Apropos of the reptiles no longer being interesting, their range narrowing, their contributors ranging from the dull to the perverse, but without the excitement afforded by a decent kink ...
Yes, I appreciate that things are not easy for you. Having the likes of Sky News and The Australian newspaper constantly criticise you and feed you and your team a steady diet of misguided advice cannot be easy. But you mustn’t let this get you down because barely anyone listens to them any more. (Graudian)
Well yes, though perforce the pond hears the distant hum of the hive mind on a daily basis...
These days, sadly or happily, as the case may be, it's just a steady, repetitive drone... but now it's on to the misguided advice of the day, though perhaps "misguided" is too kind a word for relentless obfuscation, distortion and disinformation.
And the pond immediately had to ask, is cricket the last refuge of the irrelevant scoundrel?
As if the pond would bother to provide even archive links to those idle distractions. Take your talk of sandpapergate and shove it where the Sauron sun don't shine...
Meanwhile, in another place, the reptiles decided to take an entirely different tack ...
No way that the hive mind could cope any of that ...
The entire point of the hive mind is to stay abuzz in the hive.
Meanwhile, down below tales of the once upon a time flanneled fools, climate was all the go ...and having ignored COP30, suddenly the reptiles were deeply anxious about COP31:
Have at it in an archive way if anyone wants to add to Friday boredom and ennui ...
Keystone COP Chris Bowen sets off on a global power trip
Chris Bowen to serve as COP31 president after Australia cedes hosting rights to Turkey
Chris Bowen will lead UN climate talks while managing Australia’s energy crisis, as the government abandons its bid to host COP31 in Adelaide.
By Ben Packham and Geoff Chambers
Forget soaring bills, meet our Minister for UN Summits
Chris Bowen’s unprecedented dual role as UN climate summit president threatens to derail Labor’s promise to lower power bills and hit emissions targets.
Fire forces evacuation at COP30 climate talks
Fire forces panicked evacuation at United Nations climate talks in Brazil
Panicked delegates fled a UN climate conference in Brazil after fire broke out in a pavilion, disrupting crucial negotiations with just one day remaining.
by AFP and AP
Amazingly, after this flurry of floozies, the reptiles still kept at their latest jihad as a way of reminding the world why the rag had become unreadable and irrelevant.
This day Dame Slap took another break and left her loyal minions in charge of proceedings...
Judge blasts Albanese over Higgins ‘deflection’
Judge pans Anthony Albanese over Higgins’ case ‘deflection’
Former Supreme Court judge says Anthony Albanese appears unable to distinguish between Brittany Higgins’ rape and discredited claims of a political cover-up.
by Paul Garvey and Sarah Ison
Remarkably the reptiles offered a new category of PREMIUM ... as if this aged jihad was worth some kind of PREMIUM ...
Reynolds breaks her silence: ‘The truth is now binding’ after five-year battle
It turned out that what this meant was that the reptiles had reverted to a non-archival harder form of paywall, but just the tag confirmed to the pond that it was part of a deep desire to make the rag unreadable and irrelevant ...
Linda Reynolds reflects on her five-year fight to clear her name, saying recent court rulings have finally confirmed the truth. She urges the Albanese government, and especially the Attorney-General, to admit mistakes and make things right.
Nah, boring as batsh*t (*blogger bot approved), but at least it was a classic distraction, what with another tree having fallen in the NSW Liberal woods ...
Over on the extreme far right, a long forgotten ghost crying to women to have a a baby for him, turned up in the form of the ghastly Petey boy ...
Unless we push for growth, average real wages will decline
In 2025, real wage levels are at the level they were back in 2012. No wonder people feel they can’t get ahead – no real wage increase in a decade and more of what they get is taken away in tax.
By Peter Costello
Never had the ticker, but it's good to have him come out of his retirement home and feed some of his ancient, aged pap to the hive mind.
To be fair, as the pond always is, it's a tribute to the desire to make the rag unreadable and irrelevant.
Meanwhile, the anonymous Mocker confirmed once again that the most likely culprit for this phoney form of anon facadism was the dog botherer ...
Benny Hill said it best about the BBC in a clever depiction of the progressive mindset at its most insufferable – smug, insulated, driven by animus, and refusing to entertain different views.
By The Mocker
Just the opening anecdote will suffice ...
In a memorable skit, the late British comedian plays a sanctimonious television journalist on assignment outside the locked gates of a country estate.
“I hate rich people,” an immaculately coiffed Hill tells his fawning producer as he gestures towards the property.
“I believe in a fairer distribution of wealth. That’s why I’m a socialist, you see.”
As Hill outlines his vision of realising economic justice for the impoverished, an old tramp asks him for a cup of tea.
“P*ss off,” says Hill. (*blogger bot approved)
It was a clever depiction of the progressive mindset at its most insufferable – smug, insulated, driven by animus, and refusing to entertain.
P*ss off (*blogger bot approved) is clever, neigh witty? Suddenly Tamworth seemed the urbane centre of a sophisticated universe
And what did the BBC have to say about this?
...many forget that Benny Hill first forged his TV career with a long stint at the BBC, where The Benny Hill Show ran on and off for an amazing 13 years from 1955-1968.
So it's just p*ssing from inside the tent ... (*blogger bot approved).
Enough of the unreadable and irrelevant, time for a deep dive with Killer of the IPA ...
The header: We absurdly turn blind eye to the nuclear energy future that is so obvious, Lucas Heights stands alone, despite the enormous economic and environmental benefits a small civilian nuclear sector would bring.
The caption for all creatures great and small, and please no screen caps of that three eyed fish in The Simpsons: People fish near the towering Dukovany nuclear power plant in Dukovany, Czech Republic. (Photo: Petr David Josek/AP.)
Killer remained deeply infatuated by Milei and never mind that $20 billion bail out ...
For news of that you have to turn to the WSJ ...(*archive link)
A taster ...
And with that unpleasant tale of a grifter, chainsaw in hand, but always with an insatiable desire for cash in the paw noted, it's on with Killer of the IPA ...
Much of that malaise stemmed from the influential rule of Juan Perón, whose unique Latin fusion of socialism and fascism – Peronism – scarred Argentina’s development for generations.
But, in fairness, Perón did leave one enduring achievement: he launched a nuclear industry in 1950 that still provides safe, cheap, reliable electricity, and even supports highly sophisticated technology exports Australia can only dream of matching.
Indeed, it was an Argentinian company that built Australia’s only nuclear reactor – the Lucas Heights research reactor – in the mid-2000s, at a cost of about $400m. Unfortunately, that remains our only one, despite the enormous economic and environmental benefits a small civilian nuclear sector would bring. Instead, Australia has settled for one of the most embarrassing and fact-free nuclear debates in the developed world.
Now the pond doesn't have to spend any time noting the way that Killer - and indeed the IPA - have turned from straightforward denialism to a cannier form of nuking the country to save the planet, not that it needed saving because climate change is a religious cult indulged in by fanatical zealots.
It's enough to note the distractions featuring that chainsaw grifter ... Newsweek Senior Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer reacts to Javier Milei’s win in Argentina’s midterm elections. “South America is a mess with the seeming exception of Argentina, which is really good news,” Mr Hammer told Sky News Digital Presenter Gabriella Power. “Milei has been able to achieve a lot in a very short period of time.”
Speaking of the IPA, Wilcox managed to bring together those two IPA strands - its support of coffin nails, and its current desire to nuke the country, and if not, to continue with preferred emissions (do inhale):
It turned out that Killer had been on a junket - thank the long absent lord, the IPA still seems to have a travel budget:
In June, that former Soviet republic – the world’s largest uranium exporter – selected Russia’s Rosatom to build its first domestic nuclear plant, with a second to be built by China.
Lavalle also rejects the conventional Australian wisdom that nuclear is too expensive. He argues a new medium-sized reactor of around 300MW could be built for between $1USbn to $US1.5bn ($1.541bn to $2.331bn) – an order of magnitude lower than the absurd $600bn figure the Albanese government circulated when rubbishing the Coalition’s proposal for seven reactors at the last election.
“No, it’s not extremely expensive,” he insists. “The reactors’ capital cost might be high, but operational costs are very low if you take into account that it will be running for 40 or more years.”
The reptiles slipped in a snap of a sight that always pleases them, It was an Argentinian company that built Australia’s only nuclear reactor – the Lucas Heights research reactor – in the mid-2000s, at a cost of about $400m. Picture Thomas Lisson.
Would you want to buy a plant from this mob, deeply in hock to the IMF?
Killer would, what with the IPA brand of Killernomics being keen to nuke the country ...
“Refurbishment is a very good deal,” Lavalle says. “It’s about a third of the cost of a new reactor.”
New large reactors, he adds, can be built for about $US4000 per kW. “At that level they are in the same range as wind and solar – but nuclear produces energy even without wind and through the night.”
This is precisely what Australia’s beloved Levelised Cost of Energy comparisons omit: wind and solar only work about a third of the time, and require massively expensive transmission expansions and batteries that remain laughably inefficient and costly.
Argentina is a reminder of how ideological – and frankly unserious – Australia’s energy policy has become, even putting Labor’s three-eyed fish antinuclear campaign aside. As a global nuclear revival accelerates, driven by surging demand for airconditioning in developing nations, rising electric vehicle loads in rich ones, and the explosion of AI data centres, Australia is positioning itself as an irrelevant outlier.
Then came another snap designed to warm the cockles of the hive mind heart: Cooling towers of the Dukovany nuclear power plant are seen in Dukovany, Czech Republic. Picture: AP /Petr David Josek
Oh it was a feast of towers ...
The Coalition has torn itself apart over net-zero emissions targets when more populous nations, including the US and Argentina, clearly do not care. One of Argentina’s assistant economic ministers, Luis Lucero, told me he didn’t know his country’s emissions target – and, mercifully, didn’t appear remotely concerned. (For the record, it’s a 21 per cent cut from 2007 levels by 2030, far easier than Australia’s 43 per cent cut from 2005 levels.)
Then came another towering distraction, featuring the ever denialist dog botherer, Global Nuclear Security Partners Australia Managing Director Jasmin Diab discusses Australia's stance on nuclear energy, despite being one of the world's largest uranium exporters. “We are a nuclear nation,” Ms Diab told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “We also produce a lot of the southern hemisphere's nuclear medicine isotopes. “Yet we are not heavily involved in the biggest nuclear industry exhibition globally.”
Now it's not for the pond to rabbit on about Killernomics and the IPA desire to nuke the country, what with them not being content with best efforts to smoke the country to death.
That's best left to others; all the pond wants to do is observe Killer, for once free of masks and Covid, but still deep in his devotion to chainsaws ...
Despite superb solar potential in the Andes and world-class wind in Patagonia, Argentina has sensibly ignored the fading ideological obsession with intermittent energy. The idea of subsidising unreliable power is laughable for a government determined to run fiscal surpluses. Compare that to Australia’s vast, opaque off-budget Capacity Investment Scheme, funnelling billions into technologies that require the wind to blow and the sun to shine.
In the early 1970s prime minister Billy McMahon choked off what might have become a domestic nuclear power industry by cancelling the Jervis Bay plant proposed by his predecessor, John Gorton. It’s not too late to try again. With a better-quality public debate inspired by the verifiable facts in Argentina and elsewhere, it might even be popular. More than 70 per cent of Kazakhstanis backed nuclear power in a referendum last year.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.
We must reverse Billy McMahon! It's never too late to do an IPA!
Killernomics at its finest, and deserving of an infallible Pope...
And so to one of the pond's few remaining treats, the almost unreabable, reliably pompous and portentous musings of Our Henry.
The pond uses the affectionate term while aware that it was as ancient as the nineteenth century, what with it having appeared in The Diary of a Nobody way back when, in the context of Mr Pooter's party ...
...Mr. Nackles, Mr. Sprice-Hogg and his four daughters came; so did Franching, and one or two of Lupin’s new friends, members of the “Holloway Comedians.” Some of these seemed rather theatrical in their manner, especially one, who was posing all the evening, and leant on our little round table and cracked it. Lupin called him “our Henry,” and said he was “our lead at the H.C.’s,” and was quite as good in that department as Harry Mutlar was as the low-comedy merchant. All this is Greek to me.
Some might say that Our Henry is all Herodotus or all Aristotle to them ... but what's the bet the ancient Greeks will get at least a mention?
The header: Phillip Adams attacks me, but is trying to take spotlight off the issue; Phillip Adams should now do what intellectual honesty requires: address the arguments or apologise for his appalling tweets.
The caption for the image, which looks appallingly like it has been colourised, an artificial way of making if seem more "now", but which in its own way is a deep distortion and betrayal of any historical authenticity: A group of Jewish civilians being held at gunpoint by German SS troops after being forced out of a bunker in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. Picture: Ullstein Bild via Getty Images
It turns out this week that Our Henry was still intent on his jihad with the token hive mind leftie, aka sell out advertising man. so the pond should provide an archive link to Our Henry so that anyone wanting to follow the links can do so ...
You see, as part of the insufferable sight of old fogeys still going hard at each other, a little pre-history is required.
Our Henry's opening flourish ...
... referenced some earlier history ...
Not anti-Semitic to deplore Benjamin Netanyahu ‘overkill’ in Gaza
The pond can't quote them at length but must acknowledge the depth and nature of this jihad ...
The fact is that of the roughly 450,000 Jews herded into the Warsaw Ghetto, barely 30,000 survived. At least 80,000 – not 7000 – died in the Ghetto itself, and another 340,000 were murdered during the successive deportations or in the death camps.
As for Adams’s claim that Israel’s conduct in Gaza was even more appalling than that of the Nazis, it abandons all reason by equating the Germans’ coldly planned extermination of utterly defenceless men, women and children with the civilian casualties of a brutal urban war waged against an enemy that systematically uses its own population as human shields.
Yet Adams, in what he presents as his response, did not address a single one of those contentions. Instead, he cast himself as the target of an ad hominem attack – an assault on his character rather than a challenge to his statements.
You see? No need to contemplate what has actually been going down in Gaza and the West Bank. Just offer furious, righteous indignation, preferably dressed up with ancient fatuities ...
The reptiles decided to run a snap of the wretched one, and the pond has to confess to its shame that it once had relatives who lived in Gundy, Broadcaster and journalist Phillip Adams at his country estate in Gundy, in the NSW Hunter Valley. Picture: Max Mason-Hubers / The Australian
Our Henry was relentless, but of course the main point is to wait for the old blowhard to throw in some classical references, as if that form of camouflage constituted an argument:
The trick has its own kind of low cunning. In pretending to repel an unjustified ad hominem smear, its practitioners launch one themselves, impugning both their critics’ logic and their integrity while posturing as the wronged party.
But the reason the ploy is now ubiquitous is not merely that it is a cheap “get-out-of-jail” card; it endures because it perfectly mirrors the ethos gutting serious debate on issues ranging from Gaza to Indigenous policy, multiculturalism and transgender rights.
That ethos spurns the politics of reason in favour of the politics of position. Every disagreement is reimagined as a confrontation between self-proclaimed victims – whose asserted victimhood confers moral superiority – and morally tainted perpetrators. Arguments no longer concern propositions but identities; disputes cease to be disagreements and become existential struggles.
We saw that logic on full display only days ago in the proceedings pitting Greens deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi against Pauline Hanson, where Senator Faruqi’s barrister, Jessie Taylor, characterised Senator Hanson’s remarks not just as profoundly offensive but as an assault on Faruqi’s “whole identity”, “in which her Muslimness is integral and indivisible”. And as for Hanson herself, her conduct was, Taylor insisted, far worse than a momentary lapse or everyday political mudslinging: it flowed from Hanson’s own hardwired identity, with its “ubiquitous” and “notorious” “racism”, and a “hatred and hostility towards outsiders not divided cleanly along the lines of race or religion”.
Entirely lost in these battles-to-the-death between identities is one of the Judeo-Christian tradition’s most momentous contributions: the distinction between deploring the sin and damning the sinner.
Now some will reckon that a reference to "Judeo-Xian" tradition is enough, but the pond reckons Our Henry has got way more game than that to bring to the table, but first a couple more distracting snaps, Pauline Hanson arrives at Federal Court. Photo: NewsWire/ Gaye Gerard; Mehreen Faruqi arrives at Federal Court. Photo: NewsWire/ Gaye Gerard
The opening flourish to the next gobbet reassured the pond that the hole in bucket man has still got game, what with talk of - shades of Mr Pooter - the ancient Greeks:
It is no accident that the emergence of this contention coincided – indeed, for the first time since Aristotle – with sustained efforts to distinguish valid from invalid forms of argumentation, so that the untrammelled right to debate dogmas, ideas and opinions would allow the truth to shine.
That was the context in which ad hominem arguments came to be viewed as fallacious, for they breached what John Stuart Mill called “the real morality of public discussion”.
That morality not only demands the avoidance of “vituperative language” but also rejects the intellectual cowardice and “want of candour” involved in using attacks on a speaker’s person to avoid answering the substance of what that speaker said.
But Adams’s tweet, which claimed that I had called him anti-Semitic, did more than that. It exemplified the prevailing tactic of fleeing the argument and instead rousing one’s rusted-on supporters. In ancient Rome, upper-class men could rally gangs of roughs to intimidate critics and opponents; today, the gangs are mustered in X’s rigidly segregated echo chambers.
That effectiveness, however, compounds the harm it causes. Bayle put the danger with characteristic clarity: “This is the surest means of having no longer any common principle of reasoning, and of reducing (argument) to the laws of the strongest, and to these ridiculous maxims: this is very good when I do it, but when another does the same, it is a detestable action.”
And just look at the follow up name-dropping: Pierre Bayle, John Locke, Orestes Brownson’s apothegm, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, In ancient Rome
... all in aid of two old fogeys having a dust-up ...
The reptiles tried to defuse the fuss by featuring the discursive if minuscule Minns: New South Wales Premier Chris Minns has commented on the neo-Nazi protests on Saturday, claiming these protesters seem to have gone around the Nazi symbol law. “A lot of those activists have been incredibly strong about rejecting the government’s hate speech laws, and now they’re suggesting that we should be throwing the book using the exact same laws, so there’s got to be a double standard here,” Mr Minns said. “This proves, in my view, that letting antisemitism and racism out of the bag in any context metastasises in the community and results in more division and racism, not less. “The hate speech laws that we’ve pursued in the NSW parliament, we believe are important and send a clear message that we are not going to stand for this kind of hatred in our community.”
Amazing really, that a man of such singular incompetence could rule the NSW roost, but to be fair, the Liberal party are trying really hard to make life incredibly easy for him ...
Now back to the fussing and the feuding and the in-fighting, as Our Henry keeps bunging on a do ... and when Our Henry drags in Cicero, the pond considers it "case closed"...
That not only intensified the conflict. As German historian Christian Meier showed, it also prevented the contenders from sensibly discussing, much less agreeing upon, any path forward. The collapse of public reason produced a “crisis without a solution”, condemning the republic to its eventual demise.
What the fate of our own polity – and, more broadly, of the West, which suffers the same ailments – will be remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: a civic culture that abandons the discipline of public reason abandons itself. That is why Adams, and those who deploy similar tactics, must be held to account.
And that is why Adams should now do what intellectual honesty requires: address the arguments or apologise for his appalling tweets.
Will the ancient advertising man dodder back into print to continue the feud?
Will he attempt to match the Ciceo, Meier quoting hole in bucket man, in an attempt to match Our Henry at his game?
Will the pond have the slightest interest?
On the upside, there's always an end to this kind of feuding and in-fighting ... and in the interim, as the two old codgers go at it, there's something to be said for the sight of demented old men shouting at clouds and flailing away at each other...
That said, if the pond wanted dementia, it would rather the fun of watching King Donald rule those disunited states, sadly ignored by the reptiles, but celebrated yet again by the immortal Rowe ...
Waiter, a CU of the tats if you please, what with the immortal Rowe clearly relishing the chance to offer his latest take of the madness of King Donald I, kissing cousin to King George III...
