In which the pond eventually gets to Our Henry ...

 

What do we want?

We want more lung cancer, we want more diseases, we want younglings smoking, or if not that develop a vaping addiction, we want to put even more pressure on the hospitals and health care system, we might even want a return to smoking in restaurants and offices and planes, heck we want a triumph for the IPA and big tobacco, because we want to return to the good old days of the 1950s, when men (and women) could look incredibly sophisticated by puffing on a fag. 

Why you'd score sex every night if you just exhaled in a seductive way...

What do the reptiles want? 

Hard to say, because the lizard Oz sent the brain fart to coventry, putting it way down the page in the digital edition, easing into it by writing it up as best they could, with hack Sarah Ison hacking away under the header Angus Taylor unveils wider plan to dismantle organised crime’s revenue streams. 

She didn't even dig up a decent illustration ...

 

The real reptile agenda remained as it has been for months, with that eternal nonce, NSW premier Minns top of the page, ma...

EXCLUSVE
‘Baby Premier’: Minns reveals ‘bitter lesson’ from pro-Palestine protest inferno
NSW Premier Chris Minns has called the policing strategy behind allowing the pro-Palestinian march to the Sydney Opera House ‘bullshit’.

By Sharri Markson 

Every word, action and thought that Minns offers to the world, and to Sharri no less - full disrespect - ensured long ago that the pond would rather vote for the Babadook than for him and his government.

As for reading the nonce, sorry, you're on your own in that trek to the intermittent archive.

The real reptile mission, climate science denialism, continued apace, with the indefatigable Geoff back in top spot, putting the canny crusading Cranstonin his box ...

EXCLUSIVE
Bowen’s climate tzars set up ‘misinformation’ unit
Chris Bowen’s department has launched a cross-agency working group as the Climate Change Authority faces accusations of pursuing a stealth carbon tax on industry.
By Geoff Chambers and Noah Yim 

As usual, it was a double barrelled assault with Geoff chambering his own round ...

Albanese government launches taskforce to combat climate policy ‘misinformation’
Chris Bowen’s Climate Ministry of Truth is hunting pesky ‘misinformation’ peddlers – otherwise known as critics of the Albanese government’s energy and climate change agenda.
By Geoff Chambers

A couple of screen caps can take care of Geoff's bleat ...

Sorry, the pond has to interrupt.

What you won't be reading about in the dis- and misinformation rag?

Dammit, the Graudian has reverted to demanding details with menaces before providing access to the yarn, so it was off to the intermittent archive with them ...

And so on and on, but back to Geoff, and in his closer, he was still offering misdirection, with talk of "zealots" in the way that Orwellian hacks do ...

What's so funny about all this? 

Well it's always ironical when an Orwellian propaganda machine, a daily provider of misinformation, lies and distortion, projects it on to others...

That link about "pesky 'misinformation pedders'" linked to a Geoff piece ... which had another of those propaganda images atop it, showing furtive, anxious figures withering under Geoff's gimlet eye ...

Remarkably the only mention of climate in that other piece was a mention of Climate 200-backed teals, so the link itself was a form of misdirection and misinformation, though perhaps it helped Geoff in his martyrdom syndrome ...

The other link featuring the "energy and climate change agenda" did at least link to Geoff and Noah blathering on about climate change ...

Documents reveal energy firms promised $40bn to win deals on Labor’s marquee renewables scheme
Cash payments, Indigenous artwork commissions and free energy systems – the extraordinary price renewable companies are pledging for social licence under Chris Bowen’s secretive scheme.
By Noah Yim and Geoff Chambers

The pond would have liked to linga longa with the man currently atop the lizard Oz's current Orwellian propaganda machine - clearly the canny Cranston needed a break - but duty called on the extreme far right ...

Oh sheesh, not more of it ...

Climate authority has no business tackling tax policy
The Climate Change Authority’s foray into business tax inputs threatens regional industries and risks driving up living costs.
By Tania Constable
Contributor

Where do the reptiles get them from?

Tania Constable is chief executive of the Minerals Council of Australia.

Ah, say no more, how foolish of the pond ...it was obvious where this would be going from the get go ...

When Tania is asked by young 'uns what she did in the climate change wars, she can look the younglings in the eye, and proudly say she did what she could to ensure that the planet became a hellfire for climate activists ... and everybody else too, but what the hell Archy, toujours gai ...

Sheesh, more than enough already, now can the pond get on with the real business at hand, the most important intellectual foray into Orwellianism the reptiles offer each week.

It's the hole in bucket man on a Friday, and this day it's a doozy ...

The header: Why the intellectual left can’t let go of Mao’s Cultural Revolution; From Sartre to Foucault, intellectuals flocked to Mao’s Cultural Revolution and applauded its horrors. Sixty years later they are repeating the mistakes of the past.

The caption the snap setting the tone for Our Henry's rant: An illustration of Mao Zedong talking to his people from Lily Xiao Hong Lee’s book, Woman of the Long March.

This is an exceptionally handy form of misdirection.

Our Henry could have marvelled at the folly of an Iran war of choice, he could have noted the US slide into an autocracy and a brocracy ...

He had a vast palette available to him showing how the far right - and what passed once as centre right - was leading the world towards misery and disaster.

But instead he retreated into the past, into a safe space for the hive mind ...

Sixty years ago, as Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution took hold, Beijing was convulsed by an orgy of killing. In one district alone, Red Guards murdered more than 100 schoolteachers and academics in the two weeks from August 26 to September 8, 1966. Instead of being killed outright, most were tortured to death, in ordeals involving an X crudely scored into shaven scalps, whippings with copper-buckled belts, beatings with nail-spiked clubs and scalding with boiling water. Nor were educators the Red Guards’ only victims: citywide, political killings claimed nearly 2000 lives over the same period.
Mao had launched the Cultural Revolution in June. But the decisive turn came in late July, when Jiang Qing swept away every restraint on violence. “When good men beat bad men,” she declared, relaying Mao’s instructions, “the bad men merely get what they deserve.”
Thus began China’s descent into the abyss. In Guangxi, on the Vietnamese border, cannibalism became part of the punishment ritual: people branded “demons and monsters” were cut up alive; their livers, believed in traditional Chinese medicine to contain the soul, were removed; and local party officials encouraged banquets at which human flesh was mixed with pork.
Meanwhile, at the other end of China, authorities hunting an imaginary separatist conspiracy brutally interrogated some 790,000 ethnic Mongols, permanently disabling 120,000; another 20,000 were executed or driven to suicide.

This is water off a duck's back to the pond, what with the pond never having been charmed by Mao, or for that matter Stalin, in much the same way that the pond isn't currently charmed by sociopathic Vlad the invader or mad King Donald, with his devotion to North Korea and Vlad ... with The Death of Stalin one of its favourite films, and with Steve Buscemi doing a rich comedy turn as Nikita, Soviet leaded Nikita Khrushchev farewelled by Chinese leaders Mao Zedung and Liu Shao-chi after 10th anniversary celebrations of Chinese Republic.

Our Henry can't contemplate what Faux Noise has wrought in the United States, nor is he willing to understand how a cruel dictatorship might at the same time result in material success, helping explain why the pond is currently driving around in a Chinese-manufactured EV, with many other Chinese-made gadgets in the house (for that matter, where would the Allies have been without Stalin in the second world war?)

By the time the Cultural Revolution was over, the dead numbered over one million. Yet none of its crimes dampened the enthusiasm of the Western intellectuals who flocked to admire socialism’s latest great experiment.
Drab and discredited, the Soviet Union could no longer plausibly pose as humanity’s earthly paradise. Exotic China – a land of mystery, beauty and purpose, rising to greatness after decades of Western humiliation – became the vessel for revolutionary romanticism’s every hope.
Hailing what Australian author Dymphna Cusack had already said was not a “revolution” but a “resurrection”, Maoism’s achievements were vaunted in messianic terms. Returning from China when the killing was at its worst, fabled Harvard Sinologist John K. Fairbank described a “miraculous” transformation that had made the Chinese “healthy, well-fed and articulate about their role as citizens of Chairman Mao’s new China”. Echoing the Gospels, Australian-born Harvard scholar Ross Terrill proclaimed that Maoism had “healed the sick, fed the hungry and given security to the ordinary man”.
China, American psychologist Carol Tavris reported, had “eliminated many of the diseases that the flesh is heir to” – including “prostitution, drugs, theft, rape, murder and litter”.
But such “dreamlike” accomplishments were only a small part of the Cultural Revolution’s appeal, especially to those who embraced Maoism as a political creed. What it truly fed was the intellectuals’ longing for total revolution: the fantasy not merely of changing the world but of remaking humanity itself. Better still, “culture” stood at the project’s very heart, installing intellectuals at the revolution’s commanding heights.
That the new world would emerge blood-drenched from the old was not an unfortunate blemish: it was a vital part of the attraction. Bourgeois violence, Jean-Paul Sartre maintained in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), was repressive; the violence of the oppressed, unleashed in a “sublime revolutionary upsurge”, was inherently regenerative. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) – to which Sartre contributed a sanguinary preface – built on that foundation, casting violence as a “cleansing force” that cured the black man’s “inferiority complex” by shattering the white man’s privilege.

It's easier just to traduce the left, when it might have been just as easy to traduce all those intellectuals who thought Herr Adolf was mighty fine, or who have fallen into line with the Orange Mussolini, but no Our Henry, in his simple-minded way picks obvious targets ... Jean-Paul Sartre

The pond knew that there would be a real point to all this rabbiting on ...

Michel Foucault carried the legitimation of violence further still. Until the Cultural Revolution, he had cut a relatively conventional figure: soberly dressed and largely detached from university politics. Almost overnight, he reinvented himself: drastically altering manner and appearance, he joined the Gauche prolétarienne (Proletarian Left), France’s most extreme Maoist sect.
This was not merely a choice of viewpoint but of identity, with admiration for terror at its core. Violence, Foucault said, was an understandable “act of vengeance against the oppressive classes”; once it seized power the revolutionary vanguard would quite rightly “exert a power that is violent, dictatorial, and even bloody”. Ashamed of having played no part in the May 1968 student rebellion, Foucault conspicuously hurled rocks from a safe height at riot police, experiencing a cathartic, highly sexualised feeling that his partner described as “a definitely Nietzschean ‘joy in destruction’ ”.
Throughout the West, Maoism’s converts likewise adopted a total identity, with dress and the Little Red Book – which Lin Biao called a “spiritual atom bomb of infinite power” – serving as litmus tests of revolutionary authenticity. Two of the founding members of Germany’s Red Army Faction, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, waved little red books in the air at their first trial in Frankfurt. More comically, this paper reported in October 1971 that a young Brisbane radical attended a university disciplinary hearing “in full Chinese workers dress – blue cotton tunic, matching cap, two-inch-square Mao badge and well-thumbed Little Red Book”.
The China these Maoists revered was not a real country: they worshipped “la Chine dans nos têtes”, the China in our heads – a China purged of every fact that might disturb their faith.
Those facts were there for anyone who cared to look. As early as 1967, René Viénet, who taught at Nanjing University, denounced the Cultural Revolution’s horrors; Father László Ladány’s Hong Kong-based China News Analysis meticulously documented them week by week. Then, in 1971, Simon Leys published The Chairman’s New Clothes, demolishing the Maoist myth.

A snap heralded the real point ... Palestinian Hamas militants spictured (sic) during a military training training (sic sic) session in Gaza City. Picture: Mahmud Hams / AFP

After a little more ranting, the real point came ...

But to Foucault and his comrades, it scarcely mattered that the “Cultural” Revolution had slaughtered Chinese scholars and devastated the country’s cultural heritage. What mattered was absolution for the sins of their imperialist forebears, forgiveness for basking in the bourgeois comforts of an affluent society – and, most of all, the exhilaration of imagining themselves at history’s spearhead, borne on the “wind from the East” into a sunlit future.
That sunlit future left China in ruins, its people reduced to abject poverty. Yet startlingly few of the Western leftists who had hailed the Cultural Revolution later acknowledged their error, much less grappled with its causes. Foucault remained enthralled by total revolution, insisting on its necessity. Contending that “morality is a residue of the old world”, his colleague, Alain Badiou, refused to mourn Maoism’s “hundreds of thousands of dead”: “violence, often extreme”, he argued, marks “every attempt to practice a free politics”. As for Slavoj Žižek – the New New Left’s intellectual darling – he acknowledged that “the Cultural Revolution miserably failed” yet insisted that “terror is the condition of freedom”.
For these leading left-wing intellectuals, liberty must come wrapped in death. And the exaltation of bloodshed still quickens the hearts of today’s useful idiots, just as it did those of their predecessors.

The real point?

Yes, they have traded the Mao badges for keffiyehs, replaced an imaginary China with an imaginary Hamas and morphed yesterday’s “imperialist running dogs” into “filthy Zios”. But the yearning is unchanged: to be swept up in the human tide of total revolution, to be cleansed of every sin, to be intoxicated by the sheer thrill of violence. The Cultural Revolution is over. Sixty years on, its virus remains as lethal as ever.

How could the pond resist?

Here's a man who fellow travels with ethnic cleansers and those inclined to genocide ...

Far-right Israeli minister outlines plan for removal of all Palestinians from Gaza
Itamar Ben-Gvir claims proposal for illegal forced displacement of 2 million people is ‘realistic’ and ‘concrete’ (intermittent archive link)

How about a little palate cleanser? A reminder where Our Henry's rhetoric leads? How about a reading from Haaretz? 

What with Orwellian abuse of words today's reptile feature ...

Israeli Settlers Turn Words Into Action. So Should Their Opponents
The Israeli right hates the phrase 'violent settlers' but it loves 'voluntary emigration.' Confronting both will mean adopting the strategy that settlers and Israel's government have perfected

Say what?

"genociders," "violent Zionist colonizers," "Nazi invaders."

That about summarises the company Our Henry likes to keep ...

Our Henry learn a lesson? Is it possible for lickspittle fellow travellers ever to learn a lesson?

Luckily some are not as competent as others in the killing fields ... even if it lets mad mullahs off the hook, and actually helps to solidify their repressive regime ...

Sociopaths everywhere ...so many Lord Haw Haws of the lizard Oz and Our Henry kind ...

In which the pond settles for mad King Donald's war of choice and a serve of pearls of wisdom...

 

At the start of the first episode of season five of The Wire, Bunk and his cop mates use a photocopier as a fake polygraph to fool a credulous young crim.

As the routine goes down, Bunk's mate observes Americans are a stupid people, by and large. We pretty much believe whatever we're told. And then later Bunk adds The bigger the lie, the more they believe.

This isn't anti-Americanism, though for a 2005 show, it's prescient enough about the mess America is currently in.

After all, Bunk is just recycling Herr Adolf and we all know what the Germans made of believing the big lie.

And what might be said of the hive mind produced by the lizard Oz, save to say that the longer the lie is repeated, the more the jihad works.

And that's where the pond starts today, with newly anointed jihadist, the canny Cranston, tag teaming with Brownie at the top of the "news" section ...

That splash gives the reptile game away ...

BRACE FOR AN IRATE RISE
Chalmers defends plunging house prices as living standards flatline
Treasurer admits tax reforms a factor in house price fall but vows no change
Jim Chalmers has conceded his tax reforms helped drive house prices down yet refused to change course, even if the damage to the property market worsens.
By Greg Brown and Matthew Cranston

Just note the comical graphic at the head of the jihad to see the propaganda intent...

Not to be outdone, reliable jihadist Geoff was on hand just below, eager to add to the bad news, and blessed by another snap making Jimbo look silly ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
Now the Treasurer is even blaming algorithms

Jim Chalmers’ inconvenient truths, as economy runs on fumes
Jim Chalmers has added social media to his growing list of things that make his job harder.

The pond highlighted these jihadists because it's Thursday and so the pond is going to do a bunk on a couple of the contributors on the extreme far right, both beavering away for the Daily Zionist News.

The pond has never much bothered with petulant Peta, and this bleat ensured an ongoing lack of attention...

The Bondi Beach massacre inquiry is a sham unless it’s reopened
We owe the dead the truth, and unless this royal commission urgently reopens hearings and takes evidence from politicians and senior leaders, we will have failed them.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

The petulant one was backed up by another contribution, though the pair seemed hopelessly confused and contradictory ...

Enough evidence is there for the antisemitism royal commission – let Virginia Bell tally it up
The true reckoning of the work of the commission comes only after we see the commissioner’s report
By Michael Easson

C.f. another "news" story dressed up as an EXCLUSIVE ...

EXCLUSIVE
Creatives hold closed-door roundtable with royal commission
Virginia Bell’s royal commission heard from prominent Jewish creatives to gather testimony about antisemitism infiltrating Australia’s arts sector.
By Elizabeth Pike

What's the point of this incessant ongoing campaign? 

Partly it's to keep up the incessant drum beat, in a way that will sustain the jihad for months. Never mind any contradictions, just keep it running like that campaign to ruin the Voice.

More importantly, as the pond has suggested a number of times, if the Commission doesn't come up with recommendations suited to the reptile agenda - at this point it seems that agenda will only be satisfied if all criticism of the government of Israel and its ethnic cleansing activities in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon is banned - then the mother of all jihads will be launched over the holiday season break, ensuring a happy Xmas for reptiles.

The pond is so over it that it couldn't even muster the strength to head off to Haaretz to hear the latest news about the ethnic cleansing and the apartheid system currently being deployed in Israel.

And with that issue kicked to the corner, the pond couldn't muster much interest in much of anything else.

Savaging Telstra is like being given a free hit with a photocopier acting as a polygraph:

Telstra outage: The next ‘long fuse’ may have already been lit
How a single system failure has exposed the wider, hidden risks within Telstra
The release of an investigation into Telstra’s network outage marks an important turning point for chief executive Vicki Brady.
By Eric Johnston
Associate Editor

And the pond could only wish Samer a happy time as he contemplated the Iran folly ... what with economic D-day having given way to the bombing of weddings as a solution.

Besides, his piece was an import from The Times, a reminder of the dreck served up by locals on a Thursday ...

The pond could at least use that as an excuse to slip in a Luckovich, what with Herr Adolf a running theme today ...

(For more sieg heil details, see the Georgia Recorder)

Sameh did his best to sort it all out in his final gobbet ...

Say what? It's now all about getting the mad Mullahs to go back to the MOU, which was a confession of the abject failure of this war of choice, with the hope of getting a few concessions, like ... we didn't really mean for you to be in control of the strait, we meant more that we wanted a sock puppet government of the Venezuelan kind, so we could make out like bandits on a colonial oil junket, just to help climate science with a final epic push to the two degree mark.

Speaking of climate science that set the tone for a serve of pearls of wisdom:

The pond is pleased the pearls included a reference to the joys of AI (and the data centres the bots need) because it did enjoy this double-edged 'toon by Jennings in The Graudian ...

Apart from being on the road to hell, what's the point of these pearls?

It's the usual, forget net zero, forget climate science, forget renewables ...

The government’s commitment to high-cost and intermittent energy sources that cannot meet the growing demands of AI data centres is made worse by Canberra’s bizarre insistence (until recently) on the kind of energy that is unsuited to data centres.

The pearls that subsequently dropped were just window dressing, an elaboration on that theme ...

The government’s likely demand is that AI not replace a single union member’s job in this country or undercut their conditions. And its 2026 budget assault on savings and investment, as we know, will penalise high-risk and high-return investments across the economy, with the government and its bureaucrats to police a narrow carve-out for some start-ups.
Chalmers describes AI as the “next wave” of technological change “that has now arrived”, giving the impression that it has materialised out of thin air.
But technological change is a by-product of innovation and risk-taking by entrepreneurs in search of profits, with investors and consumers – acting through free markets – the ultimate judge of their success or failure.
A government that is hostile to entrepreneurs and believes bureaucrats rather than markets should allocate resources will only stifle, rather than foster, this process. Yet Chalmers believes “we” – meaning our politicians and bureaucrats – can somehow micromanage the AI revolution to maximise its productivity benefits and eliminate its costs and risks altogether.
This is rubbish. I don’t pretend to know whether the AI revolution will prove to be a big bang or a whimper. But if it proves to be the former, it will – like every previous positive structural shock we have experienced – cause considerable economic pain.

For no particular reason the reptiles flung in an AV reminder that the best way of dealing with a moronic desire to use black roofs in a sunburnt land is to deploy solar panels ...Treasurer Jim Chalmers confronts Australia’s first one trillion dollar national debt

Golding caught that spirit ...

For man who confessed to not having the first clue about the AI revolution, this Pearl delivered a number of inane pearlers...

The pain is not something governments can wish away or abolish but inevitably accompanies – indeed is the reverse side of – the economic benefits these episodes bring.
China’s economic renaissance at the end of the 20th century is a case in point. We became one of that country’s most important suppliers of iron ore, coal and other commodities while benefiting enormously from its low-cost exports.
This shock lifted growth, productivity and living standards in this country, but also led to the elimination of many jobs in the manufacturing and textile sectors.
Bob Hawke and Paul Keating understood that this was a package deal. If the benefits were going to be enjoyed by the many, the costs would have to be borne by the few. Rather than micromanage this process as the Labor Left and unions wanted them to do, which would’ve killed it off and left us poorer as a result, they encouraged it by largely getting out of the way. Their reasoning was that the bigger the economic dividend we could earn from our expanding trade ties with China, the more rapidly displaced manufacturing workers would be re-employed elsewhere. And for those unable to do so, growing government revenues would easily fund targeted safety nets.
While AI is a different case, the same logic applies if it does end up cutting a swath through our white-collar industries.
That remains a big if, given we cannot predict the future (as Treasury has demonstrated recently with its rent and house price guesses). If Treasury were doing its job, it would have rejected the idea of an AI policy framework that could somehow capture the benefits of this technology in a cost-free way.

Did the pond need any further evidence to add to the mountain that proved that the French clock devotee and the dinkum drinker lived in reptile minds rent free? Not really ...Paul Keating and Bob Hawke. Picture: Getty Images

The pond thought another Golding was more to the point ...

After that came a reminder that the real point was standard climate science denialism, with net zero the usual reptile sticking point ...(sorry, people of Nepal, sorry Pacific islanders)...

It would be telling the government to support structural change, whether from AI or any other source, by cutting corporate tax rates to attract investment; lowering spending to take pressure off interest rates; increasing the flexibility of the labour market; abandoning net zero to bring down energy costs; and making sure specific help is available for affected workers.
Who knows, perhaps the latter could be allowed to dip into their superannuation savings to fund necessary retraining?

A master stroke, yet another way to make sure that super will never serve its intended purpose, though on the evidence people do tend to have a certain longevity, at which point super might be handy to help offset a miserable, miserly pension.

Towards the end, this Pearl did attempt a minor billy goat butt ...

I am not suggesting we should disregard wider AI risks; for example, to copyright holders and consumers. 

But that butt was immediately met by another butt ...

But where possible these should be dealt with under existing laws rather than creating a parallel, AI-specific, legal regime.
When a possible technological revolution beckons, we have a simple and inescapable choice.

And so a climate science Luddite was able to fling around with wild abandon the notion that he was besieged by Luddites...

Do we embrace it, trusting that the benefits it will bring to the many – in the form of higher productivity and living standards – will outweigh the dislocation and pain it inflicts on the few?
Or do we resist it, putting the protection of every threatened job ahead of the interests of the rest of the community, like modern-day Luddites?
Chalmers, in his characteristically muddled way, thinks we can have the best of both worlds. When a treasurer is incapable of acknowledging trade-offs as obvious as this one, perhaps he should be looking for another portfolio.
David Pearl is a former Treasury assistant secretary.

Not bad for a man who confessed in a muddled way characteristic of reptile contributions, I don’t pretend to know whether the AI revolution will prove to be a big bang or a whimper. 

This offerer of pearls of wisdom probably brings the same intellectual depth to his understanding of climate science...

And so to wrap up proceedings with an immortal Rowe, bringing together EVs and RBA ...

And as the pond has reached season five of The Wire in its retrospective season, why not offer that opening scene?

In which the pond goes Pacific, and ends up sinking into the sea with the torporific "Ned" ...

 

The craven Craven today did his bit for the Australian Daily Zionist News, with an attack on Richard Flanagan, which coyly avoided tagging Flanagain as anti-Semitic by labelling his position on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank this way: In fairness to Flanagan’s positions, they may not be positively antisemitic. Instead, they may represent a different form of Jewish dismissal. This is asemitism.

Such a stupid man - he was never a passable academic - and that's as much as the pond will say, but here's the link for masochists ...

Richard Flanagan’s dangerous idea is just a chilling form of denial
The novelist is a passable author, but as a cultural analyst he ranks well below most rugby league commentators.

Meanwhile, the propaganda side of the rag carried on, with the canny Cranston seeming to have taken over from Geoff Chalmers as head of the hit squad ...

The pond will list off the contributions for the pleasure of masochists not sated by the craven Craven:

EXCLUSIVE
Chalmers’ correction hits home: Treasury to answer for ‘rosy’ price forecasts
Former Treasury officials say the department’s predictions of the budget impact on property growth could have been nothing more than ‘guesses’, as the nation’s biggest bank downgrades its forecasts.
By Matthew Cranston and Lydia Lynch

Put it another way ...

Sorry vulgar youff.

But then the pond paused because a new name - or so it seemed to the pond - had joined the reptile hit squad ...

It was originally presented as COMMENTARY, later rebranded to ANALYSIS:

COMMENTARY by CHRIS BYCKI
Seven critical flaws in Treasury’s ‘garbage’ tax modelling

Crucial questions Treasury must answer about its CGT reforms
If Treasury’s assumptions are wrong, the budget CGT changes may produce very different outcomes from those the government promised.

The pond likes to encourage new members of the hit squad - anything to boost the lizard Oz gene pool - and did admire Frank's artwork, though it wondered yet again when Frank will stop taking credit for these visual monstrosities and let AI take the blame.

It's such crude propaganda, worthy of Der Stürmer...

Don't expect the pond to offer more, there's the link above for veteran masochists ...

As for Brycki, it was just another form of hustle, as the tag at the end of the piece revealed:

Chris Brycki is the founder and chief executive of online investment adviser Stockspot.

Yes, the reptiles had offered a rare treat to Brycki's business, a link outside the hive mind, an exceptional honour where punters might discover the joys of online investment advice:

Sharemarket investing done for you
We set up and manage your sharemarket portfolio to help you achieve your financial goals.

Nah, not really.

There could be found a note on the new member of the hit squad:

Below all that, the reptiles offered their own temptation to punters - get rich with reptile advice:

Want to build real wealth? Our free newsletter delivers investment strategies, smart superannuation tips, property insights, and the insider tactics wealthy Australians use to get richer. Sign up here.

Nah, even more not really. 

And the pond thought replicating that "sign up here" link unwise, lest some innocence take the bait and waste their schekels on getting poorer.

If the hacks are so good at doing investments and getting richer, why are they trapped pandering to the hive mind? 

The reptiles also remembered that there was an election coming in Victoria and Gina's pet needed another boost:

EXCLUSIVE
‘Read the briefings’: Allan’s cabinet was told of secret $8bn tax

Jacinta Allan’s secret levy revealed to full cabinet in June, 2024
Cabinet documents have exposed a bitter internal Labor blame game over who kept Victoria’s secret $8bn rail levy hidden from the public for years.
By Anthony Galloway

Back on the extreme far right, Dame Slap was out and about, as is her wont on a Wednesday ...

The international treaty racket is rocket fuel for One Nation
Pauline Hanson and her party are shouting ‘last drinks’ to the notion our established parties can plough on with business as usual.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

It was a hearty - if unhealthy, in the manner of a reptile jumbo burger - mix of 18C hate (an ancient reptile whine), together with predictable guff featuring transphobia, Greenies fear and loathing, blather about the Reef, net zero, the Voice and a pro forma brand of black bashing as the triumphant conclusion.

Do the reptiles really think that blathering about international treaties, in the way that some rage at "cosmopolitanism", is going to have an impact over and above the daily realities of getting by?

Apparently so, because Dame Slap decided to join the Canavan "black coal batters" Caravan, and in the process pumped up Pauline:

There are good treaties and practical treaties. However, much of the international treaty business is a shameless racket used by activists to bypass parliamentary democracy.
Hanson and Canavan do us a great service in calling it out.

The pond had no time for it, what with other delights awaiting, and the pond still waiting for a reptile explanation of how climate change had nothing to do with the Nepal disaster ...

Besides, the pond had "Ned" to hand, but before being bored out of its gourd, the pond wanted to offer a little teaser, if only because the headline touched on another mad King Donald triumph ...

The header: US influence is the big absentee at this year’s Pacific forum; The fact is Australia’s neighbours do not fear disappointing Canberra in the way they fear disappointing Beijing.

The caption for the reptiles' nightmare: Anthony Albanese probably had high hopes to improve regional security at the 55th Pacific Islands Forum. Picture: AFP

It could be worse. 

Imagine if the mad king actually took an active interest in the Pacific, as he's done with Venezuela, as noted by Paul Krugman ...

The Plot to Steal Venezuela’s Oil
A scam that is both vile and deeply stupid

So Pacific nations have been spared for the moment a dose of vile stupidity and instead can sink into the rising seas as a side benefit of the mad king's climate science denialism.

That noted, this should properly be the bromancer's turf, but if Aldi can make a living offering "lookalike" brands, so can the pond ...

A week ago Anthony Albanese would have looked forward to this week’s session of the Pacific Islands Forum at Koror, Palau, with optimism. He reasonably could have hoped the 18 heads of government who attended would further improve regional security and Australia’s close relationship with its Pacific Islands partners.
Instead, the Prime Minister is scrambling to minimise the fallout of China’s payback after the 2022 PIF sidelined Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s general security proposal for the region.
Beijing had considerable grounds to think its interest in the region would be at risk again at this year’s forum. The forum’s host, Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr, planned to pursue a resolution denouncing the Chinese missile test that landed in the waters between Nauru, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu in July.
Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale wanted to secure a general regional security agreement that would have undermined elements of China’s bilateral security agreements while uniting much of Australia’s bilateral security agreements.
As an ally of Taiwan, Palau would be giving some prominence and access to Taipei, which China had undermined at the two preceding forums.

At this point the reptiles offered an audio distraction, but thought so little of it, it was just a one line link:

LISTEN NOW: Island meltdown: China’s massive blow-up rocks the Pacific

The pond made the error clicking on the link and found it was more of the usual, with the notion implicit that climate change had done nothing to harm island paradises ...

One of the chief pleasures of not offering reptile audio and AV distractions is not getting bogged down in desperate attempts to attract a wider audience ...

The hapless reptiles missed the boat yet again, what with the US fuss about Lindsay Clancy dominating the headlines, and wiser minds heeding the need to cut back, Too Much True Crime? It's Okay to Step Away ...

If you linger too long on the main page, you score that overriding pop up, but the pond wasn't tempted and headed back to the Pacific for the bad news ...

While it is difficult to prove that China has sabotaged the leaders meeting, New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters sees good reasons for believing President Xi Jinping’s fingerprints are all over the last-minute chaos in Koror.
The first shock was the departure of Wale, who flew back to Honiara to deal with an unexpected leadership challenge from a cabinet colleague. Wale has pursued a new relationship with Canberra that has rolled back some of the gains China has made in Solomon Islands since the latter switched from diplomatic recognition of Taipei to Beijing in 2019.
It is difficult to believe the challenge to Wale’s leadership at home was not encouraged by the Chinese mission in Honiara, which maintains close links with the former government and its supporters. Other notable absentees in Koror include Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, Kiribati President Taneti Maamau, Samoan Prime Minister La’auli Leuatea Schmidt and Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Jotham Napat.
Each of these is significant in their own right, though for different reasons. Fiji is the hub of Pacific regionalism and the anchor for Australian-Pacific Islands security arrangements as demonstrated by the signing of the recent bilateral defence treaty. Kiribati also has close ties to China since switching recognition to Beijing in 2019 and has a proposed constitutional amendment that would prevent it from switching back to Taipei at any time in the future.
Former Samoan prime minister Fiame Mata’afa was instrumental at the 2022 forum in mothballing China’s regional security proposal. Yet La’auli has taken a softer line on China. Napat has curried favour with Beijing by watering down the on-again, off-again security agreement between Vanuatu and Australia.
With five key Pacific leaders absent, it’s doubtful any measures concerning China will be effectively pursued at Koror.

Chairman Xi's already copped a deserved pounding for the way he's hidden the disaster in Tibet, and here was more fear ...Australia’s neighbours do not fear disappointing Canberra in the way they fear disappointing Beijing and Xi Jinping. Picture: Vladimir Voronin

It was time for a final brief gobbet of fear...

While much of this will be seen as a challenge to the successes Australia has achieved in its co-operation with its regional neighbours, the reasons rest more with the broader Indo-Pacific and global geopolitics. The fact is Australia’s neighbours do not fear disappointing Canberra in the way they fear disappointing Beijing. They know Australia will always be there for them. Our neighbours are aware that, whatever disagreements they might have with Canberra, Australia would not punish them in the way China could and would. Thus the mismatch between friendship and fear at play in Palau is not whether middle power Australia can hold the line against great-power China.
The critical question is: Where is the great-power balance? The US, the other Pacific great power, is not only missing in action, it also is antagonising the region’s microstates.
The Trump administration has gloried in disrupting the rules-based order, celebrated the asymmetries of power politics and pursued policies that put at risk core regional aspirations such as the Paris Agreement’s climate commitments, regulation of deep seabed mining and environmental zones for fisheries protection.
China’s capacity to influence the region through subliminal fear is possible because there are no credible consequences. It is difficult for Canberra to be Washington’s deputy sheriff when no one believes there is a sheriff.
Richard Herr is a former honorary director and adjunct professorial fellow at the Centre for International and Regional Affairs at the University of Fiji.

And that was that, as the mad Sheriff disappeared into a cloud of puffery and smoke ... and the pond could reveal the reason it went there ... as the perfect segue to the immortal Rowe ...

Then it was time to bore off socks and stockings with a natter by "Ned"...

The header: How Howard’s realism rewrote the rules on borders; Border protection is the most singular defeat suffered by the progressive movement in this country over the past 30 years.

The caption for the allegedly period snap: An army helicopter being assembled on the tarmac of Christmas Island airport before assisting SAS soldiers heading out to MV Tampa in August 2001. Picture: News Corp.

The pond doesn't know why it bothers to stay loyal to "Ned", especially as he occasionally indulges in wayward triumphalism, as in Border protection is the most singular defeat suffered by the progressive movement in this country over the past 30 years.

Given the recent tragedy in Nepal, the pond could offer an immediate variation: Action on climate change is the most singular defeat suffered by the progressive movement in this country over the past 30 years, and what a triumph that's been for the planet. You're welcome Nepalese people.

Besides, correspondents will realise from the header alone that they have been here very recently, what with the pond recently having featured the bromancer's mea culpa ...

Why I was wrong about the Tampa affair
John Howard was right and ahead of the game. All countries now want to control their borders. The nation is in his debt.

"Ned" usually wanders outside the hive mind to plagiarise the thoughts of others, but here he was in much the same turf, producing the usual sensation of weird déjà vu and deep ennui ... fo all five minutes of the read ...

It is the 25th anniversary of one of the decisive events in our history – the landfall denial of the MV Tampa that saw a showdown between the compassionate acceptance of open borders and the principle of national sovereignty vested in the control of borders.
The Howard government’s decision to deploy the military in August 2001 to stop the Tampa disembarking on Australian territory with more than 430 asylum-seekers became a global drama that polarised attitudes towards John Howard as prime minister.
The consequences of that event still resound in Australia and in other jurisdictions. It was driven by Howard’s conviction that the Tampa be denied by any means of executive power while his opponents invoked the moral and universal obligation on rich nations to welcome asylum-seekers arriving on their doorstep.
The politics of Tampa were primal and brutal. Australia was under virulent assault from global opinion makers. The risks Howard ran to impose his will were astonishing. At several points Howard could have been thwarted or defeated. In the cause of sovereignty he chose an extreme solution that came with a cost in humanitarian concern. At the time nobody foresaw the full legacy – that Howard would establish an iron law of Australian polity rejecting asylum-seekers arriving by boat and that, a generation later, this would be envied by many democratic nations.
Ultimately, the issue was settled by public opinion. Howard’s stand – the strong man as populist – was one of his most popular decisions as prime minister. When the Rudd-Gillard government tried to reverse Howard’s policy it was crushed by public hostility. When the Abbott government embraced Operation Sovereign Borders – to stop the boats – it championed the Howard precedent.

The pond should have also mentioned nausea at the triumphalism, though the point of "Ned's" natter is obscure.

Do the reptiles think this repeated wandering down memory lane will boost the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way?

More to the point, it will surely boost Pauline as the strong woman as populist. Is that the hidden reptile agenda?... Australian SAS troops preparing to depart Christmas Island for MV Tampa. Picture: Megan Lewis

Does "Ned" have any doubt? Nah, he's in true blue, ridgy didge red-headed ranga turf ...

Anthony Albanese, once an open-borders exponent, has now signed up to Howard’s doctrine. Border protection is the most singular defeat suffered by the progressive movement in this country over the past 30 years. Yet much of the left, while vanquished on the issue, remains defiant and unrepentant.
By 2001 asylum-seeker arrivals were part of a criminal and lucrative people-smuggling industry. In the previous three years more than 8000 people had arrived by boat. Papers were going back and forth from cabinet searching for an answer. Immigration minister Philip Ruddock told the author: “We were under attack from people-smugglers.”
When the Tampa sailed over the horizon it was a threat and an opportunity for Howard. Under captain Arne Rinnan, the Tampa had collected the asylum-seekers from a stricken boast and had set course for Indonesia. The flashpoint for the Howard government came when the asylum-seekers “threatened” the captain – in Rinnan’s words – demanded he change course to Christmas Island and entry to Australia, and warned they would jump overboard unless he complied.
“We couldn’t tolerate that,” Howard said. Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet head Max Moore-Wilton said: “Australia had to draw the line as a nation.” Howard’s office chief, Arthur Sinodinos, said: “Ministers felt ‘if we cave in to this, how could we possibly explain it to the Australian people?’ ” Ruddock later told ministers there was intelligence that a pipeline of 10,000 people were waiting to come from Indonesia. The cabinet was rock solid – every senior minister was committed: Peter Costello, Alexander Downer, Peter Reith.
Denying landfall was filled with hazards. Howard was making up policy as he went: “I knew it was a risky decision.” What would happen to the asylum-seekers, already facing medical issues? The government tried to get Indonesia to accept the boat, but Jakarta shut its door. The captain, having initially followed instructions, finally decided to defy authorities and entered Australian waters.

A snap of the lying rodent interrupted the triumphalism ... John Howard announces SAS troops had taken control of the MV Tampa. Picture: News Corp

It was a minor pause, a little pandering to the heroic subverter of humanitarian care ...

It was assumed outside the government that Howard would crack at this point. Instead, the national security committee ordered the SAS to board the Tampa and take control of the ship.
Howard’s blood was now up. With the politics moving into hysterical mode, Howard defied the UNHCR and insisted that none of the Tampa people would land or be processed in Australia.
Yet he came to the brink of defeat in the courts. In a farcical situation, Federal Court judge Tony North, who had found against Howard in the waterfront case, now found against him in the Tampa case – a ruling that would have destroyed Howard’s entire position. On appeal, the government won 2-1 in the court. The upshot: the human rights lawyers had failed to stop the government.
Facing another crisis Howard and his ministers had to decide: If Australia was saying no, who in the world would take the Tampa boatpeople? After days of alarm and desperate diplomacy, the answer came: New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark took 150 and Nauru accepted 280, with Howard and Ruddock unveiling the Pacific Solution, a new legal and administrative model that said asylum-seekers could be sent to Pacific nations for processing.
While ALP leader Kim Beazley supported the deployment of the SAS, he opposed Howard’s Border Protection Bill. Explaining the supreme principle on which he acted, Howard told parliament: “Every nation has the right to effectively control its borders and to decide who comes here and under what circumstances, and Australia has no intention of surrendering or compromising that right.”

In his usual pompous, ponderous way, "Ned" embarked on a listicle ...

There are four conclusions.
First, as an island continent Australia has a geographical advantage and a political expectation it will protect its borders, a situation few other nations enjoy. Second, the Tampa was not a rejection of refugees but an insistence that Australia would accept refugees only in an offshore program. In the decades before 2001 Australia had been generous in accepting more than 500,000 refugees including from all races – largely in offshore processing in co-operation with the UN – the core point being government control of the program.
It was the critics who said Australia must now accept the reality of global people movements and accept the arrival of asylum-seekers by boat who really aspired to a radical change in refugee policy, a change that Howard rejected.

The reptiles interrupted the listicle to call in the troops one more time ... Armed SAS troops head out on a barge to MV Tampa. Picture: Megan Lewis

... and then "Ned" maintained the ranga rage ...

Some advocates, however, pretended the Tampa decision was a one-off – that prioritising compassion in this case would have no “pull factor” legacy when the entire history of asylum-seeker experience in Australia and globally ran to the contrary: nations that signal acceptance get more people arriving. This was the reality that undercut the moral appeals.
Third, Tampa was a significant factor in Howard’s 2001 election win, notably when linked to the 9/11 terrorist attack on America. Howard agreed it was a “major issue” in the campaign that also saw Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party virtually obliterated. But the government warrants condemnation for the disreputable ploy of linking boatpeople with terrorists.
Fourth, many prominent critics accused Howard of racism and of regressing to an old-fashioned quasi-White Australia bias over the Tampa event, a claim confounded by the reality: safe borders created the conditions for an expanded offshore legal immigration intake. This was the chief and enduring public policy legacy.
The permanent migration intake increased from 74,000 to just under 160,000 while Howard was PM. During Howard’s first three years in office, net overseas migration averaged 86,000 annually, while in his final three years the average was 188,000 – an astonishing increase. The big lift came in the second half of the Howard era, after 2001, when immigration expanded rapidly with a marked boost in the nation’s racial and cultural diversity, with more Asian and more Muslim migrants.
This is fundamental to Howard’s legacy and was achieved with remarkably little political unrest about immigration policy. That many progressives still cannot concede this reality testifies to their inability to grasp the political dynamics of Tampa – it meant every PM had to master the people movement test and that border protection was the necessary (but no sufficient) condition for successful, expanding immigration.

Put it another way: those who think the lying rodent introduced a new level of fear of furriners, which has culminated in the perils of Pauline, can only stand back and admire the way that reptiles of the "Ned" kind blather about "successful, expanding immigration", when in reality there's now a canker in the core ...and every week reptiles of the Dame Groan kind rail at the disasters arising from immigration.

They can't even get their nonsense into some kind of order.

And so, in the absence of Wilcox, to end with the rare treat of a Golding, providing not just an analysis of the ranga, but also of "Ned" ...

The pond has long believed that the Dutch are a strange tribe - being in Nederland and being made to watch a sitcom and wonder why everybody else in the room was laughing was probably what did it - and as further evidence, Lubach has returned, and offers subtitles so that English speakers can enjoy this peculiar cult ...