In which Our Henry and Killer perform their usual Friday duties ...

 

A little while ago, the bromancer stupidly attempted to use Xian theology to cast the current "excursion" as a just war, when in reality it's a stupid war being conducted by a mad king and his minions.

So the pond was all agog at the prospect of Our Henry giving his own view of war, and what it's good for ...

No time for niceties or a survey of other reptiles in action, it was time to plunge in the deep end:

The header: Strategy of ‘limited war’ undone by limited will; The lesson America drew from Vietnam was when you fight, fight to win. If that lesson is ignored in Iran, the world will become a far more dangerous place.

The caption for the snap foreshadowing a retreat to the past: Two US soldiers guard a street in Saigon during a rash of Vietcong attacks in the Vietnam War. Picture: Getty Images

In a desperate attempt to recover his past form, Our Henry opened with a flourish and and a nod to all that made Prussia great again:

Helmuth von Moltke, the great Prussian strategist who crushed Austria in seven weeks and France in seven months, observed that “no plan of operations survives first contact with the enemy’s main force”.
Should the strikes on Iran end with nothing resolved, the conclusion deserves to be starker still: it is not only the plan that has failed, but the doctrine behind it.
That doctrine – limited war theory – was born in the 1950s. Recoiling from the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction, and from an American approach, forged in World War II, that coupled technological superiority with overwhelming firepower, the think tanks associated with the Pentagon proposed a more calculated alternative: restricted, proportionate force calibrated to political objectives.
Wars were reconceptualised as bargaining exercises.
Adversaries, subjected to “graduated escalation”, would read the signals, weigh the costs, and, once continuing proved costlier than settling, come to the table. Armed force was just coercive diplomacy, each move a carefully pitched message leading to a negotiated outcome.

Of course this retreat meant that Our Henry could romp through the past, and the reptiles could run ancient images of ancient warriors, thereby avoiding the current mad king: President John F. Kennedy embraced the concept amid the Cold War.

Our Henry rambled through 'Nam days:

President John F. Kennedy embraced it, including as the answer to a Cold War increasingly waged in the jungles and shanty towns of the Third World.
But Vietnam exposed the doctrine’s fatal flaw. Having entered the war, Washington placed elaborate restraints on itself – geographic sanctuaries, target immunities, incremental deployments.
Meanwhile, Hanoi fought for total stakes: the unification of Vietnam, by any means, over any timeline. General Giap grasped exactly what American strategic restraint reflected: not scrupulous proportionality but limited will. Each restriction confirmed, in the Communists’ reading, that the US lacked the stomach for a real fight.
The proof came with Operation Rolling Thunder, launched in 1965: a highly selective bombing campaign designed to send “signals” and bring Hanoi to the table. The message didn’t get through. Rolling Thunder ground on for three years, inflicting damage without dinting the Communists’ unrelenting focus on victory.
When the far deadlier Linebacker campaign of December 1972 finally targeted critical infrastructure, it did induce the North to negotiate – but by then it was far too late: the war was politically lost at home, the endgame already written.

Another image reminded the hive minds that they were stuck in the past: A Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) tank enters the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon on May 1, 1975. Picture: AP

Our Henry continued his flurry of 'Nam references, slowly cranking into later excursions and the lessons to be learned:

As Robert Osgood, who advised presidents Nixon and Reagan, concluded, the US “was in an inferior position in any contest of wills” because its interests were less absolute, and its reliance on public support far greater, than Hanoi’s.
The Tet offensive of January 1968 had proved the point. A military rout for the Communists, it was a political catastrophe for the Johnson administration – all the more so as North Vietnam timed it to resonate in the primaries and the upcoming elections.
The president’s own advisers – the “Wise Men” – told him the war was unwinnable. “If they had been so deeply influenced by Tet,” Johnson noted, “what must the average citizen be thinking?” Giap sensed the change: “Until Tet they thought they could win the war, now they knew they could not.”
From Vietnam, America drew two lessons. First, if you fight, fight to win. “When we commit our troops to combat, we must do so with the sole object of winning,” Reagan’s defence secretary, Caspar Weinberger, declared in 1984, articulating the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine of “decisive force” that marked a return to pre-Vietnam practice.
Second: don’t try to remake foreign nations in America’s image. Entanglement in civil conflicts has a grim internal logic – costs mount, resolve withers – and Tolstoy’s two great warriors, Time and Patience, will outlast any occupier whose electorate tires of deaths and pain.
George W. Bush heeded the first lesson and ignored the second. “Shock and awe” – the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine’s direct progeny – was devastating on the battlefield. But as the second lesson had predicted, “nation-building” turned into a politically unsustainable fiasco.

Still no image of the mad king, with the Kenyan socialist forced into duty: Barack Obama abandoned the first lesson. Picture: AP

Our Henry was keen to drag the Democrats into his sermon:

Reeling from that outcome, Barack Obama abandoned the first lesson too. Nothing made that clearer than the absence of the word “victory” in his 2009 West Point address on strategy. Limited war theory returned under new branding – “strategic patience” – repeating the failed logic of its previous application: a decision in favour of indecision.
Joe Biden then applied that logic to Ukraine, barring Kyiv from striking Russian soil and rationing weapons in cautious – “sufficient but not escalatory” – tranches. That gifted the initiative to Vladimir Putin and turned the conflict into a blood-soaked quagmire.
The Ukraine conflict should have made one thing unmistakeable: graduated escalation is not a strategy; it is a way of avoiding one. But Iran is an even less promising context for the doctrine’s application. Where Hanoi and Moscow each pursued strategic ends, the Iranian regime frames the conflict in categorically different terms: not a contest to be managed but a Holy War, fuelled by an apocalyptic theology of redemptive martyrdom.
Against such an adversary, half-measures are futile. Victory requires the decisive force Obama and Biden would not countenance: a sustained campaign aimed at crippling critical infrastructure, paralysing the regime’s capacity to function and obliterating its offensive capabilities.

At this point in his long exegesis, the hole in bucket man finally got around to mad king Donald, and what a relief, no mention of it being a just war...

Instead, after a strong start, Donald Trump drew a red line and then, seemingly seduced by the lure of the “deal”, deferred the reckoning.
The risk is of a return to the discredited doctrine of limited war, leaving Iran free to attack its neighbours, hold the world economy to ransom, and feign negotiation – or even worse, dictate a deal’s terms.

The reptiles at last realised that the mad king was worthy of a snap, especially one where he showed off his tiny hands without showing his bruises: Donald Trump is counting the cost of his decision to attack Iran. Picture: AP

That would usually warrant the immediate deployment of a cartoon, but the pond was awestruck by the way Our Henry continued with an impeccable set of references, this time with a bearing on the bromancer's absurd blather about a just war:

Wars, Machiavelli warned, begin where you will, but do not end where you please. How this one will end remains clouded by an impenetrable fog in which all options are possible and none certain.
What is clear, however, is that the ramifications reach far beyond the conflict itself. Looking at the United States, it is hard not to recall Joseph Chamberlain’s despairing remark in 1902, as Britain emerged badly shaken from the Second Boer War. Victorious but financially, militarily and politically depleted, Britain was, said Chamberlain, a “weary titan”, staggering “under the too vast orb of its fate”.
The consequences were inexorable: Britain could no longer underwrite the Pax Britannica, and the burden of guarding the global commons slowly passed to the United States. It is that inheritance which is being tested in the Strait of Hormuz.
The problem is that no alternative guarantor stands ready. European governments have neither the military means nor the political will. Accustomed to luxuriating in the benefits of a peace they have done nothing to secure or defend, they mutter fighting words only to immediately walk them back, petrified at the prospect of their own blood being shed. Nor can the gap be filled by the paper tiger of international law, which, unlike real law, is more often invoked against upholders of the rules than against their defiers.
That leaves the United States. But Americans are as divided as at any time since the Civil War, and less willing than ever to shoulder costs from which others make the greatest gain.
For Australia, which has long prospered in the shelter of a powerful ally, the oil price is likely to prove the least of the shocks to come. A country that has never had to assure its own lifelines may now face the harshest challenge of all: a world in which the threats can be trusted but the promises cannot.

And with that the pond must congratulate Our Henry. 

Job done in style, and with bigly historical form.

And not a single mention of the current government of Israel, or its role in the folly, or its expansion into Lebanon, and above all, not a single mention of how Rupert Murdoch advised the mad king to embark on this folly ...

Put it another way, as only the immortal Rowe can do ...

And with that done the pond could turn to an update on the early morning news of the day, and the war was at the top of the LIVE unfolding reptile coverage.

More madness, with fuel and fertiliser high on the list, but the pond resisted the chance to gloat on the matter of EVs.

The numbers are finally turning?

That's the best angle the reptiles could come up with?

Actually if you happened to have gone solar and installed a battery, the numbers turned some time ago... but sticking with gas guzzlers was where the reptiles wanted the country to go.

How incessantly and inanely they preached on the urgent need to avoid renewables, to dwell in the sweet land of coal and gas, and to avoid any attempt to enter the new world of the electrostate.

And now here we are:

Meanwhile, other reptiles were in a state of panic, but luckily the intermittent archive was back in action, so the pond could sent the solemn bouffant one off to that cornfield ...

In serious times, Anthony Albanese flicks the switch to serious
Anthony Albanese’s strategy has collapsed, forcing him to drag Chris Bowen away from his trademark arrogance toward public reassurance.
By Dennis Shanahan

Who knows if that link will last, and so the pond decided to offer a teaser trailer, if only to show the unserious way that the reptiles began with a snap of Albo in decidedly unserious mode ...

A baby snap, and just two minutes of verbiage and not a single mention of the arrogance of the king and his minions?

And that's supposed to be serious reptile talk about the need to be serious?

Follow the reptile way ...

Speaking of reptile panics, the lizard Oz editorialist was also out and about, and suddenly the folly of the mad king was just an excuse to berate Australia for not living in survivalist, full prep mode, and failing to get its kit ready for the trip to the bug out ...

Quick, make sure your bug out bag is full of nitrogen:

If the pond might be so bold ... that header should have read "a fertiliser crisis set in motion by a mad king and his minions, as advised and proposed by mad Rupert Murdoch, who sold his Australian citizenship for a mess of US pottage", but perhaps that's too long and too indigestible for the local hive mind ...

What a pity all the same that we should have copped a wedgie from the loons on the way to the bug out...

Last and decidedly least in the pond's reptile rounds this day came Killer of the IPA ...

The Killer headline: How CPI masks our real wages horror story; Housing has become the dominant economic fact in Australian life. Yet it remains largely invisible in our primary measure of inflation.

The missing caption: the place where the Killer caption should be for the Killer snap of Jimbo, but somehow MIA, even though he's the chief villain and it's all his fault.

Killernomics took a new turn today. 

How to deal with the impact of a completely unnecessary war which has flung international markets into a pickle, and which has begun to have a dire effect on the local economy? And which will certainly compound any inflation issues we were facing.

How to handle a mad excursion by a mad king?

Why, what you do is spend four minutes of reading time - so the reptiles clocked it - by ignoring any talk of war, and instead focusing on IPA Killernomics ...

It's a singular approach, in a singularly Killer way ...

Ordinary people scoff when you tell them the inflation rate is 3.7 per cent. Sure, even the official rate is higher than normal – and rising – but I’m yet to find anyone who believes the CPI is a good indicator of their day-to-day experience.
The government breathed a little sigh of relief this week when the headline rate dropped a tiny bit to 3.7 per cent but according to the 1039 people Roy Morgan surveyed in its latest ANZ collaboration, it had increased to 6.9 per cent in the last week of March. Not quite as pessimistic, the folks at the Melbourne Institute surveyed this month said it was 5.2 per cent.
Consumers generally believe inflation is higher than it officially is, so who’s more correct: the plebs or the boffins?
I’ll side with the plebs on this one. New Institute of Public Affairs research released this week, entitled The CPI Myth: how official inflation statistics ignore house prices and hide a collapse in real wages, sets out how starkly the CPI understates the inflation that most matters.
The official index – bandied around by politicians as if it’s the ultimate arbiter of price pain – ignores the cost of buying a home. It also ignores home loan interest rates and stamp duty.

The reptiles interrupted that IPA promo with an AV distraction... Capital Economics Head of Asia-Pacific Marcel Thieliant claims he expects the RBA to lift rates to 4.6 per cent with inflation expectations at “record high".

Is it wrong to note that there's a war on?

Killer pressed on in a way that even Dame Groan would be forced to admire:

Don’t be fooled by the category of “new dwelling purchase by owner-occupier” – that excludes the cost of buying the land. It is simply the cost of building a home, not acquiring the land underneath it, which can be as much as 90 per cent of the value in Sydney.
Former CBA economist Gareth Aird and I crunched the numbers and put dwelling prices back in the CPI, as the US Bureau of Labour Statistics once did between 1953 and 1983. The impact is staggering and sobering. Real wages are lower now than in 1998 after simply replacing the above misleading category, which has averaged an 8.5 per cent weight in the CPI with dwelling prices.
If we make dwelling prices 15 per cent of our alternative CPI (hardly a tendentious choice given around half of homebuyers spend nearly 40 per cent of their disposable income buying and paying off their home), real wages are almost 10 per cent below their 1998 level.
We can’t find any comparable 27-year period in Australian history when real wages were lower at the end than at the beginning.
“Real wages were going backwards before we came to office, they’re growing under Labor, and we see that again in these figures,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers declared in November, crowing about “the longest period of consecutive annual real wage growth in almost a decade”.
The average capital city dwelling prices in Australia have risen almost 430 per cent since 1998, while the official CPI has risen only 114 per cent. Even with a modest 15 per cent weighting for dwelling prices – keeping everything else in the CPI – it would have increased 155 per cent.
No wonder people increasingly have contempt for Chalmers’ claims and the statistics behind them. Housing has become the dominant economic fact of Australian life. It shapes labour mobility, family formation, savings behaviour and intergenerational inequality. Yet it remains largely invisible in our primary measure of inflation.

Sssh, don't mention the war ... RBA governor Michele Bullock addresses the media. Picture: NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

Surely Killer will now get around to mentioning the way that the current excursion is going to resonate in economies around the world, and drive inflation.

Nah, not on your nelly, you're in the land of Killernomics ...

Mercifully, the CPI does include rents, which made up 6.6 per cent of the CPI last year. Do you know anyone who is spending 7 per cent of their income on rent?
Perhaps the Sydney or Melbourne elite who spend their winter renting villas in Queensland. The typical renter households actually spend around 30 per cent of their income on rent.
In fact, if you’re a plutocrat, the CPI probably might not be a bad gauge for your personal inflation rate. After all, the weights given to the 87 expenditure groups are based on total household spending in the economy. The top 10 per cent of earners make up 30 per cent of the spending.
Bread and milk each account for less than 1 per cent of the CPI, less than new luxury cars; and used cars aren’t in the CPI at all. Automotive fuel accounts for around 3-4 per cent of the CPI, about the same as the combined weight of private school fees, overseas holidays and cruise travel.
They don’t need to include the price of passports, up 100 per cent in a decade to over $420 (the world’s most expensive), either as the wealthy already have one.
To be clear, measuring inflation is difficult. There is no perfect index. Canada still includes home loan rates, for instance. The US experience is a reminder of how politics intrudes on how the CPI is measured.
Until the early 1980s, the US included house prices and home loan interest rates in its CPI. In the late 1970s the Carter administration freaked out over a soaring CPI underpinned by soaring house prices and official interest rates.
Indexed social security payments were spiralling out of control. American income tax scales were also being indexed by this excessively honest CPI too, which was costing Washington billions.

The chief villain was at last identified in the final snap ... Jim Chalmers during a visit to a housing construction project in the suburb of Westmead in Sydney. Picture: Dean Lewins / AAP

Forget about the mad king, it's all the fault of the preening Jimbo ...

Economists to the rescue! Dwellings were deemed “assets” that didn’t belong in the CPI. Henceforth, housing in the US CPI would be based only on rents, including the hypothetical rents owners would be paying themselves were they renting from themselves.
Australians don’t even enjoy the dignity of having their income tax threshold indexed at all, let alone by a more realistic CPI.
When official statistics consistently diverge from people’s lived experience, trust erodes. People begin to doubt not just the numbers, but the institutions producing them. The ABS does produce a few CPI alternatives for pensioners, self-funded retirees and welfare recipients. Perhaps the Boomers running the ABS might consider a couple of other series for renters and homebuyers that include much bigger weightings for rents and dwelling prices, respectively? Though those “real wage” figures wouldn’t look so great then.
So it’s not so reassuring when the Treasurer points to the Reserve Bank forecast that inflation will be back below 3 per cent by the middle of 2027. What else have those forecasts ever said? You can bet it won’t be. But the bigger deceit is what’s in the CPI itself.

Speaking of some fair deceit and cheating, it's remarkable that Killer could spend an entire column entirely removed from thinking about the current folly, but credit where IPA credit is due ...

Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

That's how they do Killernomics at the IPA.

And so to close with the infallible Pope. 

The pond regrets that this matter didn't seem to enter reptile noggins, at least at the top of the digital edition, and certainly not in the columns on the extreme far right. 

Perhaps on the weekend. In the meantime, this ...

Now that detail resonated... and not just for the movie reference ...

And speaking of AV distractions, trouble in Vlad the sociopath land ...

... and trouble in mad King Donald land ...

A day of bits and pieces, with Dame Groan in her usual pieces ...

 

Big mistake, cardigan wearers.

The pond is so used to listening to the Beeb nightly on what's allegedly a local news radio station that calling in the Beeb to act as scabs and strike-breakers only made the pond wonder when there might come a campaign to replace the  entire ABC with the Beeb.

What a refreshing diversion to be able to take in the Beeb's televisual news on News 24 without the usual local ambulance chasing.

Trust Jack the Insider to make the obvious jokes for the gloating reptiles ...

And so on ... 

Sadly, with the intermittent archive still acting kinda funny, the pond has had to resort to teaser trailers again... and the odd relieving 'toon:

This is a taste of petulant Peta, in the same state angst-ridden, existential brooding about the perils of Pauline as all the other reptiles:

It must be terrifying for the reptiles to discover that One Nation has assiduously read them and taken on board their migrant and Islamophobia, and their climate denialism and love of coal and lust to nuke the country, not to save the planet, just to nuke it ...

Unfortunately there's no way to drag in some alternative to the reptiles.

The best way to deal with them is simply to avoid them, but that's not in the pond's job description.

And that's why the pond ended up yet again with Dame Groan, turning in her usual dinkum groaning, and for once she had something to groan about, or at least the good citizens of Wodonga did, with the pond yesterday observing this at a petrol station in Wodonga, while indulging in a relaxing EV charge ...

Once again the old groaner sought to blame local pollies for the mindless excursions of mad king Donald, deep into adventurist excursions...

The header: Australia supply chain crisis: The worst is yet to come; For a country that produces as much food as we do, why on earth are we facing shortages of products like this?

The caption for Frank's astonishing work: Higher fuel costs feed into so many other prices that impact inflation. Artwork: Frank Ling

It was only a three minute groaning, but the pond was exceptionally pleased, because you don't see the sort of artwork offered up by Frank as the key illustration every day of the week.

What an astonishing image erupting from the bowels of a graphics department at the top of its game, and as for the caption advising that higher fuel costs impacted other costs, it was the sort of economics lesson that can only be called visonary.

It inspired Dame Groan to even greater, 'we'll all be rooned' heights ...

The release of the February CPI figures showed that annual headline inflation rose by 3.7 per cent while the trimmed mean figure was 3.3 per cent. On the face of them, it looked as through inflation was stabilising, albeit at an unacceptably high figure.
Both figures are essentially meaningless as they relate to a period before the conflict in the Middle East and the rapid escalation of the oil price, which is floating above and below the $US100 mark.
It’s not just the higher price of fuel per se but the fact that this price feeds into so many other prices that makes it important.
The Treasurer is canny enough to acknowledge that the February CPI figures are not indicative of what is to come. Addressing a large group of big business executives, he even talked about an inflation figure close to 7 per cent, with the impact of the current global uncertainty paralleling the global financial crisis.
What these past two weeks or so have demonstrated to people is the importance of hydrocarbons in our daily lives. It’s not just the price and availability of fuel at the servo; it goes well beyond this. Diesel is more important than petrol in enabling the farmers and regional communities to continue their productive activities, including getting foodstuffs to market.

The pond must confess to also being bowled over by the illustration for the AV distraction ... Australia's headline inflation figure has fallen from 3.8 per cent to 3.7 per cent.

Once upon a time it used to be illegal to reproduce images of currency, but the pond likes to walk on the wild side ...

This is a graphics department that's on fire, and it produced an incendiary groaning ...

The scarcity and escalating price of urea is of particular concern as farmers prepare for winter planting. For a nation that makes enough food to feed around 70 to 80 million people, it is more than passing strange that we don’t produce urea locally. We could, but the combined cost of energy (particularly gas) and labour has made urea’s production uneconomic compared with importing this essential fertiliser.
The price of oil feeds directly into construction costs, particularly through much more expensive PVC pipes.
This couldn’t be happening at a worse time.
There are also unexpected worries such as the shortage of helium – a by-product of gas processing – which is required for the operation of MRI machines. We can all live without party balloons; MRI machines are a different matter.
For all the discussion of the problems of supply chain blockages during Covid and the need to be better prepared in the future, it’s not clear anything material has been done. The Productivity Commission prepared a useful report, Vulnerable Supply Chains, that was released in 2021.
It turns out that businesses and people are inclined to underestimate the chance of adverse events occurring with substantial consequences. But we should expect the government to do a better job at this – to provide insurance where the actions of private businesses and individuals fail to do so.
The government should be able to identify critical and essential import supply chains and assess the adequacy of their risk management. Some of the tools include stockpiling, long-term contracts and diversification of supply. Support for local production may be justified in some instances.
The immediate economic future is highly uncertain and unlikely to be quickly resolved even if events in the Middle East calm down quickly. The damage to the large LNG plant in Qatar will take a long time to repair. The consequences for the global LNG market will be substantial, and Australia may be a net beneficiary.
We may need to use the surety of our LNG supplies – don’t even think about imposing an export levy that would be passed on to customers – to secure guaranteed supplies of fuel, urea and other items we may need.
With only a few weeks before the budget, Jim Chalmers is staying firm in his resolve to achieve several changes, including on spending restraint, taxation reform and productivity. If the Prime Minister stays true to form, his instinct will be to refrain from scaring the horses and apply a degree of pump-priming in the form of some cost-of-living measures.
It will be interesting to watch this conflict play out. Whatever happens, the immediate economic outlook looks grim as people deal with the high degree of uncertainty and higher living expenses.

The pond was pleased to be reminded of one of the key reasons for this folly ... with Crikey taking up the story (sorry paywall)

Murdoch’s Fox News has been the loudest global advocate of the Iran War over the past 23 days, so it came as no surprise over the weekend to read reports claiming that the 95 year old “chairman emeritus” of News Corp and Fox Corp had personally urged Donald Trump on multiple occasions to join Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempted regime change war of choice against Iran.

The piece referenced the AFR, which had picked up the original Bloomberg source ...

And so on, and these days it's getting tough to sort out who's the biggest war criminal ...

It's a day of bits and pieces, so the pond should note that the bouffant one was also on hand to distract from the real criminals ....

Sadly he could be swallowed in one gobbet gulp ... but at least he provided an excuse for another 'toon ...

Carry on bleating ...

Uh huh ...and not a single mention of that first refuge for scoundrels, the lizard Oz and Faux Noise.

But staying in the bouffant spirit, why not a full blown DIY campaign?

The pond decided to make only a token note of Allegra's attempt to pander to Dame Groan ...

Pitiful ... but the pond guesses that indies must do whatever it takes to score a mention in the hive mind.

The pond was pleased however when the bouffant one took the pond back to the grand days when the lizard Oz was known as the Catholic News Daily (before it became the Daily Zionist News) ...

Excellent stuff and it gave the old Pellists a chance to trot out a snap of their wretched hero, together with another ... Late cardinal George Pell. Picture: Getty Images; Mykola Bychok, who was appointed by Pope Francis as a cardinal in 2024. Picture: Jacquelin Magnay

The bouffant one then wrapped up proceedings ... ite in pace ...

Finally, instead of the reptiles sending in the bromancer to fix the middle east, or serve up "Ned" sighing at clouds, or even the emeritus chairman explaining how the current excursion was anything but a wondrous folly designed to ruin the world, the reptiles decided to advice on strategies for impending war.

Given the aged Emeritus Chairman's inclination to war mongering, perhaps it was wise and necessary way forward.

Carry on Mick ...

Of course none of this will help fix the main problem - the rogue country at the source of all the recent excursions, which also happens to ber busy internally falling apart, and arranging for planes to crash into fire trucks...and who mentions the Trumpstein files these days?

Mick eventually caught up on the way that the rogue imperial adventurer has helped Vlad the Sociopath out of a pickle by giving his budget an oil bonus of a most unseemly kind, but whatever ... the pond reckons it's a certainty that Mick won't include King Donald's ramshackle, rogue authoritarian country in his list of authoritarian countries threatening the world order ...

At worst apparently the mad king might be deemed to be pursuing "not a good strategy" ...

What to do? Bring back the bromancer so the world can be truly stuffed, and we'll have a war with China by Xmas!

Mick, in his strategising, did leave out one thing that ordinary Australians might do to make the world a safer place. Not a dime, not a red cent, to war mongers of the Murdochian kind.

And while we're at it, perhaps best to avoid giving the mad king a sharpie ...

And so to a few visual distractions to wrap things up ...think of them as ABC radio in drag ...

In which the bromancer, Monsieur Dupont and "Ned's" natter set the Wednesday pace ...

What with King Donald promising boots on the ground in the form of thousands of paratroopers (so the reptiles said) and Jimbo warning of tough times ahead (so the reptiles reported), it was inevitable that the brave, bold, warrior known to intimates as the bromancer would duck for cover and decide to take it all out on the Europeans ...

The header: Anthony Albanese embraces his European ideals, glosses over the difference of a few billion between friends; Anthony Albanese has struck agreements with Europe that signal Australia’s dangerous drift toward the continent’s struggling economic and political model.

The caption for the snap of the dangerous duo: Anthony Albanese and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in Canberra on Tuesday. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The bromancer could only summon up three minutes of copy to warn against this dangerous drift towards those wretched European types, what with their cheese-mongering and fancy plonk, but a careful reading could reveal his yearning for King Donald and his amazing excursions ...

Anthony Albanese loves Europe; he loves its politics, its leaders, its food and especially its failed social model, which he is now imposing on Australia.
Nonetheless the Prime Minister is rightly happy about finally signing a free-trade agreement with the European Union, and a security agreement as well. FTAs are a good thing in principle, even limited ones like this, though they tend to be wildly over-boomed and never deliver anything like what is claimed for them.
The FTA with Europe, Albanese tells us, will add $10bn a year to the Australian economy. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, at the same press conference, says it might add “almost $8bn” to the Australian economy. Nobody takes figures like this too seriously, so what’s a couple of billion dollars in the headline figure between friends? But these agreements do in fact reveal the growing intimacy between the Albanese government and the European leadership.
Trade Minister Don Farrell has done a good job for the government. But Albanese is operating at an altogether deeper level. His government behaves very much like a European government. Australian politics is coming to resemble European politics, as Australian society itself looks increasingly European.

Shocking stuff. 

Increasingly European? The pond almost fainted with fright ...and the reptiles compounded the fear with an AV distraction featuring a hideous creature that came to walk amongst us ...

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivers a powerful address in the Australian parliament following the signing of a historic free trade agreement. “What we signed today will unleash a new era of economic and security partnership,” Ms von der Leyen said. “The distance has traditionally been a barrier to our relationship, but today geography is no more our destiny, and distance is no longer a protection or luxury.”

It turns out all that reptile blather about Western Civilisation, and the Judaeo-Xian heritage and such like counts for naught when it comes to the crunch, and what really matters is an unthinking embrace of King Donald's adventures.

Europe itself is a decadent cesspit ...

Once, when Europe embodied humane values, social compromise, hi-tech development and war-sobered democratic solidarity and national security responsibility, that might all have seemed a good thing. Now, not so much. Now, the European model embodies state incompetence, social stress and political fragmentation. Welcome aboard, Australia.
Europe is addicted to massive universal welfare programs (whereas Australia once targeted welfare through means testing) and wildly inefficient transfer payments that ensure crippling tax levels, lack of incentive and chronic, structural budget deficits. They also routinely strangle business in byzantine regulation.
Australia could be a leading member of the European All Stars on all these measures.
Like Europe, Australia has burdened itself with a hugely costly, ultimately unworkable energy policy that makes energy prices uncompetitive with the rest of the world and ensures that reindustrialisation can only occur with massive and unsustainable government subsidies.
The European elite has so consistently ignored the concerns of its people, especially on immigration, that the society has lost faith in normal democratic politics. The traditional political parties are losing support to new parties challenging on the populist right. Sound familiar?
The official ideology of the EU essentially rejects mainstream European cultural heritage and instead of a self-confident historical narrative of achievement and imperfection, promotes the delegitimisation of its own traditions, along with endless identity politics and grievance. Any echoes there?

Just to remind the hive mind yet again of the treachery at work ...Von der Leyen in parliament on Tuesday. Picture: AAP

Talk about fraught times for bromancers, forced to seek out the ugly truth beneath the glittering surfaces ...

Now we have the military co-operation agreement between Australia and Europe. The Albanese government actually does defence diplomacy pretty well. The problem is it virtually doesn’t do defence in substance at all, a very European combination.
Von der Leyen was an elegant, witty, respectful and positive presence in the national parliament. It was good that she spoke, and she spoke well.
Yet it is still the case that, even after four years of Russian war in Ukraine, Europe’s leading nations have not produced military forces, military platforms or military ordnance on anything like the scale that their grave security situation requires. Their budgets are in constant deficit because of the ever increasing demand for universal welfare payments, and they thus cannot make the decision to resource their own defence properly, instead relying, as ever, on the Americans, even as Donald Trump routinely mocks them for their derelictions. However, compared with the Albanese government the Europeans look like Godzilla after a Red Bull overdose.

As if a couple of world wars had turned them into a bunch of pathetic wimps ... how the Reichsmarschall des GroßAustralisch Reiches yearned for a real man, doing manly things with his bone spurs ... US President Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

Sorry, whenever King Donald appears, the pond is contractually required to celebrate with a worshipful cartoon ...

Ahh, you won't find any of that nonsense in Europe, unless you happen to visit Hungary with the bromancer's best buddy, the onion muncher ...

And so to the bromancer wrapping up his despair ...

Von der Leyen confirmed that European leaders had said they would send ships to help the US open the Strait of Hormuz. However, she added, this would only happen after hostilities had ceased. In other words, the Europeans would make a military contribution when there was no longer a military need. They would work to open up the Strait of Hormuz after it was already open.
A very European military commitment. However, even that was more than Australia under Albanese would offer. When asked whether Australia would send a naval vessel to the Strait of Hormuz the Prime Minister simply dodged the question. That’s because, apart from the implausible case of the two air warfare destroyers currently notionally in service, the Australian navy possesses no ship that could realistically be sent to the Strait of Hormuz.
The key to understanding the security agreement between Australia and Europe is that it can’t amount to much. European nations and their militaries can’t cope with Europe’s security challenges, much less make a big ­contribution in the Indo-Pacific. Australia has a tiny number of exquisitely complex defence platforms, so tiny in number that they cannot in themselves make any strategic contribution anywhere, even in the defence of Australia, much less the defence of Europe.
Tokenism, speeches and symbolism on the other hand – the EU and the Albanese government do all that very well.
Australia now rejoices in its participation in the Eurovision song contest. This surely makes the Albanese government yearn for more. How comfortable it would be in the European Union itself!

Indeed, indeed, how much better to dance along to the sounds of that ear worm YMCA ....

And now to an apology. 

In recent times, the pond has taken to sending reptiles to the intermittent archive where correspondents can inspect them at their leisure, but for whatever reason, the archive hasn't been itself these last few days.

So the pond can only show its homework and show what it decided to miss out on.

First up was Dame Slap doing a standard bit of black bashing ...

That's more than enough black bashing.

The pond also decided to miss out on Mandy, even though she was talking about a matter and a country the reptiles have studiously ignored ...

Thanks for raising the matter, Mandy, and anyone wanting follow-up could head off The Diplomat's Why Pakistan Is Desperate to Avert an Iran-Saudi confrontation, or perhaps to AlJazeera for Pakistan 'ready to host US-Iran talks': Can latest peace push work?

Call the pond weird - many do - but the pond's taste runs to reptiles in full hysterical overload, cranked up to eleven ... and Monsieur Dupont was exactly what any loon doctor might order ...

Damn those 'leets. 

Why every day the lizard Oz featured an attack on sociopathic Vlad the Impaler's excursion into Ukraine, and every day the pond kept blinking and missing it, but here he is, in the usual company ... Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, China’s President Xi Jinping and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arriving to a military parade in Beijing. Picture: AFP

It seems deeply unfair to avoid featuring the biggest war monger of them all at the moment - Cuba next? - but the pond will go with the flow, as Monsieur Dupont readies the country for war ...

Real-world events have shattered the illusion that the generational peace Australians have long enjoyed would continue indefinitely.
Europeans who smugly proclaimed that war on their continent had been consigned to the dustbin of history received a rude shock in 2022 when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in pursuit of his imperial ambitions. This should have been a wake-up call that Pax Americana was fracturing and we needed to lift our game on defence. Again, nothing was done. While Europeans and pacifist Japan ramped up their defence spending, ours flatlined despite warnings from Defence Minister Richard Marles that our strategic circumstances are the most challenging and dangerous since the end of World War II.
Putin’s invasion was followed in short order by the murderous Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 supported by Tehran and its proxies, igniting a series of linked conflicts across the Middle East leading to the current US-Israeli strike against Iran.
Warning lights should have been flashing red in the National Security Committee of cabinet spurring serious attempts to immediately increase fuel reserves, identify supply chain risks, move from “just in time to just in case” planning and redouble efforts to make more of what we need in this country – otherwise known as sovereign capabilities.
But apart from laudable efforts to support Australian critical minerals miners, the government hasn’t done nearly enough to build the resilience needed to mitigate rising geopolitical risk. We have wafer-thin petroleum reserves. Anthony Albanese hasn’t delivered on his promise to build a strategic merchant fleet that could carry oil and other essential commodities in emergencies. Perversely, he now appears to be considering higher taxes on gas exports when the world is facing a critical gas shortage, risking a collapse in new investment.

It's a long time since the pond has thought of Winston, but how splendid of Monsieur Dupont to look across the dutch for advice,  New Zealand's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Rt Hon Winston Peters. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Indeed, indeed, it's deeply alarming that the current leadership of the United States is united in its desire to unravel a rules-based order, but here we are ...

Ironically, it took a New Zealand foreign minister to bell the cat. Winston Peters has admitted his country and Australia ought to have been better prepared for the Iran war oil crisis and made “serious mistakes” in allowing fuel refineries to close because they were “too cocky” about the state of the world.
It should have been obvious that an unusually peaceful period in world history has ended and we are returning to the historical norm. The respected Peace Research Institute Oslo reports that the world is experiencing a surge in violence not seen since World War II. Sixty-one conflicts were recorded across 36 countries in 2025. PRIO research director Siri Aas Rustad warned: “This is not just a spike – it’s a structural shift. The world today is far more violent, and far more fragmented, than it was a decade ago.
“Conflicts are no longer isolated. They’re layered, transnational and increasingly difficult to end. It is a mistake to assume the world can look away.”
And this may be only the beginning. The next decade could see escalating conflict around the world that will directly impact on Australia, the most serious of which would be a military confrontation between China and the US over Taiwan. To borrow from the late Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, that would be the “mother of all battles”, dwarfing the supply chain and geopolitical upheavals of recent weeks.
It’s no surprise that revisionist powers China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are united in their desire to unravel a rules-based order crafted by the US and fellow democracies that has served Australia well. But few foresaw that an American president would actively participate in the dismantling of this order. Serial interventionist Donald Trump has led a revolution “against the very world that America made”, says Carnegie’s Stewart Patrick.
If you think that’s a stretch, read the 2026 US National Defence Strategy. It dismisses “the rules-based international order” as a “cloud castle” abstraction.

Just the USA Monsieur Dupont?

Isn't the call coming from inside the house? You should really keep up ...

And so on, and oh dear, and the next snap is no consolation,  Richard Marles

At that point, Monsieur Dupont spluttered out, but not before urging on the war with China, preferably by Xmas, as reptiles are wont to do at the drop of a war mongering excursion hat ...

Dispelling the false assumption that geography will continue to cushion us from overseas shocks is a task of government. But the message isn’t getting through often or sharply enough.
When the Ukraine conflict first broke out, complacent elites, who should have known better, asserted that a conflict in distant Europe wouldn’t affect Australia. That was patently wrong. Global supplies of key agricultural products, energy and metals were severely disrupted. The drone war with Russia revealed a potentially fatal structural flaw in our defence force. We have no effective counter-drone capability.
The same people continue to argue that we shouldn’t get involved in a Taiwan conflict because it’s far away and doesn’t concern us. That canard should be rebutted. Much of our trade and energy goes through the South China Sea. If simmering tensions over Taiwan erupt into military conflict, war will come to our shores whether we like it or not. Our geography won’t protect us.
The question is: Does the Albanese government have workable contingency plans in place for such an eventuality?

Just one final flourish. 

Monsieur Dupont warned the hive mind at the start about the dangers of leets and then signed himself off this way ...

Alan Dupont is chief executive of geopolitical risk consultancy The Cognoscenti Group and a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute.

The Cognoscenti Group? 

Why that's up there with the Illuminati ... or perhaps the Rosicrucians ...

And so to "Ned", still in a state of hysteria about the croweaters ...

Poor "Ned", and yet the pond will always turn to him, even if he manages to drag some ancient toad relic out of the dustbin of collective memories... Peter Beattie inside Queensland Parliament, August 1998.

"Ned" was in a state of dire panic ... apparently forgetting that the readership of the lizard Oz had been trained for years to embrace the climate-denialist, Islamophobic, minority fearing and loathing, ways of the redhead's mob...

The SA result reflects the opinion poll trend across the nation: there is a massive vote transfer within the centre-right. It confirmed what we knew: that One Nation can ruin the Liberals, but it cannot win enough preferences to stop Labor being the net winner against a broken Liberal Party.
The numbers are telling: the stronger the Hanson vote, the weaker the overall centre-right vote. Hanson isn’t interested in governing; her brief is sabotage, laying political landmines. If One Nation remains a strong force in future, the consequences are guaranteed. It will assist NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns to be re-elected in March 2027 and then assist the re-election of Anthony Albanese in 2028.
Given that most One Nation voters loathe the Labor Party and the Albanese government, this suggests a disconnection between their emotional disposition and the consequences of their vote. (The qualification, of course, is that some One Nation voters just want to wreck the two-party system.)
If One Nation succeeds in usurping the Liberals and the ­Coalition as the major party of the centre-right, that becomes a devastating event for Australia – Hansonism as the alternative to Labor. It would terminate centre-right politics as it has long been practised in this country.
It is astonishing that the Liberal Party has been confused about whether One Nation is a friend or an enemy. Seeing Hanson openly seeks to destroy the Coalition vote, such confusion is inexcusable folly. The iron law that should govern Liberal Party attitudes towards One Nation is obvious: whatever maximises its vote against Labor, given the goal is to defeat Labor.

Can't we just nuke them? It's good enough for the country, so why not them? Or should we embrace dunderheads keen to destroy writers' festivals? Chris Minns; Peter Malinauskas

It turns out that "Ned", in his usual way, doesn't have much of a clue, might even be part of the problem ...

The Liberals, therefore, should strive to weaken Hanson’s primary vote and to maximise the flow of One Nation preferences to the Coalition. That’s both a primary and preference strategy. It rules out either simple-minded attacks on Hanson or alignments with her. The Liberals need to differentiate themselves from Hanson, avoid turning her into a defiant heroine but make preference decisions solely based on vote maximisation.
More than 30 years ago, ANOP pollster Rod Cameron, who guided the Labor Party for so long, said Hanson thrived on criticism from elites, and “the more criticism she gets, the better she travels”.
Too many people have forgotten this. The golden rules are: don’t criticise her personally, don’t call her a racist or a fascist – that just confirms the dogmatism of her supporters.
Stress instead that she can never govern, she only sets one Australian against another Australian, and, as Matt Canavan said recently, she has never delivered anything worthwhile – not a ­“single dam, single road, single hospital”. A vote for Hanson is a wasted vote.
The Liberals need to avoid a counter-productive binary debate about whether to move to the left or right to combat Hanson. They need, instead, to act as a governing party.
That imposes two requirements. First, remember Hanson is your opponent. The Liberals are not in a team with Hanson, they are not in a coalition with her, and they will never seek to govern with her. Those conservatives who dream of a governing partnership – Liberals, One Nation, Nationals – are deluded since these three parties are too fundamentally different to form a troika. The Liberals who champion this approach risk killing their own party.

And what of the reptiles who joined in the cheerleading? The ones who did their very best to normalise the redhead? 

Isn't the call coming from inside "Ned's" house? Didn't the reptiles celebrate the way the redhead had caught up with the right hive mind attitudes?

And so on and on, a heady reptile brew of immigration fear and loathing and climate science denialism.

The twin planks of the lizard Oz this past decade. 

It doesn't leave much room for a beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, what with him coming to fame by shouting at windmills. Not much of a distinct brand there ... Leader of the Opposition Angus Taylor during Question Time. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

All "Ned" had to offer him  was the chance to sound like Pauline ...

Second, the Liberals need to show their cultural credentials as the party of tradition. Much of Hanson’s success lies in fighting the cultural hegemony of the progressive left in its commitment to identity politics, contemporary tribalism, excessive immigration, weakening Australian identity, and undermining national unity.
Every position advanced by Hanson is tied to the pitch that “I’ll restore the country you are losing” and, in this sense, Hanson targets a genuine affliction in this country.
The irony of election night is that Premier Peter Malinauskas in his victory speech invoked patriotism and the flag as the necessary virtues to stop Hanson’s inroads into the Labor vote. Targeting One Nation, he said pride in country can’t be co-opted by any single party. “The cultural question must be top of mind,” Malinauskas said. “It comes down to: are you for Australia?”
He said One Nation must be met with two responses – economic gains and national pride. The Premier’s message was anathema to left-wing progressivism in this country, but as an ­election winner, he was beyond criticism.
This was an invitation and a lesson for the Liberals. They need to stand up and present themselves as the party of flag, anthem, patriotism, duty, honour, family, personal responsibility, and unity in diversity. And if the moderate wing of the Liberals can’t abide this essential step to halt Hanson, then it also risks killing the party.

Say again?

They need to stand up and present themselves as the party of flag, anthem, patriotism, duty, honour, family, personal responsibility ...

They need to sound just like patriotic, flag-waving Pauline? 

... and then throw in a token reference to "unity in diversity" as the only difference? 

This on the very day that Dame Slap returned to her standard black bashing form?

Completely clueless ... please allow the infallible Pope ot help ...

And now, as everybody knows that Moby is a d*ckhead supreme, (*google bot aware),  the pond felt inclined to celebrate ...