Wonder of wonders, it took a borrowed piece from The Nepal Times to at least note the bleeding obvious in the lizard Oz...
Nothing about this disaster was natural – not the location of hydropower plants on trans-Himalayan rivers, not the highways and settlements built on rivers, not the corruption and greed, not the poor governance.
Sonia Awale
Reading that sub heading, a member of the hive mind might have thought that yet again climate change was a non-starter. Other issues mentioned, with climate change carefully excluded.
But the reptiles couldn't exclude it from the borrowed text:
...This was not a ‘natural’ disaster. Nothing about it was natural – not the glacier melting due to greenhouse gas build-up due to fossil fuel burning, not the location of expensive hydropower plants on trans-Himalayan rivers, not designing highways to follow rivers, not the settlements that have grown around them, not the corruption and greed, not the poor governance.
Say what? Greenhouse gas build-up due to fossil fuel burning!!
And again ...
...Early warning will be of no help if homes are located right next to rivers flowing down from the world’s youngest and most seismically-active mountain range, now feeling the full impact of the climate crisis.
There's a climate crisis? There is: The full impact of the climate crisis!!
And again ...
Winston Churchill once said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” This disaster also offers the chance for Prime Minister Balendra Shah and his government to demonstrate a proactive approach in search, rescue, rehabilitation and a preparedness strategy for the future.
Give up the addiction to coal? Prepare for the hazards of climate change?!!
Make what use of it you can, because it's unlikely you're going to read that sort of stuff in the lizard Oz anytime soon.
Not once did yesterday's reptile rolling coverage dare to mention "climate" or "science" or "climate change"...
And this morning's coverage studiously avoided mentioning any possible cause ....
Water, then torture: families’ haunting vigil after Nepal flood
Nepal’s glacial tsunami disaster has left 38 Australians missing, with authorities warning the death toll could make it Australia’s worst foreign tragedy since the 2002 Bali bombings.
By Amanda Hodge
Just below that was a personal interest story, but neither the updated version, nor the earlier archived version dared to mention climate change:
Ecstasy amid the agony as Australian hiker makes contact; search continues for those missing in Nepal floods
An Australian woman caught in Nepal’s deadly flooding has made contact with her family and confirmed she is alive. The news comes as others anxiously await news of their loved ones.
By Mohammad Alfares and Elizabeth Pike
Sonia Wales' Nepal Times story remained up early in the morning, but it will soon be swept away, with the rag made safe once again for its Ughmanns and Borgs and Lloydies of the Amazon ...
Meanwhile, the reptiles continued their work for the Australian Daily Zionist News ...
Anti-Israel agenda bolstered when crucial questions remain unasked
‘Opportunity lost’ as antisemitism inquiry avoids questioning key anti-Israel figures
The antisemitism royal commission has wrapped its hearings without calling a single hate preacher or anti-Israel protester to give evidence.
Here's a crucial question that remains unanswered.
Why were people in Israel shocked by the sight of a donkey tortured by being dragged to its death behind an ATV, when the routine of ethnic cleansing goes on daily in the West Bank and Gaza? Israelis Only See the Victim When It's a Donkey
There was another EXCLUSIVE reptile contribution:
Labor ‘not equipped’ for anti-Israel protests, MP told Bondi rabbi Yehoram Ulman
The Bondi massacre’s worst-affected Jewish congregation has told the antisemitism royal commission a federal MP privately admitted the Albanese government was ill-equipped to handle post-October 7 protests.
By James Dowling
Over on the extreme far right the dog botherer chipped in ...
If any other community had to guard its children this way it would be seen as a crisis.
By Chris Kenny
Associate Editor (National Affairs)
Um, there's something of a crisis going down in Gaza and the West Bank ... if the pond might quote Haaretz again, 'Israel Is Sending Armed Militias in Gaza to Commit War Crimes – and I Have to Protect Them'
But the word "coordination" is misleading in this context. The soldiers had no idea what they were walking into. Only in retrospect did they realize they were witnessing an arbitration mechanism following a dispute within one of the militias operating in Gaza.
"One of the clan members with us had apparently accidentally shot another gunman's wife," an IDF combat soldier familiar with the incident told Haaretz. "Before our eyes, right there, the price was set, and the other man simply shot him in the legs. Everyone around accepted it as if it were a legitimate verdict. We stood there in complete shock."
And so on, and the pond isn't here to enable facilitate or enable Zionism in the lizard Oz, and blames the BBC, which has of late been cranking up its coverage of the ethnic cleansing, which inevitably turns up on the ABC's news channels...
That latest story is an AV report, here.
Enough already, and the pond looked deeper, and stumbled across yet another sample of Ughmann climate science denialism.
The header: From migration to energy, signs One Nation rise is having a material effect on Labor policies; History repeats for Chris Bowen, whose data centre mandate has collapsed.
The caption for a typical snap of glum, evil, threatening despots, or so the Ughmann sees them: PM Anthony Albanese dumped Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s renewable data centre rule after Queensland revolt. Picture: Dan Peled / NewsWire
As well as spending a bigly amount of time bashing furriners, the Ughmann was wildly excited and triumphant about the prospects of the Queensland and NT governments supporting big tech and data centres and to hell with sustainability ...
First up the furriner bashing, which harks back to the happy days when everybody was fitting out Juliar for a chaff bag ...
To dress this self-inflicted wound, Chris Bowen, then immigration minister, crafted a cunning plan dubbed the Malaysian Solution. This envisaged transferring up to 800 people who arrived by boat to Malaysia while accepting 4000 recognised refugees from that nation for resettlement here. It borrowed the central logic of the Howard scheme: people arriving irregularly by boat would be denied processing and settlement in Australia.
The reptiles backed this up with an amorphous snap, Julia Gillard announced the Malaysian Solution in 2011, a deal in which Australia would send 800 asylum-seekers to Malaysia in return for 4000 bona fide refugees.
The pond took the trouble to do an image search, and whaddya kno, that very same snap was deployed by the NY Times way back in June 2009...
Not to worry, sloppy labelling is the least of the reptile thought crimes ...
“The (Immigration) Act is clear that a third country can be declared, and that the minister can declare that third country, and we have followed the act to the letter,” he said. Bowen’s declaration went down 6-1 and the court permanently restrained the government from transferring the asylum-seekers to Malaysia.
In the smoking ruin of defeat, Bowen called the judgment “profoundly disappointing” and suggested the court had indulged in judicial activism. “What the High Court has decided today is not what was previously considered as understood and accepted law,” Bowen said.
How desperate did this get? The reptiles had to resort to an aged 'toon ...Nicholson cartoon
The pond guesses that the reptiles must dwell in a long lost golden age of Labor bashing because it looks pretty grim these days for the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way ...
In 2008 Chris Evans, Labor’s immigration minister at the time, basked in the glow of adoration that radiated from the serried ranks of the righteous in a speech to the Refugee Council.
“Abolishing the Pacific Solution … was one of the first things the Rudd Labor government did on taking office,” Evans said. “It was also one of my greatest pleasures in politics. Neither humane nor fair, the Pacific Solution was also ineffective and wasteful.”
Labor never grasped that a tough border regime was what gave government the licence to run a large migration program without provoking a public backlash. Australians would accept mass migration so long as they believed the borders were controlled and the program orderly. Nor did Labor understand that many recent migrants, who had waited their turn and come through the front door, had little sympathy for those they regarded as queue jumpers.
Governing is not a morality play. Policies should be judged by what they do, not by how virtuous they make their authors feel. Sometimes the national interest demands choices that offend the prevailing elite orthodoxy. Borders define nations and Australia cannot fix the world.
There came another snap ...Asylum seekers arrive at Christmas Island, 2012.
Funny (peculiar), CNN back in June 2014 identified an uncropped version of a very similar snap as showing Suspected asylum seekers arrive on Christmas Island, after being intercepted by the Australian Navy, on August 3, 2013. Scott Fisher/Getty Images
Whatever, asylum seekers look pretty much the same to the reptiles at the lizard Oz, deviants seeking to destroy the hive mind way of life ...
As it raced towards electoral oblivion in 2013, Labor dumped Julia Gillard as leader, rebooted Kevin Rudd to save the furniture, and set about systematically replacing every brick in the Pacific Solution wall. The offshore processing regime pioneered in the Howard era is the system that is in place today and it now enjoys bipartisan support.
After that bout of triumphalist wandering down past times, the Ughmann turned to the present and the need to use coal, gas and nukes, to make the world safe for tech bros, data centres and AI:
“If a data centre is proposed to only use gas, it will not meet the minimum national standards and it won’t be allowed to register, and it will not be able to proceed,” Bowen said.
Once again, performative morality was dictating policy. In the creed to which Bowen pledges obeisance there are virtuous sources of energy and sinful ones. What matters most is not cost, utility or dispatchability but ideological purity. But there are now some infidels in the state and territory pews.
Cue a snap of the beast looking his usual, comical self... Energy Minister Chris Bowen appearing at the National Press Club. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
This is a difficult sell for the reptiles ...
... but the Ughmann was more than up for the job ...
“The Constitution is pretty clear about any conflict between commonwealth legislation and state legislation, and which legislation prevails,” Bowen said.
Here Bowen was betting that, if push came to shove, the High Court would back him in. The language he used on the clarity of the law was an eerie echo from the past and experience has not mellowed his hubris. Once again he was banking a win before the race began.
The federal government can ride roughshod over the NT, but Queensland is a tougher constitutional nut to crack. Then there is the tricky politics of picking a fight with a state historically hostile to edicts from Canberra and usually pretty adept at mobilising a maroon tide of discontent.
So, the Queensland Premier went into this week’s national cabinet geared up for a fight with the federal government. David Crisafulli was pitching his own framework for data centre approval: compulsory local consultation, rules over water use, and no wind and solar mandates. His hand was strengthened by Queensland’s unusually tight grip on its electricity system, with the state owning the major transmission and distribution networks and much of its generating capacity.
Let's hear it for a pollie who can't look beyond his short term navel ... Queensland Premier David Crisafulli and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese were at odds over data centre energy policy. Picture: Adam Head
Make way for the supine pollies and reptiles helping out the tech bros ...
In the post-cabinet press conference price trumped generation sources on Anthony Albanese’s checklist: “I certainly understand that different states have different issues, but we know that the priority is keeping our energy costs low,” Albanese said.
Crisafulli said Queensland was happy to sign on to a national framework that ensured communities had a say in projects and didn’t dictate energy sources.
“We believe that we can control our data sovereignty, protect the rights of local communities, and enable that energy mix to bring those data centres on,” he said.
The Northern Territory also claimed victory, believing it was free to build data hubs running off the gas that is about to flow from the massive Beetaloo Basin project. Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro says the Basin could power Australia for the next 200 years and left the cabinet meeting declaring it “will be online within days”.
But, as this column was going to press on Friday, Bowen emphatically declared there was no exemption at all.
Time for a snap of the key villain ... Anthony Albanese wants to keep the AI boom going without the growing pains. Picture: John Feder
Stuff the environment? Relax, it's just "growing pains" ...
Bowen said Queensland and the Territory could make a case for a different energy mix but the Australian Energy Regulator would decide whether it was cheaper than renewables. “It is not a carveout, not an exemption, not an ability to use fossil fuels without the express permission of the Commonwealth.”
So who won National Cabinet? At deadline Queensland and Canberra appeared to have fundamentally different understandings of what they had agreed. Perhaps Bowen’s threatened constitutional showdown is back on after all. Watch this space. If Bowen wins it will be another spectacular act of economic self harm.
Because artificial intelligence is forcing a change of political focus worldwide. This is a novel and unsettling technology. There is a ghost in this mind machine and it haunts us all. Depending on your preferred expert it represents an extraordinary opportunity, an existential threat or both. Whichever it proves to be, we are now in an information arms race moving at light speed. Australia must be in that race because experience tells us AI will be developed for good and ill, and what can be built somewhere will eventually threaten everywhere.
It wouldn't be a lizard Oz story without the presence of the Canavan "coal matters" caravan ... Nationals Leader Matt Canavan says the “ridiculous idea of net zero” needs to be scrapped. It would be one of many initiatives from the party aimed at lifting economic performance and boosting productivity. “We have a job to convince people in the next couple of years that we have a plan to restore confidence in our economy,” he said. Mr Canavan told Sky News Australia the Nationals have “got a plan to lower taxes to make sure inflation doesn’t erode your budget every year”. “We have got a plan to use all our energy resources and scrap this ridiculous idea of net zero. “We have a great nation, and I want to offer hope to people.”
Sheesh, he's still talking to Sky Noise down under? There never was a re-brand?
And so to a final poignant cry ...
In the US, planned gas-fired capacity tied directly to data centres has soared to 189 gigawatts, roughly 2½ times the installed capacity of Australia’s entire eastern electricity market. Microsoft has signed a 20-year deal to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island and Meta is locking up nuclear power of its own. China builds more wind and solar than any other nation but almost 70 per cent of the electricity consumed by its data centres comes from coal and it is testing a truck-mounted nuclear reactor. That’s in addition to the 150 large-scale reactors it intends to build.
This is what an energy arms race looks like. The US is reaching for gas and resurrecting nuclear reactors; China is using coal, gas, nuclear, wind and solar. Nobody serious is entering this contest powered by wind, solar and batteries alone.
Nationals leader Matt Canavan said it was high time Australian governments realised the real cost of net zero would be how much industry we can hold and attract.
“If we are spending billions bailing out aluminium smelters because electricity is too expensive, why would it be different for data centres?” Canavan said.
“And if data centres are what they are cracked up to be, then net zero goes from fantasy to impossibility.”
This column has said many times that the world is not doing net zero because there is a chasm between what nations say in climate communiques and what they do. Last year global fossil-fuel consumption hit another record and carbon emissions rose again. I don’t celebrate that. It’s just an inconvenient truth.
Australia has abundant coal, gas, wind and solar and around a third of the world’s uranium. To deliberately rule most of that out and attempt to run AI as a three-legged race is not a plan for victory. It is unilateral disarmament. In that race, we lose.
Lucky Nepalese. The Ughmann is doing his very best to make sure you can go on losing bigly ...but it just might be a tough sell ...
John Birmingham in his quaintly named Substack, Alien Sideboob, pretty much said everything that will likely be said about the coming lizard Oz response under the header The Reckoning. Inter alia ...
“Everyone can see, even non-scientists can see, that there’s melting glaciers and melting ice and there’s less snow and more rain and the rain’s coming down faster all across the mountains. The conditions and the type of precipitation that’s falling in the mountains are all changing so fast that denying that it’s climate change takes a willful act to ignore all of the evidence.”
So, she got the memo, but by close of business another memo will have arrived on desks in Houston and London and on the highest floors of those towers in Sydney and Melbourne, where Australia’s own multibillion-dollar fossil fuel companies plot their infernal schemes. That memo does not change. It orders that doubt be manufactured, that The Method be deployed again, a bastard cousin of the scientific method that the tobacco industry deployed for decades to deny, to evade, to create uncertainty in order to keep selling a product the industry already knew killed people.
Of course, they’ll be cursing it in private, the damnable bad luck of having so many wealthy white tourists die screaming in such shareable video. That sucks for them because we would have all forgotten this by Monday if the thousand killed had been poor, and brown, and local to the mountain that killed them. We think of death as the great leveller, but the dead have never been equal. Grief and remembrance enjoy much better production values when the deceased look like the commissioning editor.
One last thing. I’ll put good folding money on the table right now and tell you that someone will put a microphone in front of Albanese or someone like him, in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, to ask “Was this a result of climate change?”
And whoever is asked will respond, with a peevish frown and censorial tone, “Now is not the time to talk about that sort of thing.” Quite right too. Twenty years ago was the time to talk about this shit, and people did. We’ve known this was coming for decades. We know what the companies and their captive governments knew, and we understand that they pressed on, regardless. That mountain did not thaw and fall because these things just happen sometimes. It fell because projections were filed, understood, and set aside in favour of quarterly returns.
It fell because the reckoning is here.
As usual, the pond had to send snappy Tom to the archive ...
Anthony Albanese has now addressed the Business Council of Australia five times, yet business leaders say Australia still cannot tax or regulate its way to prosperity.
By Tom Dusevic
Columnist
The pond only needs the economic advice of Dame Groan ... a teaser trailer sampling should be more than enough to see if a visit to the intermittent archive was required ...
There's a lot more, but the pond needed some light relaxation, and the bromancer came along to deliver the goods ... he was on his usual rampage, and the pond always has to make room for him, especially as he opened with a dash of Shelley ...
Strange, and never mind the layout, the pond knows that poem in a different context.
Hey ho, hey nonny no, on we go ...
The Australian navy surface fleet has never been older, nor weaker, than in this time, which, as the government often proclaims, presents the most dangerous strategic circumstances since 1945. Our surface combatants are seven remaining Anzac-class frigates, small, elderly, barely armed; and three air warfare destroyers. Only the AWDs have the remotest claim to being modern warships.
Way back in the 2009 defence white paper, which should have been entered for the Miles Franklin best work of fiction prize, we decided to replace the Anzacs pretty damn fast. Moving at lightning speed, by 2016 we had a project: to build nine new frigates to replace the eight Anzacs, at a total cost of $30bn. At the navy’s urging, we decided on specialist anti-submarine warfare frigates.
There's a real awkwardness to the bromancer's pitch.
For decades he and the reptiles at large have been extolling the benefits of the US alliance, the glories of Pine Gap, the comfort and security offered, and then along came mad king Donald, showing where his heart truly lies ...
Is there a further irony?
The Hunter-class frigate progam was announced by Malware back in June 2018, with the able support of Marise Payne, Minister for Defence, and "Poodle" Pyne, Minister for Defence Industry, and now we're stuck with the boondoggle, at a time when drone warfare has revolutionised battlefields on sea and land ... As the Hunter has progressed, not in the physical world but on paper and in digital imagination, it has gobbled up a lot of money, about $8bn so far. Picture: BAE
The important thing is to forget this ancient history ... and moan about what the Liberal government produced without attaching any blame to actual Liberals, or even the reptiles themselves...
That’s right, the government was told the Type 26 was a mature design and it’s not in service eight years later. If that’s a mature design, I am my grandfather’s uncle.
Then, having been told to make minimal changes, Defence and the navy added so much new stuff that it went from 8800 tonnes to 10,500 tonnes, as my colleague Cameron Stewart revealed. Yet it still has the Type 26 propulsion system. As analyst Marcus Hellyer observes, you can’t increase the weight by a quarter without losing significant range and speed. Naturally, the Albanese government decided to abandon navy support and supply ships that would give our surface combatants greater range.
As the Hunter has progressed, not in the physical world but on paper and in digital imagination, it has gobbled up a lot of money, about $8bn so far. By 2021 the estimated cost had blown out to $45bn. In 2023 the Australian National Audit Office produced a report so scathing, so frankly unbelievable in the bad process and wishful thinking it exposed, it was a kind of bureaucracy nightmare porn. Yes, Prime Minister on a heroin trip. It should have been titled 5000 Shades of Grey.
How happy and proud the reptiles were way back when ...
Grand days, and now, petty, parochial poseurs and grandstanders are all the go ... South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas takes a selfie with the crowd assembled for the Hunter-class frigate keel laying ceremony at Osborne Naval Shipyard. Picture: James Elsby
The bromancer maintained his rage ...
The first is scheduled to be delivered in 2032, which means it might go into service in 2034. If you think that $27bn figure will hold, you want to check who’s drugging your coffee. So a mature design in 2018, for a mere frigate, is going to cost nearly $30bn to deliver just three, 20 years later. It’s a good thing this was an urgent project. I’d hate to see Defence taking their time.
The Hunter is a weird ship for our navy. It has only 32 vertical launch system cells with which to defend itself or inflict damage on any other surface ship. Modern warships of its size tend to have 96 to 112 VLS cells, though big destroyers can have many more. Former chief of the navy, Vice-Admiral David Shackleton, commented: “The Hunters aren’t powerful enough ships for what the navy needs.”
In time, but not yet, unmanned ships, acting as VLS trucks, will become more important. Even our AWDs, which would be described as frigates, not destroyers, anywhere but Australia, have only 48 vertical cells. The Hunter’s defenders claim the VLS number doesn’t matter because you don’t hunt subs with vertical cells. True enough. If Australia had a surface fleet of 40 vessels, a few specialising in anti-submarine warfare might be worthwhile.
But in what possible military context could the Hunter actually be used to hunt and destroy a Chinese nuclear submarine?
At this point the reptiles discovered there had been a brand change ... The Australian Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan condemns Australia’s $27 billion plan for three new frigates, warning the vessels are becoming excessively expensive, heavy and potentially ineffective. “This is a ridiculous project, $27 billion for three frigates; these are the most expensive frigates in the history of the world,” Mr Sheridan told News24 host James Macpherson. “They are now ridiculous ships. “We’re going to get a slow, fat frigate.”
It's a disaster ...
The most effective anti-submarine warfare is conducted by other submarines. To have any chance at all a surface ship has to know in advance roughly where the sub it’s going after is located. Genuine anti-submarine combat is very complex, joint, nearly theatre-wide, involving attack submarines, convoy escorts, dedicated aircraft, helicopters, all in large numbers, and vast intelligence resources.
There’s no way the Australian Defence Force, much less the navy, has the mass to provide that context to make dedicated specialist ASW surface ships credible or a good use of resources. We could have built three more AWDs, or indeed bigger ships, at a fraction of the Hunter costs and had them in the water by now. The heavy, ponderous Hunters will move more slowly than the nuclear subs they hunt. When trying to be quiet they will use electric propulsion, making them even slower. If they can detect a state-of-the-art sub, probably that sub can detect them.
There’s only one context in which the Hunters make any sense. If a Hunter were deployed as a niche part of a big US operation, with the Americans providing all the protection, it might be a useful addition, at the margin, to US capability.
And after that mention of the US alliance, and helping out the US, there came a snap of a stray destroyer ...Air Warfare Destroyer HMAS Sydney.
... and the bromancer almost came to the nub of his problem...
No one supports the US alliance more than me.
Cue a little comedy, showing exactly how the the US is an amazing fighting machine, sending those mad Mullahs packing on an almost daily basis, with so much winning... Trump’s Record of Deluded War Boasts Comes Back to Bite Him
The actual graphic didn't make it into the archive, so here's the winning...
And so on, and suddenly the bromancer is all for independence, maybe look after ourselves rather than rely on mad king Donald...
Thus we produce insanely expensive platforms in tiny numbers with no independent strategic weight.
If we designed the ADF genuinely to have autonomous strategic weight, we’d have a chance of looking after ourselves if necessary and, paradoxically, we’d be more useful allies to the Americans.
The Albanese government, like previous governments, only pretends to focus on defence of Australia. Nonetheless, it has made one good recent decision – to buy 11 Japanese Mogami-class frigates, much smaller than the Hunters, and vastly cheaper, but also with 32 VLS cells, lots of other weapons and a bigger range; and to get at least the first three built in Japan with absolutely minimal design change.
The Albanese government won’t fund defence properly. It fraudulently pretends it can add nuclear submarines to an already woefully inadequate defence budget, which has not moved as a percentage of GDP, and not hollow out the ADF. In that context, imagine what you could do with a spare $27bn.
As Shelley might have said: Look on my works, ye feeble, and despair.
Or you could look on the reptiles' tragic devotion to the alleged US alliance - even after all that the bromancer couldn't renounce it - and have a laugh along with Canadians ... Feuding Ally Plans Street Name Mocking TACO Trump
Not a Natalie Avenue?
Just a thought. Elbows up Canada ...
