The pond has safely landed, which is more than can be said for some unfortunates, but is still getting its proverbial horse manure together.
A lot has happened since the pond took a temporary leave of absence, but the pond takes the view briefly promoted in that Don Henley song The Boys of Summer:
Out on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac A little voice inside my head said, “Don't look back, you can never look back” I thought I knew what being a dedicated herpetology student was, what did I know? Those days are gone forever, I should just let those reptile rantings go ...
Even with the chaos and anarchy of new surroundings, and even with the letting go, how could the pond miss the opportunity to be an Our Henry completist?
But when the pond went there, the cupboard was bare. No Henry in sight, he'd done a bunk and disappeared into the night.
Instead there was endless musings on the Haines tragedy, for which only the infallible Pope would serve ...
And the immortal Rowe had a thought for Murdochians and reptiles everywhere ...
The pond was pleased to discover that amidst the carnage, there was still room for an old-fashioned serve of bigotry ...
The pond is always astonished at the way that the lizard Oz can drag this sort of rhetoric out of dank darkness and into the view of the hive mind ...
Stop right there.
Let's go back a little further than Magna Carta.
The pond has been paying attention to the LRB (not the band), and became befuddled working out what or who was exactly a Briton or a Britain while reading Pablo Scheffer's Frightened Chicks ...
...It is into this society that the first of the ‘Angles or Saxons’ arrived. Though the events surrounding their appearance remain mysterious, Higham agrees with Bede and Gildas (and most modern scholars) that they were invited by the early British kings. One of the knottiest issues facing the rulers, he writes, was ‘how to both maintain social order and secure themselves against external attack, pending the return of imperial troops’. British society had been demilitarised for centuries, and many of its experienced soldiers had disappeared with the imperial forces. Equipping an army can’t have been easy at a time when farmers were struggling to get decent ploughs. Gildas thought the decision to task outsiders with the island’s defence was an act of ‘desperate and crude mental dullness’, but at the time it must have seemed uncontroversial: Romans had for many years been hiring barbarian foederati to protect the northern frontiers.
The archaeological record over the next century and a half shows Anglo-Saxon settlements spreading like inkblots across the British landscape, starting in the south-east (where the mercenaries may originally have been stationed as coastguards) then moving gradually north and west. By the late ninth century, the English kingdoms stretched from Exeter in the south-west to Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth in the north-east. (Like the Romans, the English didn’t make it to Strathclyde and the lands beyond the Forth, which remained culturally Celtic.) Two questions in particular have been the subject of debate. How did the incomers g0 from being a few small rebellious bands to a dominant cultural and economic force? And what happened to the Britons?
The traditional account follows Bede’s description of the Anglo-Saxons’ raising an army, massacring or displacing the natives and filling the empty land with Germanic farmers – what the historian David Dumville once described as a ‘cultural genocide following resisted invasion and colonisation’. Reading the early notices in the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, it’s hard to disagree. ‘In this year Ælle and his three sons, Cymen, Wlencing and Cissa, came with three ships to the land of Britain,’ the entry for 477 states, ‘and there killed many Britons and drove others in flight to the wood.’ By the time the annal was put to parchment in the ninth century the British had been rechristened wealas (foreigners), a term that was soon used to refer to slaves and which eventually provided the name for Wales, a Celtic stronghold beyond the grasp of the English kings. One of the more unflattering Old English riddles hinges on a double entendre about a wonfeax Wale – a dark-haired slave girl, or a dark-haired British woman – who has been feorran broht (brought from afar). That the woman in question is described as alien suggests that the perceived connection between the British and their old heartlands had been comprehensively severed.
Many Britons appear to have fled to Wales in the fifth and sixth centuries. Linguistic evidence shows that Latin speakers – the former elites – retreated west, where they fortified old settlements and reoccupied abandoned Roman forts. Welsh court poets began calling the lost lowland territory ‘Lloegyr’: a foreign land, inhabited by foreign people. Other Britons went to the Continent, establishing enclaves in Galicia and Brittany (where Celtic Breton is spoken to this day). Yet Higham persuasively rejects both the idea that the Anglo-Saxons had a large army and that the Britons were fully displaced. Drawing on archaeological and legal evidence, the picture he paints is of a steady trickle of small warbands crossing the North Sea, settling in fertile valleys, killing or expelling the local landowners and subjugating the peasants.
These first ‘Anglo-Saxons’ were far from homogeneous: analysis of DNA in early English graves shows they came from as far away as Norway and Gaul. And, at least initially, this was not a total conquest. Some areas remained under nominal British control as late as the seventh century. Parts of Hertfordshire, for instance, seem to have resisted English encroachment for decades, stubbornly remaining in their old Roman towns and worshipping their old Christian cults. The name of the small river Beane, which winds from Stevenage to Hertford, probably comes from a Brittonic word akin to the Welsh bychan (‘little’). Members of certain early royal lineages later claimed by the English had distinctly British names: Cerdic, the first king of Wessex, whom Alfred the Great claimed as an ancestor, and the Mercian kings Pybba and Penda. The name of Æthelwealh, the last independent king of Sussex in the seventh century, translates to ‘noble Briton’. It’s not known whether these men were part Celtic by descent, or simply named in an insular tradition. But Higham suggests that this was a time of ‘strong regional identities, some of which may have been more or less British’.
Subjugated islanders probably made up the majority of the population in the new English enclaves. They are almost invisible in the archaeological record, however, which is dominated by the free English farmers, or ceorls (churls), who ruled over them. Although in time the word ‘churl’ would carry distinctly unaristocratic associations, the richer among the early ceorls were served by enslaved cupbearers and commanded dependants known as hlafæta (loaf-eaters). Higham sees them as central to the spread of Englishness. It was through the ceorls, he argues, that the English language, customs and material culture became markers not just of ethnic identity but of social position. Over a number of generations, as the ceorls conquered and exploited more and more British-held lands (which in time cohered into the first Anglo-Saxon kingdoms), their mores came to be adopted by anyone seeking higher status.
What a mess, what a melting pot, what a multicultural storm of confusion, but as we were talking about historical amnesia, why not go there?
And so to the final serve of rancid bigotry, and waddya kno, he tried to revert by serving up a billy goat butt, dressed up in the form of a "yet" ...
Anyone trying to weigh the so-called “immigration debate” should spend some time in an Australian hospital.
Immigration is being used cynically as a political wedge by those harking after a long-gone monoculture without regard for facts or practical consequences.
I recently spent several days in hospital where my experience before, during and after an operation demonstrated how deluded and dangerous this low-grade politics is. Any healthcare experience is a reminder that more than half the Australian population was born overseas or has at least one parent born overseas. My blood samples were taken days before by technicians of Nepalese and Indian heritage. The taxi driver who turned up at 5.40am to take me to hospital was a cheerful bloke from Delhi who took me straight to the correct entrance in a sprawl of medical facilities.
I was prepared for my operation by a nurse of Nepalese origin. Then I was put under by an alert anaesthetist from India who’d rung me in advance to check on a mistake I’d made in my paperwork.
The surgery was carried out by an excellent doctor of Pakistani origin, who explained carefully and clearly before the operation what would be done, and why. Over the next five days I was cared for by nurses whose families were from India, Nepal, the Philippines, Tibet and Ethiopia; a cosmopolitan mix of Muslims, Hindus, Christians and others, along with several we would once have classified as Anglo-Celtics.
If the politicians pushing the anti-immigration line could instantly send most of these people “home”, those of us connected to medical devices would have awakened to a largely still and silent building, sadly missing their skills and cheerful approach.
The anti-immigration lot will throw up their hands and say that of course they don’t mean to banish “those” immigrants. That’s not the point.
The reality is that with an ageing population and declining birthrate, cynically harking back to the White Australia era risks unleashing racism that can dishearten and discourage people that our workforce badly needs.
That lowest common denominator debate and the way it’s being delivered – basically blaming immigrants for everything – is highly offensive, unsophisticated and riddled with misinformation and contradictions.
Having a multicultural society brings great benefits and we’ll be in serious trouble if they all go “home”. Certainly, fix any rorts but leave the rest alone...
And so on, and well yes Brendan, but you can't stop bigots doing what bigots gotta do ...
While the pond won't be looking back at assorted reptile stews, now fetid and ruined by exposure to the noon day Tamworth sun, there are plenty of 'toons worth catching up with ... including the immortal Rowe, staying in the bigot spray moment ...
And so to Killer, and the pond apologises for the use of caps, but it's part of the readjustment and the returning ...as Killer headed into Mike Pence territory, the man the MAGA mob wanted to hang ...
And so on, and the trouble with a pothole analysis is that you're liable to end up in a pothole, but you hardly expect a mob of insular academics and lickspittle fellow travellers to get out on the back roads ... I Drove An Empty Two Lane Road Into Never Before Seen Indiana
The pond doesn't usually stick in an AV distraction in the middle of a reptile rant, but confessing to a letch for backroads decline and decay seemed appropriate, what with Killer infatuated with Killer buildings celebrating the killing fields ...
Good old Mike Pence ...
Sorry, the pond is incredibly distracted, and struggling to cope with this plunge back into the hive mind...
Medicare beneficiaries with obesity or overweight will have access to Zepbound and orforglipron, if approved, at $50 a month
INDIANAPOLIS, Nov. 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) today announced an agreement with the U.S. government to expand access to its obesity medicines and reduce patient costs. The agreement builds on Lilly's longstanding commitment to finding solutions with policymakers that improve access to life-changing medicines. In 2020, Lilly partnered with the Trump Administration on a pilot program that paved the way for Lilly to be the first company to cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35 per month. Lilly will now improve access to nearly 40 million Americans living with obesity on government insurance programs and millions more who pay out-of-pocket. Unlocking access to these medicines can be game-changing for Americans with obesity – a risk factor driving more than 200 associated diseases, including heart disease, strokes and certain types of cancers.
"Today marks a pivotal moment in U.S. health care policy and a defining milestone for Lilly, made possible through collaboration with the Trump Administration. As we expand access to obesity treatments for more Americans and advance one of the most innovative obesity pipelines, we remain focused on improving outcomes, strengthening the U.S. healthcare system, and contributing to the health of our nation for generations to come," said David A. Ricks, Lilly chair and CEO. "This agreement adds to our established commitment to affordability – from being the first company to cap insulin out-of-pocket costs at $35 per month to launching LillyDirect, an end-to-end digital healthcare experience."
As this is the pond's last post for a little while, and - it goes without saying - also the day that Our Heroic Homeric Henry strides on to the scene - the pond wanted to end with a "western civilisational" bang, not a woke whimper.
What better inspiration than liddle Marco's speech in ancient Greece, echoing ancient Greek wisdom down through the ages to arrive at a corrupt Kimberley and a mad king irritated because only he can do corrupt in his court.
For those coming in late, or those who've already forgotten, liddle Marco delivered what he imagined was a presidential speech, designed to launch his 2028 bid, and orchestrated against a carefully chosen backdrop, though he could have achieved the same effect by staying in Washington and using a green screen:
The pond won't bother to link to the speech - it's easily found, and it was meretricious tosh and revealed liddle Marco to be a tone-deaf twit - but the pond was agog at the notion that Our Henry might rise to the challenge and demolish Marco.
...again and again, Rubio wandered back to a precarious theme, that history is decided by “great men” who defy adversity and conquer lesser peoples. He almost seemed to be writing out text for a video game (Super Mario?), offering “an arena for great men to test and prove themselves”, where they can show off “fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory”.
There was also this in Salon, though alas the pond can't quote it all ...
...scratch the surface of the history Rubio cited, and those ideals look about as worthy of celebration as a new data center being built in your hometown or having to pay $6 a gallon for diesel. The secretary’s examples of Western heroism were the Spartans at Thermopylae and the philosopher Socrates, both of whom, he said, illustrate the “Western” willingness to “pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.” But the Spartan militarism that Rubio so admires came to define the city state’s culture only because they had no choice but to devote all state resources to maintaining an army sufficient to suppress the revolts of the massive number of enslaved fellow Greeks upon whom the Spartan economy depended. And the most plausible explanation for why Socrates was executed is that he had been an intellectual mentor to several of the men who ruled Athens as a violent, dictatorial junta in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war; it was Socrates’ student Plato, who devoted his talent to sanitizing the political reputation of his teacher by painting him as a courageous free-thinker. Rubio mentioned the influence of Plato as a key link between ancient Greece and the founding of the United States. But Plato’s influence upon the framers of the U.S. Constitution consisted primarily in legitimizing their conception of the new nation as an inegalitarian state in which only those whom they deemed worthy would have access to political power. Yes, Socrates taught and Plato wrote, as Rubio said, in the Parthenon’s shadow. But when ancient Greeks looked at that temple they saw a monument not to democracy but to the wealth and power Athens had amassed for itself by its coercive, imperial treatment of their fellow Greeks. The construction of the Parthenon was funded by income from the lopsided, extortionate alliances into which Athens bullied other city-states on the pretext of providing protection against the defeated Persians coming back to impose slavery upon the Greeks. It almost seems that Rubio knows this, because his warning to Europe sounds a lot like that ancient Athenian propaganda: “The course we take will determine whether the West . . . resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.” Oppression and exploitation of marginalized groups, promotion of authoritarian rule, imperial domination and wealth extraction; these aren’t aspects of “Western Civilization” that anyone should be proud of. But Rubio is, or said he is, because these are the aspects of that heritage that correspond most closely to the Trump administration’s view of the world. In fact, the secretary’s speech was pretty direct about this. When Rubio decried how, before Trump, “we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history,” he can only be referring to the removal of Confederate statues that served to celebrate white supremacy. His grandiose description of America before European colonization as “an open and wild land” that “became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition” erased the role of genocide and displacement of Native Americans people in this process. But why should anyone be surprised to hear something so egregiously shameful from a Trump administration official? This is the very history that Trump has worked to suppress in museums, including the Smithsonian, and national parks nationwide. You can sense the desperation for legitimacy in Rubio’s choice to give this speech in Athens, where he hoped the ruins of the parthenon would lend prestige to his claims. You can sense it in the fulsomeness of his praise of “Western Civilization,” as if just repeating “virtue” or “honor” enough times will paper over the corruption scandal surrounding U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. These visual and rhetorical clichés are intended to make Trump’s policies look respectable, but all they do here is reveal the profound weakness of the administration. They can’t point to any genuinely positive accomplishments. Going into the midterm elections Trump and his party have nothing to run on. So instead we get a speech like this — a ham-fisted appeal to the die-hard MAGA base, the kind of people who actually want to live in a dictatorial, corrupt police state and to delude themselves about history.
And liddle Marco also aroused the ire of Xians, as in this outing in the WSJ ... though alas this day the intermittent archive decided to have one of its hissy fits, "too many requests" being the excuse du jour ...
This time it was the Xians getting their noses out of joint ...
...Mr. Rubio characterized this relentless struggle—fueled by what the Greeks called thumos, “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride”—as the “heart of great civilization.” Without it, he declared, nations lose their will to fight, even to survive. In our times, he said, Europe has abandoned thumos for comfort and safety, rejecting the pursuit of excellence in the name of an egalitarianism of mediocrity. The Continent can save itself only if it can “awaken from its long slumber” and again embrace the “fire” of times past. But Europe’s era of fire led to colonialism—and to the backlash against it that has shaped world politics up to the present day. In the 20th century, national self-assertion generated two conflicts that devastated Europe and left few parts of the globe untouched. The European Union, which President Trump regularly reviles as an anti-American plot, represents a collective decision to prevent the recurrence of such conflicts. Under the Trump administration, Mr. Rubio says, the U.S. has made a different choice, “the unapologetic pursuit of national power,” coupled with the understanding that power requires not only the economic, technological, and military means to exercise it but also the demonstrated willingness to use it when prudence and diplomacy fail. The power to do what? Mr. Rubio (or his speechwriter) seems to have read Thucydides up to Pericles’ funeral oration but no further. Fifteen years later, the Athenians sent their navy to the neutral island of Melos, demanding that the Melians abandon their neutral stance, join the Athenian-dominated Delian League, and pay tribute to Athens. The Melians refused, appealing to justice. The Athenian envoy dismissed their appeal. In the real world, he replied, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” It was in this spirit that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ridiculed Canada’s refusal to knuckle under to U.S. trade demands: “I don’t think you can be in a tit-for-tat with someone who’s 13 times larger than you are.” Untethered from law and justice, overweening power becomes dangerous not only to those on its receiving end, but also to those who wield it. The Greeks understood that when daring and pride go too far, they mutate into reckless and self-destructive hubris. Egged on by demagogues, Thucydides narrates, Athens embarked on a war of choice—the Sicilian expedition, the disastrous failure of which contributed to Athens’s eventual defeat in the Peloponnesian War. Hubris leads people and nations to overestimate what their power can accomplish and to underestimate the effectiveness of their opponents’ response. This lesson isn’t obsolete. In his celebration of Greek virtues, Mr. Rubio ignored their opposite—religious virtues. The Bible praises Moses as the humblest man on earth. In Proverbs we read that “pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” There is considerable daylight between the secretary of state’s paean to power and the Sermon on the Mount—which isn’t to say that I would bet America’s survival on the proposition that the meek shall inherit the earth. I suggest, unoriginally, that what we call the West emerged from, and is sustained by, the continuing tension between Athens and Jerusalem, not either in isolation from the other. In 2022, Nate Hochman, the young man who is now Mr. Rubio’s chief speechwriter, published a prescient article tracing the decline of the religious right in the Republican Party and the rise of a less religious form of conservatism that embraces national self-assertion over any form of universalism, including Christianity. Mr. Rubio’s speech is evidence of this shift. Years ago, I was the token liberal at a conference dominated by conservatives of various stripes. When I expressed concern about the rise of Christian nationalism, a traditional conservative acquaintance replied, “If you’re worried about Christian nationalism, wait till you see the pagan version.” I’m beginning to understand what he meant.
Even the National Review showed contempt, again with an Xian spin ...
...Rubio’s narrative is hobbled by both historical and conceptual errors that create, at best, a misleading (and MAGA-friendly) account of the American story. “Here, in Athens,” Rubio said, “we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West.” They include “fierce individuality,” “relentless ambition,” “daring exploration,” and “a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory.” Here is a secular account of Western civilization that might have come from the pen of Voltaire on the eve of the French Revolution. Left off the list were the transformational concepts of the Jewish and Christian traditions: the biblical teachings about men and women bearing the image of God, about man’s alienation from the Creator, and about God’s redemptive vision for humankind. Without these beliefs, there would be no Western civilization. There are also important factual errors in the speech: the claim that the Greeks offered us a model of republican government (Greek democracy was decidedly not a republic, a fact that terrified the American founders about the prospects of direct democracy); that “the Greeks gave us history itself” (the Jews were writing narrative history roughly a thousand years before Herodotus); or that the Greeks invented the idea that “there is a rational order to the cosmos” (the opening chapters of the book of Genesis in the Bible establish the rationality of God and his created order). Given his audience in Athens, Rubio can be forgiven for failing to draw attention to the implosion of Greek democracy. It, of course, ended in the most brutal and protracted war of the classical world: a 25-year bloodbath between the Athenian empire and Sparta and its allies. In their two-volume defense of Western civilization, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, co-authors Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins underscore the moral damage resulting from Athenian self-interest, the appetite to dominate others, and the inordinate love of honor. As they summarize it: “The Greeks, so proud of their superiority over the Persians, had turned themselves into barbarians.” The Greek historian Thucydides, the most reliable contemporary chronicler of the Peloponnesian War, was relentlessly honest about the catastrophe. Greeks committed atrocities against fellow Greeks; women and children were enslaved; prisoners were slaughtered; cannibalism occurred during the sieges. “Love of power operating through greed and through personal ambition,” he wrote, “was the cause of all these evils.” Yet Rubio sidesteps this dreary history and comes very close to turning the vices of the ancient world into virtues. The architects of the Parthenon, representative of the Greek spirit, “held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others” and to be engaged in “that constant struggle for distinction.” The greatest of the Greek philosophers would take issue with this view of human flourishing. “Justice in the life and conduct of the State,” wrote Plato, “is possible only as it first resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.” Aristotle, in his Politics, also viewed the character of a political society as dependent on the character of its citizens. “For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all,” he wrote. And the aim of political life? “Justice is the bond of men in states, for the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society.” The concepts of virtue and justice, however, appear nowhere in Rubio’s account of the achievements of the West and of the American political order. There are references to “heroism, honor, duty,” but they are extracted from any moral or religious context. There is a nod to Christianity and “the empire of Christendom,” but no hint of the civilizing impact of the Christian gospel on the Greco-Roman world. Rubio thus praises Achilles for his “pursuit of eternal glory” but seems unaware that it was Achilles’s cruelty, uncontrolled rage, and ego — his hubris — that led to his undoing. Maybe the reason for Rubio’s silence about these vices is that they match too closely with those of the president he serves. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Rubio’s speech is the total lack of any democratic purpose to American foreign policy. Instead, the nation’s great aims are to “reindustrialize our economy,” “rebuild our factories,” and “fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.” Again, the unanswered question recurs: toward what end? In Reagan’s Westminster speech, he made the defense and promotion of democracy the moral lodestar of America’s engagement on the world stage. “So let us ask ourselves: What kind of people do we think we are?” Reagan said. “And let us answer: free people, worthy of freedom, and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.” On display was Reagan’s profound belief in American exceptionalism, the idea that America’s national interests must be framed — and constrained — by its democratic and religious ideals. It was this belief, rooted not in Greek philosophy but in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, that helped the United States to defeat imperialistic Japan and Nazi Germany in the Second World War; create the Nuremberg Trials to bring to justice the Nazis for their human rights atrocities; launch the Berlin Airlift to rescue West Germany from Soviet tyranny; design the Marshall Plan to provide an economic lifeline to Western Europe; and support the democratic Solidarity movement in Poland, which set off a series of democratic revolutions that ultimately brought down the Soviet Union. These facts seem to be lost on the Trump administration. Rubio’s answer to Reagan’s question — “What kind of people do we think we are?” — will do little to restore America’s self-identity as an indispensable defender of human freedom. Quite the opposite. The “moral imagination” of America and the West, as described by the secretary of state, lacks the moral ballast of biblical religion: the true source of both American greatness and national renewal. Without it, American exceptionalism — like Greek exceptionalism — will lie buried under the ruins of a once-great civilization.
That's about the biggest build up the pond has ever done for a reptile entrance, but it was all there, Greeks, Thucydides, Aristotle, Xians, etc. etc.
What a chance to rise to the challenge, what a golden chance to deliver stern denunciations and profound references.
So what did Our Heroic Homeric Henry do?
Blew it bigly ... and stayed full Trumpian ICC-hating Zionist, with just another rabid rant for the Australian Daily Zionist News.
Talk about a major disappointment ...
The header: By Henry Ergas Nobel Peace Price: Purveyors of hate poison legacy of Holocaust
The plea to listen to the bot: Listen to this article 8 min
The caption for a snap designed to evoke fear and loathing: Former ICC judge Navi Pillay, who was awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. Picture: AP
The plea to pander to the G bot: Make us preferred on Google
Our Henry decided to offer a bog standard defence for the ethnic cleansing that's been going down in Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention southern Lebanon and Syria. The cheapest trick is to argue about the definition of genocide and drag in the Holocaust, and Our Henry is the cheapest of tricksters:
The award of the Nobel Peace prize to South African jurist Navi Pillay, who has spent decades as one of Israel’s most strident critics, comes as no surprise. Unlike the committees that award the other Nobel prizes, which are drawn from Sweden’s learned institutions, the peace prize committee is appointed on a party-political basis by the Norwegian parliament. Politics is not incidental to the process; it is encrusted in its nature. Nor is it a coincidence that the committee that awarded Pillay the prize is chaired by Jørgen Watne Frydnes, the Labour appointee whose term ends in December. A longstanding critic of Israel, which he considers an “apartheid state”, Frydnes called the accidental killing in Gaza of Al Jazeera “journalists” (who moonlighted as terrorists) a “grotesque attack on the freedom of expression”. Crowning his chairmanship by canonising Pillay can only enhance Frydnes’ adulation by Norway’s vehemently anti-Israel left. The underlying issue, however, is neither Frydnes nor Pillay. Both are symptoms of a broader disease: the chronic abuse of the term “genocide”.
How feeble was the outing? No Thucydides, just Francis:
Centuries ago, Francis Bacon warned about the “shoddy and inept application of words which lays siege to the intellect”. In the case of “genocide”, the siege began at the word’s birth. When Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, he devoted a mere 16 pages of a 671-page book to it, producing, as historian Anton Weiss-Wendt puts it, “an indictment rather than a clear delineation” of a crime.
A snap of an alleged villain followed: The Head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, right, speaks with the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Navanethem 'Navi' Pillay via video link at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo on October 10. Picture: AFP
And so to avoiding what's going down in Gaza and the West Bank by way of semantic and pedantic quibbling, with bonus Holocaust, always a reliable diversion and distraction:
Genocide, for Lemkin, could be “political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious and moral”. The concept’s sweep was as vast as its boundaries were indistinct. That lack of precision reflected, at least in part, how indelibly the nature of the “crime of crimes” had been burnt into the public mind. If Auschwitz gave it a name, the photographs of the camps gave it an unforgettable immediacy: heaps of emaciated corpses, survivors scarcely distinguishable from the dead. The new term therefore meant something far worse than a massacre. What it meant, wrote Helen Fein, in one of the works that defined genocide studies, was the killing of “people in captivity, people who have surrendered, or people without a state or political organisation that can offer a credible threat to the perpetrator” – or, put more formally, “the asymmetrical slaughter of an unorganised group by an organised force” serving no military purpose. That had been the fate of the Jews of Europe, transported across a continent solely to be murdered. Their extermination continued as defeat closed in on Germany, the machinery of death consuming the resources of a collapsing regime. “Mere Jewish survival”, as historian Steven Katz puts it, “was the active enemy”. So too in the Armenian genocide, which had featured prominently in pre-war discussions of the crime Lemkin named. Yes, thousands of Armenians, armed by Russia, deserted to the enemy or rose in revolt against the Ottomans; in the fighting that broke out at Van in 1915 neither side took prisoners. But their extermination as a people occurred after they had been defeated, their weapons seized, their resistance broken. The Armenians, said Talat Pasha, the Ottoman interior minister, “can live in the desert but nowhere else”. Some 300,000, mainly women and children, were driven to the wastelands of Der el Zor; by September 1916, barely 12,000 remained alive. They, too, were then butchered, as were those who had escaped the death marches. Nor did the Ottoman regime spare the Syriac Christians, who had played no role in the hostilities. Utterly defenceless, they were mercilessly slaughtered. Far from punishing the crime, the Turkish parliament granted pensions to the perpetrators’ families in 1926.
Throw in a snap of another villain: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Picture: AFP
Erdogan provided Our Henry with another chance to avoid mentioning what's been going down in Gaza and the West Bank courtesy the current government of Israel:
None of that has troubled Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Having assured the world that “a Muslim cannot perpetrate a genocide”, he now accuses Israel at every opportunity of committing one. The history of his own country is absolved by assertion; Israel is condemned by incantation. For him, as for Pillay, the mere fact of Palestinian casualties tars Israel with the “crime of crimes”. The Genocide Convention’s drafters had recognised the danger: that civilian losses in war would be conflated with genocide. “In modern war,” the official commentary on the draft convention noted in 1947, “the civilian population inevitably suffers severe losses.” Yet “even heavy losses on the civilian population in the course of operations of war”, it stressed, “(do) not as a rule constitute genocide”. The fundamental distinction was between war’s dreadful toll on civilians and the deliberate elimination of a people in cold blood. The State Department confidently believed that the requirement of “an overall plan to destroy a human group” would ensure that was understood. It had reckoned without Stalin, who meticulously revised each of the Convention’s successive drafts. In June 1948, a confidential State Department report noted that the Soviet bloc had secured “what they frankly described as an ‘educational’ document, not for ‘jurists’ but for the ‘peoples of the world’, in other words, a propaganda weapon”. Soon enough, that weapon was turned on the United States. But it was against Israel that the venom flowed most freely. Of the 1037 references to genocide published by Pravda between 1948 and 1988, fully one-fifth were aimed at Israel – twice as many as concerned the Vietnam War. Thus, in 1952, Soviet fronts claimed Israel was pursuing a “genocidal campaign” against the Arabs; within a week of the Six Day War, the Soviets demanded an end to Israel’s “genocide against the Arabs”, and; on June 6, 1982, they branded Israel’s entry into Lebanon “a policy of genocide against the Arab people”. As the accusations multiplied, the word’s meaning dissolved. By 2015, some 80 countries, home to four-fifths of humanity, had been accused of “genocide”, with the term’s infinite varieties covering everything from the extinction of languages to the disappearance of often barbaric cultures. “Genocide” had become, concluded Weiss-Wendt, “a hollowed-up vessel that could be filled with any meaning”. Yet drained of precision, the word retained its power, which fed on the memory of the greatest slaughter of Jews in history: the more sacred that memory became, the more potent its appropriation. Turned against Israel, the accusation consummated an outrageous inversion: the murdered Jews supplied the moral authority for demonising the Jewish state. And what more damning charge could there be than to charge the people marked for annihilation of perpetrating the same crime against others? But the dead cannot be conscripted into that monstrous travesty without falsifying how they died. Nor can the parallel be sustained without suppressing how this war began and whom Israel was fighting. That beginning was the massacre of October 7. As for the enemy Israel confronted, it was heavily armed, had vowed to repeat the atrocities “again and again”, and did nothing to protect, and everything to deliberately imperil, Gaza’s civilians from the wars it had chosen to unleash. That is the war Pillay’s commission branded genocide; that is the verdict the Nobel committee has now enshrined, lending its authority to “A wash of lies / That eats like acid at the feet of men”. And with it, a prize for peace has desecrated the memory, and tarnished the legacy, of those who perished in war-torn Europe’s darkest crime.
A minor quibble.
Shouldn't Our Henry's thumb bio start this way?
Henry Ergas AO is a rabid ranting Zionist who learned nothing from his sojourn in Europe, before returning to Australia to deliver weekly Zionist rants to the Australian Daily Zionist News.
Instead the reptiles offered this ...
Henry Ergas Columnist Henry Ergas AO is an economist who spent many years at the OECD in Paris before returning to Australia. He has taught at a number of universities, including Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the University of Auckland and the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique in Paris, served as Inaugural Professor of Infrastructure Economics at the University of Wollongong and worked as an adviser to companies and governments.
For once there were a few cracks in the hive mind. A few weren't on board, though there was also the usual reliable collection of full-blown loons...
Luckily there was also a recent infallible Pope to hand ...
As for the rest of the reptiles this day, the pond stayed shattered.
With the intermittent archive doing a bunk, all the pond could do was note some seminal contributions, and provide a url ...
There was an outing on the Canavan caravan ...
‘Worst’ trade deal sells out Aussie jobs European steel tariffs stay at 50 per cent, cheese subsidies remain intact – yet Labor is calling its EU free-trade deal a win for Australia. By Matt Canavan Contributor
Worth hanging around for when the archive comes good?
Nah, not really...and ditto the craven Craven ...
Australians want less immigration. Universities can’t keep ignoring it As public support hardens for lower migration, the hardest choices can no longer be dodged, especially by universities that have turned international students into a business model. By Greg Craven Columnist
See that reference to the 'leets? That's where the pond would have dropped out of this tedious class.
Does the gormless one fancy he's a member of the 'leets, or does he fancy himself as a dissident 'leet at one with the common herd, or is he just a humbug down with the fake ranga?
Even Killer Creighton was off his oats ... but as this is the last post for a while the pond thought it should attempt a little completism, especially as in the first gobbet Killer attempted to swim against the reptile tide ...
What's weird is that embedded in all that is the notion that News Corporation is stuffed full of "sensible people" ...
Luckily in his next gobbet, Killer decided to bash old folks, as if ageing wasn't already doing the job (note the fancy way the reptiles are now using sub-headers):
With vulgar youff dancing in the streets with Killer, it was on to bashing the poor buggers who decided to put themselves in harm's way for no particular benefit. Who wouldn't be traumatised at the entire waste of time the Afghanistan adventure produced?
And that was that...and as for the "news"of the day? It was just greenie bashing and more celebrations of the fake ranga, what with the splitters everywhere these days ...
It was a never no mind for the pond, what with the Greens having decided that Australia should offer no military support to Ukraine ...
“The Greens have been clear from day one that we’re a party of peace and non-violence, and we don’t support military aid to the Ukraine,” Shoebridge told this masthead in an interview in his Sydney office, referring to a party position that has not gained significant attention. (here, paywall)
Looks like the pond will have to find the latest iteration of the Happy Birthday Party at the next election, but it does segue to the latest immortal Rowe ...
The Greens in bed with the mad King, Uncle Leon and Vlad the sociopathic invader?
Who would have thunk it, but then again in times past they did manage to cut off their carbon tax nose to spite their climate science face ...
As for liddle Marco, Jamelle Bouie had a few thoughts - he comes from the both siderist NY Times, but nobody's perfect ... Marco Rubio does not know a thing about "Western civilization"
Lordy lordy, that the pond should be approvingly quoting Rory.
For those wanting to avoid the rest of the blather, just after the 22minute mark Rory begins talking about liddle Marco, comparing him to a Victorian headmaster blathering on to his students about the glories of the British empire ... How does Marco Rubio’s Parthenon speech fit the Trump administration’s ideas on European “civilisational erasure” – and how does it depart from traditional Republican rhetoric?
This is the penultimate post by the pond before going dark for an indeterminate amount of time.
It's not so much the physical move, which will happen in a day, but getting computers back up, reconnecting to the intertubes and sorting through an enormous amount of junk.
It would be nice if, in these last few days, the reptiles managed to publish something compelling, something that sustained interest in the pond in the dark times, but that's just a measure of the pond's delusional devotion to herpetology studies.
Instead say, any commentary on Ukraine being sold down the river, there's just a bog standard continuation of the endless war on Jimbo, with these yarns briefly at the top of the digital rag...
STATE PUSHBACK NSW to waive stamp duty as Chalmers charges ahead on trust changes NSW has become the first state to rule out individuals and businesses being hit with stamp duty should they restructure their trust arrangements following federal Labor’s reforms. By Sarah Ison, Lachlan Leeming and Julie-anne Sprague
They needed three reptiles to put together that sorry tale? More talk of the suffering of the trusty rich?
This is the way that endlessly rippling waves and water wear down coastlines and rocks.
Only two reptiles were needed to help in the next phase of the agitated jihad ...
ALP AGITATION Sting in PM’s tale as Albanese walks away from boast Anthony Albanese has walked back his claim of personally reversing the ATO credit card ban as Labor MPs say internal morale has hit a new low. By Greg Brown and Rosie Lewis
Geoff chambered a bog standard round ...
Dr Jim’s record falling flat in treasurer match-ups The fact that the Prime Minister has been forced to step in and clean up Chalmers’ mess on several occasions is a bad look for the Treasurer. By Geoff Chambers Political editor
Over on the extreme far right, Jack the Insider joined the chanting children in this version of Lord of the Flies ...
Past is past, Dr Jim … it’s your future I’d be worried about Chalmers should forget about nostalgia, otherwise we might wistfully recall a time when giants of Australian political history really strolled the corridors of power. By Jack the Insider Columnist
It's the repetition of visual images as part of the jihad that introduces a certain visual numbness ... with Jack recycling a lizard Oz favourite.
Talk about an inexhaustible ability to recycle old hits ...
And Geoff's piece was also a reminder of past visual glories...
It's the sheer inane repetition, the mindless ongoing sloganeering that means the rag is a propaganda sheet of the lowest and basest kind, that some days gets to the pond.
But why worry about images?
Well think of the alternatives.
it's Thursday, and that's petulant Peta day, and she was on a crusade worthy of a medieval Xian king ...
The pond absolutely refuses to indulge this sort of crusade - there's always the archive for Peta cultists - but as a counterpoint might note an alternative in another place ...
...On Friday, the electoral matters committee will ask hard questions of Hales – unprecedented for a man who for decades has answered only the inquiries of his own acolytes. He tried to get out of the grilling but failed. At stake is not just his church’s reputation, but millions of dollars in tax exemptions. Charities in Australia are prohibited from campaigning for political parties, and Hales’ church runs a dozen charities with hundreds of millions in assets. Research in the UK reveals the Brethren use these riches almost entirely for their own benefit. A finding that the church was involved in electioneering could seriously imperil these generous concessions. A number of right-wing groups have leapt to Hales’ defence. Holding him to account is a threat to religious freedom, they say. Turning Point USA, the controversial US right-wing organisation, called on the Trump government to lobby Australia over Hales’ questioning, with pastor Lucas Miles worried that, “If this approach succeeds against one church, it becomes a precedent of intimidation for all”. The Coalition members of the committee have labelled Hales’ grilling a “witch-hunt”. The Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, Michael Stead, and his organisation, Freedom for Faith, say the Brethren is a simple “mainstream Christian denomination,” whose members “have as much right as any other Australian to participate in the electoral process”. “Religious leaders (are not) automatically responsible for the political choices, associations or conduct” of their members, Freedom for Faith told members of the committee in an email. (Neither they nor the Coalition responded to recent questions about Hales’ long history of antisemitic comments.) Experts who know the Brethren better say these defences are wrong-headed. Reverend Tim Costello, a senior fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity and former president of the Baptist Union of Australia, said Hales’ church “regard the rest of us Christians as so unfaithful that they will not worship, fellowship or even eat or drink with us. “And the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren break up families … this is not freedom of conscience or freedom of religion.”
And so on, and the chance of reading anything like that in the lizard Oz?
Between zilch, zero and zip ... (and yet any sensible atheist might wonder why all these churches get endless tax breaks and government indulgences)
What you get in the lizard Oz is endless hate, fear, division and loathing ... and the need for shadows to get on board the fake ranga agenda ...
Here's another piece the pond wouldn't touch with a barge pole ...
That's the same loon that the pond recently noted was a charlatan, and yet he has the cheek, in the time of mad king Donald and tech bro billionaires, to blather about "western civilisation"...
...beneath these political and strategic motivations is a deeper intolerance towards different points of view. The left since 2010 went from demanding the cancellation of controversial speakers, to government censorship, to the celebration of the killing of Charlie Kirk for the things he said. This intolerance stems from the left’s dogmatic certainty that it is right and moral and its opponents wrong and immoral. Western civilisation rests upon the idea that the truth emerges from dialogue and thus that free speech is the enabling foundation for democracy. The West’s first great martyr was Socrates, whom the government ordered to death for the things he said. The Albanese government’s demand for censorship and the ability to wage informational warfare through the use of fake accounts is an attack on this Western tradition of free speech and democracy. I encourage the people of Australia to use their voices forcefully to oppose it. Michael Shellenberger is the CBR chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech at the University of Austin, the founder of Public.News, and the president of Civilization Works. He was a guest of the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia.
...Shellenberger has faced accusations of "bad science" for his comments on climate change in Apocalpyse Never; he has also been criticized for arguing with prominent climate scientists on social media and "apologising" to the world on the behalf of environmentalists. A panel of scientists organized by Climate Feedback analyzed the claims he made in his "apology" article, concluding that they were "inaccurate or mislead readers by contradicting available evidence or using scientific data out of context." A Snopes article, which consulted multiple scientists that Shellenberger had cited, was similarly critical; Michael Mann called one of Shellenberger's central arguments "completely wrong," and found it was also contradicted by the very IEA source Shellenberger used to support it.
He's also in the grip of a demented form of transphobia and can be relied upon for endless blather about "woke" ...
The pond doesn't want to get in the way of its final post tomorrow featuring Little Marco, and "western civilisation" and Socrates, but what the heck ...
...The secretary’s examples of Western heroism were the Spartans at Thermopylae and the philosopher Socrates, both of whom, he said, illustrate the “Western” willingness to “pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.” But the Spartan militarism that Rubio so admires came to define the city state’s culture only because they had no choice but to devote all state resources to maintaining an army sufficient to suppress the revolts of the massive number of enslaved fellow Greeks upon whom the Spartan economy depended. And the most plausible explanation for why Socrates was executed is that he had been an intellectual mentor to several of the men who ruled Athens as a violent, dictatorial junta in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war; it was Socrates’ student Plato, who devoted his talent to sanitizing the political reputation of his teacher by painting him as a courageous free-thinker.
And with that preview done and dusted, what else was there to contemplate this day?
The pond feared that, by eliminating all the basest of the reptile loons, it had arrived at a blank canvas, but huzzah, old faithful war horse and rogue biddy Dame Groan hovered into view to warn that we'll all be rooned ...
The header: Judith Sloan A workable gas reservation policy? I think not
Hear the clarion call of the bot: Listen to this article 4 min
The caption for the frankly terrible opening illustration: Australia's oil and gas infrastructure as the lifeblood of the nation's economy. Sources: iStock. Artwork: Frank Ling
The plea for the mighty tech bro G: Make us preferred on Google
There will be a few wimps who will say that they've read all this before, but remember, it's not just the art of endless visual representations, there must also be endless text recylings.
Dame Groan groaning about gas and renewables is an eternal, never ending classic ...
There are legitimate grounds for a government imposing a gas reservation policy as long as it’s declared before investments are made. Those risking their money can assess whether to proceed based on the requirement that a certain percentage of output must be reserved for domestic use. But that is not what the Albanese government has in mind. It wants to impose conditions on the big gas exporters to reserve 20 per cent of their output to be available for domestic use. In this way, the domestic market can be somewhat oversupplied – a figure of 110 per cent is mentioned – thereby creating downward pressure on domestic gas prices. Bear in mind here there is not one domestic gas market in Australia and there are major constraints because of the lack of pipeline connection. And why would Western Australia want to participate because it has its own scheme? It also doesn’t bear thinking how the scheme would work in the Northern Territory because there are no substantial case users there. The whole idea reminds me of that famous quote from Friedrich Hayek: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Throw in women and I’m fully on board.
It's part of the reptile lexicon to throw in dire examples of renewables, with dastardly solar the thumb image for this AV distraction ...
Next video thumbnail Australia would be ‘entirely reliant’ on renewables if Albanese government got its way The Samuel Griffith Society Executive Director Mia Schlicht says Australia’s energy system would be “entirely reliant” on wind and solar if the Albanese government got its way.
Any mention of renewables always sends Dame Groan deep into the deep end of the "we're all rooned" pool ...
Let’s be clear here: the Albanese government’s previous attempt to regulate domestic gas prices when they soared after the outbreak of the Ukraine war was a complete disaster. Some misguided Treasury officials thought it was possible to control both price and quantity, suggesting that they should never have passed their economics degrees. The end result was exemption after exemption, with domestic gas prices remaining high. Good one Jim, good one Chris. Let’s be clear on another matter: the coal-seam gas fields in Queensland would never have been developed were it not for meeting export demand. It’s all very well to try to turn this around and expect those LNG exporters to meet domestic needs, but if that had been the case in the first place, the investments, certainly the extent of them, would probably never have occurred. Recall also that the Rudd/Gillard government contemplated introducing a reservation scheme at that time and rejected it.
Is there anything that will appease here? Sure, an image celebrating sweet, dinkum, virginal, completely clean and innocent Oz coal A coal seam gas well head in the Surat Basin, Queensland.
Dame Groan wasn't having any of that sort of carry on ... she was all in on gassing the planet, as you'd expect from a Santos devotee ...
It’s worth noting here the complete hypocrisy of some of the states, particularly Victoria and NSW, in this policy space. Their governments complain about high gas prices but have done everything in their power to block new gas developments. The Victorian government even went to the trouble of inserting a “no fracking’ provision in its constitution – I ask you? This was done in the full knowledge that the once ample gas supplies in Bass Strait were running out. NSW produces no domestic gas at all and yet it has impeded the development of the gas project at Narrabri at every step of the way – both Coalition and Labor governments. In fact, various plans to import gas into Victoria and NSW are reasonably developed. The costs would be horrendous, but supply might be able to be guaranteed. So, what should we make of Resources Minister Madeleine King’s presentation to the National Press Club? It was easy to gain the impression she didn’t much want to talk about the gas reservation policy, preferring to drone on about the importance of resources, particularly critical minerals.
Cue the villainess herself ... Madeleine King addresses the National Press Club in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire
Her presence made Dame Groan very mad ...there was no way that renewables should be allowed in country, not when it and the planet could be gassed.
She quickly skated over the details of the now tabled reservation legislation, pointing to the watered-down ministerial discretion. She also mentioned eliminating loopholes and the potential for gaming – read my lips, the bureaucrats would have no idea about this stuff. The key danger is that the intervention will drive domestic prices below the long-run marginal cost of new gas projects. Add in the large element of uncertainty and it’s entirely possible that investment in local gas projects will simply dry up. Of course, there are plenty of activists on the Left who would be happy with this outcome. Any short-run relief in terms of gas prices would very quickly be followed by much higher prices. While King regards gas as vital to Australia’s energy future, including for the processing of critical minerals and firming the electricity grid, her words could easily turn out to be hollow. The scheme doesn’t come into play until 2028, but the disincentive to invest has already started. The truth is that Australia has oodles of gas; it’s just that it’s in the ground. It may stay there for many years, if not decades. Talk about shooting ourselves in the foot.
Never mind, the hive mind was right behind Dame Groan ... except for one heretic ...
And as this is the penultimate post for a time, the pond thought it would drop in on the lizard Oz editorialist for a last whiff of what's behind the hive mind ...
Achieve a two state solution while Benji is all in on a greater Israel from the river to the sea? Good luck with that, as the ethnic cleansing continues apace.
And there was this effort, a rousing reminder of the Dame Groan reptile way ...
And with that the pond will be up tomorrow for a final post, hopefully then returning in goodly time for ongoing reptile disasters, including the pending US election mid-terms, because what could possibly go wrong?
