In which the Angelic one prays, the Ughmann does shipping, and the long absent lord help us, grating Gemma does furries ...

 

The pond should properly open with a tip of the hat to the correspondent who noted silly Hugh Marks attempting to befriend the reptiles, as reported by the venerable Meade yesterday, with a reference to the fable of the frog and the scorpion: Top Marks for cosying up to News Corp – but Hugh knows if it’ll stop constant attacks on the ABC? (as told by prime ham Orson Welles in Mr Akradin)

Sadly, as the pond can personally testify, Marks is one of those snowflakes who has risen to the top to prove that the Peter Principle remains solidly in place and working as well as it's ever done.

Now back to the war ...

As King Donald celebrates the spirit of the season by promising to commit war crimes - attacking power plants in the same way that Vlad the Sociopath has been doing to Ukraine - what could the reptiles do, but send out the Angelic one to lead the county in prayer?

The header: ‘Huge miscalculation’: Easter prayer amid widespread fears of food and medicine shortages;Easter hope takes a hit as war in the Middle East threatens potential shortages of everything from fertiliser to lifesaving medications.

The caption for a sight that has no meaning to EV owners: Cuts to fuel excise have been welcomed as 'better than nothing' but the bigger picture remained surety of supply, said trucking company owners. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

Why the Angelic one?

Well, she can cluck and commiserate ...

Easter in the Christian tradition is a time of hope; hope and new life. Yet I’d bet that not many of us are feeling too hopeful right now.
The war in the Middle East may do something few other wars have done to Australia: cause the collapse of our much-vaunted national complacency. The war’s consequences are not short-term, no matter where you live in our country: the city, the suburbs or the bush. People are rightly nervous.
The latest Newspoll is proof of this. Asked whether they approved or disapproved of US military action against Iran, 72 per cent of voters said they disapproved (including 50 per cent who strongly disapproved) compared with 23 per cent who approved and 5 per cent who said they didn’t know.

The reptiles quickly jumped to an AV distraction, and some sign of hope ... Foreign Minister Penny Wong was among ministers from around 40 countries who met virtually overnight to discuss reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The vital shipping lane has been closed to most marine traffic since the outbreak of war in Iran. The meeting was held after Donald Trump's comments that securing the waterway was for others to resolve. The UK is leading the response. Leaders from France, Germany, Canada and the United Arab Emirates were among those who attended the meeting. But France's President Emmanuel Macron told reporters in South Korea it was “unrealistic” to open the Strait by force.

The Angelic one was still stuck on the job of reporting the bad polling ...

On the question of whether Australia should join allied nations in supporting the US to keep the Strait of Hormuz open for international shipping, 63 per cent of voters opposed sending naval vessels.
If you think this is just a leftie position, think again. More than two-thirds of every age group disapproved of the US military action in Iran. However, proving that their focus is the narrowest of any voting group (and heralding a possible decline in the Hanson party’s sudden popularity as the war continues), only One Nation voters were likelier to support the war in Iran.
So, one aspect of the response from the public to this war is that it does not divide into obvious left and right camps, although the media is a different story. It is fairly obvious to most – whether they be average readers and armchair critics or distinguished overseas academic political theorists such as John Mearsheimer – that by closing the strait, Iran holds all the cards.

Uh huh, quick, turn to the pastie Hastie before all this leftie talk radicalises the pond ... Andrew Hastie addresses a press conference at Eze Steel in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

How desperate are the times?

Pretty desperate if you read the Daily Terror ...

Commiserations to the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, as the Angelic one pressed on ...

Opposition industry and sovereign capability spokesman Andrew Hastie is in good company when he says: “We can be critical of bad strategic decisions … I think this was a huge miscalculation. Iran has managed to pretty much hold the whole world economy to ransom, and because we’re at the end of a very long supply chain we’re going to experience pain.”
The Trump administration’s attempts to extricate itself from this expanding imbroglio with a 15-point plan that the Iranians have ignored is widely regarded as nothing more than face-saving grandstanding for the US president. To paraphrase that old saying, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. The lack of hope, or at least a strong feeling of pessimism, pervades the commentary.
In Australia, the government’s marked lack of preparedness is a big part of that. It is true there was almost no warning about this disastrous war. We’ve had one shock, in the Covid pandemic, which we know will probably happen again, so the lack of preparation of this government for another long-term economic shock infuriates many.
The short-term thinking is stark. A piffling halving of the fuel excise is hardly reassuring and what is galling for most Australians is that we know we have huge untapped resources, especially coal and gas, and gave up drilling for our own oil years ago.

At least there's a chance to remind the hive mind of the real villain ... Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

The Angelic one finally remembered her duty and launched an obligatory attack on renewables and cockamamy talk of actual climate science ...

What is more inexplicable is that even if there had been some warning of this crisis, it is unlikely the government would abandon its rigid renewable energy policy to take any firm action. Everyone on Labor’s frontbench is committed to this as an article of faith. The result of the government’s fundamentalist ideology on renewables is to ignore some of the most valuable resources a country could have in a time of crisis, thus doing great harm to the population and our ability to export those resources.
But life goes on and checking out the prices of electric vehicles and cancelling plans to travel to Europe are minor problems caused by the oil shortage.

Throw in a snap of a ship and the reptile terror was complete ...Supply chains are being stifled by the blockade of one of the world’s most important shipping routes, the Strait of Hormuz. Picture: AFP

Please, long absent lord, slake the Angelic one's thirst for oil ...

Petroleum products are our biggest imports. We need diesel for farmers and mining, for road transport across the continent. Plastics manufacture will be affected, but even more serious ramifications of the interruption of supplies are on the horizon. This week it became apparent that farmers are running short of fertiliser, since most of it comes through the Strait of Hormuz. Lack of fertiliser can mean food shortages in the short term and no food in the long term.
In our part of the world, where we are used to having what we need at the local shop, this could be an inconvenience. But Australia exports two-thirds of the food it produces and an irksome difficulty for us is a looming disaster for other parts of the world where disruptions in food supply and distribution have serious consequences, such as famine and wars.

But who could have encouraged this apocalypse? As the fuel crisis deepens, farmers in regional Australia warn that it may bring their businesses to a halt.

On that question, the Angelic one was strangely silent ...

Then there are consequences of interruptions to supply for people who need medical help. It is likely we will have a shortage of medical supplies of all sorts, from equipment to everyday stuff, including medicine.
Britain’s National Health Service is already running out of supplies. Australia imports 90 per cent of our medications. An interruption of these drugs is dire for people who have chronic and life-threatening conditions, as do some of my children whose medicines were sometimes in short supply during the Covid crisis.
Some of us are right to be pessimistic. We are acutely aware that this war is going to have consequences in more ways than petrol prices at the bowser. I may be accused of being a catastrophist – perhaps I am – but this Easter, this suburban mum will do the only thing she or any of us can in the face of this war. Pray – hard.

Prayer? 

Hard prayer? Die hard praying?

That's the best the Angelic one can offer?

How about leaving News Corp?

Rupert Murdoch, Netanyahu ‘pressed Trump’ to strike Iran (caution: intermittent archive link)

Washington | Donald Trump’s decision to wage war on Iran was partly motivated by pressure from outside allies while his own White House team stayed more muted – underscoring how in his second term, guardrails have been traded for a green light.
Those privately pressing Trump to strike Iran included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, media mogul Rupert Murdoch and some conservative commentators, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
The News Corp founder communicated with Trump several times as he urged the president to take on Tehran, according to one person briefed on their interactions.

On what known planet should the pond be forced to agree with Megyn "white Santa, white Jesus" Kelly?

'He'll Be Dead Soon': Megyn Kelly Rages At Ex-Boss Rupert Murdoch Over Iran War Stance
The onetime Fox News headliner ripped Murdoch and other Republicans who've egged on Donald Trump's war against Iran.

And yet here we are ...

The pond really should have saved that one for the bromancer, who will appear tomorrow in the pond for an Easter Sunday homily, but it suits the Angelic one just as well ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles continue to amaze by dodging and ducking and weaving, and who better at that art (or sport) than the Ughmann?

Why he was so hot to trot that the reptiles stuck him at the top of the digital page early on Saturday morning ...

It was a seven minute read, so the reptiles said ...

The header: The ship that proves Australia is losing global fuel security game; A ship from Kuwait on an unprecedented route to Botany Bay exposes a supply chain so fragile it could bring the nation to a standstill. If the fuel stops, Australia stops.

The caption for the uncredited work of art: Australia’s future now hangs on a complex international chess game involving ships carrying liquid fuel from distant refineries across the oceans to our shores.

The pond was delighted to see that the reptiles have at last discovered the sort of service to be found at the likes of Maritime Traffic, and mortified that they didn't feel the need to provide a link. (You can waste hours finding your vessel)

The pond's correspondents know what's coming.

The Ughmann loves the war, loves the chance to celebrate the importance of oil, loves the chance to denigrate renewables and deny climate science yet again ... all the more exciting because he can use arcane new shipping ways to make his points:

It is sobering to track this traffic in real time on a Kpler dashboard, where loaded vessels appear as green arrows inching towards their destination. Touch an arrow and the name of the ship appears, along with its cargo, the port it left and the one it is bound for. That thin green line pointing towards Australia is all that stands between continuity and crisis in this island nation. If it breaks, or even slows, the effects here will be swift and severe.

Quick, another graphic if you please ... The STI Solace’s green-line progress of its fuel shipment to Australia. Picture: Kpler

Time, please, gentlemen, for a plug ...

Kpler is a global trade intelligence company that sits at the nerve centre of the physical economy, stitching together billions of data points to show how energy and commodities are actually moving around the world. It has generously given this column access to its data.

And so to make sundry ponderous points:

Isolate the trade in diesel, petrol and jet fuel to Australia and it shows 36 ships on their way at the time of writing. Twenty-eight are coming from the Asian refineries that usually supply 90 per cent of our fuel. More than two of these ships must off-load at a port here every single day to feed our voracious appetite for liquid fuel, as more than 40 per cent of all the energy consumed in Australia is burned in the engines that drive transport, mining and agriculture.
The notable recent shift in the fuel trade is the emergence of long-haul supply. Four ships have crossed the Panama Canal after loading on the US Gulf coast. Two more have sailed from a refinery in Washington state and another was loading there on Thursday. Historically, fuel imports from the US have been rare, so a distant and more expensive supply line has been tapped to keep Australia moving.
But one cargo now slowly tracking down the west coast of Africa stands out, and its journey here tells the story of a nation scrounging around the world to fill supply gaps at any price.
The STI Solace set sail from Southwold Anchorage, off the Suffolk coast, on March 19 and is due to dock in Sydney on April 29. It is a mid-sized tanker carrying nearly 654,000 barrels of fuel, or about 104 million litres. It sounds like a lot but Australia uses about 173 million litres of refined fuel every day. So the STI Solace has enough fuel in its tanks to keep the country running for little more than half a day.

How about a snap of the ship? Done: The STI Solace – the drude oil oil tanker bound for Botany Bay. Picture: VesselFinder

The proud possessor of arcane knowledge ploughed on ...

On paper, this cargo looks like a shipment from the UK. But the fuel did not originate in Britain. It was transferred there.
Another tanker, the Oslo Star, loaded this cargo from a refinery in Kuwait in mid-February and sailed out of the Gulf before the shooting started. It then tracked west into the Red Sea and up through the Suez Canal, emerging into European waters in early March. As it crossed the Mediterranean and entered the Atlantic, its destination shifted repeatedly, first towards North Africa, then Rotterdam and finally to an anchorage off the Suffolk coast.
When it reached Southwold on the morning of March 19, the cargo was transferred ship-to-ship on to the STI Solace, which set sail that evening and is now carrying it halfway around the world to Australia.
Kpler’s data goes back to 2014, and this is the first time the company has recorded such a trade.
The complex logistical dance was choreographed by the Scorpio Group, a Monaco-based company that operates large fleets of tankers moving fuel between continents. Firms such as this do not produce energy. They move it, trade it and, since the war in the Gulf kicked off, redirect it in response to price and scarcity.
Forgive the blizzard of detail, but it reveals something important. This was not a shipment planned for Australia. It was a cargo looking for a buyer and in the end Australia paid the highest price. So this is not a straight supply chain, it is an expensive relay where each baton change adds costs and complexity.

Enough of all that, bring it home ... Signs cover petrol bowsers at a closed petrol station in Sydney on March 30, 2026. Picture: AFP

And with all that dancing done, the Ughmann could get down to the denialist gritty:

Australia is now engaged in a bewildering and increasingly desperate global scramble for fuel in a deeply fractured market. Our security sits largely in the hands of major producers and international traders who are constantly reshuffling cargoes to meet demand. When supply tightens, the system stretches. Cargoes are rerouted. Ships change hands at sea. Fuel travels farther, costs more and takes longer to arrive.
The world entered this crisis with good supply and a significant volume of oil, including a black fleet of sanctioned Russian cargoes, sitting on the water in tankers. That floating stock is now being rapidly drawn into the market at higher prices. No one is knocking back Russian fuel any more. But this is a limited buffer. As those cargoes are absorbed, the global chessboard will start to lose pieces and supply will tighten further.
In the gap between supply and demand lies the risk. The longer the Strait of Hormuz remains constrained and under the control of Iran, the more precarious this market becomes. It should be noted that Iran is still shipping oil and making a hefty profit on it.
In the supply chain chess game the Albanese government is a bystander.
Band-Aids on supply
That was writ large in the Prime Minister’s address to the nation and his speech at the National Press Club. When asked about the fuel crisis, Anthony Albanese talked about tempering demand by travelling less or lowering costs by cutting the heavy vehicle duty, the fuel excise and the GST.
These are price and demand Band-Aids on a haemorrhage of supply.
The government’s only supply-side moves have been to change rules to allow the limited amount of fuel we refine to stay onshore and to let the Export Finance Corporation underwrite additional fuel shipments. This is to provide comfort to the big energy companies that source the fuel.
The cargo on the STI Solace would have come at a premium. If the price drops in the month it takes to get here, the taxpayer will wear the cost.
When asked about his long-term plans to secure supply, the Prime Minister said everything was on the table but then ran through the usual bureaucrat’s list of reasons that most of it would be too hard, take too long or be too expensive.
It should be self-evident to even a casual observer that our future depends on becoming self-sufficient in liquid fuels as rapidly as we can. It will not be quick, cheap or easy, but contemplate the alternative. If the fuel stops, Australia stops.

If the pond might interrupt at this point, it should be self-evident that becoming self-sufficient in "liquid fuels" is a ludicrous proposition, and that moving towards self-sufficiency in energy might be more to the point, and that the best forms of energy are now coming from the renewables sector, what with King Donald having put the strait in dire straits, and possibly for some considerable time.

But that sort of thinking doesn't sit well with an unreformed seminarian:

That means using conventional and unconventional methods to secure the fuel we need to run the nation. Western Australia and Queensland have oil. NSW has gas and, as Robert Gottliebsen has argued in these pages, Victoria’s vast brown coal reserves should be tapped. Technologies now exist to convert coal into diesel and aviation fuel, turning a stranded resource into a strategic asset.
Energy security is national security and our security is now out of our hands. This was a wilful, catastrophic failure of the political class more than 20 years in the making. This crisis should be the catalyst to fix it but the early signs are not good.
Anyone who says electric cars are the answer is not serious. They have a role, but truck traffic between Sydney and Melbourne on the Hume Highway alone runs at 1900 B-double equivalent trips a day. That is 700,000 trips a year. The technology to rapidly replace all that traffic at the same cost and efficiency as diesel does not exist.

Pond correspondents have already noted that new technologies are rapidly being developed. 

The question is whether we want to join King Donald and revert to the1950s, or wake up to the way that China has stolen the renewables and EV race from the United States ... Oil tankers and high speed crafts sit anchored at Muscat Anchorage near the Strait of Hormuz on March 30, 2026 in Muscat, Oman. Picture: Getty Images

King Donald, in his almost infinite fatuity, and his singular failure to understand the way world markets have worked, has dropped the world in it... and the Ughmann, with equal fatuity, thinks he can get away with it.

Just before Albanese addressed the press club, Donald Trump spoke to his people. The American President made the point that the US could walk away from the war in Iran without reopening the Strait of Hormuz because his country did not rely on it for fuel security.
He is right. After decades of declining oil production, something extraordinary happened to US energy supplies from 2010 on. The shale oil revolution turned the US into the world’s biggest producer of oil and natural gas.
Trump can walk away from the war with Iran and his country will absorb the shock. Prices may rise. Consumers will feel it. But the system holds. The US has choices. Europe and Australia do not.

He's right? 

No he's not, he's a demented, clueless old king, in the last stages of reign and life.

He can walk away from it, and all will be well?

No, he can't. To paraphrase, no man or country is an island, entire of itself, every country is a piece of the world, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, the United States is the less ...

Right now, the system in the United States is being torn apart, fragmented, destroyed, with the country at war with itself, and no solution to hand.

Every day is spent in speculation about who will next get the knife, as the demented, mad king seeks ever diminishing ways to shift the blame from him. 

Who knew that a desire to avoid the Epstein files would lead to all this?

This is a world News Corp has helped shape. This is why the moment is so stark:

That is what makes this moment so stark.
The world is organised around energy. As the world’s best energy analysts at Doomberg argue, power, prosperity and security flow from those who produce it. For decades, globalisation obscured that reality. Oil moved freely, trade routes were protected and supply chains, though complex, were dependable. The Gulf war has exposed how fragile the old system was.
Supply is no longer guaranteed. It is contested, disrupted and increasingly weaponised as the global energy market fragments into competing spheres of influence. That world is breaking and will not return to business as usual.
In the emerging world order, geography and resources matter again.
The US, Russia and China are well placed in the new order. They have energy within their borders or within their reach. Europe does not. Australia has it but has chosen not to use it. Both have come to rely on long supply chains in a world where distance is now a vulnerability. Both have demonised the fuels on which their societies run. This virtue signalling is a vanity we can no longer afford to indulge.
Doomberg’s central insight is that energy systems do not evolve gradually. They appear stable, then shift suddenly when a shock hits. When that happens, the system does not return to what it was. It reorganises around new realities.
For exposed, import-dependent nations such as Australia, the implications are profound. Energy is not just another commodity. It is the foundation of economic life and national security.
We can ignore that truth or we can act on it. Because if we do nothing and that thin green line breaks, so do we.

Oh go yap to the Emeritus Chairman and get him to explain his grand plan, and what he was thinking when he encouraged the mad king in his folly ...

And after all that the pond will only briefly note garrulous Gemma, attempting to take the pond back to the days of "they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs."

Frankly the pond almost ground to a halt the moment that "furries" turned up in the header.

Hasn't Gemma been keeping up? 

The new trend is "looning"...(the pond thinks there should be a copyright claim in that, and at least some decent royalties ...

Forget that cornballl cute image of a furry clutching its cheeks, like a zillion football and other sporting mascots around the world.

Dare the pond urge students to go doggies?

Nah, if you're going to have a kink or a fetish, do it in style ...

Besides, the intermittent archive is working at the moment, so correspondents can head off there if they want to be grated by Gemma ...

Hey kid, you’re not a dog’: Italy’s schools can teach us hard lessons
Good luck turning up to class in Italy and barking at classmates. Australia’s education system cossets kids, Italy’s fosters resilience, not furries.
By Gemma Tognini
Columnist

The pond couldn't believe that in a time of war and pending calamity, this was the best that garrulous Gemma could serve up ...

Feelings and furries
In Australia, the education system shields and mollycoddles. Reading lists come with trigger warnings. Feelings take precedence.
I recall a few years ago chatting with a friend whose child was at a private school in which some students were identifying as animals. Furries. Read about it, it’s ridiculous. When I laughed and asked how long they were suspended for, she told me they were being “accommodated”.
An article I found from 2023 quoted an educator who offered this solution: “It is important to build a safe environment for them (the student) based on trust, where they feel comfortable expressing themselves to you.”
‘Hey kid, you’re not a dog’
No, it’s important to say, “Hey kid, you’re not a dog.” This absence of any kind of line in the sand is what I’m talking about.
Good luck rocking up to school in Italy in a pair of ears and barking at your classmates.
Is our system robust and focused on critical thinking or is it about constantly lowering the educational and behavioural bars? Some stats are telling, such as the number of kids being homeschooled.
In Queensland, as of August 2025 just shy of 12,000 students were being homeschooled. Between 2021 and 2025, primary school registrations grew by 110 per cent. In high schoolers, it was 167 per cent. A fraction of the millions of Australian kids in school perhaps but, as they say, it’s about the trend.
Education should be a preparation for life. It should absolutely be hard sometimes. Ditto challenging. Critical thinking, learning, should be valued and prized. Rough edges on young minds should be sloughed off over time, in class, not indulged.
I often wonder what it will take for various things to shift. To recalibrate. This is no exception. Perhaps it’s time for those in charge of the education sector in Australia to look beyond the Hills Hoist and understand what’s at stake. Maybe then something will change.

Read about it? 

Alas, there was no link to follow ... but the pond does recall a Media Watch yarn back in May 2025 ...

And the reptiles are still wondering why the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and quik stix at that ...

That's the best garrulous Gemma could offer for an Easter weekend?

Furries when there's a demented mad king still not in his retirement home?

Sheesh, Pam Bondi's already ancient news ... who's next to feel the wrath of the doddery delinquent?

In which the bromancer offers blessedly rational insights, Lloydie of the Amazon is resurrected in a gushing Easter miracle, and Our Henry goes full theologian ...

 

Some days the pond has to give up a lot to follow the reptiles at the lizard Oz.

Look elsewhere, and you might find news of King Donald giving Pam Bondi the boot.

Or news of him mocking the Macrons' marriage, producing the mild retort that the thuggish one was "neither elegant nor up to standard" in his verbiage.

Or more fun with the ongoing bimbofication sessions saga. (caution, intermittent archive link)

Or the King's retreat from SCOTUS.

And other stories, such as White House Scrambles to Wipe Trump Meltdown Footage never had the ghost of a chance

The White House posted and then rushed to delete an hour-long recording of an event with President Donald Trump that captured him lashing out at the Supreme Court after justices signaled expressed skepticism about his birthright citizenship case.
The president privately hosted a group of MAGA pastors and religious allies Wednesday for an Easter luncheon at the White House. Trump made several bonkers remarks during the event, which was never meant to be seen by the public, as the White House quickly deleted the footage from its official pages.

Instead the pond has to cope with the bromancer trying to decipher the real meaning of the low energy word salad that King Donald fed his base ...

The header: Donald Trump’s clearest Iran pitch was still full of contradictions; The US President’s address contained myriad inconsistencies, and leaves the world not much better informed about his plans for the Middle East.

The caption for the snap of the King: President Donald Trump arrives from the Blue Room to speak about the Iran war. Picture: AP

Usually the sight of the King would immediately inspire a matching cartoon, but the pond didn't have the time or the space.

Worse, the bromancer could only manage a paltry three minutes as he tried to shape something coherent out of a completely incoherent speech.

The pond supposes that it's like that old joke complaining about the lack of quality in the food, and the small portions in the serves:

Donald Trump’s address to America was his most coherent statement of purpose in Iran for many weeks. He offered, at the start of the speech, a good rationale for why action against Iran was justified.
Yet, while Trump is always better when he sticks closer to the teleprompter, the speech still contained myriad contradictions, and leaves the world not much better informed about what he plans to do, or what might happen, in Iran.
One explanation for what Trump has been saying for weeks is a continuing attempt by him to jawbone the markets. Every time Trump says “the war’s nearly finished, I’m going to bring the troops home soon”, the markets respond favourably, the price of oil drops, the prices of stocks rise.
Except that didn’t happen this time. That’s because of the law of diminishing returns, and because whenever Trump says something cheerful and hopeful, he contradicts it a minute later with prophecies of Armageddon.
This speech was no exception. The war’s going great. We’ve nearly achieved all our objectives, nearly finished, it’ll be over soon.
Phew!
But then, actually we’re going to keep bombing for another two or three weeks and we’re going to hit harder than ever.
And, we the US don’t need any access to the Strait of Hormuz. We don’t need any deal from Iran. We don’t get our oil from the Strait of Hormuz. So after we’ve gone that will be someone else’s problem.

It was a feeble effort, already running out of steam.

Even the bromancer, a devotee of nonsensical war mongering, couldn't make sense of it all.

By the time the reptiles offered an AV distraction, the bromancer was getting ready to fall down the rabbit hole, if not with Alice, then certainly with the King ... Donald Trump says ‘never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks’.

After that point, the bromancer's thinking dissolved into a puddle, like Frosty the snowman caught in a climate science denialist's heatwave...

But, if we don’t get a deal from Iran, then we will bomb it back to the Stone Age. We’ll destroy every single one of their electricity-generating plans. We may well destroy all its oil industry facilities.
So is a deal completely unnecessary to Trump and the US? Or is it so important that Trump will bomb Iran back to the Stone Age and destroy its oil industry if he doesn’t get one? Your guess is as good as mine.
At least this time he didn’t threaten to bomb Iran’s desalination plants. Did someone take it out of the speech? Does even Trump realise there must be some limits to what he threatens?
On regime change, Trump claims, fantastically, that regime change has already happened in Iran. This is preposterous. Trump has long held the view that he has a special power to create reality by just saying something.
It’s astonishing how often that actually works for him. But if Trump truly believes there has been regime change in Iran because the US has killed dozens of its leaders, he’s hallucinating. Of course, he doesn’t really believe that. This is the power of his brazenness, which sometimes serves him well but which, increasingly, people can see simply denies reality.
On the matter of Iran’s 400kg of uranium enriched to 60 per cent, which is near weapons grade, Trump no longer believes it’s necessary for the US to get hold of this, either through Iran surrendering it or US forces taking it.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier said it would be necessary for US forces to take this material. Trump’s special negotiator, Steve Witkoff, said the existence of this stockpile was why the US went to war.
Trump now says US bombing has made a big, dusty mess of the sites where the uranium is believed to be stored and America can simply watch these sites from the air – from satellites, presumably – and if Iranian personnel make any attempt to retrieve the material, the US can hit them again.
But all that could have been achieved with a military operation of a few days.
And, of course, Trump might very well be trying to mislead, while US special forces prepare what would have to be the most daring raid in history.
The tone from Trump this time was blessedly rational. But we still have almost no idea what he plans to do, or what he might do.
That’s our world.

That's what's passes as "blessedly rational" in the bromancer's world?

Roll it around on the tongue, savour the taste of blessedly rational as an Easter treat ...

...we still have almost no idea what he plans to do, or what he might do.
That’s our world.

Put it another way.

Now there's a blessedly rational car wreck for you ...

And now to the reason the pond felt constipated, jammed up, overloaded this Friday.

You see at the top of the page there came the return of Lloydie of the Amazon, a gushing Easter miracle, and the reptiles were all in ...

Lloydie of the Amazon was equally into it, with a bigly eight minutes opus on offer ...

The header: Does Australia - and our PM - have what it takes to drill baby drill?; In just two decades, Australia has gone from energy self-sufficiency to dangerous dependence. Like the US, we can turn it around. The question is, will we?

The caption: What, say what, no caption for that splendid piece of lizard Oz graphic art? 'Tis sad, but true, the way that creative genius goes unrecognised this day...

The pond had almost forgotten that Lloydie of the Amazon existed - thought he might have got lost in the Amazon again as he tried to save the world via tourist resorts - but instead he's back and worse than ever.

All the pond could do was stand back and let him gush his devotion to fossil fuels ...

Like the explosive power of fossil fuels, the global story of energy is shaped by crisis. Australia is no exception. The war in Iran is forcing government to confront our import dependence. Since 2000 Australia’s liquid fuel equation has flipped. We have gone from being self-sufficient in oil and petrol, with eight refineries supplying 98 per cent of consumption, to having two refineries and a reliance on imports for roughly 90 per cent of our fuel needs.
Across the same two-decade period, the US has achieved the reverse and both Japan and Germany have absorbed a bitter lesson in energy vulnerability.
Lessons from the US, Europe and Japan
Two Gulf wars and the ingenuity of a wildcat driller, George Mitchell, transformed the US from being dependent on the Middle East for crude oil to being the world’s biggest producer and an energy export superpower. The transformation is due to Mitchell’s discovery in 1997 of how to drill wells horizontally and liberate oil and gas held deep underground in rock formations.
The energy crisis theory also works in reverse. During the same period, the Japanese tsunami in 2011 and associated Fukushima nuclear disaster up-ended the power equation and energy security of industrial powerhouses Japan and Germany. Both countries swore off nuclear energy as a result of the Fukushima nuclear accident – despite the fact it did not cause any deaths – but both have now changed their minds.

It was nuke the country to save the planet time ... The No. 3 reactor building at Tokyo Electric Power Co's tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2010.

When Lloydie gets gushing and nuking like this, there's nothing to do but stand back, or get caught in the geyser ...

Japan has restarted 15 nuclear reactors and another 10 are in the process of restart approval. Energy market disruption caused by the war in Ukraine spurred Japan to further reconsider nuclear because without it Japan must import about 90 per cent of its energy requirements. This is why debate in Australia about changes to gas production, exports and the prospect of super profit taxation is watched closely and of great concern in Tokyo.
The loss of Russian gas because of the invasion of Ukraine also left Europe badly exposed.
Germany had turned to Russia for gas as it shut its last three nuclear power plants in 2023, but German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told business leaders this year it had been a “serious strategic mistake” and the country would rebuild nuclear production.
In 2025, nearly 70 per cent of Germany’s energy needs were met through international imports despite the many billions of dollars that have been spent on a world-leading renewable energy transition. “I want us to eventually have acceptable market prices for energy production again and not have to permanently subsidise energy prices from the federal budget,” Merz said. His answer is nuclear.
Australia’s feat of energy self-harm
It can be argued that, like Germany and Japan, Australia has performed its own feat of energy self-harm. Exploration for oil has been allowed to falter and production of liquid fuels has been sent offshore by a combination of economies of scale, lack of investment and strict environmental mandates from government.
In Australia, climate change has become the crisis that drives energy policy. But, as the war in Iran has shown, energy security is about a lot more than phasing out coal-fired power stations to make electricity. Australia runs on diesel fuel. Fossil fuels produce the fertilisers we need to grow our food and export crops. Fossil fuels make plastics that are ubiquitous to construction and modern life. Diesel-powered cranes unload containers at the wharves and diesel-powered machinery mines the coal and iron ore we export and fuels the trucks that keep our supermarket shelves stocked.
Work is being done on electric-powered trucks but they have their limits. They are more expensive to buy and their small range is not suited to Australia’s long-haul routes. Heavy batteries lessen the payload that can be carried and presumably further increase the cost of freight.
Big miners are exploring ways to shift production to electric diggers and dump trucks, but while Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue is talking a big game about what the future holds, BHP and Rio have slashed spending on green initiatives. This mirrors a global trend to get back to basics.
The evidence is that Australia must work to encourage future investment in the energy and resource projects that pay the bills against strong competition from Canada, the US, South America, Africa and elsewhere. And we must decide if we want to re-establish domestic energy security or remain dependent on extended import supply lines at a time of global upheaval and potential conflict.
There have been plenty of opportunities lost. The failure of the much-hyped hydrogen revolution to work at cost and scale has left us without a clear pathway to replace liquid fuels.

In cases like this, the pond can merely observe and offer for the pleasure of its correspondents, with illustrations... Oil from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The BP-leased oil platform exploded and sank in 2010, leaking an estimated 200,000 gallons of crude oil per day from the broken pipeline.

How Lloydie relished the disaster:

Deepwater Horizon and our last best chance
The failure of the last best chance to replace the dwindling oil reserves from Bass Strait can be traced to another crisis: BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The Deepwater crisis gave environment groups the leverage they needed to campaign against BP’s ambitions to drill for oil in the deep waters off the Great Australian Bight.
Deepwater Horizon in 2010 was the world’s biggest oil spill in which 800 million litres of oil was spewed into the Gulf of Mexico across 87 days. Only about 25 per cent of the oil was recovered, leaving half a billion litres of oil in the Gulf. BP said economics, not environmental politics, caused it to pull out of the bight project but its own oil spill modelling showed a Deepwater Horizon-style spill in the bight could take more than six months to control, would be certain to hit land and would spread oil for thousands of kilometres. If a spill happened there was a “high probability” it would affect important marine species, including sperm whales and pygmy blue whales.

Yet more disaster footage... The US Coast Guard battles blazing remnants of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

Lloydie gushed on ...

After BP pulled out, Norwegian energy giant Equinor was given permission to drill for oil in the Great Australian Bight but it also pulled out in February 2020, citing poor project economics. Equinor said the project did not stack up financially with other global energy projects. This is despite estimates that more than nine billion barrels of oil could be extracted from several fields, making it – despite the much deeper waters – the logical replacement for dwindling reserves in Bass Strait.
The discovery of oil in Bass Strait in the Gippsland Basin off Victoria in 1965 by Esso and BHP fundamentally changed the nation by delivering energy self-sufficiency. More than five billion barrels of oil have been produced from Bass Strait across five decades but production has been in steady decline since peaking in the 1980s.
Export exposure
Rather than being self-sufficient, Australia today is a major exporter of energy, principally coal and gas, but a net importer of liquid fuels. According to the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, in 2022-23 Australia produced 771 petajoules (equivalent of 131 million barrels) of crude oil, condensate and LPG, of which more than 94 per cent was sent offshore.
In return about 90 per cent of refined products including petrol and diesel were imported, mostly from refineries in South Korea and Singapore. Australia now has only two operating oil refineries – the Lytton Refinery in Brisbane and the Geelong Refinery in Victoria – which provide only about 17 per cent of domestic demand. Australia consistently falls short of the International Energy Agency requirement to hold 90 days of net oil imports, typically maintaining roughly half that amount.
Opting to import our liquid fuel requirements was a conscious decision. The Australian Institute of Petroleum, an industry lobby group set up to promote self-regulation, argued in 2017: “Australia’s transport fuel security depends on flexible supply chains and diversity of product supply, not domestic refining of domestic crude oil.”

Lloydie was wild-eyed with local excitements... Offshore oil and gas production on the North West Shelf off WA.

There's nothing like living the climate science denying, renewables fearing, fossil fuels loving dream ...

Its members were Ampol Limited, BP Australia, Mobil Oil and Viva Energy Australia.
The AIP argument was that Australia did not need to subsidise local refineries or a new nationally owned refinery.
It said if Australia had more refineries to meet domestic fuel demand, this would simply result in more crude imports as domestic crude production was insufficient and unsuitable by itself to achieve “self-sufficiency” in transport fuels.
The AIP said substituting crude oil imports for petroleum product imports would not increase transport fuel security.
It said no new refinery had been constructed in an industrialised/Western nation for more than 20 years. And Australia offered none of the capital or operating cost benefits available in many developing countries.
“Compared to refineries across Asia, Australian refineries suffer from substantial disadvantages in operating and capital costs that preclude Australia from consideration for major new refinery projects,” the AIP said.
“In the context of Australia’s demonstrated efficient and reliable access to large-scale refineries in Asia (and excess Asian supply currently and forecast), it is difficult to see any case for the very significant cost of a taxpayer-funded refinery (for example, at least $US5bn for a minimum efficient scale refinery).
“High coastal shipping costs would make domestic distribution from a ‘central’ refinery uncompetitive against imported cargoes of fuel.”
Many of these things still may be true. But the Iran war crisis has exposed our vulnerability. We are dependent on much more than fuel and if the war continues the economic costs will continue to escalate.
How we can turn this dependency around
Like the US, Australia is well placed to turn around our import dependency.
At present, Australia’s oil production is heavily concentrated in a few offshore regions, with most of the remaining crude resources located in the continent’s northwest and southeast.
According to Geoscience Australia, the Northern Carnarvon Basin in Western Australia is Australia’s most prolific oil-producing region, accounting for nearly 70 per cent of the country’s remaining identified crude oil resources.
The Gippsland Basin, which includes Bass Strait, is in a significant state of decline and transitioning towards decommissioning.
The Cooper-Eromanga Basin in South Australia and Queensland is the largest onshore oil and gas province in Australia.
The Bonaparte and Browse Basins in Western Australia and the Northern Territory are massive gas hubs but produce large quantities of condensate, which is used as a refinery feedstock.
There is renewed interest in Queensland’s Surat and Bowen basins, where the Taroom Trough has been identified as a “new oil frontier”, with major exploration and appraisal drilling under way.
This week Queensland Premier David Crisafulli said the field had the potential to produce “hundreds of millions of barrels” of oil.

What set Lloydie off? What brought him back? 

Could this be another terrifying thing to pin on King Donald's Iranian excursion folly? 

It's perhaps not down there with murdering 150+ schoolgirls, but it's a goodly firestorm, An oil tanker burns after being hit by an Iranian strike in the ship-to-ship transfer zone at Khor al-Zubair port near Basra, Iraq, on March 11.

Lloydie stayed all in, until the final frenzied gush of oil-fuelled madness ...

“There’s potential for a veritable sea of domestic oil right here in Queensland,” he told the Liberal National Party’s annual State Council. “We must promise ourselves, as a nation, never again will we be vulnerable entirely to foreign conflicts injuring our energy security. For too long, the national conversation about mining has treated the industry as something we should be embarrassed about.”
The Iran war is a wake-up call and a chance to rethink national priorities.
To succeed, however, it would be necessary to match crude oil production with refining capacity, create large stockpile reserves and to develop an efficient way to distribute product around the country. And, as in the US, this might involve leaning into unconventional technologies such as fracking that have proved highly controversial.
There is still work to do to prove up reserves in the Taroom Trough in Queensland. And there are bitter fights to be had about the environmental risks of deep-sea drilling in the Great Australian Bight.
But, as in the US, shale oil could be our big untapped potential. The Beetaloo Basin is a massive, highly prospective shale gas field in the Northern Territory that is transitioning from exploration to commercial production, with first gas sales to the NT domestic market targeted for mid to late 2026. Several key wells in the Beetaloo Basin have confirmed the presence of liquid hydrocarbons with estimates of hundreds of millions of barrels.
The same is true for the Canning Basin in Western Australia.
The question is whether Australia still has the institutional and political wherewithal to drill baby drill.

Phew, please allow the pond to pause to celebrate what war can produce ...

At this point, the pond had no alternative but to do a hard cut on Killer of the IPA, a scandalous sacrilege for a Good Friday...

At best, the pond could offer a teaser trailer ...

And the pond could offer a fragile link to Killer in the intermittent archive, working early this day ...

PM’s fuel excise cut just ignores our real energy problems
For weeks people have put up with being accused of irrationality for ‘hoarding’ petrol when such behaviour is a perfectly rational response.
By Adam Creighton
Adam Creighton
Contributor

But the pond had to rule against full coverage, on the grounds of space and redundancy.

What could Killer add to what Lloydie of the Amazon had already gushed about? 

Not much ...

...The sad transition from having among the cheapest energy in the world to the most expensive rests mainly on the government’s obsession with replacing cheap fossil fuel with unreliable wind and solar energy. Barely 6 per cent of the workforce was employed in manufacturing last year, around half the level it was two decades ago.
Albanese also extolled the wonders of removing the lower minimum pay rates for 18, 19 and 20 year olds. After returning from the US last year, where there are no such concessional pay rates, I was struck by how many young people worked in retail. These changes won’t be great news for many young Australians who will simply be passed over for a more experienced, older worker.
What new limitations on gambling advertisements, also part of the PM’s speech, has to do with how the government would handle the emerging fuel crisis is anyone’s guess.
Unfortunately, there’s little governments can do to alleviate panic buying once it’s begun. Unless they can convince people their facts were mistaken – very difficult in a crisis when governments are known to lie – formal rationing can only exacerbate the panic. Next week could be interesting.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

So Killer had to be sacrificed, but it was for a good cause - in the spirit of the season.

With Killer of the IPA truncated, neigh crucified, that left room for a full outing with Our Henry, proudly on hand for the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

The header: How the ancient story of the Exodus forged the foundations of Western freedom; What happened at Sinai was not merely a religious revelation. It was the founding moment of a new kind of political order.

The caption for the painting that helps date Our Henry's thinking: ‘The miracle of the Exodus’. Moses and the Children of Israel Crossing the Red Sea, c.1855, by Henri Frédéric Schopin.

The 1850s? Possibly a tad too modern, muh lud.

The hole in bucket man offered a bigly seven minutes of Easter piety, skating around the awkward way that Jews and Jesus lovers and trinitarians have their issues.

The pond was reminded of this recently when it took another look at the Coen brothers' bit of fluff Hail Caesar, about Hollywood making a bible epic ...

Narrator: Ancient Rome. Twelve years into the rule of Tiberius, ruler maximus. Rome's legions are masters of the world, the stomp of its sandals heard from the Iberian peninsula in the west through the halls of the great library of Alexandria in the east. As oppressed people everywhere writhe under the Roman lash, freeman and vassal are united in one compulsory worship. The emperor, Caesar, is Godhead, lord of every man's body and spirit. For those who will not submit, the galleys, the arenas, even crucifixion await. But there is a new wind, blowing from the east, from the dusty streets of Bethlehem, that will soon challenge the vast house of Caesar, that edifice wrought of brick and blood which now seems so secure!

Why, it's almost as good as a Thucydides reference.

Curiously only the week before that the pond had dipped into a really terrible Bible flick from the 1950s and the Coen brothers were true to brand ...

Protestant Clergyman: Who plays Christ?
Eddie Mannix (the studio head trying to get the assembled clergy to give the script a tick of approval): A kid we're all very excited about, Todd Hocheiser, a wonderful young actor we found in Akron, Ohio, after a nationwide talent hunt. But Hocheiser is seen only fleetingly and with extreme taste. Our story is told through the eyes of a Roman tribune, Autochlus Antonius, an ordinary man, skeptical at first, but who comes to a grudging respect for this swell figure from the East.

The film was full of great theology:

Catholic Clergyman: God has children.
Rabbi: What? And a dog? A collie, maybe? God doesn't have children. He's a bachelor. And very angry.
Catholic Clergyman: No! No! He used to be angry!
Rabbi: What? He got over it?
Protestant Clergyman: You worship the god of another age!
Catholic Clergyman: Who has no love!
Rabbi: Not true! He likes Jews.

Our Henry's playing the role of the rabbi ...

At last, the time had come: as they prepared to flee Egypt, the children of Israel stood on the threshold of deliverance. But even before they were freed, they received a commandment that would echo through the ages.
“This day shall be unto you for a memorial,” said the Lord, “and throughout your generations you shall keep it a feast forever.”
That command, given thousands of years ago, was once again observed this week as Jewish families across Australia celebrated Passover. In many homes, the mood will have been sombre – darkened by the hostility that erupted with the massacres of October 7, 2023, and then metastasised into murderous antisemitic violence.
Yet the Passover Seder – the ritual meal in which the Exodus story is recited and retold – is above all a time to remember, to celebrate and to pass on from one generation to the next the miracle of the Exodus.
It would be a mistake to see the narrative of the flight of the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt as simply a gift to the Jewish people. Its themes have shaped the Western tradition itself and, through it, the democratic inheritance Australia received with British settlement.
That inheritance is now increasingly fragile. Understanding the ideas that underpin our liberty is therefore more crucial than ever. The Exodus narrative is, at its core, the story of how they entered our world.
Not conquest, consent
What happened at Sinai was not merely a religious revelation. It was the founding moment of a new kind of political order. When the children of Israel stood at the foot of the mountain, they did not receive a code imposed by a conqueror or a law decreed by a king. They entered into a covenant.
The Hebrew word – berit – describes a binding, bilateral, conditional commitment between God and the people, in which obligations run in both directions. God committed himself to Israel; Israel committed itself to God’s law. The community the covenant created rested not on conquest but consent.
Nothing like this existed in the ancient world. The great empires – Egypt, Assyria, Babylon – understood power as flowing downward from a god-king whose authority was absolute. The Exodus inverted this logic entirely. The God of Israel had heard the cry of slaves and taken their side against the greatest empire on Earth.
Power was no longer self-justifying. Those who wielded it were answerable for its use.
The covenant at Sinai added something more far-reaching still: that even the highest authority was bound by commitments it had made. A ruler who broke the covenant – who governed in his own interest rather than his subjects’ – forfeited the claim to their obedience.

Don't expect the pond to make any sense of this. The pond is a hard core atheist, not of the angry king, but rather the sort that's bemused at the notion of putting the cutlery out in the garden ... Orthodox Jews in New York observe ‘biur chametz,’ a Jewish ritual where leavened food items are burned on the morning ahead of Passover.

There's a bigly sprinkling of theological references of the sort designed to pander to devotees of portentous Henry's ability to parade pompously his book larnin'///

The most just constitution the world had ever seen
For centuries after the fall of Rome, the Exodus’s political implications lay dormant, confined to the small, harshly persecuted Jewish community. It took the Protestant Reformation to recover the Exodus narrative as a political text. The catalytic moment came in Geneva, where John Calvin preached his famous Deuteronomy sermons in the 1550s, devoting fully 22 weeks to Moses’s speeches at the edge of Canaan. For Calvin, Moses was not primarily a wonderworker but a lawgiver: the author of the most just constitution the world had ever seen, in which the subjects’ duty to obey depended on the ruler’s obedience to law.
Calvin’s followers drew conclusions he never dared articulate. They fused the Exodus covenant with older constitutional traditions to argue that a ruler who violated his covenant obligations could be resisted and deposed.
The greatest English voice in this tradition was John Milton. Writing in 1644, he cast England itself as a new Israel – a covenanted people called to bring freedom to the world. If England was the “nation chosen before any other”, it was surely so that “out of her, as out of Sion, should be sounded forth the trumpet of reformation”.
The consequences for the British constitutional tradition were momentous. Magna Carta, sealed in 1215, had played almost no constitutional role for centuries. Then suddenly, between 1581 and 1616, it burst on to the scene, championed by often Puritan lawyers who saw no distinction between freedom of conscience and freedom from arbitrary power.

The reptiles interrupted with a truly bizarre visual distraction, Runnymede in Surrey, where the Magna Carta was signed in 1215.

Couldn't they dig up a meaningful snap of the actual document?

As for the rest, the pond likes to keep its theology and its constitutional arguments simple ...

Catholic Clergyman: It's the foundation of our belief that Christ is most properly referred to as the Son of God. It's the Son of God who takes the sins of the world upon himself, so that the rest of God's children, we imperfect beings, through faith, may enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Eddie Mannix: So, God is - split?
Catholic Clergyman: Yes! And no.
Eastern Orthodox Clergyman: There is unity in division.
Protestant Clergyman: And division in unity.
Eddie Mannix: I'm not sure I follow padre.
Rabbi: Young man, you don't follow for a very simple reason. These men are screwballs.

By this point, Our Henry sounded like he was expecting to be swept up in a constitutional rapture by this Sunday, a kind of new rising from the dead ...

The pre-eminent figure in giving these ideas a coherent intellectual basis was John Selden (1584-1654), simultaneously an outstanding English common lawyer and the foremost political Hebraist in Europe – a Christian scholar who was a magnificent translator of Talmudic commentary.
Selden placed the notion of a covenant between rulers and the ruled at the heart of English political and legal theory. Law was not the command of the sovereign; it was the accumulated wisdom of the community, binding even on kings because it preceded any act of regal will. And the common law was its embodiment and glory.
The Puritan settlers who crossed the Atlantic carried that covenantal vision with them. They saw themselves as a new Israel, their journey an Exodus, the ocean the Red Sea. John Winthrop, addressing his fellow passengers aboard the Arbella in 1630, invoked the Exodus in urging them to discard the corruptions they were leaving behind: “So He carried the Israelites into the wilderness and made them forgette the fleshpotts of Egipt.”
The Mayflower Compact the settlers signed was not a constitution in the modern sense. It was a covenant: a mutual commitment, made in the presence of God, to form “a city upon a hill”, a body politic enacting laws for the general good. Community preceded government, and government derived its authority from the community’s consent.
Those institutions became the experience of self-governance for the makers of the American Revolution. By then the Exodus connection was ubiquitous: asked about the Great Seal of the United States, Benjamin Franklin immediately suggested “Moses lifting up his Wand, and dividing the Red Sea, and Pharaoh, in his Chariot overwhelmed with the Waters.”
On Sinai’s foundations Britain forged the rule of law; the United States infused it with the spirit of democracy.

It wouldn't be a genuine contribution to the Australian Daily Zionist News without the following ...

Remember, Islamophobia is never far from the surface in Our Henry and in The Australian Daily Zionist News ...

By contrast, Islam
Set against that tradition, the Exodus’s Islamic reception is striking. Moses is the most frequently mentioned prophet in the Koran, appearing 136 times, far more than Mohammed himself. Yet Exodus’s significance follows a logic diametrically opposed to its reception in Judaism and post-Reformation Christianity.
In Judaism, the Exodus is the founding event of a people; in Protestantism, it became the template for constitutional liberty. In Islam, by contrast, it serves primarily as a prefiguration of Mohammed’s superior prophethood, before which even Moses recedes.
The result is that the covenant has never possessed, in Islamic political thought, the explosive emancipatory power it acquired in the West. Instead, authority flows downward from God, not upward from a consenting community.
Brilliant 19th-century Islamic reformers – Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad ‘Abduh, the Young Ottomans – and their liberal successors tried to derive a Koranic basis for constitutional government. Al-Afghani himself lamented that Muslim thought had fallen into taqlid – blind deference to inherited authority.
But they were working against the grain. Their tradition had no Reformation recovery of the Sinai covenant, no Puritan-common law alliance, no Mayflower Compact. Precarious and institutionally unrooted, the constitutionalism they promoted collapsed under the onslaught of secular authoritarianism on the one hand and Islamic fundamentalism on the other.
The example of Islam makes plain that what is at stake is not antiquarian curiosity. It is the survival of a distinctly Western political inheritance whose foundations we have largely forgotten – and that is under assault.
The ancient Greeks were right: the antonym for truth is forgetfulness. When it triumphs, truth dies. The truth being lost is this: the Exodus did not merely inspire institutions. It shaped a way of thinking about power – that authority is conditional, that it must answer to law and that citizens are not mere subjects but participants, with rights and duties, sharing a community of tradition and destiny.
Not just remembrance, but education
That way of thinking cannot be assumed. It must be taught, relearnt and defended. That is why Jews treasure the Passover Seder. It is not simply a ritual of remembrance; it is a ritual of education based on a pedagogy that embraces, rather than suppresses, disagreement.
The central ritual obligation in the Seder is triggered not by a priest or a scholar but by a child’s question: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The adult’s duty is not to answer authoritatively but to respond in a way that generates further inquiry. The narrative must be argued over, not just recited. As the evening ends, the participants must feel that they themselves, not their ancestors centuries ago, had been brought out of Egypt.

Just to rub it in ... Families celebrate the Passover Eve dinner at a festive table in an underground shelter, in Ramat Gan, Israel, on April 1.

Look, we can all come together, we can all agree ...

Eddie Mannix: As for the religious aspect, does the depiction of Christ Jesus cut the mustard?
Catholic Clergyman: Well, the nature of Christ is not quite as simple as your photoplay would have it.
Eddie Mannix: How so, father?
Catholic Clergyman: It's not the case, simply, that Christ is God or God - Christ.
Rabbi: You can say that again! The Nazarene was not God.
Eastern Orthodox Clergyman: He was not not God.
Rabbi: He was a man.
Protestant Clergyman: Part God.
Rabbi: No, sir!
Eddie Mannix: Rabbi, all of us have a little bit of God in us, don't we?

Gentlemen, please...

Protestant Clergyman: God loves everyone!
Catholic Clergyman: God is love!
Eastern Orthodox Clergyman: God is who he is.
Rabbi: This is special? Who isn't who he is?
Catholic Clergyman: But, how should God be rendered in a motion picture?
Rabbi: God isn't in the motion picture!

What about the action?

Eddie Mannix: We don't want to send it to market except in the certainty that it will not offend any reasonable American, regardless of faith or creed. Now that's where you come in. You've read the script; I wanna know if the theological elements of the story are up to snuff.
Eastern Orthodox Clergyman: I thought the chariot scene was fakey. How is he going to jump from one chariot to the other, going full speed?

Final thoughts?

Eddie Mannix: We don't need to agree on the nature of the deity here. If we could focus on the Christ, whatever his parentage. My question is: is our depiction fair?
Eastern Orthodox Clergyman: I have seen worse.
Eddie Mannix: Reverend?
Protestant Clergyman: There's nothing to offend a - reasonable man.
Eddie Mannix: Father?
Catholic Clergyman: The motion picture teleplay was respectful and exhibited tastefulness and class.
Rabbi: Who made you an expert all of the sudden?
Eddie Mannix: And, what do you think, Rabbi?
Rabbi: Eh? I haven't an opinion.

Thank you, Rabbi Henry, but don't be modest, you always have an opinion ...

Sock it to us in a final gobbet of Zionist glory ...

Beneath that insistence lies a deeper truth: freedom is never self-sustaining. It depends on habits that have to be cultivated and preserved. If those habits weaken, the institutions built upon them crumble.
We are living through such a moment. The language of rights is invoked by those who would use them to bury the rights of others. The language of duties is reviled. Authority is dismissed outright. Reasoned disagreement gives way to a cancel culture that masquerades under the banner of freedom of expression.
To remember the Exodus, then, is not merely to honour a distant past. It is to recall the conditions of our own freedom – and to pledge, as we do at the Seder, to cherish and renew its foundations.
There may come a time, God forbid, when children no longer know how to ask why we gather on that night and parents no longer know how to answer. But for so long as Judaism survives – with its love of questions over answers, of debate over conformity, of learning over ignorance – Passover will teach generation after generation the joy of inquiry, the virtue of wisdom and, most of all, humanity’s inextinguishable quest for freedom on this Earth.

And so constitutional democracy carries on its warrior ways, with the full blessing of Rabbi Henry ...

And with that, another oldie, a real test of what the google bot will tolerate ...