples.
He almost seemed to be writing out text for a video game (Super Mario?), offering “an arena for great men to test and prove themselves”, where they can show off “fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory”.

There was also this in Salon, though alas the pond can't quote it all ...

Rubio’s Greece speech is MAGA’s latest classical cover story
The Trump administration keeps borrowing ancient prestige to make its brutality look noble
By Curtis Dozier

...scratch the surface of the history Rubio cited, and those ideals look about as worthy of celebration as a new data center being built in your hometown or having to pay $6 a gallon for diesel.
The secretary’s examples of Western heroism were the Spartans at Thermopylae and the philosopher Socrates, both of whom, he said, illustrate the “Western” willingness to “pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.” But the Spartan militarism that Rubio so admires came to define the city state’s culture only because they had no choice but to devote all state resources to maintaining an army sufficient to suppress the revolts of the massive number of enslaved fellow Greeks upon whom the Spartan economy depended. And the most plausible explanation for why Socrates was executed is that he had been an intellectual mentor to several of the men who ruled Athens as a violent, dictatorial junta in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war; it was Socrates’ student Plato, who devoted his talent to sanitizing the political reputation of his teacher by painting him as a courageous free-thinker. 
Rubio mentioned the influence of Plato as a key link between ancient Greece and the founding of the United States. But Plato’s influence upon the framers of the U.S. Constitution consisted primarily in legitimizing their conception of the new nation as an inegalitarian state in which only those whom they deemed worthy would have access to political power. 
Yes, Socrates taught and Plato wrote, as Rubio said, in the Parthenon’s shadow. But when ancient Greeks looked at that temple they saw a monument not to democracy but to the wealth and power Athens had amassed for itself by its coercive, imperial treatment of their fellow Greeks. The construction of the Parthenon was funded by income from the lopsided, extortionate alliances into which Athens bullied other city-states on the pretext of providing protection against the defeated Persians coming back to impose slavery upon the Greeks. It almost seems that Rubio knows this, because his warning to Europe sounds a lot like that ancient Athenian propaganda: “The course we take will determine whether the West . . . resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.”
Oppression and exploitation of marginalized groups, promotion of authoritarian rule, imperial domination and wealth extraction; these aren’t aspects of “Western Civilization” that anyone should be proud of. But Rubio is, or said he is, because these are the aspects of that heritage that correspond most closely to the Trump administration’s view of the world. 
In fact, the secretary’s speech was pretty direct about this. When Rubio decried how, before Trump, “we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history,” he can only be referring to the removal of Confederate statues that served to celebrate white supremacy. His grandiose description of America before European colonization as “an open and wild land” that “became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition” erased the role of genocide and displacement of Native Americans people in this process.
But why should anyone be surprised to hear something so egregiously shameful from a Trump administration official? This is the very history that Trump has worked to suppress in museums, including the Smithsonian, and national parks nationwide. 
You can sense the desperation for legitimacy in Rubio’s choice to give this speech in Athens, where he hoped the ruins of the parthenon would lend prestige to his claims. You can sense it in the fulsomeness of his praise of “Western Civilization,” as if just repeating “virtue” or “honor” enough times will paper over the corruption scandal surrounding U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. These visual and rhetorical clichés are intended to make Trump’s policies look respectable, but all they do here is reveal the profound weakness of the administration. They can’t point to any genuinely positive accomplishments. Going into the midterm elections Trump and his party have nothing to run on. So instead we get a speech like this — a ham-fisted appeal to the die-hard MAGA base, the kind of people who actually want to live in a dictatorial, corrupt police state and to delude themselves about history.

And liddle Marco also aroused the ire of Xians, as in this outing in the WSJ ... though alas this day the intermittent archive decided to have one of its hissy fits, "too many requests" being the excuse du jour ...

The Pagan Nationalism of Marco Rubio’s Athens Speech
The secretary makes serious arguments, but he leaves out Jerusalem. (*intermittent archive link)
By 
William A. Galston

This time it was the Xians getting their noses out of joint ...

...Mr. Rubio characterized this relentless struggle—fueled by what the Greeks called thumos, “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride”—as the “heart of great civilization.” Without it, he declared, nations lose their will to fight, even to survive. In our times, he said, Europe has abandoned thumos for comfort and safety, rejecting the pursuit of excellence in the name of an egalitarianism of mediocrity. The Continent can save itself only if it can “awaken from its long slumber” and again embrace the “fire” of times past.
But Europe’s era of fire led to colonialism—and to the backlash against it that has shaped world politics up to the present day. In the 20th century, national self-assertion generated two conflicts that devastated Europe and left few parts of the globe untouched. The European Union, which President Trump regularly reviles as an anti-American plot, represents a collective decision to prevent the recurrence of such conflicts.
Under the Trump administration, Mr. Rubio says, the U.S. has made a different choice, “the unapologetic pursuit of national power,” coupled with the understanding that power requires not only the economic, technological, and military means to exercise it but also the demonstrated willingness to use it when prudence and diplomacy fail.
The power to do what? Mr. Rubio (or his speechwriter) seems to have read Thucydides up to Pericles’ funeral oration but no further. Fifteen years later, the Athenians sent their navy to the neutral island of Melos, demanding that the Melians abandon their neutral stance, join the Athenian-dominated Delian League, and pay tribute to Athens. The Melians refused, appealing to justice. The Athenian envoy dismissed their appeal. In the real world, he replied, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
It was in this spirit that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ridiculed Canada’s refusal to knuckle under to U.S. trade demands: “I don’t think you can be in a tit-for-tat with someone who’s 13 times larger than you are.”
Untethered from law and justice, overweening power becomes dangerous not only to those on its receiving end, but also to those who wield it. The Greeks understood that when daring and pride go too far, they mutate into reckless and self-destructive hubris.
Egged on by demagogues, Thucydides narrates, Athens embarked on a war of choice—the Sicilian expedition, the disastrous failure of which contributed to Athens’s eventual defeat in the Peloponnesian War. Hubris leads people and nations to overestimate what their power can accomplish and to underestimate the effectiveness of their opponents’ response. This lesson isn’t obsolete.
In his celebration of Greek virtues, Mr. Rubio ignored their opposite—religious virtues. The Bible praises Moses as the humblest man on earth. In Proverbs we read that “pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” There is considerable daylight between the secretary of state’s paean to power and the Sermon on the Mount—which isn’t to say that I would bet America’s survival on the proposition that the meek shall inherit the earth. I suggest, unoriginally, that what we call the West emerged from, and is sustained by, the continuing tension between Athens and Jerusalem, not either in isolation from the other.
In 2022, Nate Hochman, the young man who is now Mr. Rubio’s chief speechwriter, published a prescient article tracing the decline of the religious right in the Republican Party and the rise of a less religious form of conservatism that embraces national self-assertion over any form of universalism, including Christianity. Mr. Rubio’s speech is evidence of this shift.
Years ago, I was the token liberal at a conference dominated by conservatives of various stripes. When I expressed concern about the rise of Christian nationalism, a traditional conservative acquaintance replied, “If you’re worried about Christian nationalism, wait till you see the pagan version.”
I’m beginning to understand what he meant.

Even the National Review showed contempt, again with an Xian spin ...

Marco Rubio’s Earnest, Flawed Defense of the West
By Joseph Loconte 

...Rubio’s narrative is hobbled by both historical and conceptual errors that create, at best, a misleading (and MAGA-friendly) account of the American story.
“Here, in Athens,” Rubio said, “we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West.” They include “fierce individuality,” “relentless ambition,” “daring exploration,” and “a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory.” Here is a secular account of Western civilization that might have come from the pen of Voltaire on the eve of the French Revolution.
Left off the list were the transformational concepts of the Jewish and Christian traditions: the biblical teachings about men and women bearing the image of God, about man’s alienation from the Creator, and about God’s redemptive vision for humankind. Without these beliefs, there would be no Western civilization.
There are also important factual errors in the speech: the claim that the Greeks offered us a model of republican government (Greek democracy was decidedly not a republic, a fact that terrified the American founders about the prospects of direct democracy); that “the Greeks gave us history itself” (the Jews were writing narrative history roughly a thousand years before Herodotus); or that the Greeks invented the idea that “there is a rational order to the cosmos” (the opening chapters of the book of Genesis in the Bible establish the rationality of God and his created order).
Given his audience in Athens, Rubio can be forgiven for failing to draw attention to the implosion of Greek democracy. It, of course, ended in the most brutal and protracted war of the classical world: a 25-year bloodbath between the Athenian empire and Sparta and its allies. In their two-volume defense of Western civilization, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, co-authors Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins underscore the moral damage resulting from Athenian self-interest, the appetite to dominate others, and the inordinate love of honor. As they summarize it: “The Greeks, so proud of their superiority over the Persians, had turned themselves into barbarians.”
The Greek historian Thucydides, the most reliable contemporary chronicler of the Peloponnesian War, was relentlessly honest about the catastrophe. Greeks committed atrocities against fellow Greeks; women and children were enslaved; prisoners were slaughtered; cannibalism occurred during the sieges. “Love of power operating through greed and through personal ambition,” he wrote, “was the cause of all these evils.”
Yet Rubio sidesteps this dreary history and comes very close to turning the vices of the ancient world into virtues. The architects of the Parthenon, representative of the Greek spirit, “held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others” and to be engaged in “that constant struggle for distinction.”
The greatest of the Greek philosophers would take issue with this view of human flourishing. “Justice in the life and conduct of the State,” wrote Plato, “is possible only as it first resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.” Aristotle, in his Politics, also viewed the character of a political society as dependent on the character of its citizens. “For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all,” he wrote. And the aim of political life? “Justice is the bond of men in states, for the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society.”
The concepts of virtue and justice, however, appear nowhere in Rubio’s account of the achievements of the West and of the American political order. There are references to “heroism, honor, duty,” but they are extracted from any moral or religious context. There is a nod to Christianity and “the empire of Christendom,” but no hint of the civilizing impact of the Christian gospel on the Greco-Roman world. Rubio thus praises Achilles for his “pursuit of eternal glory” but seems unaware that it was Achilles’s cruelty, uncontrolled rage, and ego — his hubris — that led to his undoing. Maybe the reason for Rubio’s silence about these vices is that they match too closely with those of the president he serves.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Rubio’s speech is the total lack of any democratic purpose to American foreign policy. Instead, the nation’s great aims are to “reindustrialize our economy,” “rebuild our factories,” and “fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.” Again, the unanswered question recurs: toward what end?
In Reagan’s Westminster speech, he made the defense and promotion of democracy the moral lodestar of America’s engagement on the world stage. “So let us ask ourselves: What kind of people do we think we are?” Reagan said. “And let us answer: free people, worthy of freedom, and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.” On display was Reagan’s profound belief in American exceptionalism, the idea that America’s national interests must be framed — and constrained — by its democratic and religious ideals.
It was this belief, rooted not in Greek philosophy but in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, that helped the United States to defeat imperialistic Japan and Nazi Germany in the Second World War; create the Nuremberg Trials to bring to justice the Nazis for their human rights atrocities; launch the Berlin Airlift to rescue West Germany from Soviet tyranny; design the Marshall Plan to provide an economic lifeline to Western Europe; and support the democratic Solidarity movement in Poland, which set off a series of democratic revolutions that ultimately brought down the Soviet Union.
These facts seem to be lost on the Trump administration. Rubio’s answer to Reagan’s question — “What kind of people do we think we are?” — will do little to restore America’s self-identity as an indispensable defender of human freedom. Quite the opposite. The “moral imagination” of America and the West, as described by the secretary of state, lacks the moral ballast of biblical religion: the true source of both American greatness and national renewal.
Without it, American exceptionalism — like Greek exceptionalism — will lie buried under the ruins of a once-great civilization.

That's about the biggest build up the pond has ever done for a reptile entrance, but it was all there, Greeks, Thucydides, Aristotle, Xians, etc. etc.

What a chance to rise to the challenge, what a golden chance to deliver stern denunciations and profound references.

So what did Our Heroic Homeric Henry do?

Blew it bigly ... and stayed full Trumpian ICC-hating Zionist, with just another rabid rant for the Australian Daily Zionist News.

Talk about a major disappointment ...

The header: By Henry Ergas
Nobel Peace Price: Purveyors of hate poison legacy of Holocaust

The plea to listen to the bot: Listen to this article
8 min

The caption for a snap designed to evoke fear and loathing: Former ICC judge Navi Pillay, who was awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. Picture: AP

The plea to pander to the G bot: Make us preferred on Google

Our Henry decided to offer a bog standard defence for the ethnic cleansing that's been going down in Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention southern Lebanon and Syria. The cheapest trick is to argue about the definition of genocide and drag in the Holocaust, and Our Henry is the cheapest of tricksters:

The award of the Nobel Peace prize to South African jurist Navi Pillay, who has spent decades as one of Israel’s most strident critics, comes as no surprise.
Unlike the committees that award the other Nobel prizes, which are drawn from Sweden’s learned institutions, the peace prize committee is appointed on a party-political basis by the Norwegian parliament. Politics is not incidental to the process; it is encrusted in its nature.
Nor is it a coincidence that the committee that awarded Pillay the prize is chaired by Jørgen Watne Frydnes, the Labour appointee whose term ends in December. A longstanding critic of Israel, which he considers an “apartheid state”, Frydnes called the accidental killing in Gaza of Al Jazeera “journalists” (who moonlighted as terrorists) a “grotesque attack on the freedom of expression”. Crowning his chairmanship by canonising Pillay can only enhance Frydnes’ adulation by Norway’s vehemently anti-Israel left.
The underlying issue, however, is neither Frydnes nor Pillay. Both are symptoms of a broader disease: the chronic abuse of the term “genocide”.

How feeble was the outing? No Thucydides, just Francis:

Centuries ago, Francis Bacon warned about the “shoddy and inept application of words which lays siege to the intellect”. In the case of “genocide”, the siege began at the word’s birth.
When Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, he devoted a mere 16 pages of a 671-page book to it, producing, as historian Anton Weiss-Wendt puts it, “an indictment rather than a clear delineation” of a crime.

A snap of an alleged villain followed: The Head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, right, speaks with the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Navanethem 'Navi' Pillay via video link at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo on October 10. Picture: AFP

And so to avoiding what's going down in Gaza and the West Bank by way of semantic and pedantic quibbling, with bonus Holocaust, always a reliable diversion and distraction:

Genocide, for Lemkin, could be “political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious and moral”. The concept’s sweep was as vast as its boundaries were indistinct.
That lack of precision reflected, at least in part, how indelibly the nature of the “crime of crimes” had been burnt into the public mind. If Auschwitz gave it a name, the photographs of the camps gave it an unforgettable immediacy: heaps of emaciated corpses, survivors scarcely distinguishable from the dead.
The new term therefore meant something far worse than a massacre. What it meant, wrote Helen Fein, in one of the works that defined genocide studies, was the killing of “people in captivity, people who have surrendered, or people without a state or political organisation that can offer a credible threat to the perpetrator” – or, put more formally, “the asymmetrical slaughter of an unorganised group by an organised force” serving no military purpose.
That had been the fate of the Jews of Europe, transported across a continent solely to be murdered. Their extermination continued as defeat closed in on Germany, the machinery of death consuming the resources of a collapsing regime. “Mere Jewish survival”, as historian Steven Katz puts it, “was the active enemy”.
So too in the Armenian genocide, which had featured prominently in pre-war discussions of the crime Lemkin named. Yes, thousands of Armenians, armed by Russia, deserted to the enemy or rose in revolt against the Ottomans; in the fighting that broke out at Van in 1915 neither side took prisoners.
But their extermination as a people occurred after they had been defeated, their weapons seized, their resistance broken. The Armenians, said Talat Pasha, the Ottoman interior minister, “can live in the desert but nowhere else”. Some 300,000, mainly women and children, were driven to the wastelands of Der el Zor; by September 1916, barely 12,000 remained alive. They, too, were then butchered, as were those who had escaped the death marches.
Nor did the Ottoman regime spare the Syriac Christians, who had played no role in the hostilities. Utterly defenceless, they were mercilessly slaughtered. Far from punishing the crime, the Turkish parliament granted pensions to the perpetrators’ families in 1926.

Throw in a snap of another villain: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Picture: AFP

Erdogan provided Our Henry with another chance to avoid mentioning what's been going down in Gaza and the West Bank courtesy the current government of Israel:

None of that has troubled Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Having assured the world that “a Muslim cannot perpetrate a genocide”, he now accuses Israel at every opportunity of committing one. The history of his own country is absolved by assertion; Israel is condemned by incantation. For him, as for Pillay, the mere fact of Palestinian casualties tars Israel with the “crime of crimes”.
The Genocide Convention’s drafters had recognised the danger: that civilian losses in war would be conflated with genocide. “In modern war,” the official commentary on the draft convention noted in 1947, “the civilian population inevitably suffers severe losses.” Yet “even heavy losses on the civilian population in the course of operations of war”, it stressed, “(do) not as a rule constitute genocide”.
The fundamental distinction was between war’s dreadful toll on civilians and the deliberate elimination of a people in cold blood. The State Department confidently believed that the requirement of “an overall plan to destroy a human group” would ensure that was understood. It had reckoned without Stalin, who meticulously revised each of the Convention’s successive drafts.
In June 1948, a confidential State Department report noted that the Soviet bloc had secured “what they frankly described as an ‘educational’ document, not for ‘jurists’ but for the ‘peoples of the world’, in other words, a propaganda weapon”.
Soon enough, that weapon was turned on the United States. But it was against Israel that the venom flowed most freely. Of the 1037 references to genocide published by Pravda between 1948 and 1988, fully one-fifth were aimed at Israel – twice as many as concerned the Vietnam War.
Thus, in 1952, Soviet fronts claimed Israel was pursuing a “genocidal campaign” against the Arabs; within a week of the Six Day War, the Soviets demanded an end to Israel’s “genocide against the Arabs”, and; on June 6, 1982, they branded Israel’s entry into Lebanon “a policy of genocide against the Arab people”.
As the accusations multiplied, the word’s meaning dissolved. By 2015, some 80 countries, home to four-fifths of humanity, had been accused of “genocide”, with the term’s infinite varieties covering everything from the extinction of languages to the disappearance of often barbaric cultures. “Genocide” had become, concluded Weiss-Wendt, “a hollowed-up vessel that could be filled with any meaning”.
Yet drained of precision, the word retained its power, which fed on the memory of the greatest slaughter of Jews in history: the more sacred that memory became, the more potent its appropriation. Turned against Israel, the accusation consummated an outrageous inversion: the murdered Jews supplied the moral authority for demonising the Jewish state. And what more damning charge could there be than to charge the people marked for annihilation of perpetrating the same crime against others?
But the dead cannot be conscripted into that monstrous travesty without falsifying how they died. Nor can the parallel be sustained without suppressing how this war began and whom Israel was fighting.
That beginning was the massacre of October 7. As for the enemy Israel confronted, it was heavily armed, had vowed to repeat the atrocities “again and again”, and did nothing to protect, and everything to deliberately imperil, Gaza’s civilians from the wars it had chosen to unleash.
That is the war Pillay’s commission branded genocide; that is the verdict the Nobel committee has now enshrined, lending its authority to “A wash of lies / That eats like acid at the feet of men”.
And with it, a prize for peace has desecrated the memory, and tarnished the legacy, of those who perished in war-torn Europe’s darkest crime.

A minor quibble.

Shouldn't Our Henry's thumb bio start this way? 

Henry Ergas AO is a rabid ranting Zionist who learned nothing from his sojourn in Europe, before returning to Australia to deliver weekly Zionist rants to the Australian Daily Zionist News. 

Instead the reptiles offered this ...

Henry Ergas Columnist
Henry Ergas AO is an economist who spent many years at the OECD in Paris before returning to Australia. He has taught at a number of universities, including Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the University of Auckland and the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique in Paris, served as Inaugural Professor of Infrastructure Economics at the University of Wollongong and worked as an adviser to companies and governments.

For once there were a few cracks in the hive mind. A few weren't on board, though there was also the usual reliable collection of full-blown loons...

Luckily there was also a recent infallible Pope to hand ...

As for the rest of the reptiles this day, the pond stayed shattered.

With the intermittent archive doing a bunk, all the pond could do was note some seminal contributions, and provide a url ...

There was an outing on the Canavan caravan ...

‘Worst’ trade deal sells out Aussie jobs
European steel tariffs stay at 50 per cent, cheese subsidies remain intact – yet Labor is calling its EU free-trade deal a win for Australia.
By Matt Canavan
Contributor

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fcoalition-demands-urgent-changes-to-eu-trade-deal-amid-growing-backlash-from-farmers%2Fnews-story%2Fe297381d5721cdb32605ae2866dab5a2

Worth hanging around for when the archive comes good?

Nah, not really...and ditto the craven Craven ...

Australians want less immigration. Universities can’t keep ignoring it
As public support hardens for lower migration, the hardest choices can no longer be dodged, especially by universities that have turned international students into a business model.
By Greg Craven
Columnist

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fno-amount-of-cash-will-satisfy-our-aristocratic-unis%2Fnews-story%2Fdc938b5b8bd91190ecdeac79fbcb789c

The pond would have cut him short anyway ...

See that reference to the 'leets? That's where the pond would have dropped out of this tedious class.

Does the gormless one fancy he's a member of the 'leets, or does he fancy himself as a dissident 'leet at one with the common herd, or is he just a humbug down with the fake ranga?

Even Killer Creighton was off his oats ... but as this is the last post for a while the pond thought it should attempt a little completism, especially as in the first gobbet Killer attempted to swim against the reptile tide ...

What's weird is that embedded in all that is the notion that News Corporation is stuffed full of "sensible people" ...

Luckily in his next gobbet, Killer decided to bash old folks, as if ageing wasn't already doing the job (note the fancy way the reptiles are now using sub-headers):

With vulgar youff dancing in the streets with Killer, it was on to bashing the poor buggers who decided to put themselves in harm's way for no particular benefit. Who wouldn't be traumatised at the entire waste of time the Afghanistan adventure produced?

And that was that...and as for the "news"of the day? It was just greenie bashing and more celebrations of the fake ranga, what with the splitters everywhere these days ...

It was a never no mind for the pond, what with the Greens having decided that Australia should offer no military support to Ukraine ...

“The Greens have been clear from day one that we’re a party of peace and non-violence, and we don’t support military aid to the Ukraine,” Shoebridge told this masthead in an interview in his Sydney office, referring to a party position that has not gained significant attention. (here, paywall)

Looks like the pond will have to find the latest iteration of the Happy Birthday Party at the next election, but it does segue to the latest immortal Rowe ...

The Greens in bed with the mad King, Uncle Leon and Vlad the sociopathic invader? 

Who would have thunk it, but then again in times past they did manage to cut off their carbon tax nose to spite their climate science face ...

As for liddle Marco, Jamelle Bouie had a few thoughts - he comes from the both siderist NY Times, but nobody's perfect ... Marco Rubio does not know a thing about "Western civilization"

 

Lordy lordy, that the pond should be approvingly quoting Rory.

For those wanting to avoid the rest of the blather, just after the 22minute mark Rory begins talking about liddle Marco, comparing him to a Victorian headmaster blathering on to his students about the glories of the British empire ... How does Marco Rubio’s Parthenon speech fit the Trump administration’s ideas on European “civilisational erasure” – and how does it depart from traditional Republican rhetoric? 

In which Dame Groan saves the penultimate post day by arriving to gas the country, and gas the planet ...

 

This is the penultimate post by the pond before going dark for an indeterminate amount of time.

It's not so much the physical move, which will happen in a day, but getting computers back up, reconnecting to the intertubes and sorting through an enormous amount of junk.

It would be nice if, in these last few days, the reptiles managed to publish something compelling, something that sustained interest in the pond in the dark times, but that's just a measure of the pond's delusional devotion to herpetology studies.

Instead say, any commentary on Ukraine being sold down the river, there's just a bog standard continuation of the endless war on Jimbo, with these yarns briefly at the top of the digital rag...

STATE PUSHBACK
NSW to waive stamp duty as Chalmers charges ahead on trust changes
NSW has become the first state to rule out individuals and businesses being hit with stamp duty should they restructure their trust arrangements following federal Labor’s reforms.
By Sarah Ison, Lachlan Leeming and Julie-anne Sprague

They needed three reptiles to put together that sorry tale? More talk of the suffering of the trusty rich?

This is the way that endlessly rippling waves and water wear down coastlines and rocks.

Only two reptiles were needed to help in the next phase of the agitated jihad ...

ALP AGITATION
Sting in PM’s tale as Albanese walks away from boast
Anthony Albanese has walked back his claim of personally reversing the ATO credit card ban as Labor MPs say internal morale has hit a new low.
By Greg Brown and Rosie Lewis

Geoff chambered a bog standard round ...

Dr Jim’s record falling flat in treasurer match-ups
The fact that the Prime Minister has been forced to step in and clean up Chalmers’ mess on several occasions is a bad look for the Treasurer.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

Over on the extreme far right, Jack the Insider joined the chanting children in this version of Lord of the Flies ...

Past is past, Dr Jim … it’s your future I’d be worried about
Chalmers should forget about nostalgia, otherwise we might wistfully recall a time when giants of Australian political history really strolled the corridors of power.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist 

It's the repetition of visual images as part of the jihad that introduces a certain visual numbness ... with Jack recycling a lizard Oz favourite.

Talk about an inexhaustible ability to recycle old hits ...

And Geoff's piece was also a reminder of past visual glories...

It's the sheer inane repetition, the mindless ongoing sloganeering that means the rag is a propaganda sheet of the lowest and basest kind, that some days gets to the pond.

But why worry about images?

Well think of the alternatives.

it's Thursday, and that's petulant Peta day, and she was on a crusade worthy of a medieval Xian king ...

Taxpayers deserve answers over ALP grants to Islamic groups
The notion that taxpayers are left funding any individual or organisation connected with radical Islam should see urgent and immediate action.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

The pond absolutely refuses to indulge this sort of crusade - there's always the archive for Peta cultists - but as a counterpoint might note an alternative in another place ...

Brethren a controlling sect, not a religion, former and current members say
Lindy Jacomb was a naive 20-year-old member of the Exclusive Brethren, living at home with her family, when spiritual curiosity got the better of her. So she wrote to her church’s global leader and other elders. (*intermittent archive link)
Michael Bachelard and Sherryn Groch

Here's the nub of that piece ...

...On Friday, the electoral matters committee will ask hard questions of Hales – unprecedented for a man who for decades has answered only the inquiries of his own acolytes. He tried to get out of the grilling but failed.
At stake is not just his church’s reputation, but millions of dollars in tax exemptions.
Charities in Australia are prohibited from campaigning for political parties, and Hales’ church runs a dozen charities with hundreds of millions in assets. Research in the UK reveals the Brethren use these riches almost entirely for their own benefit. A finding that the church was involved in electioneering could seriously imperil these generous concessions.
A number of right-wing groups have leapt to Hales’ defence. Holding him to account is a threat to religious freedom, they say.
Turning Point USA, the controversial US right-wing organisation, called on the Trump government to lobby Australia over Hales’ questioning, with pastor Lucas Miles worried that, “If this approach succeeds against one church, it becomes a precedent of intimidation for all”.
The Coalition members of the committee have labelled Hales’ grilling a “witch-hunt”. The Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, Michael Stead, and his organisation, Freedom for Faith, say the Brethren is a simple “mainstream Christian denomination,” whose members “have as much right as any other Australian to participate in the electoral process”.
“Religious leaders (are not) automatically responsible for the political choices, associations or conduct” of their members, Freedom for Faith told members of the committee in an email. (Neither they nor the Coalition responded to recent questions about Hales’ long history of antisemitic comments.)
Experts who know the Brethren better say these defences are wrong-headed. Reverend Tim Costello, a senior fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity and former president of the Baptist Union of Australia, said Hales’ church “regard the rest of us Christians as so unfaithful that they will not worship, fellowship or even eat or drink with us.
“And the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren break up families … this is not freedom of conscience or freedom of religion.”

And so on, and the chance of reading anything like that in the lizard Oz? 

Between zilch, zero and zip ... (and yet any sensible atheist might wonder why all these churches get endless tax breaks and government indulgences)

What you get in the lizard Oz is endless hate, fear, division and loathing ... and the need for shadows to get on board the fake ranga agenda ...

Here's another piece the pond wouldn't touch with a barge pole ...

Labor’s ‘digital duty of care’ amounts to radical state censorship
Labor’s legislation is the most radical mass-censorship legislation any Western government has proposed in the internet era.
By Michael Shellenberger

That's the same loon that the pond recently noted was a charlatan, and yet he has the cheek, in the time of mad king Donald and tech bro billionaires, to blather about "western civilisation"...

...beneath these political and strategic motivations is a deeper intolerance towards different points of view. The left since 2010 went from demanding the cancellation of controversial speakers, to government censorship, to the celebration of the killing of Charlie Kirk for the things he said. This intolerance stems from the left’s dogmatic certainty that it is right and moral and its opponents wrong and immoral.
Western civilisation rests upon the idea that the truth emerges from dialogue and thus that free speech is the enabling foundation for democracy. The West’s first great martyr was Socrates, whom the government ordered to death for the things he said.
The Albanese government’s demand for censorship and the ability to wage informational warfare through the use of fake accounts is an attack on this Western tradition of free speech and democracy. I encourage the people of Australia to use their voices forcefully to oppose it.
Michael Shellenberger is the CBR chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech at the University of Austin, the founder of Public.News, and the president of Civilization Works. He was a guest of the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia.

Yet another reminder, per his wiki ...

...Shellenberger has faced accusations of "bad science" for his comments on climate change in Apocalpyse Never; he has also been criticized for arguing with prominent climate scientists on social media and "apologising" to the world on the behalf of environmentalists.
A panel of scientists organized by Climate Feedback analyzed the claims he made in his "apology" article, concluding that they were "inaccurate or mislead readers by contradicting available evidence or using scientific data out of context." A Snopes article, which consulted multiple scientists that Shellenberger had cited, was similarly critical; Michael Mann called one of Shellenberger's central arguments "completely wrong," and found it was also contradicted by the very IEA source Shellenberger used to support it.  

He's also in the grip of a demented form of transphobia and can be relied upon for endless blather about "woke" ...

The pond doesn't want to get in the way of its final post tomorrow featuring Little Marco, and "western civilisation" and Socrates, but what the heck ...

Rubio’s Greece speech is MAGA’s latest classical cover story
Curtis Dozier

...The secretary’s examples of Western heroism were the Spartans at Thermopylae and the philosopher Socrates, both of whom, he said, illustrate the “Western” willingness to “pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.” But the Spartan militarism that Rubio so admires came to define the city state’s culture only because they had no choice but to devote all state resources to maintaining an army sufficient to suppress the revolts of the massive number of enslaved fellow Greeks upon whom the Spartan economy depended. And the most plausible explanation for why Socrates was executed is that he had been an intellectual mentor to several of the men who ruled Athens as a violent, dictatorial junta in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war; it was Socrates’ student Plato, who devoted his talent to sanitizing the political reputation of his teacher by painting him as a courageous free-thinker. 

And with that preview done and dusted, what else was there to contemplate this day?

The pond feared that, by eliminating all the basest of the reptile loons, it had arrived at a blank canvas, but huzzah, old faithful war horse and rogue biddy Dame Groan hovered into view to warn that we'll all be rooned ...

The header: Judith Sloan
A workable gas reservation policy? I think not

Hear the clarion call of the bot: Listen to this article
4 min

The caption for the frankly terrible opening illustration: Australia's oil and gas infrastructure as the lifeblood of the nation's economy. Sources: iStock. Artwork: Frank Ling

The plea for the mighty tech bro G: Make us preferred on Google

There will be a few wimps who will say that they've read all this before, but remember, it's not just the art of endless visual representations, there must also be endless text recylings.

Dame Groan groaning about gas and renewables is an eternal, never ending classic ...

There are legitimate grounds for a government imposing a gas reservation policy as long as it’s declared before investments are made. Those risking their money can assess whether to proceed based on the requirement that a certain percentage of output must be reserved for domestic use.
But that is not what the Albanese government has in mind. It wants to impose conditions on the big gas exporters to reserve 20 per cent of their output to be available for domestic use. In this way, the domestic market can be somewhat oversupplied – a figure of 110 per cent is mentioned – thereby creating downward pressure on domestic gas prices.
Bear in mind here there is not one domestic gas market in Australia and there are major constraints because of the lack of pipeline connection. And why would Western Australia want to participate because it has its own scheme? It also doesn’t bear thinking how the scheme would work in the Northern Territory because there are no substantial case users there.
The whole idea reminds me of that famous quote from Friedrich Hayek: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
Throw in women and I’m fully on board.

It's part of the reptile lexicon to throw in dire examples of renewables, with dastardly solar the thumb image for this AV distraction ...

Next video thumbnail
Australia would be ‘entirely reliant’ on renewables if Albanese government got its way
The Samuel Griffith Society Executive Director Mia Schlicht says Australia’s energy system would be “entirely reliant” on wind and solar if the Albanese government got its way.

Any mention of renewables always sends Dame Groan deep into the deep end of the "we're all rooned" pool ...

Let’s be clear here: the Albanese government’s previous attempt to regulate domestic gas prices when they soared after the outbreak of the Ukraine war was a complete disaster. Some misguided Treasury officials thought it was possible to control both price and quantity, suggesting that they should never have passed their economics degrees.
The end result was exemption after exemption, with domestic gas prices remaining high. Good one Jim, good one Chris.
Let’s be clear on another matter: the coal-seam gas fields in Queensland would never have been developed were it not for meeting export demand. It’s all very well to try to turn this around and expect those LNG exporters to meet domestic needs, but if that had been the case in the first place, the investments, certainly the extent of them, would probably never have occurred.
Recall also that the Rudd/Gillard government contemplated introducing a reservation scheme at that time and rejected it.

Is there anything that will appease here? Sure, an image celebrating sweet, dinkum, virginal, completely clean and innocent Oz coal A coal seam gas well head in the Surat Basin, Queensland.

At this point some cynic might attempt a Graham Readfearn billy goat butt ...

Heretics!

Dame Groan wasn't having any of that sort of carry on ... she was all in on gassing the planet, as you'd expect from a Santos devotee ...

It’s worth noting here the complete hypocrisy of some of the states, particularly Victoria and NSW, in this policy space. Their governments complain about high gas prices but have done everything in their power to block new gas developments.
The Victorian government even went to the trouble of inserting a “no fracking’ provision in its constitution – I ask you? This was done in the full knowledge that the once ample gas supplies in Bass Strait were running out. NSW produces no domestic gas at all and yet it has impeded the development of the gas project at Narrabri at every step of the way – both Coalition and Labor governments.
In fact, various plans to import gas into Victoria and NSW are reasonably developed. The costs would be horrendous, but supply might be able to be guaranteed.
So, what should we make of Resources Minister Madeleine King’s presentation to the National Press Club? It was easy to gain the impression she didn’t much want to talk about the gas reservation policy, preferring to drone on about the importance of resources, particularly critical minerals.

Cue the villainess herself ... Madeleine King addresses the National Press Club in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

Her presence made Dame Groan very mad ...there was no way that renewables should be allowed in country, not when it and the planet could be gassed.

She quickly skated over the details of the now tabled reservation legislation, pointing to the watered-down ministerial discretion. She also mentioned eliminating loopholes and the potential for gaming – read my lips, the bureaucrats would have no idea about this stuff.
The key danger is that the intervention will drive domestic prices below the long-run marginal cost of new gas projects. Add in the large element of uncertainty and it’s entirely possible that investment in local gas projects will simply dry up. Of course, there are plenty of activists on the Left who would be happy with this outcome.
Any short-run relief in terms of gas prices would very quickly be followed by much higher prices. While King regards gas as vital to Australia’s energy future, including for the processing of critical minerals and firming the electricity grid, her words could easily turn out to be hollow.
The scheme doesn’t come into play until 2028, but the disincentive to invest has already started. The truth is that Australia has oodles of gas; it’s just that it’s in the ground. It may stay there for many years, if not decades. Talk about shooting ourselves in the foot.

Shooting ourselves in the foot? Maybe ...

Never mind, the hive mind was right behind Dame Groan ... except for one heretic ...

And as this is the penultimate post for a time, the pond thought it would drop in on the lizard Oz editorialist for a last whiff of what's behind the hive mind ...

Achieve a two state solution while Benji is all in on a greater Israel from the river to the sea? Good luck with that, as the ethnic cleansing continues apace.

And there was this effort, a rousing reminder of the Dame Groan reptile way ...

And with that the pond will be up tomorrow for a final post, hopefully then returning in goodly time for ongoing reptile disasters, including the pending US election mid-terms, because what could possibly go wrong?

That's cruel ...

Finally a reminder of one of the cankers at the core ... Alex Gibney says Universal ‘wavered’ over releasing Elon Musk documentary
The revelation comes after the four-hour film’s Venice premiere drew a string of criticisms and insults from the founder of SpaceXAI

In which the bromancer goes rabid and bites the mad king, while Dame Slap stays rabid and savages Malware ...

 

This day the lizard Oz jihad on Jimbo cranked up another notch (it's way beyond eleven):

SIGNATURE SPEECH
‘We shouldn’t turn on fellow Aussies,’ says Chalmers but PM undermines Jim
The Treasurer warned left-wing activists not to campaign against One Nation voters from a position of ‘smug moral superiority’, but an Anthony Albanese anecdote undermined his Treasurer.
By Greg Brown

Talk about an easy target for a Brownie bushwhacking...

Jim Chalmers has warned left-wing activists not to campaign against One Nation from a position of “smug moral superiority”, declaring his budget of tax hikes was needed to stem the voter drift to the “far right” as it showed Labor was up-ending the status quo.
Declaring his lifetime in the battler suburb of Logan meant he “carried with me” a “genuine respect and understanding”, the Treasurer said supporters were “mourning a loss of control” and treated “feelings … as real as facts” but counselled that Labor “shouldn’t turn on them”.
The significant speech was delivered minutes before Anthony Albanese publicly admitted to rolling his Treasurer and personally intervening to extend the deadline for businesses to pay their tax bills via credit card.

And so on, and moving quickly along to avoid the sight of roadkill, and with the reptiles having spent the last week pumping up the Josh volume (it was way beyond eleven), it was left to Geoff to chamber a round at him ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
Frydenberg to come riding back? Hold your horses
Is Josh Frydenberg back in federal politics? It’s not a done deal yet in the former Liberal treasurer’s mind
Josh Frydenberg is expected to poll and focus group every nook and cranny across Kew, Hawthorn and Camberwell before deciding to run against his Teal nemesis Monique Ryan in 2028.

Who cares, who gives a FF? Is he attempting some modern version of a vacillating Hamlet?

Beyond the valley of the pallid, the insipid, the ineffectual and the weak-kneed, while over on the extreme far right, the MAGA cap-donning Dame Slap was conducting her own personal jihad against Malware...

The pond just had to savour that snap of a preening Malware, jostling up against a man who's out of his depth ...

As for the actual content, thank the long absent lord for the intermittent archive ...

The ‘broad church’ is in ruins. What now for the Libs?
One simple thing would be to expel Malcolm Turnbull from the party. If he wants to play martyr, let him. It can’t be any worse than it is right now.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

As soon as a scribbler insists on "MUST", the pond knows that it must ignore the blather, but the pond is prepared to go as far as a teaser trailer ...

Sigh, not the "climate ideology" again, said by a scribbler without a 'science' bone in her denialist body.

The pond had not the slightest interest in defending Malware, nor in this jihad against him, nor the blinkered bigotry involved in it ... but, as always, Dame Slap managed an astonishing display of projection ...

That screen cap missed the barking mad nub of it ...

Liberals took leadership roles championing the voice was a betrayal of the most basic tenet for conservatives: that every human being must be treated equally under our founding document, the Constitution.
If you didn’t support the dogma on net zero, you were treated as a philistine. If you didn’t agree with the voice, you were likely labelled a racist.
This is how the left treats freedom of speech – agree with it, or it will shame you into silence or submission.
The complete surrender of the Liberal Party on traditional centre-right cultural issues was so abject that some Liberals – even former prime ministers – adopted a deliberate strategy.
Don’t talk about the culture wars, they said. Instead, discussing immigration became racist, expressing gender-critical views was hateful and questioning DEI was straight-out oppression.
The problem for the Liberal Party is its left flank. Can we please stop calling them “moderates”; there is nothing moderate about them. More comfortable shuffling around the left ecosystem of Labor-Green-teals, they cannot avoid responsibility for the cultural and economic carnage under way in this country.

Join with Dame Slap and go further right, beefy boofhead, and soon too you'll be donning a MAGA cap and surrounded by shadowy figures ...

Luckily the bromancer was on hand to save the pond from the madness ...

Watching him cope with what Faux Noise has bequeathed to the world should become a national sport, as the reptiles gave him a big splash...

The reptiles' artwork is achieving new levels of AI brilliance on a daily basis ...

The header: By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor
Donald Trump’s making the worst decisions of his US presidency

The pleasure of a bot voice read: Listen to this article
5 min

Huzzah, a return of Frank with his usual frankly feeble collage, with a meaning and significance impossible to decipher: Donald Trump stands defiant amid swirling symbols of conflict. Pictures: iStock. Artwork: Frank Ling

The desperate cry from behind the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

Usually the bromancer tries a both siderist tack. You know, King Donald has done some good things, but some of his decisions have been mildly unfortunate.

Not so this day. The bromancer was beside himself, quivering with indignation, though the sight of a jelly thinking it had a spine might unnerve some...

Under the twin pressures of looming mid-term congressional elections, and the physical and intellectual decline which almost always begins to afflict men in their ninth decade, Donald Trump has in the last few days made the worst decisions of his presidency, if not his entire life.
One of the worst things Trump has ever done as president is to reverse course on Russia and Ukraine and reward Vladimir Putin for nearly five years of murderous aggression against Ukraine.
Trump has suspended US sanctions against Russia so that it can sell several hundred thousand barrels of diesel to the US and other parties. This suggests how desperate Trump is politically. He says this will reduce US fuel prices. In fact the Russian supplies are probably not big enough to affect US retail prices, certainly not before the mid-terms on November 3. Trump desperately wanted something to announce.
Consider the strategic cost of the incoherence of US policy and the shocking strategic betrayal of Ukraine. Barely five minutes ago Washington was going to levy punitive sanctions against India for buying Russian oil and thereby contributing to Moscow’s war effort.
Now that Trump needs the fuel, all that’s thrown in the trash can.
Not to mention that this is a morally indefensible and contemptible way for the US to treat its ally, Ukraine.

Not before time there came an AV distraction ...

Next video thumbnail
Trump fumes over the ‘ridiculous’ war as Putin and Zelensky ‘don’t know how to make a deal’
US President Donald Trump expresses frustration against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky for ‘not knowing how to make a deal’ over the ongoing war. “Last month, they lost 32,000 people mostly soldiers … it’s ridiculous that war,” Mr Trump said. “I settled eight wars … I thought this would be one of the easier ones but it’s not. “We’re going to get that deal done.”

The bromancer carried on ranting ...

Russia invaded Ukraine without any cause or justification. This is black and white. Ukraine fought back heroically and received help from the US and Europe. An American leader with one scrap of decency would help raise the cost of Moscow’s aggression and persuade it to agree a ceasefire.
Trump’s only effort to exert leverage, instead, is against Ukraine.
Trump wants Ukraine to give up territory within the Donbas, and beyond, which Moscow has been unable to take by military force. Putin has apparently told Trump that if Ukraine does that, he’ll end the war.
But this would leave Ukraine gravely at risk strategically, behind not only reduced but less defensible borders, and open to subsequent Russian invasion after the Kremlin has a few years to recover and digest its winnings.
The single most repellent factor in Trump’s political persona is his sycophancy towards powerful dictators – Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un. He’ll act against weak dictators like Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and he thought he could get a quick victory in Iran. But strong man dictators get nothing but servile deference from Trump, interspersed with very occasional bouts of fatuous bluster.
Perhaps nothing more fully indicates his increasingly erratic mixture of hubris, ego, miscalculation and personalised magical thinking than Trump announcing that Russia and Ukraine had agreed on a ceasefire of strikes against each others’ energy infrastructure.
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky had no warning of such an announcement. If Putin made some kind of nod to Trump in a private telephone conversation, the Russians nonetheless showed the contempt in which he holds Trump by bombing Ukrainian energy targets hours after Trump’s announcement.
Putin humiliated Trump, so naturally Trump lashed out at Zelensky. Trump demanded Zelensky be replaced as president, a demand previously made only by Putin. Trump’s officials threatened to refuse even to allow European governments to buy US weapons for Ukraine, and to cut off intelligence from Ukraine.

Say what? If Putin made some kind of nod to Trump in a private telephone conversation...

WTF?

Still pandering? Still unable to cope? 

He lied, he made it up, he's in the grip of sundowning dementia ...

"Well, they agreed. You know why? ... 'I said you agree'" 

He was talking to himself in the wee witching hours, while between Truth Social posts.

Cue a snap of the demented king ...Trump wants Ukraine to give up territory within the Donbas, and beyond, which Moscow has been unable to take by military force. Picture: AFP

All the same, the bromancer's turning continued in a most satisfying way ...

Trump is intimidating US allies, fawning over US enemies. It’s ugly and counter-productive.
This is Trump behaving much worse than in his first term – indeed undoing allied co-operation projects he prosecuted in his first term – much worse even than in the first 18 months of this term. Can Trump no longer handle pressure? Is frustration with the way the world refuses to co-operate with his delusions now leading him into policy by wild temper tantrum?
These are gravely worrying times for US allies, which should nonetheless keep the alliance structures in place in the hope that Trump settles down, and alliance mechanisms can be fully revived after Trump’s gone.
But in some ways the most grotesque Trump move in recent days was allowing Pete Hegseth, who has no business being US Defence Secretary, to announce that Washington would livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, convicted of a terrorist mass shooting at a US military base in 2009.
Australians, most Western citizens, no longer support the death penalty. However, it has wide support in the US; 27 US states still practice it. Bill Clinton authorised executions when as Arkansas governor.
However, to conduct an execution publicly is immoral and profoundly offensive. It will make the executed terrorist a hero among jihadists everywhere and provide them with priceless propaganda footage. It also gravely coarsens American life. And it’s a fundamental abuse of human rights.
Even a prisoner to be executed is a human being and deserves to have his human dignity respected. Civilised societies like the US do not, as a matter of policy, taunt, torture and publicly humiliate prisoners. This is just sick, a graver offence to civilised values than anything Trump has come up with previously.
If this is what the next two years of Trump look like, we’re entering dark times.

"Entering", bromancer? 

It's been dark times these past ten years, thanks to you bloody Murdochians ... but as a result of the bromancer's turning, the hive mind began to show a dangerous tendency towards splitting and schism ...

The pond almost fainted when QLA replied to Ian with a dire heretical answer: "Yes"!

What a relief to see a few of the hive mind stayed solid, even as it came to this in the lizard Oz. 

Relax Ian, settle back for a fun reversion to Roman times:

What else?

Well there was Nick, but the pond is always inclined to think he should get nicked...

The Greens denounce US-style ‘imperialism’… then embrace it
They need the kind of politics capable of speaking to people outside activist group chats.
By Nick Dyrenfurth
Contributor

It was just the usual serve of Zionism, servicing the needs of the Australian Daily Zionist News, and a reminder of how John Curtin must be revolving in his grave at a furious pace ...

Oh and the reptiles found space for Jane Hume, but she would say this, wouldn't she?

Labor’s climate red tape is a killer for small business
Australia’s businesses should be building our prosperity, not buried in paperwork.
By Jane Hume
Contributor

Climate change? Climate science? The impact of the changing climate on all forms of business, long, short, and tall?

Go whistle at the wind ...

And while embracing AI and bots and importuning Google to pay attention, the reptiles felt brave enough to serve up a little AI bashing, apparently unaware that refusing to use "SI" made them the enemy of the people ...

I’ve worked in AI for years. The tech giants are taking us for a ride
What the government is proposing is extremely unpopular, with virtually no supporters but the AI companies themselves.
By Ed Newton-Rex

There was an infallible Pope for that ...

Eric was also briefly over on the extreme far right, a rare concession to the lizard Oz's business coverage ...

‘Shotgun wedding’: Inside the ASX’s bitter biotech stand-off
Two companies united by the goal of saving lives are at war with each other in an ASX power struggle involving billionaires, a fund manager kingmaker and a mystery stakeholder.
By Eric Johnston
Associate Editor

The pond rushed through that mob, but the least the pond can do is reassure the MAGA-fied lizard Oz hive mind that some things were still normal, in their usual abnormal way ...

Know who else isn't a member? Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and North Korea, fine company for the reptiles ...

And with that noted, and as the pond will shortly be signing off as it makes a move to Pixie Paddocks (aka Fairy Meadowns), the pond wanted to save a little space in order to point of a few Fintan O'Toole moments.

The pond has always had a soft spot for Fintan O'Toole in the NYRB, a way to recover some brain cells after hard days hitting the lizard Oz books.

Gulliver’s Warning
Like Gulliver in Lilliput, “greatness” in the political realm depends on the existence of a group deemed puny or weak. (*intermittent archive link)

In celebrating one of the pond's favourite books, Fintan also managed to put in the boot ...

...The reactionary politics of today is a politics of the sublime—pain invoked, pain distanced, pain rendered politically delightful. This was true of Brexit, which depended on invoking an idea of Britain (in fact a free and prosperous country) as enslaved and oppressed by the European Union. And it is true of Trump. Before him American political rhetoric (including conservative rhetoric) had a grammar of uplift—the American Dream, Kennedy’s New Frontier, Reagan’s Morning in America, Obama’s arc of history bending toward justice. But Trump, from the beginning of his campaign in 2015, went for the full sublime. He created a vision of America as a hellhole—what he called in his first inaugural address “American carnage.” He imagined it for his fans as a country on the verge of obliteration. But he also presented, of course, a dramatic denouement: the appearance of what Gulliver called “the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World” to transform this abjection into its opposite—greatness.

And he was in fine form when the hard copy of the magazine arrived in the letterbox early this week ...

Devils in America
The lessons that Donald Trump learned from Roy Cohn—lie, cheat, engage in unlimited corruption—now shape official government policy in the US. (*intermittent archive link)

The book reviewed:

American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump
by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark
Scribner, 509 pp., $32.00

Fintan provided a timely reminder that the rot in American politics goes way back to the 1950s, and to the deeply closeted Roy Cohn (shades of the parrot),, the mad king's McCarthyist mentor:

...In 2017 Trump famously asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” The answer stares at him from the mirror: he is his own Roy Cohn. Though the influence of his lawyer and fixer on the young Trump is common knowledge, not the least of the virtues of Bird’s punchy, racy, and appropriately nauseating new biography is the renewed force it gives to this cliché. There is something eerie about the thoroughness of Trump’s mimicry of Cohn’s way of dealing with the world: lie relentlessly, refuse to pay small bills, respond to all criticism with smears and threats, claim all defeats as triumphs, sue everybody all the time, weaponize the law and, when you can, the entire justice system, learn from the Mafia, use the phone to avoid leaving a paper trail, always present your highly privileged self as a victim of the elites, divide the world into allies to be used and enemies to be abused, into the winners who must be flattered and the losers who are there to be exploited in every imaginable way.
Trump’s language is Cohn’s language (always preface a big lie with “if you wanna know the truth”) and so is his whole style of public speaking—Cohn taught him to ad lib everything. Above all, Trump learned one very big thing from Cohn: that the veneer of morality in the American upper class is very thin. Cohn proved conclusively that there is no limit to its tolerance for corruption. Trump got that message—and so did Jeffrey Epstein.

These were just a few of the delicacies served up ...

...Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the screenplay for The Apprentice, makes Cohn a full-on deconstructionist who tells the young Trump that “there is no right and wrong. There is no morality. There is no Truth with a capital T. It’s a construct. It’s a fiction. It’s manmade…. You create your own reality.” And, one might add, your own unreality. More than anything else, Cohn was a swindler, and like all good con men he knew how to disappear from the domain of hard facts. Bird writes that “he left behind no private papers, not even an archive of his legal career. He had destroyed just about everything.”

...Just as Cohn defied the distinctions between reality and unreality and between life and death, he also broke down the divisions between fame and infamy. He grasped with remarkable clarity the truth that American celebrity has no moral content. When Trump claimed in the 2005 pussygate tapes that “when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything,” he was merely stating the facts as Cohn had shown them to be. Cohn made himself, first and foremost, a star. After that, none of his crimes ever really mattered, except in the sense that notoriety was even more valuable than adulation.

...For the rich and famous, Cohn thus combined the magnetic attractions of both obscenity and obscurity. Everyone knew at some level that he was a very nasty piece of work but everyone believed that, like some black magician, he was able to command the forces of darkness. It was always better to have Satan in your corner—even if the devil was as likely to defraud you as to help you.
And “everyone” means an astonishing range of the rich and famous: from the Catholic archdiocese of New York (Cohn was close to Cardinal Francis Spellman and his successor, Cardinal Terence Cooke) to Mafia hoodlums like “Fat Tony” Salerno and Carmine Galante; from his great friend Si Newhouse, the owner of Condé Nast, to Bianca Jagger (whose divorce from Mick he handled); from Rupert Murdoch to Estée Lauder, from the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to the owners of Studio 54, the nightclub at which he himself was a fixture. Nancy Reagan called him often from the White House because he could supply a fix of her favorite drug: gossip. Cohn became the connective tissue of New York society: at his parties Andy Warhol could meet Trump (whom he called “really good-looking…. He’s a butch guy”) or Chuck Schumer.

And this was the closer ...

...The gay community in Provincetown was disgusted by the sight of Cohn with underage boys on his yacht. Disturbingly, Bird, ignoring the dynamics of sex trafficking, refers to these children as “hustlers,” a term he would surely not apply to Epstein’s victims. But he does give a shocking account of the experiences of Richard Kerr, who from the age of eight was incarcerated in the notorious Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast, which was run by pedophiles with alleged links to British intelligence. Kerr says that when he was sixteen he was trafficked to have sex with Cohn in Venice.
The account is entirely credible, but it will fall back into the category of rumor, gossip, innuendo. Even if it is true, how could the rich and famous and the righteous Republicans for whom Cohn is still a patriotic hero possibly have known such things? For them, it was enough to know that Cohn’s unscrupulous brutality was at their service. In everything he did, he confirmed for them the only truth they ever really wanted to know: that, in the end, there is only power. In his all-inclusive depravity, he liberated them from the nagging burdens of morality. A world in which Cohn could thrive was a world in which truth and justice were indeed mere constructs.
Bird’s horrifying biography makes the ultimate political triumph of this malevolence seem far less surprising. In Angels in America, Kushner has Cohn ascend, after his crucifixion, to heaven and then return “dressed in a fabulous floor-length black velvet robe de chambre.” He must surely now come down from wherever he is and enter the President’s Bedroom on the second floor of the White House, in the early hours when the Truth Social posts have stopped, to sit quietly by the bed and relish his vindication. He is the founding father of the rotten republic.

And that's just the beginnings of why the Unites States doesn't want the scrutiny of an international court, but does want to stage public executions ...

The pond revisited that movie recently, and decided it was inclined to be tortured and overwrought, but with some tidy performances ...

And now, as talk of public executions is all the go, and stonings in the square is the thing du jour in federal parliament (well played Liberal MP Angie Bell), why not go the full Old Testament hog?