In which the pond reheats Killer of the IPA stodge, and serves up pontificating Our Henry as a bonus, but tries to provide a few distractions along the way ...

 

Has there ever been a US emperor who hasn't loved himself a little bit of regime change (there not having been a herself to date)?

No mucking about, the pond's going to leap straight into the reptile coverage of the sounds of the hounds of war being unleashed ...

It's sure, dead certain, that it will be top of page.

And the pond was equally dead certain that the bromancer, aspiring Reichsmarschall des Großaustralisch Reiches, always with a taste for piracy on the high seas, and extrajudicial murders, would be on top of it all...

Oh dear, sorry, the once again the pond was completely wrong.

The reptiles didn't have time for any of that, what with them being terribly busy with their own jihads ...

Maybe later in the day, albeit likely well after the pond has clocked off from its reptile duties ...

The closest the pond could decipher the reptiles on war duties came at the top of the page from Cam, suddenly waking up to the desire of King Donald to sell Ukraine down the river ...

Trump’s peace plan: A multibillion-dollar Russian prize
How plans for multibillion-dollar deals in Russia are shaping Trump’s Ukraine peace plan
The US President’s repeated concessions to Vladimir Putin come as massive business deals await US companies in post-war Russia.
By Cameron Stewart
Chief International Correspondent

Why it's like reading a week old Occupy Democrat's Post on Facebook ...itself taken recent WSJ yarns ...

It's always disconcerting when a reptile inadvertently catches up with the real world...but it's hardly news, what with cartoonists already having explored the angles...

While on the war front, the reptiles dragged Japan's ambassador to Australia in to wage war with the Chinese ambassador:

It’s ‘erroneous’ to say Japan will break its peace commitment
Chinese claims about my nation’s defence policies are ‘unfortunate’ and inconsistent with the facts.
by Kazuhiro Suzuki

Meanwhile, mean girl Nicolle continued the war with assorted mean girls ...

ALP’s Mean Girls are ‘feminist frauds, traitors to women’
Former Liberal MP Nicolle Flint delivers a blistering broadside to Penny Wong and Katy Gallagher, and an apology to Linda Reynolds and others for not speaking up when she should have.
By Nicolle Flint

Could a day pass in the lizard Oz without extended sighing and weeping at the suffering of Linda?

NACC
Reynolds urges corruption watchdog to reopen probe into Higgins’ $2.4m settlement
The former Liberal senator argues the commission did not have access to key information when the probe closed with no findings of corrupt conduct.
By Elizabeth Pike

That's the reptiles for you. Always wanting a feminist head on a pike.

Entirely missing? 

News of a recent actual corruption finding ...

Lehrmann inquiry head Walter Sofronoff loses bid to overturn ‘serious corrupt conduct’ finding, Former judge did not prove the ACT integrity commission’s findings of his ‘dishonesty, bad faith and partiality’ were without evidence, court finds

Strange, since reptile Dame Slap was such a big part of the findings, a veritable star ...

...In March 2024, the ACT supreme court ruled Sofronoff’s findings against Drumgold were infected by a perception of bias due to his communications with Albrechtsen. It ruled that their communications gave the impression Sofronoff “might have been influenced by the views held and publicly expressed” by Albrechtsen.
The ACT supreme court later released a trove of emails and text messages showing Albrechtsen and Sofronoff had 273 interactions over the inquiry’s seven months, including 51 phone calls, text messages and emails. The pair also held a private lunch meeting in Brisbane.
The former judge also spent seven-and-a-half hours on the phone to The Australian during the inquiry, many of which were with Albrechtsen.
Sofronoff had handed his final report to Andrew Barr, the ACT chief minister, on 31 July 2023 at about 1.15pm, the commission’s report found. He then sent the report in a text message to Albrechtsen less than an hour later. Sofronoff had already given the columnist at the Australian draft copies of the report in the days before, which the commission described as “highly sensitive, confidential documents”.
Albrechtsen called Sofronoff on 2 August informing him she had received the final report from another source and intended to publish a story in The Australian the following day.
The commission said Sofronoff did not attempt to prevent her from publishing the story, other than to ask her to not publish a name that should have been redacted in the copy of the report she had.
In Thursday’s judgment, the court also dismissed Sofronoff’s claims that the integrity commission needed to prove his evidence was wrong.

And so on ... and no doubt in due course there'll be another Dame Slap rant about the inequities of the legal system.

The pond has decided to ignore entirely the current reptile jihad about Ley, entitlements and so forth ... that won't end until the reptiles feel they've scored a scalp, and there'll be much yahooing and buzzing in the hive mind until that's done and dusted.

Anyone who wants to dive in should surely now by now how to take a URL, head off to the intermittent archive and read the palpitating outrage

What else? 

Well the pond's rigorous culling left it with just Killer of the IPA doing a bit of the same old same old ...

The header: The net-zero zealots are fading into irrelevance as the wheels start coming off pipe dream; Few people these days say they supported the disastrous Covid lockdowns. We should expect the same forgetfulness about net zero.

The caption for the wretchedly cheap illustration, which didn't even use AI to produce a transformed head by way of a morphing: Our nation’s policy and corporate elites are like Homer Simpson, slowly retreating into a hedge after enthusiastically backing net zero.

The pond is all for lame references back to a 1990s cartoon series, but the pond seems to remember the reptiles always getting agitated whenever Blinky came into shot ...

Never mind, as always, this bout of Killer from the IPA climate science denialism is presented not so the pond can get agitated, present counter-arguments and such like, but merely for the record.

There has to be some record of the inane, incessant, seemingly endless reptile thirst for repetition ...and perhaps Killer might, yet again, drag in Covid, masks and a bit of anti-vax sentiment for some light relief ...

Every few days that famous cartoon meme of Homer Simpson slowly retreating into a hedge crosses my mind. The 1994 Simpsons episode is an amusing analogy of the embarrassing approach our nation’s policy and corporate elites have taken by enthusiastically backing net zero.
The release this week of the Australian Energy Market Operator’s fantasy forecast, which supposedly lays out Australia’s path to becoming a “renewable energy superpower”, is the latest example of rhetorical retreat before the fall.
The last Integrated System Plan from 2024 mentioned the government’s net-zero plan 31 times in the 94-page document. The latest 2026 draft includes it only once across 115 pages.
Meanwhile, the Australian resource giants have realised the big banks were on to something in crab-walking away from financial and rhetorical commitments to net zero. Rio Tinto this week cut the sum it planned to waste on so-called decarbonisation projects from $US7.5bn ($11.3bn) to less than $US2bn.
In October the global Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which had been a flagship initiative for finance types to pontificate about net zero, collapsed. Governments around the world are rapidly losing interest. COP30 in Brazil was a fizzer; there was no binding commitment on how to eradicate fossil fuels. Few nations have bothered to live up to their promised Paris emissions reductions.

Already tired? Thinking this is way too much Killer of the IPA? 

The reptiles haven't even begun, come on down Killer of the IPA chatting with fellow denialist Sharri, full disrespect ... IPA Senior Fellow Adam Creighton says the Opposition will “get ahead” of public opinion if it opposes net zero. “I think if the Coalition opposes it, they will be getting ahead of public opinion,” Mr Creighton told Sky News host Sharri Markson. “As energy prices keep rising … I think more people are going to realise it is because of the changes in the energy market.”

Of course that AV interruption had to feature a terrifying array of solar panels. 

About the only thing that would have been better would have been a snap of those bloody infernal whale-killing machines littering the Hume down Goulburn way, or perhaps a nuclear power station emitting a steamy heat, or perhaps a snap of dinkum innocent virginal clean Oz coal, the sort of snaps designed to make Killer cream his jeans ...

Climate Action Tracker, an online monitor of global progress to net zero, rates the US as “critically insufficient”, joining Russia, Saudi Arabia, Argentina and six others. Even Canada, China, India, Argentina and three others are “highly insufficient”.
Even academics are walking away from net zero. Just this week the journal Nature had to retract a major paper published in April 2024 that projected that climate change could cause $US38 trillion a year in economic damage by 2049 and a 62 per cent reduction in global GDP by 2100.“The study had so many errors that Nature has now retracted it, but what an embarrassment,” he Wall Street Journal opined. “The economic harm from climate change no longer exceeded the costs of the government interventions to do something to arrest warming temperatures.”
We should expect a few more Homer Simpsons to fade into the bushes over the coming months. AEMO’s latest ISP must be sobering reading for anyone with a grip on reality who’d invested their credibility in the government’s net-zero targets.
As energy market expert Aidan Morrison at the Centre for Independent Studies pointed out of the plan, the supposed increase in solar and wind capacity from 23 gigawatts today to 58 gigawatts by 2030 – in just five years – verges on impossible, absent World War II levels of resource and administrative redirection. “That’s all we’ve ever built, over say 15 or 20 years, but in four more years we’ll somehow build 35GW more,” he noted on Wednesday.
Never in Australian history has the gap between political rhetoric and economic and scientific reality been so great (perhaps this is a function of the vast bulk of politicians having studied law or arts degrees). Victoria’s Labor government has regulated to shut down the Yallourn coal-power station in 2028, which supplies about 16 per cent of the state’s electricity, and the even bigger Loy Yang A (around 30 per cent) by 2035. I’m not a betting man, but I’m happy to forecast that won’t happen, just as NSW and Queensland have had to extend the lives of theirs.
The latest quarterly emissions figures show the federal government’s plans to cut emissions by 43 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030 simply can’t happen, especially if it keeps importing 300,000 net migrants a year. No wonder transport emissions are up almost 21 per cent since 2005, and overall emissions down only 4.5 per cent.

Nothing like dancing with delight at the death of the planet, as the reptiles again doubled down with another serving of Killer and Sharri, full disrespect ... IPA Senior Fellow and Chief Economist Adam Creighton claims if the Coalition decides to keep its net zero emissions target it will “wreck the Australian economy”. “The reality is, net zero might sound a nice idea, but it’s an extraordinarily huge tax on the Australian economy,” Mr Creighton told Sky News host Sharri Markson. “It’s putting up energy bills. “I think Chris Bowen has made a … very cynical, political judgement that in the next three years it’s still going to be popular. “I would say to the Coalition should dump it now and should get ahead of public opinion.”

The pond must confess to disappointment. 

Not a shot of clean, virginal coal, or a steamy vision of the way to nuke the country to save the planet ...

As the wheels start coming off the net-zero pipe dream, at least the government can claim to be leading the world in something. Australia has cancelled more green hydrogen capacity (almost 1.5 megatons) since 2020 than the US and China combined, according to the Financial Times this week, and more than any other nation in the world.
“Low-carbon hydrogen – made with either renewable energy and water or gas and carbon capture and storage – has struggled to secure upfront contracts from buyers, with so-called green and blue hydrogen more expensive than the ‘grey’ version derived from fossil fuels without its emissions being captured,” the paper reported.
The government’s precious green hydrogen revolution that has already cost taxpayers billions in subsidies, and which is meant to replace Australia’s coal and gas exports, is a figment of the net-zero fundamentalist imagination.
Even the government is aware voters are far less keen on climate change zealotry than the Labor faithful. Its 2025 budget mentioned net zero 92 times, among 18 references to Australia’s becoming a “renewable energy superpower”. Mentions collapsed to 20 and zero respectively in this year’s pre-election budget, according to IPA research published in June.
Expect even fewer mentions next year if the Coalition can get its act together and link power price increase to unrealistic energy policies, especially after Jim Chalmers said he would cease the partial nationalisation of the household electricity bills to hide the true cost of energy fantasies. Labor has dodged a bullet in not hosting next year’s COP31summit in Adelaide, by which time more of the corporate, political and academic world will have woken up to reality. Few people these days say they supported the disastrous Covid lockdowns. We should expect the same forgetfulness about net zero.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

The pond apologises. 

Killer must be off his oats. Sure he dragged in a mention of Covid at the very end, but what about the emasculation produced by masks, or the castrating dangers of vaccines? Entirely missing!

Also entirely missing? 

Such delicacies as Trump, 79, Melts Down Over Failing Health in 500-Word Rant

By golly, he really should have been given a prize for that ...

What's really bizarre is the way all this banana republic stuff is now treated as the new normal.

And if you're after trifling pleasures you should head off to Nick getting nicked in stories such as Virgin Podcaster Loses It After Being Told to ‘Get Laid’

“You’re not gay?” the controversial journalist said.
 “No, but I will say that women are very difficult to be around, so there’s that,” Fuentes responded, sending Morgan into a rant about how his young guest was “a misogynist old dinosaur.”
“I know I’m the boomer here, but actually, you’re a 27-year-old dinosaur, aren’t you, Nick Fuentes?” he said. “‘All women are annoying. All women grow old. They all get fat,’ says the guy—have you ever had sex?”
“No, absolutely not,” Fuentes replied.

Oh dear.

And likely you could have missed key policy decisions of earth shattering moment ... Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

How does he do it? From piracy on the high seas to the font police, he never rests, but why was that story in such a despicable font?

So much fun going down with sleepy Don (and the infallible Pope)...

And what about recent reptile triumphs, sadly swept from view but still celebrated by First Dog?

The pond is pleased to help out by serving up a dose of Killer to any vulgar youff who managed to escape the strict age verification at work on this site.

The full to overflowing intertubes can never get enough lizard Oz yarns about the climate change hoax.

Sadly because of the pond's devotion to fundamentalist Zionist, ethnic cleansing devotee and bucket repair man Our Henry, all the pond had to hand those stray vulgar youffs as a bonus this day was a routine bit of black bashing ...

The header: Jacinta Allan’s Indigenous treaty reverses century of progress; The Victorian treaty does not correct past injustice it creates a new and pernicious inequality which contradicts the values Australians hold dear.

The caption featuring the cowering one: Premier Jacinta Allan with members of her front bench after she issues an apology to Indigenous Victorians in the lower house at Parliament.

Thus far the pond has tried its best to avoid this form of reptile jihad, this kind of black bashing, but it's Our Henry, so the pond had to bend rules.

Of course the only reason the pond can offer to justify the exception is the need to observe the amount of pompous, portentous and pretentious references to ancient sages that the always pontificating old bigot makes ...

Even then, the opening flourish was disappointing ...

Earlier this week, Jacinta Allan marked the approaching end of the year by delivering a fulsome apology to “the First Peoples of Victoria” for the historic acts that “stripped” them of “their rights and their self-determination”. “Today,” she pledged, “this parliament becomes a place of reckoning” – a reckoning that will, thanks to the Statewide Treaty, inaugurate “a future where the power taken is returned”.
Yet far from constructing a future of equal civic rights for all Australians, thus definitively turning the page on past wrongs, the treaty takes Australia one step further toward its unravelling as a nation-state.
To say that is not to predict that our institutions will crumble or our way of life sink beneath the oceans. Rather, it is to recall that the historic achievement of the nation-state, as a form of governance, lay in securing the political equality of its citizens.
By establishing an Indigenous assembly empowered to determine its own electorate, design its own rules, exercise a degree of jurisdiction over those it claims to represent, and spend taxpayer funds without genuine accountability, the legislation strikes at the heart of that achievement. The result, perversely, is the very thing justice abhors: two classes of citizen, one endowed with political privilege unavailable to others.
Overturning the principle of political equality is no small matter. Securing it was the work of centuries, and in much of the world the process remains tragically incomplete. But in the West, the circle of equal citizenship was, however slowly, widened until the last vestiges of inherited privilege were swept away.

The last vestiges of inherited privilege have been swept away?

Waiter, the pond will have some of what the old bigot's been drinking, as we pause for an obligatory snap of the evil doer, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan gives evidence before the Yoorrook Justice Commission.

Those doubters who wondered if Our Henry was up to his usual game will be silenced by the next gobbet, as Our Henry put a Locke on his arguments ...

The essence of that trend was simple: citizenship was detached from all forms of particularism. The state was to be ethnically, racially and religiously neutral – and whenever that neutrality was breached, a principled fight was called for against the violation.
Nor was the concept of political equality complex or obscure. Every citizen, it simply meant, should be vested with the same rights and obligations. Springing from the Judeo-Christian moral inheritance, its implications for political equality were given lucid expression in the 17th century by John Locke, who regarded the principle as perhaps the most important truth about God’s way with the world.
Yes, Locke recognised, we differ greatly from one another; and yes, some “suffer from some deficiency in the mind”. Yet however varied our intellects, even the most limited have been endowed with “a candle” that “shines bright enough” to “lead them to the sight of their duties”.
Hence, despite vast differences in ability, there exists a natural right to a “state of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another”. To draw political distinctions based on birth or status, Locke added, was as foolish as asserting that “those who have black hair or grey eyes should not enjoy the same privileges as other citizens”.
It was no accident that Locke’s formulation coincided with the emergence of the modern idea of sovereignty. Influentially articulated by Jean Bodin, sovereignty denoted the state’s ultimate authority over a territory and its people. The state’s mission – and the fundamental justification for its sweeping power – lay in its ability to overcome the divisions that could otherwise tear communities apart, breeding fratricidal conflicts Bodin himself had painfully experienced in the Wars of Religion. Sovereignty’s mark was therefore not brute force, but the forging of unity: the transformation of a people into a patria, a shared nation.

See how blithely concepts like the Judeo-Christian moral inheritance spring from the old bigots keyboard.

Pardon the pond if it doesn't feel at one with the old bigot's notion of a patria, because he's just the sort of pompous patriarch that makes the notion nauseating ... as the reptiles paused for a different form of nausea, the meretricious Merritt having a bigoted chat with bigot Petulant Peta ... The Australian Legal Affairs Contributor Chris Merritt joins Sky News host Peta Credlin to analyse the legal ramifications surrounding the Victorian Indigenous Treaty. “The implications in my view of the Treaty and the arrangement … are all bad,” Mr Merritt told Ms Credlin. “We moved away from race-based preferences … equality before the law, that is the great victory … it was a resounding success.”

Inspired by being in the company of such splendid hive mind bigots, the old curmudgeon doubled down with even more arcane references...

Yet unification, later thinkers realised, was by no means automatic. Citizenship, and the shared identity it implied, did not exist independently of the structures that embodied it. On the contrary, it was created and renewed through the institutions by which it was exercised – above all, participation in the political process. A “people” was moulded into being by acts such as voting that define the bounds, and nurture the feeling, of membership in a common political community.
That is why Albert Venn Dicey, late Victorian Britain’s greatest constitutionalist, warned that “incalculable evils” would follow from the “tendency to intensify differences” that separate political representation for distinct groups within the citizenry would inevitably create.
Harvard’s Jane Mansbridge later captured the core of Dicey’s objection. When a group is accorded unique political rights and exclusive forms of representation, its members inevitably come to believe they possess “some essential traits that define them and render them unable to be represented adequately by those without such traits”. The result of this “essentialisation” of difference, she observed, is to “trap the individuals in the group in the images traditionally held of the group”, hardening the “lines of division between that group and other citizens”.
That the Victorian treaty will have precisely those effects is beyond doubt. But they are not unintended by-products. They are its very purpose – to transform descent into destiny, manufacturing out of whole cloth an Indigenous “nation” and binding its members in internal allegiance, at the expense of our common allegiance as equal citizens of Australia. That it does so on the basis of race makes the project all the more odious.

As if to rub salt into the referential wound, the reptiles dug deep into the archive to turn up a dirt cheap, rights-free still of ... John Locke

Case closed ...and yet the pond felt something missing.

Surely Our Henry needed to torture the English language, in much the same way that you might offer a serve of poisoned flour, or perhaps poison a billabong, or indulge in a massacre with a little tossing off cliffs ...

There is, however, a rich irony here. It was long the left’s charge against European colonialism that it “essentialised” subject groups – dividing Hutu from Tutsi, for example – by differentiating their rights and duties, thereby deepening, if not crudely inventing, cleavages that crippled post-colonial states. Yet now essentialisation is reborn as a virtue, its sins purged because the target of the injury is not the colonised but the supposed colonial nation itself.

Bingo.

essentialisation is reborn as a virtue

What rough beast is that, caught slouching towards portentous verbosity?

And there is irony, too, in the use of the term “treaty”. One of the decisive steps in the formation of the modern state was the emergence in the 18th century of a clear distinction between laws, contracts and treaties. Until then, those distinctions were blurred; only with the consolidation of sovereignty did “treaty” come to mean an agreement between sovereign states, governed by rules utterly distinct from those of private agreements and domestic legislation.
Victoria’s legislation turns that history on its head. It first enters into what it calls a treaty – misusing the word – so as to fabricate a fictious “sovereign” that will be its counterparty later.
Dividing Australians is far from the only harm this scheme will inflict, but its defects are too numerous to catalogue here. What is certain is that the damage will spread if other Labor states follow Victoria’s lead, as they well may.

Yes, yes, it's the end of the world, as bad as using the wrong font, but just to show that the old bigot is up to the task, in tune with the current zeitgeist, please wheel in a feisty, comely blonde ... State Liberal leader Jess Wilson

Our Henry could relax at last. 

Civilisation was on the way to being secured.

His bigotry was in the safe hands of a blonde, and she knew just what to do with all those errant brunettes and blacks ...

That is why only one question matters: Will this supposed treaty be allowed to endure? It sits uneasily with the Constitution’s guarantee of representative government, which presupposes the political equality the legislation denies. And it epitomises everything wrong in the “progressive” mindset tearing this country apart.
It therefore deserves to be challenged at every turn, first and foremost by Jess Wilson and the Victorian opposition. If centuries of Western political thought, and the very principle that so successfully forged a nation out of strangers, are to be cast aside, they cannot be allowed to go quietly. Jacinta Allan closed her oration by pledging that “Victoria will not look away”. With Australia’s future at stake, nor should we.

Oh vigilant bigot, no doubt those difficult, uppity blacks will be intimidated by the stout-hearted way you've bludgeoned them about the head with a fine shillelagh of references, a birching that would make a Grainger proud ...

Meanwhile, in another country, entirely unnoticed by Our Henry and the hive mind, but captured by the immortal Rowe ... headed "in times roman"

In which Dame Groan delivers some musty, stale, repetitive air, while Barners' hunting season is now officially open ...

 

So here we are with this day's reptile chorus of complaints ... and sure enough, the whining, whingeing culture continues at the lizard Oz, with petulant Peta setting the pace ...

This perpetual grievance culture must end
Australia’s apology mania is wrong and must stop
We have created an Aboriginal grievance industry that needs to perpetuate victimhood to justify its continued existence, to build platforms of power.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

Speaking of apologies ...

The pond doesn't want to be seen encouraging the  whinyblack bashing culture that's rampant in the Oz, so it was off to the intermittent, often failing, archive with her.

Ditto one note Dame Slap, still riding her latest hobby horse ...

Sally Dowling v Penelope Wass: This ugly public brawl undermines justice
The escalating war between Sally Dowling and Judge Penelope Wass has reached breaking point, with serious consequences for defendants and complainants caught in the crossfire.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

Never mind the undermining of justice performed by Dame Slap in recent times.

As for Jack, the outsider on most issues, never mind the children, he was agitated for the parents ...

Social media ban to come at a cost for parents
Soon we’ll see what Albo’s zest for the social ban amounts to after parents catch on they have to fork out for the seven volume set of À la recherche du temps perdu and an oboe.
By Jack the Insider
Columnist

Luckily the pond had a Wilcox for that ...

Ah, mum, too much reading of the reptiles will always put you in a tizz ...why not take up social media, it could hardly be worse than the lizard Oz?

As predicted and expected, the "news" section carried on the latest reptile jihad ...

EXCLUSIVE
Farrell family flies almost halfway to moon on taxpayers … within rules
Trade Minister Don Farrell flies family using $90,000 of taxpayer funds
Fresh scrutiny of MPs’ travel entitlements reveals Don Farrell’s extensive use of taxpayer-funded family flights and Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s 78 publicly funded trips for her lobbyist husband.
By Noah Yim and Jack Quail

Geoff chambered another round but could manage only a two minute rant ...

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Anthony Albanese runs ‘nothing to see here’ strategy and digs in behind big spender Anika Wells
Anthony Albanese’s defence of Anika Wells’s family travel expenses creates a stalemate where politicians accessing generous entitlements attack other politicians doing the same thing.

The only thing there to note was the yarn in another rag: 

Meanwhile the reptiles were agitated by another yarn featuring mad King Donald ...

Trump administration proposes mandatory social media checks for visa-free US travel
The Trump administration is proposing sweeping new travel rules that will impact Australian tourists.
By Joseph de Avila and Michelle Hackman

Relax, no need to travel, the madness can be safely observed from a distance...

And as well as the infallible Pope, there's always TT...

What a relief, a breath of stale air, to see Dame Groan out and about, burbling in her old biddy way about the usual ...

The header: Adding more renewables will not fix Australia’s energy price crisis; To Rod Sims’s way of thinking, the problem with our electricity prices is all about the cost of gas and our ageing coal-fired plants that are prone to break down.

The caption for Sauron himself, surrounded in the usual way by whale-killing windmills (you can see the whales on a daily basis on the Hume down Goulburn way): Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen

There was nothing new to see in the old biddy's rant. It was as stale as the pond's joke about whales being killed, but it took much longer, a full five minutes, running through the biddy's standard range of climate science denialist tricks ...

The pond merely catalogues it, so that it can join the pond's compendium of Groans ...

According to Rod Sims, former Australian Competition & Consumer Commission chairman, our high and rising electricity prices have nothing to do with the penetration of renewable energy.
To Sims’s way of thinking, the problem with our electricity prices is all about the cost of gas and our ageing coal-fired plants that are prone to break down.
Windmills, solar panels, batteries, hydro and a touch of gas can do the trick of achieving the holy grail of affordable and reliable energy while also meeting emissions reduction targets.
Not everyone agrees. There is a logical disconnect to Sims’s story because he omits the ad hoc expansion of subsidised renewable energy and the consequences it would have for the workings of the electricity grid and prices. It certainly wasn’t market forces.
While early interventions in the electricity grid were small-scale, across time the preference given to sustainability over affordability and reliability has led to an overdependence on weather-dependent generation, the intermittency of which has led to a series of problems.
These include the need for a massive overbuild of renewable installations and the requirement for expensive backup to cover situations when renewables, even with batteries, cannot meet demand.

The reptiles graced the apologist with a snap, Rod Sims addresses the National Press Club. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Sure enough that set off another bout of groaning ...

This is why the estimates of wind droughts, for instance, are so critical. The grid must be designed to deal with worst-case scenarios; averages are highly misleading.
By favouring renewable energy with financial backing and dispatch preference, the business model of the backbone of our electricity grid, coal-fired power plants, was quickly eroded.
In another scenario, these plants would been refurbished and/or rebuilt. Sims’s estimate of the cost of the new build of coal-fired power station is simply inaccurate. Using current sites and existing connections to the transmission system, Australia could have had a new suite of high-efficiency, low-emissions coal-fired plants that would have kept electricity prices competitive while providing free ancillary services that the grid requires.
It may be water under the bridge, but it is still worth thinking about what has been forgone.
It’s hardly surprising that China continues to build new coal-fired plants because they offer affordable and reliable power to service industry as well as provide cheap power to households.
Certainly, gas has increasingly become the price-setter in the east coast grid, the national electricity market. Open-cycle gas plants are a much better fit to provide backup to the uncertain flow of electrons from wind and solar than coal plants.
But it should not surprise anyone that the domestic price of gas has surged, given the strong antipathy of the Victorian and NSW governments to any new gas developments. For a long time, this aversion was shared by federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, although recently he has described gas as “the ultimate backstop in our energy grid”.
The fact remains many gas producers view Australia as a difficult place to explore for and exploit gas fields. Just look at the interminable delays in the development of the Narrabri project in NSW, the output of which is slated entirely for the domestic market. There is also insufficient infrastructure to support several potential gas projects, including in Queensland and the Northern Territory.

Inevitably the dog botherer was enlisted to help out, Sky News host Chris Kenny says Chris Bowen’s solar share scheme is an “insult to taxpayers” as bills continue to rise.

On and on the old biddy ranted and groaned, her grief and sighing up there with the suffering of the Mock Turtle in Alice ...

The bottom line is the push into renewables has not gone well. There is a great deal of volatility in the market, with prices often hitting the maximum allowed. You see this particularly in South Australia with its high penetration of renewables. Bankrolling the installation of wind and solar farms, as well as promoting rooftop solar for households, has been insufficient to accommodate the planned exit of coal-fired stations. The owners of Yallourn, Loy Yang A and Eraring are all receiving substantial annual subsidies – in the ballpark of hundreds of millions of dollars – to keep the plants operating.
The construction of the new transmission lines required to link far-flung renewable installations also has been delayed and the costs have blown out. The transmission companies are hurriedly ordering synchronous condensers to provide the ancillary services that coal provides for free. These costs will be added to consumer bills in due course, along with the costs of the extra transmission lines and other infrastructure.
The net effect has been to dramatically push up electricity bills for households and businesses. According to the recent consumer price index figures, electricity costs increased by nearly 40 per cent across the year ending in October. Were it not for the rebates in place – yes, more subsidies – householders would have really felt the pinch. The decision by Jim Chalmers to discontinue the rebates next year could prove to be a courageous one.
In the meantime, energy-intensive operations – mainly smelters and refineries – have been operating at a loss, in part because of rising energy bills. Both the federal and state governments have stepped in with substantial subsidies to prevent their closure.
The point is that once upon a time we had affordable, reliable electricity where the market determined investment decisions. After two decades or so of forcing renewable energy – a very low-density form of energy requiring a great deal of land –the situation in which we find ourselves is dire.
Realistically, there is no prospect of green hydrogen or offshore wind filling the gaps, although that was the federal government’s plan at one stage.
Consumers are reluctant to sell electricity back to the grid and the take-up of electrical vehicles has been disappointing.
It is simply disingenuous therefore to suggest that the way out of this pickle is to install even more renewable energy – the Sims solution. Adding more renewables doesn’t overcome the problem of intermittency.

Cue Dan the man to help with the whining, the chorus of complaining, though it has to be said that a 'dozer on top of a pile of coal is a quaint way to illustrate the deep reptile devotion to sweet, virginal, clean, lovely and decent Oz coal ... Shadow Energy Minister Dan Tehan calls out Labor’s energy policies as Australians face “higher and higher” energy bills. “No one says pursuing 82 per cent renewables in your grid by 2030, which is completely and utterly ideologically driven, is a sensible way to do this,” Mr Tehan told Sky News Australia. “We are becoming more aware of the need for proper baseload power.”

A final round of complaints just about did it ...

In fact, wind has become a relatively expensive option and landowner objections to its installation are getting stronger, if anything. Several large-scale solar farms in New South Wales are going broke because the prices during the day are often negative due to the glut caused by solar rooftops.
The Australian Energy Market Commission is now walking back from its prediction that electricity prices would fall over the decade due to the penetration of renewables. The expectation is that real prices may rise by 13 per cent over the coming decade; there are reasons to think that this is an underestimate.
Victoria’s Auditor-General is also warning that the state’s grid is not well-placed to cope with the anticipated closure of the Yallourn coal-fired power station in 2028. The expectation now is that further subsidies will be required to ensure its continuation. The state’s plan for offshore wind is in tatters as the recent round of auctions had to be cancelled. In any case, offshore wind is a particularly expensive means of generating electricity.
As for the proposition pushed by Bowen and other cabinet ministers that renewables are the “cheapest form of new energy” – note the inclusion of new – it is becoming clear that when all the system costs are included, this assertion simply doesn’t stack up.
Add in the risk of total blackouts, such as the one that happened recently in renewables-dependent Spain and Portugal, and the case for a Plan B that is not based on the further expansion of renewables becomes compelling. It would be better for everyone if some of these coal plants were rebuilt rather than allowed to limp on.

Recent? She's still banging on about Spain and Portugal? According to AI and wiki, the last big Iberian peninsula blackout was back in April  but to the doddery old duffer, caught in a repetitive time warp, it probably felt like yesterday ...

Here, have a break, have a Golding in lieu of a Kit Kat ...

The pond wanted to end with a note that at last it's open season on that wascally wabbit Barners, Tamworth's eternal shame ...

Good old Ron - haven't heard from the old laggard in years - was out and about in the lizard Oz shedding crocodile tears ...

If you want to follow any of the links, you can do it via the intermittent archive.

The pond was mainly interested in the grieving, as if Tamworth's shame had ever been anything other than a blundering, deeply clueless Tamworth boofhead and git ...

The pond can never get over the undying stain of having been born in the same hospital as the boofhead ...

The pond resorted to the timeless Burroughs' cut and paste method as a way of continuing its war with roaming AI bots ...

Completely clueless ... but then Ron has always been that way ... 

At last it came time to wrap up with a final gobbet of whining and moping...

Dropping net zero? 

Old Ron wants to think that it's a good start? 

But then Ron has always been a completely clueless buffoon of the first water ...think way back to 2015 ...

Can a clueless clown of the first water carry any credibility berating another clown, or is it just part of a circus slapstick routine?

But this is Barners' hunting season, and the pond couldn't help noticing another attempt to nail Tamworth's shame in another place ... I take it all back. Barnaby is a fool, after all (*archive link)

Here it should be noted that anyone who didn't think Barners was a fool from the get go has to be marked as a most peculiar fool, sadly much like the town of Tamworth, repeatedly voting for the clown and then wondering why it was considered the country capital for an ongoing carnival of clowns ...

Barners was never politically dumb?

He always had the next 17 moves mapped out in 4D chess before anyone figured out he was playing 5D chess?

Who is this fool, this blithering, blathering idiot? 

It made the pond insatiable, the pond wanted more ...

If anyone wanted to understand why Tamworth kept voting for its undying shame, there's a more than fair clue buried at shallow grave level in this nonsense.

Suddenly they're going to ghost him, as if he never did anything worthy of a ghosting before bedding down with Pauline?

Ye sainted aunt's collection of Tamworthian stupidities ...

He's never, until now, been a fool?

Really?

Oh it's been a long time since Tony Windsor ...

What a remarkably obtuse and foolish piece about a remarkably obtuse and perennially foolish politician, whether pandering to Gina, or cavorting in his usual narcissistic, exhibitionist, attention-seeking delusional clown car way ... proving that a doctorate these days is an entirely meaningless measure, if the expectation is to read something sensible.

Well it's been a long Barners hunt, and the pond hopes that the wait for the immortal Rowe as the pond trudged through the thickets of north west slopes and plains stupidity (not to mention the follies of the northern tablelands) was worth it ...

Dammit, the pond can't remember seeing that critter in the movie ...

In which the bromancer, "Ned" and the onion muncher serve up a generous amount of blather ...

 

A big day for the reptiles, and not because of the ongoing assorted jihads ...

They won't let this one go until there's a scalp ...

EXCLUSIVE
Wells unrepentant as Greens catch family frequent flight fever
Anika Wells taxpayer-funded travel saga widens to include Greens Senators
WATCH | As Anika Wells refers her family’s travel to the expenses watchdog, Greens senators and Anthony Albanese himself face scrutiny over similar entitlements used for sports, music festivals, and protests.
By Noah Yim, Jack Quail and Liam Mendes

Speaking of which, how good is it to see Golding return after a short break?

Wells' actual policies were well down the page, and presented with proud defiance and comely enthusiasm:

SOCIAL MEDIA
We will stand firm against the tech giants: Wells
Communications Minister Anika Wells has vowed to defend Australia’s world-leading under-16 social media ban against tech giant legal challenges as the law takes effect.
By Sarah Ison

The lesser Leeser was on hand to help out ...

...The former High Court chief justice responsible for modelling SA’s draft social media legislation in 2024, Robert French, said the federal scheme would “undoubtedly be a work in progress” but he was “reasonably optimistic” it was an important public policy step.
“It will also provide a much needed support to parents who have concerns about social media based on their children from on the ground experience of its effects,” he said.
While some Coalition MPs have raised concerns over the workability of the social media ban, opposition education spokesman Julian Leeser said he was supportive of the policy and would also be open to initiatives to limit smartphone use, as proposed by the SA government.
“Social media has become a tool for bullying and worse, and too many young people are being harmed by what appears on their screens,” he told The Australian.
Mr Leeser revealed that in a show of support for the policy, he would stay off social media between Christmas and Australia Day.

That must be a huge relief to victims of the lesser Leeser's insatiable appetite for social media ...

And speaking of Golding ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles will always have an undying love for sweet, virginal, clean, innocent, decent Oz coal ...

ENERGY
Reality for ALP as coal will be needed until 2049, says AEMO report
Coal will be needed as an on-demand source to stabilise the energy grid until 2049 in an extraordinary 12-year-long extension threatening Labor’s 2050 net-zero target.
By Colin Packham and Richard Ferguson

Sing the song of coal Geoff ...

COMMENTARY by Geoff Chambers
Utopian forecasts pave way to net zero future
The energy regulator has delivered a $128bn bombshell that threatens to derail Chris Bowen’s promise of cheap, abundant renewable power for all Australians.

And there was still much love for poor, endlessly suffering Linda ...

Linda Reynolds: I haven’t received one cent after defamation case win against Brittany Higgins
Linda Reynolds is not giving up the fight to receive a defamation payout of more than $1m from her former staffer Brittany Higgins, who claimed the former senator covered up her alleged rape by Bruce Lehrmann.
By Ike Morris

Poor pitiful her, what joy is there in persecuting a rape victim if there's no cash in the paw?

The long absent lord alone knows what the suffering readership makes of this peculiar obsession.

 Meanwhile, over on the extreme far right, Dame Slap had abandoned Linda and found a new victim:

Sally Dowling’s battles are no good for justice 
How much longer will Chris Minns countenance a chief prosecutor – and her office – being at the centre of a war with sections of the NSW judiciary?
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

The pond tiptoed past planet Janet because the reptiles were also besotted by AUKUS.

Cameron was in the grip of a dangerous triumphalism, adrift with war criminals and grifters... 

Ringing endorsement sinks the AUKUS doubters
AUKUS sceptics need to get a grip and accept that Australia is getting nuclear subs after the Trump administration’s glowing endorsement of the plan
By Cameron Stewart
Chief International Correspondent

...Those who believe Australia should never have signed up to AUKUS, including Paul Keating, Gareth Evans, Bob Carr and Malcolm Turnbull, are entitled to their opinions. But this is now a debate for the history books, because the pact is going ahead.
The more important debate now is how best to manage AUKUS. How does Australia fund such an eye-wateringly expensive enterprise without starving funding for other parts of defence?
The answer, of course, is to lift defence spending, initially from 2 to 2.5 per cent of GDP with an aspirational target of 3 per cent.
That is a debate the government will have to have, even if it is currently in a state of denial.
The AUKUS enterprise is bound to have huge challenges and setbacks in the years ahead.
Australia will struggle to find enough nuclear-qualified workers, not to mention welders and shipbuilders, to maintain and eventually build submarines here. The program is bound to be over budget and late, as they always are.
But let’s cut to the chase: AUKUS is happening and it’s time we stop pretending that it won’t.

Not so fast Cam, the bromancer was also on the scene ...

The header: AUK-ward truth: the sinking feeling behind our subs pact; Australia has paid the US another billion dollars for submarine manufacturing capability despite AUKUS facing production delays and Britain’s naval crisis threatening the entire partnership.

The caption for the carnival of fellow travellers with toadies and war criminals: Richard Marles, left, Penny Wong, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth at the AUSMIN talks in Washington. Picture: Instagram

It took just 3 minutes for the bromancer to produce some saucy doubts and fears:

This underwhelming AUSMIN meeting in Washington demonstrated a stark contradiction between the flim flam of happy talk, and the substance of nothing much happening.
I’ve covered a lot of AUSMIN meetings over the decades and I can’t recall one in which the American principals, in this case Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, wanted to exit the room before taking a single question on the alliance.
As AUSMINs go, it was a snooze fest, like Jofra Archer turning up to an Ashes cricket Test with a pillow. It’s still an Ashes Test, but there’s something fundamentally wrong – a mismatch between pillows and ashes.
The Albanese government is showing itself to be quite good at alliance diplomacy. It manages to get the senior Americans in the room, at least briefly, and they don’t beat up on us, in fact they say nice things about us.
But although Richard Marles and Penny Wong joined Rubio and Hegseth in declaring AUKUS is “full steam ahead”, the facts ­supporting that proposition are extremely thin on the ground.

The reptiles interrupted with an explanation of the wisdom of pouring vast sums of money down a black hole, Australia and the United States have agreed to go “full steam ahead” for the AUKUS pact during high-level bilateral talks in Washington DC. Defence Minister Richard Marles has refused to explain what changes President Trump’s team is seeking to make. “The review is essentially looking at ways in which AUKUS can be done better,” Mr Marles said.

The bromancer wasn't convinced by it all ...

The simple arithmetic of AUKUS just doesn’t match the declaratory policy.
History has a pretty bitter lesson here. When reality contradicts the declaratory policy, it’s reality that prevails, not policy.
The only really substantial announcement out of this AUSMIN was that Australia would pay the US another billion dollars to contribute to its nuclear submarine manufacturing capability. This is the functional equivalent of the donations the Australian colonies used to collect to subsidise Britain’s Royal Navy, in the expectation that it would look after us.
AUKUS is adrift, and even if everyone on the planet says “full steam ahead”, it doesn’t change the underlying realities.
In the years leading up to World War II, Australia was convinced that the Singapore strategy – relying on Britain’s “impregnable” naval base in Singapore – provided for Australian security.
It was used by Australian politicians as an excuse for radically underspending on defence.
Australia entered World War II in much worse shape militarily than it entered World War I. Fortunately, the Americans saved us. The Singapore strategy worked superbly until it was exposed that policy didn’t match reality.
Something similar is happening with AUKUS today.
The US companies involved have been stubbornly unable to meaningfully lift the rate of production of nuclear-powered submarines. By 2032, when Australia is scheduled to get its first Virginia-class submarine, the US will be gravely short of such boats.
Elbridge Colby, the Under Secretary for Policy at the Pentagon, is inclined to face that reality now and talk about it clearly. But doing that explodes the happy fantasies of AUKUS, which for now suit all the players. So Colby was overruled in the report he could write.
Britain, the third member of AUKUS, is in the midst of a shocking naval capability crisis.
Britain’s First Sea Lord, Marine General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, declared this week that Britain was closer to losing control of the Atlantic to the Russians than it has been at any time since World War II. Despite the Ukraine war, he said, Russia had invested “billions” into its maritime capabilities, which Britain can’t match.
This follows a devastating intervention in the debate by Rear Admiral Philip Mathias, who was at one time head of ­nuclear policy at the Ministry of Defence.
He said the UK was no longer capable of running a fleet of nuclear submarines.
The latest British nuclear sub to enter service, HMS Agamemnon, took a catastrophic 13 years to build.
Admiral Mathias said: “The SSN-AUKUS is a submarine which is not going to deliver what the UK or Australia needs in terms of capability or timescale.”
Acquiring nuclear submarines is prodigiously expensive, even for an economy as big as Britain’s.
The Albanese government’s defence budget is manifestly, wildly inadequate.
It’s also virtually inconceivable that the Brits will actually be building nuclear subs with Australia in Adelaide in the 2040s.
So why is the Trump administration appearing to be so relatively relaxed?
All that AUKUS provides for now is that we give the US several billion dollars for its submarine industry, send sailors to serve on their ships, create a maintenance base for them in Perth and slowly expand military co-operation in northern Australia.
All good, but nothing of a new capability of our own.
The US doesn’t even make a decision about providing a Virginia-class sub for us until 2031 or 2032 at the earliest.
Nothing much is happening in Pillar Two of AUKUS – defence technology co-operation.
Given how irrelevant we’ve become, the Americans are willing to continue to accept our money with good grace.
That’s the summit of Albanese defence achievement so far.

So we're just another grift, and king grifter King Donald is happy with the grift?

Before moving to the next reptile, perhaps a little holyday interruption from the infallible Pope?

Yes, he really did suggest starting a new sport, learning a new instrument or readinga book that's been sitting on your shelf for some time.

It's going to be a long summer, explaining to the partner that Albo wants new role models for teens.

Righto, it was time for nattering "Ned" to take the stand with a pompous, albeit modest, 5 minute rant channeling the thoughts of the French clock devotee ...

The header: Trump has one virtue alone – he may prevent a World War III: Keating’s assessment of new world agenda; Donald Trump’s national security strategy abandons global leadership for Western hemisphere dominance. Former PM Paul Keating hails it as a historic turning point terminating the post-World War II era.

There was no credit for the wretched collage, sensibly so, because who would take a credit when AI could be blamed? Paul Keating, left, and US President Donald Trump. Pictures: News Corp/AFP

"Ned" wasn't happy with King Donald but took seriously the notion that the US was now non-interventionist, even as assorted war criminals committed murder on the high seas and King Donald's minions plotted an assault on Venezuela ...

The revolution that Donald Trump and JD Vance represent is on brilliant display in two standout aspects of the US national security strategy – America’s abandonment of its post-World War II global leadership role and its cultural obsession about European civilisational decline.
Both testify to the Trumpian transformation, now formalised in a White House approved blueprint enthusiastically embraced by the wider MAGA movement.
Its heart, as this paper has highlighted, is the embrace of a “protect our homeland” Western hemisphere primacy – branded a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine in the same spirit as the “Roosevelt Corollary” under which president Theodore Roosevelt asserted unilateral US dominance of the Western hemisphere.
This is tied to a “predisposition to non-intervention” in foreign conflicts or setting “a high bar for what constitutes a justified intervention” – a repudiation of what Trump brands the obsession of past US elites to conduct forever wars and “to shoulder forever global burdens”. The policy denounces past “destructive bets on globalism and so-called free trade” that, it claims, hollowed out the US middle class and its industrial base.
The central idea is the renewal of American sovereignty, the elevation of the “America First” principle and the acceptance of the sovereign power of all nations against progressive post-national elites. It declares “the era of mass migration is over” and envisages an America that champions trade protectionism to rebuild its economic strength and its industrial base. It assumes a long-run global revolution.

The reptiles threw in a snap of King Donald, surprisingly with his eyes open ... US President Donald Trump’s strategy cements ‘America First’. Picture: AP

"Ned" offered a detailed synopsis - so much easier than searching for an original thought:

Pivotal to this blueprint is US energy dominance – cheap energy in the form of oil, gas, coal and nuclear – as an economic and strategic necessity. The policy repudiates what it calls “the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘net zero’ ideologies” that the document says have damaged Europe and subsidised America’s adversaries.
The overarching concept is that “the days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over”. This buries the previous vision of America as the “indispensable nation” for the global order.
On Ukraine, the document seeks a “strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass” but is devoid of any criticism of Russia or its manifest aggression. Likewise, on China – the strategy says America cannot allow any nation to “threaten our interests” but then runs with the massive qualification that the US won’t be “wasting blood and treasure to curtail the influence of all the world’s great and middle powers” – surely music in Moscow and Beijing. The implication: expand your power but don’t threaten America.
The document frames Trump as “The President of Peace” who seeks to stop regional conflicts “before they spiral into global wars that drag down whole continents”. He believes in the doctrine of “peace through strength” and therefore is pledged to ensure the US has the strongest economy, the most advanced technology and the world’s most capable military.
On Asia policy, the blueprint aspires to two ultimate goals – successfully competing against China in economic and technological terms but also strategic deterrence “to prevent war in the Indo-Pacific”. Significantly, it says allies and partners have a major role. Allies are expected to increase defence spending, with Australia specifically named.

Then came another reminder of the King, with a minor courtier, President Donald Trump speaks with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the Oval Office when the pair met in October. Picture: White House

Still strapped for an original thought, "Ned" sought out the French clock maker to help him with his natter:

The contradiction arises with a significant feature being the strong commitment to “deterring a conflict over Taiwan”, with a pledge to “build a military capable of deterring aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain” along with a warning that America “cannot, and should not have to, do this alone”, and allies expected to do “much more for collective defence”. So Trump doesn’t want a war over Taiwan but can’t let China win by incorporating Taiwan.
This document is probably the most lucid summary of the meaning of Trumpism. Like most inter-agency documents there is almost something for everybody. But what comes through is the sheer US domestic electoral appeal that radiates from every page along with the massive policy contradictions between the ends and the means. Actual delivery is improbable.
Keating’s view
There is a big message for Australia: America is changing; don’t think all this will be swept aside post-Trump. His ideas, good and bad, are taking institutional form. Don’t be fooled by the success of the Albanese government in dealing with Trump so far, and the dispensation he gave us on defence spending. America is heading into new directions that will profoundly challenge Australia and for which we are unprepared.
There will be many different Australian responses. One of the most interesting comes from Paul Keating. Long an advocate of Trump’s strategic transformation of America policy, going back to his first term, Keating hails the new US national security strategy as a historic turning point terminating the post-World War II era.
Keating told this column: “Just as Nixon alone was able to sign America up to an anti-Soviet strategy with China, Trump alone and by executive decision is removing America from its 80-year role and burden as global hegemon to reassert itself as the dominant power in the Western hemisphere, extending, formally and forcefully, its reach into Latin America.
“Trump, all by himself, is employing his mandate to alter America’s post-war strategic direction to both acknowledge and accommodate other great powers in a manner last comprehensively articulated by Franklin Roosevelt.
“Trump has one virtue and one virtue alone – he may prevent a World War III.”
Keating interprets the US security strategy as signalling Trump’s determination to avoid a future military conflict with either Russia or China. He has long argued that China’s immense strength as an industrial power means the US cannot defeat China in any war in East Asia or over Taiwan.

For helping out, the French clock lover scored his own snap, Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating. Picture: Getty Images

"Ned"was startled:

The second startling aspect of the strategy is its alarm about “the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure” in Europe – and the elevation of Europe’s changing character as a frontline strategic issue. The report sees Europe’s economic decline as tied to a far more serious demise of national identities and self-confidence, caused by migration policies, cratering birthrates, the prominence of transnational bodies and censorship of free speech. It doesn’t identify the Muslim issue but the point is obvious.
“Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less,” the policy says. “As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”
It says this demise of self-confidence is “most evident” in Europe’s relations with Russia.
European nations enjoy “a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure” (save nuclear weapons) yet “the Trump administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war”.

Apropos of all that the reptiles featured another lowlight, though it was only put together by anonymous hacks:

Donald Trump blasts Europe as ‘decaying’ with ‘weak’ leaders
The US President launched a scathing attack on Europe over migration, political correctness and the war in Ukraine.
by Staff writers and AFP

Between time in a French café in Paris and time with dozy Don in Florida, the pond knows where it would rather be.

Amazing that so much attention must be paid to a dozy Don deep into dementia, but the Putin sycophant was at it again ...and thanks to the reptiles, there came another reminder of his devotion: US President Donald Trump, right, reaches out to shake hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin in August. Picture: AFP

"Ned" kept experiencing anxiety attacks. 

Perhaps being kissing cousin with Faux Noise wasn't the best way forward ...

This document only reinforces the fear that Trump will sell Ukraine down the river.
It offers a patronising justification for US intervention in Europe’s domestic affairs, following the Munich speech by Vance early this year.
“Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory,” the document says. “America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent – and, of course, to Britain and Ireland. We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness.
“Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the US, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.”
The document professes a concern to save Europe from itself while suggesting the foundations for NATO are eroding. That’s good news for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump’s distaste for much of Europe is visceral. He doesn’t see Australia as being contaminated by the European malaise. That’s good. But here’s a question for Australia: are we becoming more like Europe?

The question that might have been better to ask?

With all the neo-Nazi ratbags and lovers of authoritarianism currently out in the wild, are we becoming more like the United States, eager to be ruled by grifters, charlatans and epic liars?

The pond felt the need for a break, a little pacing, provided by the Wilcox of the day ...

Speaking of devotees of authoritarianism still getting away with it, the onion muncher was also out and about this day:

The header: Key to conservative revival: Drop climate change fixation, end mass migration; The conservative movement risks extinction as disenchanted voters flee to fringe parties, but strong policies and clear alternatives offer a blueprint for revival.

The uncredited caption for yet another wretched collage: Britain’s Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, Liberal Leader Sussan Ley and Republican President Donald Trump. Pictures: AP, Getty, Newswire.

It was a four minute read, but the poor lad is now so adrift in a sea of irrelevance, it was good to see the reptiles give him a home.

Then he could blather on about the "Anglosphere", and climate science denialism and Nige and Viktor and all his barking mad mates.

The pond only offers this time for the onion muncher so that correspondents can do a good hating,

Or not.

There are plenty of other ways to waste time than keep company with an irrelevant loon, his time long past, still shouting into the void, though others might like to think of him in his karaoke days, a time of low comedy ...

Stand back, let the clown sing his song, even though he's clearly lost his timing at this point in his non-career ...

Apart from in the US, it is not a good time for the main conservative political parties across the Anglosphere.
Australia’s Liberal-National Coalition and Britain’s Conservative Party have just crashed to their worst defeats; and in Canada a likely Conservative landslide turned into a narrow loss due to a downside of Donald Trump, namely heavy new tariffs on friends and allies. Some conservative voters are leaving the mainstream for disrupters, supposedly more truly conservative and untainted by failure.
There is no mystery to the conservative eclipse: revolving-door prime ministerships, careerist MPs, policy incoherence and a sense of impotence against the unelected and unaccountable administrative state. We have to face up to the fact it’s not our opponents’ brilliance but our own deficiencies that are to blame.

The US is a good time for conservatism? 

The US is a mess, but the reptiles just had to bring up Susssan v. the lettuce, didn't they? Former prime minister Tony Abbott comments on the Liberal Party’s recent meeting on net zero and the party’s leadership under Sussan Ley.

The pond isn't going to single out anything in the onion muncher playlist. We've heard this out of key tuneless harping many, many times before ...

One lesson we can learn from Trump is the need for strength; the need to have better answers to voters’ problems than the other side.

Oh FFS, that must be worth a mention. The need for strength? Dozy Don is strength? More like chaos ...

Then it was on to the usual denialism, and the rolling out of Tony Bleagh yet again ...

Indeed, that should be the mark of a conservative political movement: we address the issues facing our country and try to make what’s bad better, in ways that voters might be expected to support, in line with principles that have been proven to work.
It’s pragmatism based on values. Voters expect us to deliver more jobs with higher pay, lower taxes and better prospects for young people to buy a home and start a family. So, to succeed politically, our job is to stop what governments are doing to make that harder; to adhere to the cardinal principle of politics: First, do no harm.
Let’s start by dropping the climate change fixation and the commitment to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, which even former British Labour prime minister Tony Blair has said is “doomed to fail”. As the US Energy Secretary has said: “There is no climate crisis and there is no energy transition.”
Sure, we have only one planet and should pass it on in better shape to our descendants. And climate does indeed change, as shown by the ice ages, for instance. But why do we assume that mankind’s carbon dioxide is the only or even the main factor in climate change; and even if it is, why are we turning our economies upside down to decarbonise given that China, India, Russia and now America, too, have made no commitment to reduce their emissions to net zero by 2050?

Actually we're not turning our economy upside down, we're busy shipping gas and coal overseas at a jolly good price, but never mind, time for Nigel to make an appearance, bashing furriners ,...

Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage says a cluster of problems affecting the population of the UK has occurred under the Conservative government. “As I've been saying, dire economic problems, rising unemployment, persistent inflation … mass migration making us poorer,” Mr Farage told Sky News host Paul Murray. “And that was just under the Tories.”

How soon can we deport the onion muncher back to England, what with him making the IQ of the country diminish by the day?

This futile green gesture is driving up power prices, sending heavy industry offshore and making us even more dependent on China, which produces nearly all the solar panels and the wind turbines, disfiguring landscapes, supposedly to save the planet.
Then let’s end the mass migration that is driving down wages, pushing up housing costs, putting massive strain on infrastructure and services, and in some places making citizens feel like strangers in their own country.
Australia is the only country that has ended a wave of illegal migration by boat. Then there’s Hungary, under Viktor Orban, which has managed the harder task of ending a wave of illegal migration by land plus insisted that legal migration, too, be controlled so that Hungary keeps its culture.

The onion muncher's still showing his devotion to an anti-democratic authoritarian - he really does know how to sing for his Putin-loving supper - and yet the reptiles care so little that they won't put an accent in the right place? 

Orbán!

Why in some countries you might get flung into the clink for the want of an accent.

Back to the irrelevance ...

In becoming citizens, migrants to Australia have to swear that “from this time forward, under God, I pledge my allegiance to Australia and its citizens whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey”. They need not just say it but also mean it.
The migrants we should welcome are those who are committed to joining our team, not just taking advantage of life in a free country.
And as for the argument that migrants are needed to fill the jobs locals won’t do, then improve the incentives for work, through higher pay or ending virtually unconditional welfare payments.
As conservatives, we need to break the something-for-nothing entitlement mindset that is so corrosive of societies’ morale, as people in low-paid jobs deeply resent their neighbours earning almost as much from welfare as from work.
For people under 50 who had been unemployed and on welfare for six months or more, the Howard government in Australia introduced something called work for the dole – they had to do two days’ work experience every week to keep getting their money. It meant that younger unemployed people had to go back to work, preferably for a wage, but if not for the dole. And it distinguished our side as the real working-class party while our opponents – who hated it – were exposed as the welfare-class party.

Given the way that the reptiles have ghosted Barners and his new affair, it seems odd that they should have put Tamworth's shame into the onion muncher's rant, but there he was: Sky News host Steve Price questions whether One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson had told Member for New England Barnaby Joyce of her plan not to step down for another two terms. “I wonder if that was part of the negotiations that she was going to be in charge until she’s 83 years old and Barnaby’s going to hang around as her deputy,” Mr Price told Sky News host Sharri Markson. “The big problem here is for the Coalition and the conservative side of the Coalition. “It’s a disaster for the Coalition to lose Barnaby.”

It's a disaster to lose Tamworth's shame? 

No wonder Sharri scores full disrespect.

Meanwhile, the onion muncher had reached the end, with another gobbet of irrelevance:

It is conservatives who don’t really know where they stand and what they’d do differently that voters are over. It’s when political calculation stops us doing what we know is right that conservatives fail. Our challenge is to be a strong and clear alternative to the green-left parties that have exported manufacturing jobs to China, created vast ineffectual bureaucracies, made too many citizens dependants on government and let our armed forces run down to the extent that we can’t give the Ukrainians the weapons they need to fight for everyone’s freedom.
These are fraught times. But as Margaret Thatcher famously observed, the facts are conservative. Before the lights go out, people will wake up to the climate cult. Before passing new blasphemy laws, people will finally grasp the folly of mass migration. And right before the International Monetary Fund is called in, we’ll rein back the welfare state.
But in the meantime we’ve got to “fight the good fight, stay the course, and keep the faith”. If mainstream conservative parties keep failing, it won’t just be fringe parties of the right that supplant us. Unhappy voters will keep replacing incumbents even if it means jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. That’s why pluralist democracy under the rule of law needs its champions to be strong – that’s us – if it is to survive.

There came a final tragic note:

Tony Abbott was prime minister of Australia, 2013-15.

They didn't even have the time to mention his epic recent work, his history, his TV show? All his assiduously pathetic attempts to get back into the conversation, courtesy News Corp?

Mentioning his short, incompetent reign was all they could do? 

Remind us that he was kicked out of office way back on 15th September 2015, a good ten plus years ago, and since then has drifted around like a corked bottle, its message awash in a sea of indifference?

Time for the immortal Rowe to take up that blather about the need for strength in grifting, what with the latest grift well under way ...

Shouldn't there have been a credit for Jared too?

Never mind, each time he has a go, the immortal Rowe devises grand new images for this raucous, loud piggy ...