In which the pond kicks Zionist "Ned" and doggie boy to the archive curb, but compensates with the bouffant one, some onion munching, and the Ughmann, possibly scribbling in a seminary ...

 

Be fair. 

The lettuce was very humble in victory, and described Susssan as a tough, tenacious opponent, who fought to the bitter end, and did the right thing by falling on her sword. 

She also thrashed Lord Downer by a remarkable 24 days, thereby confirming that he remains the top all-time loser and therefore eminently qualified to scribble for the lizard Oz. She also operated under a considerable handicap which has always proven difficult for female stayers ...

Perhaps Susssan will now set up shop somewhere in the hive mind.

Of course the reptiles were obsessed with the result ...

This was just as well, because elsewhere the pond noted a return to the very worst days of the Australian Daily Jewish News ...

The pond will note the braying and the baying, but in all good conscience, can't support a devotion to genocide or ethnic cleansing, and so must refer this aspect of the hive mind to the intermittent archive ...

EXCLUSIVE
March madness: The ugly truth of Sydney’s protest movement
While Hamas terrorists were still slaughtering Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, the Palestine Action Group jeered and began mobilising for a rally in Sydney. They haven’t let up since.
By Stephen Rice and Lachlan Leeming

The pond will simply note Emilia's splendid work in demonising assorted folk ...

Sadly - though also somewhat of a relief - the pond declined to embark on this weekend's Everest with nattering "Ned" ...

Commentary by Paul Kelly
A big question now hangs over Australia: will this division actually get worse?
Isaac Herzog’s visit raises profound doubts about the nation’s ability to recover from the Bondi crisis and whether our shared values are eroding.

Strangely the pond doesn't share the lizard Oz's taste for ethnic cleansing, especially enduring "Ned" obscuring it for a bigly nine minute read.

Ned's thoughts on Gaza, the West Bank and the great extermination?

The Herzog visit shows the depth of the political and moral campaign to brand Israel a pariah state – now a priority stance for many progressives and activists – fanned by the mass Palestinian victims in Gaza. Yet such tensions are as revealing about Australia with the politics of the Middle East assuming a far higher profile in this country, albeit driven by minorities, with most people divorced from the passions and activism.
For Australia, the problem is not one-dimensional.
Australia is becoming a more fragmented nation. It is losing its sense of shared values as its so-called multicultural principles are openly trashed. Its public square is tarnished by tribalism, identity politics, religious fanaticism, right-wing extremism and divisive left-wing progressivism – all contributing to the erosion of confidence in the Australian identity. The frequent line from people in the street that “this is not the Australia I know” has become a valid lament.

Yes, if you think ethnic cleansing might be an issue, you're clearly part of a decline in shared values ...

National pride and belonging in decline

As the Scanlon survey highlights, national pride and belonging in Australia are in decline. In its 2025 Social Cohesion Report, the Scanlon Foundation finds only 34 per cent take “great pride in the Australian way of life and culture” and only 46 per cent have “a sense of belonging in Australia to a great extent”. Generational differences are widening. Among 18 to 24-year-olds and 25 to 34-year-olds fewer than one in three, at 29 per cent, report having a sense of belonging in Australia to a great extent.

"Ned" went on to beat the drum about migrants, especially Muslims, thereby putting him well into Pauline's camp.

How absurd did it get? "Ned" in his final par turned to the deeply corrupt beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way to offer  a "value-led" recovery ... (If you want an insight into the Watergate scandal, one of a number of scandals, start with IA here).

With the change of leadership in the Liberal Party there are expectations that Angus Taylor, an economic liberal and cultural conservative, might offer a strong set of values to guide the Liberals and the Australian community at this time. The nation badly needs it, as the Scanlon survey shows. But Taylor will need to break the cycle – in recent years whenever the Liberals have tried to tackle cultural issues, they have lacked the skill and language to make a persuasive case. 

What a contemptible, doddery old clown "Ned" is, and the pond also consigned the dog botherer to the intermittent archive with a sigh of relief.

Lost in translation: how lies are corrupting public debate
Grace Tame’s Instagram post betrays an activist pushed onto the protest podium while spouting no shortage of slogans, but showing little understanding in a misinformed debate.
By Chris Kenny

What to say about a notorious dissembling liar when he accuses others of lying?

The dog botherer went full Zionist, and ended with this absurdity ...

President Herzog has now returned to a multiethnic country constantly riven by boisterous and freewheeling politics, perpetually under siege from state and non-state actors, but populated by people united in their devotion to the shared values that underpin Israel’s existence. There was a time we could make similar observations about Australia.

Uh huh ...that's some mighty fine values to share ...

Luckily - after those short trailers for what lies in the intermittent archive - this weekend provided a host of alternatives.

The bouffant one managed a whole eight minutes of navel gazing and fluff-gathering ...

The header: Can Angus Taylor’s new deal revive a fractured Liberal Party? Angus Taylor has won the leadership, but a harder line on immigration and promises to ‘restore values’ may not be enough to heal divisions or win back drifting voters.

The caption for another of Emilia's exquisitely awful collages, which really should be blamed on AI: Angus Taylor, Pauline Hanson, Barnaby Joyce, Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers. Artwork: Emilia Tortorella. Pictures: Supplied and iStock

Why start with this fossilised dullard? Well in earlier times, the bouffant one used to content himself with short spurts, only 2 or 3 minutes long, so consider this an encouragement award:

The fate of the Liberal Party, the Coalition and centre-right politics in this country now rests squarely with Angus Taylor, after the conservative challenger emphatically defeated Sussan Ley to become Liberal leader on Friday morning.
In his first remarks as leader, the member for Hume vowed to restore the values and standing of his party and take a hardline stance on immigration, which he presented as the crucial spearhead for the Liberals’ fightback. “The numbers are too high and the standards are too low,” Taylor declared, flagging new measures to stop “people who hate our way of life” from entering the country.
Taylor denied there would be any attempt to move the Liberal Party to the right, saying he did not see the current political landscape in terms of “right, left or centre”. Having admitted he made mistakes on tax and economic policy during the last election – when he was opposition Treasury spokesman – Taylor promised to call “the rotten government” to account on economic management and to fight “their bad taxes”.
“The first priority of the Liberal Party now,” he said, “will be to restore our standard of living and protect our way of life.”
Though initially nervous and scripted, Taylor’s first foray as Liberal leader was devoted in part to admitting past mistakes on tax and economic policy – trying to head off Labor’s attacks on his credibility – and using strong language in promising to cut the amount and style of immigration, trying to pull back the flood of support to One Nation.
Yet restoring the Coalition’s economic credibility is going to take more than admissions of error, while trying to match Pauline Hanson on immigration rhetoric carries serious risk that can’t be covered by the old welcoming of migrants because of the benefits of a great cappuccino.
Taylor promised there would be more policy and soon.
This is just as well because his leadership is set to be tested immediately with a by-election in Ley’s rural NSW seat of Farrer (formerly held by Nationals leader Tim Fischer) in which One Nation, Climate 200 teal independents, the Liberals and, potentially, the Nationals, as well as a swath of other independents, will fight each other like starved vultures over a ripe carcass.
Labor could very well not contest the by-election and concentrate the anti-Liberal vote in a seat where the independent finished second at the last election and where One Nation got half the ALP vote and finished fourth.

The caption for the snap which offers incontrovertible proof that Jimbo isn't the sharpest sheep in the back paddock: Senator James Paterson said Angus Taylor was the “smartest policy brain in the shadow cabinet”. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Really Jimbo? 

Bunging on that Rodin pose as a deep thinker didn't help, but it did remind the pond of Charlie Lewis in Crikey, sorry, paywall ...

Gender quotas? 

Now we know where that all went, as the bouffant one spared a thought for the loser ... and sounded decidedly gloomy into the bargain ...

In a gracious concession, reflecting on her first election 25 years ago and her defeat on Friday, Ley said: “There is no doubt that it has been a challenging time to lead the party after we suffered the worst defeat in 81 years, it has been tough.
“At times, very tough, but every sleepless night, every intractable problem, indeed every personal challenge, has always been put in perspective by my understanding of the burdens that so many ordinary Australians face quietly and without fuss every day.

“I will be spending the next couple of weeks thanking the amazing people of Farrer and expressing my gratitude to them for the honour of representing them for 25 years. Shortly thereafter, I will be tendering my resignation.”
Ley’s departing Parthian shot at the new leader demonstrates the mistake of expecting major change through the dumping of a leader.
The real questions facing Taylor include far more complex, fundamental and difficult problems than a relatively simple, if messy, change of leader. This quandary cannot be addressed on any puerile concept of turning right or left.
Neither can the Liberal Party’s turn to Taylor be read as an Australian-grown version of the recent sweep to the right among governments and political movements in the US, Britain, Italy and Japan.
Taylor’s victory in the Liberal partyroom in Canberra followed weeks of speculation, negotiations with conservative colleagues, a “secret” meeting with the more well-known conservative contender, Andrew Hastie, taunts from Ley’s moderate supporters, and policy-free and platitudinous promises to “restore” the party.
On Wednesday night during his brief pitch – which was followed by a short video titled Why I’m Running for Liberal Leader – Taylor said: “Under Anthony Albanese, Australians are going backwards. Our standard of living is declining, and this government is failing to protect the way of life Australians have worked so hard to build.
“We must urgently restore Australians’ confidence in the Liberal Party by demonstrating strong leadership, clear direction, and the competence and conviction to courageously fight for our values with a clear vision for the future.”
Here Taylor was indicating that he intended to move quickly on developing policy, which has been largely missing for the first nine months of the opposition.
Interestingly, Ley regards her legacy as resetting the Coalition’s energy policy on net-zero emissions by 2050, as well as the establishment of the royal commission into antisemitism and the re-forming of the Coalition after Nationals leader David Littleproud declared he could not work with her.
Before the Liberal spill, Taylor’s public pitch to become leader did not involve any policy but centred on a video declaring he was going to restore the Liberal Party and Liberal values.
It is always a problem when a politician stands in front of a placard saying “what I stand for”. This is especially so for Taylor, since the more well known and better recognised Hastie released a highly successful video last year of himself in front of a Ford Falcon and spruiking changes to industry policy.
Hastie – who went to the backbench arguing he wanted more say in determining immigration policy – became the people’s choice as conservative challenger to Ley. But he lacked the support in the Liberal partyroom to overstep Taylor.

There was promise of migrant bashing to come, the sort of jihad the hive mind loves ... Angus Taylor vows to restore Liberal values and take a tougher line on immigration. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The bouffant one noted that the pastie Hastie was still in the wings, and while correspondents have proposed a short time line, perhaps just 3 months, the pond thinks that the beefy boofhead will need a little time to hang himself, and so the Xmas silly season might be best for challenges to crank into gear ...

The still potent threat from Hastie – which is sharpened by his support among young men – is another complication for Taylor, who will come under pressure from conservatives if he fails to lift Liberal support in the polls and doesn’t deliver on clear policy initiatives.
The Farrer by-election will be a big early test on how Taylor performs and what the voting public thinks.
On Thursday, senior conservative James Paterson said Taylor was the “smartest policy brain in the shadow cabinet”, a “man of deep courage and values” who “understood this is a change or die moment for the Liberal Party”. Paterson also predicted Taylor would lift the Liberals’ standing but did not offer any policy changes under him.
This is the essential problem: conservative MPs, senators and public supporters may have got what they wanted with the removal of the moderate Ley, but without a real improvement in the polls, without a clear shift back to the Coalition from disenchanted One Nation supporters and, most important, a cut-through, clear suite of policies on immigration, cost of living, energy, economic management and housing, despair will rise again.
Leadership challenges, successful or not, haunt the leaders and pollute the parties.
There is also the issue of dealing with the Nationals in Coalition, who should be happy with the removal of Ley. But there is still the problem of the Liberal leader finding a way to straddle the electoral demands of trying to win back Liberal seats lost to the Climate 200 teal independents, defeat Labor MPs in suburban Australia and fend off the One Nation threat, especially in the regions.
Only last week, after a disruptive and damaging Coalition divorce between the Nationals and Liberals, was Ley able to do a deal with Littleproud and ensure a crucial partnership, essential for Coalition election, was re-formed. With the ink still wet on the leaders’ signatures, Taylor will have to ratify the Coalition agreement as a new leader.
But the real challenge for Taylor in solidifying his leadership and achieving the promised lift in Liberal fortunes is to produce policy that is agreeable to his own partyroom and satisfies voters that he has more to offer than Ley.
There’s no argument that Ley is responsible as leader for an even more cataclysmic collapse of Liberal support since the election defeat, with Coalition primary support at just 18 per cent in the latest Newspoll and her personal leadership ranking the lowest of any leader since 2003.
Even more calamitous for the Coalition is the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party to 27 per cent primary support in the same Newspoll that threatens Nationals as well as Liberal seats and entrenches Labor through preferences.
But the failure is not all Ley’s fault and in no way will her removal resolve the fundamental problems besetting the Liberal Party, the Coalition and the Nationals.

At this point the reptiles decided to interrupt the bouffant one's copious weeping with yet another of those deeply mystifying intrusions.

Is it a way of proposing an existential madness at the heart of reality? 

Whatever, the bouffant one carried on ...

There are factional warriors on both the moderate and conservative sides who have all but destroyed the Liberal Party at state level, leaving behind scorched rumps of dysfunctional oppositions, and whose only contribution to federal Liberal election prospects has been to infect the national movement with ideological, demographic and geographic divisions.
These divisions have confused and immobilised the Liberals on the key policy issues of cost of living, energy, immigration, tax reform and housing, where One Nation’s single, clear and unchanging message on cutting immigration draws support from the Nationals and Liberals in regional areas and alienates Liberals in seats lost to Climate 200 teal independents.
The fractious divisions also have contributed to the differentiation and separation between and within the Nationals as Coalition partner.
Yet the simple replacement of a moderate Liberal leader with a conservative doesn’t address these internal and external threats.
Taylor used a commitment to restore Liberal values as the basis for his appeal to his colleagues as he defended himself as being loyal and hardworking in the Liberal Party’s interest.
“Despite these efforts, the Liberal Party’s position under Sussan Ley’s leadership has continued to deteriorate, leaving it weaker than at any time since its formation in 1944,” he said. “This is a confronting reality, but one we cannot ignore.
“As a party that holds itself up as an alternative government, our failures have allowed the Albanese government to avoid accountability for their mismanagement of our country. This is devastating for Australians who, under Labor, have become poorer, more divided and more disillusioned.”
Albanese, who still can’t believe his luck on turning the tables on antisemitism and pro-Palestinian protests this week as he embraced Israeli President Isaac Herzog, has found a sensible centre position from which he can dismiss the extremists on both sides.
Ley had actually made inroads into Albanese’s leadership and Labor support after the Bondi Beach massacre on December 14 last year. Yet by the time the special sitting of parliament had begun in January to consider antisemitism and gun laws the Coalition made itself the centre of attention.
The Coalition split, Littleproud’s demand for an end to Ley’s leadership – which he has now achieved – and the subsequent chaos drove support in the latest Newspoll down to a record low and provided the trigger for Taylor’s challenge.
Ley was mortally wounded and the government started to build a profile of Taylor in anticipation of his rise to the leadership.
But the real damage to Ley, Taylor, the Liberals and the Coalition is that more people will turn away and that there is no basis for them to be lured back. This is the bitter harvest of leadership challenges – even for the victor.

Hallelujah, he is risen ...

Hardly a happy set of thoughts from the bouffant one, but at least it's an easy way to offset the nausea which is instantly produced by the onion muncher... always to hand to provide a ten pound Pom kind of insight ...

The header: Get your armour on, Angus Taylor, Labor’s slugfest just got real; Half an hour after he became Liberal leader, Labor’s ambush on Angus Taylor began with the launch of an attack ad. The blitz will be ferocious. He’ll need a united party behind him.

The caption for the AV distraction which the reptiles put at the head of the piece so that even the hive mind had some relief: The Labor government have released (sic) a new advertisement attacking incoming Liberal Leader Angus Taylor ...

On the other hand, the onion muncher managed just three minutes of advice, all the more sublime coming from one of Australia's worst prime ministers, a dropkick loser who first lost his job, and then promptly lost his seat.

He deserves some kind of knighthood for the arrogance and sublime lack of self-awareness on parade ...

Angus Taylor’s accession to the leadership of the Liberal Party and alternative prime minister of Australia is good news for everyone who thinks our country is drifting backwards and needs change. His declaration that he will restore Australians’ standard of living and preserve our way of life is exactly what’s needed right now.
Under the Albanese government, GDP per person has declined sharply and Australia has endured the biggest drop in real living standards of any developed country. Government policy has made a bad situation much worse.
Labor’s emissions obsession has caused skyrocketing energy prices and is closing down all our heavy industry. Labor’s green fixation has made it almost impossible for new resource projects and is inevitably ending the coal and gas exports on which our prosperity absolutely depends. Labor’s union attachments are crushing productivity and making businesses much harder to manage.
As well, out-of-control mass migration has put downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs, big extra burdens on social and physical infrastructure and is undermining social cohesion. Australia is the world’s greatest migrant success story but that doesn’t mean taking anyone from anywhere all the time.
Migrants have to be committed to Australia and take their citizenship oath seriously. The Bondi massacre shows that it’s way past time to discriminate on the basis of values and insist that every Australian has a responsibility to respect the rights and liberties that keep Australia Australian.

The pond warned that the nausea level would be high as the reptiles tried to hitch the hapless prime Angus beefy boofhead to the onion muncher ...Newly elected Liberal Leader, Angus Taylor and Deputy Leader, Jane Hume. Picture: Getty Images

Ah but, thanks to the ABC ...the pond is in the mood for some records ...

Talk about charts and records ...

One of the worst PM's of all times and still he brays on, hoping to sound relevant ...

There is no hope of better government from a Labor Party that’s owned and operated by the union movement, contaminated by the politics of climate and identity, tends to see every issue through a quasi-Marxist lens of oppressor and oppressed, and is addicted to spending and regulating. Under Labor, spending has increased by 3 per cent of GDP – on everything except the armed forces – and the public sector payroll in Canberra has grown by 50,000 in just four years, but does anyone think the quality of government has improved?
The fact that the Prime Minister’s first-term priority was the divisive race-based voice that crashed to defeat and his ongoing moral confusion about the Jew hatred that has disfigured our streets for the past two years says everything about the lamentable state of our public life.
Still, a Labor Party that’s hopeless at government is clever and cunning at low politics, and a tsunami of abuse will now be directed at Taylor and the Liberals.
It started in the parliament last week with almost every minister competing to mock the Liberal Party and play the politics of envy against Taylor for being a successful businessman, multi-generational farmer, Rhodes scholar and – supposedly – a throwback to a gentrified Australia that’s passed.
Labor and the unions have a small army of keyboard warriors on social media trying to persuade voters and stampede commentators that Taylor is out-of-touch and unelectable.
He’s being blamed for all the mistakes of the Morrison government and the Dutton opposition even though, as a loyal colleague, he simply did his best to support the team while being a voice of reason to leaders who wouldn’t often listen.
Parliamentary question time is certain to degenerate even further into a mindless slugfest. In the end, the public is repelled by ministers better at abusing the opposition than governing the country, but it will be important for Taylor’s colleagues to have their armour on.

Why did the reptiles attempt to curse beefy Angus from the get go by dragging the moth-eaten onion muncher out of the closet? Labor wasted no time in starting the ambushes on Angus Taylor, releasing an attack ad just half an hour after he was elected as the new Liberal leader. Picture: Supplied

Never mind, it was time for a little coal and gas worship, King Donald style, and more of the usual ...

I’m confident the Taylor opposition will quickly pursue a new policy direction that’s a clear contrast to a failing and flailing government.
No more coal-fired power stations will close, new gas fields will open at express speed, subsidies for renewable energy will end, the nuclear ban will go and immigration numbers will come back to the average of the Howard years by stopping language schools and unis selling work and residency in the guise of education, and stopping businesses substituting cheap foreign workers for paying and training locals.
There will be no ambivalence about Australia Day or Anzac Day; there will be only one national flag, not three; and acknowledgments of country will be confined to the Indigenous occasions where it’s only courteous to do so. Australia’s Anglo-Celtic core culture will be respected and our fundamental Judaeo-Christian ethos will be honoured and preserved because – after all – that’s what made us attractive to migrants in the first place and we do no one any favours to dilute it in a bid to make Australia more like the places migrants left.
Every Coalition MP and all the Coalition’s erstwhile supporters in the community now need to get behind the leader and the Liberal-National parties that are by far the best hope of better government in this country.
It’s time to put aside personal ambition and to be ambitious for the party and the country. It’s time to stop seeking perfection and be content with substantial improvement.
Taylor knows that this is his one and only moment to take our party and our country in a better direction and that he must rise to this mighty challenge and opportunity.
Knowing him well, I’m sure he has the character, conviction, courage and relentless energy to reverse the decline and keep our country the very best on Earth.

Just a thought. What do the younglings make of this sort of mindless bigotry and vile stupidity?

The pond will repeat the mantra at the risk of having to rush to the toilet for an upchuck:

There will be no ambivalence about Australia Day or Anzac Day; there will be only one national flag, not three; and acknowledgments of country will be confined to the Indigenous occasions where it’s only courteous to do so. Australia’s Anglo-Celtic core culture will be respected and our fundamental Judaeo-Christian ethos will be honoured and preserved because – after all – that’s what made us attractive to migrants in the first place and we do no one any favours to dilute it in a bid to make Australia more like the places migrants left.

It's all the more insufferable as he tries to make Australia more like the little England that lurks in his war-mongering, though possibly bone-spur laden, imagination ...

That endurance test done and dusted, the pond turned to the Ughmann for a little palate cleansing closer...

The header: Push for law change could embed remote work expectations despite productivity, workplace culture concerns; Warped bureaucratic priorities and pandemic-era thinking have metastasised, spreading from the public to the private sector.

The caption: Anecdotal evidence from public service managers in Canberra suggests the ever-expanding expectation of working from home now stretches to most days of the week. Picture: NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

Okay, okay, the pond was keeding, the Ughmann is no palate cleanser, he's just another palate clogger.

And the pond has just one question.

Did the Ughmann head into the office to type up this column, or did he file it from home? Just asking ... and not expecting an answer...

A couple of years ago I got a call from a friend who had just been employed by a state government.
He was wandering around his new office block, attempting to find the meeting he was scheduled to attend. This was proving a more difficult mission than he had expected because his superiors had unilaterally decided to rename all of the meeting rooms in words drawn from the local Indigenous language. Alas, the names were an obstacle course of consonants and each so similar that no one could work out which room they were supposed to be in.
Another acquaintance working in a federal department in Canberra complained of being dragooned into an unconscious bias course as part of his agency’s drive to decolonise the minds of its employees.
“Once they have found everything you actually are bigoted about, they go searching for things that you didn’t know you were bigoted about,” he said.
Without debating the merits of self-reflection and the determination to redress past wrongs, the point here is that too many senior bureaucrats seem to believe their purpose is to play lead roles in the theatre of performative virtue.

That reminded the pond of a line it liked ... turning virtue-signalling into vice-signalling ... naturally in a performative reptile way ... as the reptiles interrupted with one of those terrible thumb images for an AV, A recruiter has offered some blunt advice to parents looking to work from home full time.

Was that ECU designed to disguise a streaming from home? Who knows, and who knows if the Ughmann was at home to watch it, before scribbling away ...

That, and re-engineering the notion of work to suit the lifestyle choices of employees whose post-Covid expectations have multiplied faster than the virus. The disease has spawned a new industrial creed of indulgence and the workplace is being built around it.
In a recent parliamentary committee hearing it emerged that on any given weekday in Canberra, somewhere between a quarter and – “on a really, really good day” – a tad over one-third of the employees in the Department of Infrastructure and Transport bother to wander into work.
Given so few workers darken the doors of the workplace, the department is going to save taxpayers money by moving buildings and cutting its leases from four to two.
The road to these savings lies through $46m in fit-out costs, or about $2413 a square metre. This is significantly higher than the government’s target for such work of between $1500 to $2000.
The official departmental gloss is that the buildings must be premium grade to meet federal standards for size, acoustics and government-mandated environmental ratings.
The rarely there workforce will have the best office money can buy to visit at their leisure. Departmental leaders expressed the hope that staff might be enticed to return to an office with embroideries such as sensory rooms. These, as far as I can tell, are places where employees can lie down in a darkened space to recover from the exhausting ordeal of periodically attending the office.

The caption for this meaningless snap provoked another question ...The Australian Services Union has argued there should be a default working-from-home right for almost two million administrative staff. Picture: Getty Images

Dear sweet long absent lord, the hideous banality of stock images ...

How many reptile columnists look like that? How many head into the office to type up their "think" pieces? How many stay at home or head into a congenial location, such as a coffee shop, to do it?

The pond recalls in ancient times that it almost never headed into the office to type up copy. It was always easier to do it in a quiet space, and then drop it off before deadline time ...

Never mind, the Ughmann was on a roll, and at least it wasn't climate science denialism ...

If there is a grade above the commonwealth in torching taxpayer cash in ethical pantomime and retooling jobs to suit the private lives of public servants, it must be the ACT.
Here the permanent Labor-Greens government has built a progressive paradise. Here, when one employee was asked how he managed to work for the territory from his home on the distant NSW south coast, the reply was that his boss didn’t mind because she lived in Queensland.
Unfortunately, unlike the commonwealth, the ACT is responsible for delivering hands-on services such as education. And here, government employees not fronting up for work have consequences for students and parents.
Last year 25 schools in Canberra were closed because of potential asbestos exposure. Some stayed shut for a week.
Sounds bad until you realise the risk came from buckets of coloured play sand that contained traces of chrysotile, a type of naturally occurring asbestos. One might have thought an alternative to closing entire schools was to have someone come and collect the buckets.
That thought clearly occurred to those who run Canberra’s Catholic schools because they identified the same risk and stayed open, as did public schools in other states.
Post-Covid, the performative progressive administrative mindset treats risk not as something to be managed but as something to be eradicated. In the pursuit of eliminating a threat, any intervention can be justified because more government is presumed to be the answer to every question.
In the shadow of the pandemic, one of the conceits of politicians is to dress bad policy in the hazmat suit of public safety. Once this is invoked, anyone who objects can be branded a heretic.

The reptiles interrupted with a snap of a villain, ACT Education Minister Yvette Berry. Picture: AAP

The pond was stuck back a few lines before that, still wondering what might be an unnaturally occurring form of asbestos?

Sure asbestos could, as a fibre, be refined into different forms, but wasn't asbestos just a group of naturally occurring fibrous silicate minerals?

What was the point of labelling something naturally occurring when it was all naturally occurring, as if there was something about it that was unnaturally occurring?

Or was it wrong to expect actual science from an unreformed former seminarian?

On cue, ACT Education Minister Yvette Berry released a statement pledging: “The safety of school staff and students will always come first.”
Tellingly, the reflex of the most progressive government in Australia was to nominate staff before students and prefer the convenience of employees over education.
The insidious problem for the nation as a whole is that warped bureaucratic priorities and pandemic-era thinking have metastasised and are spreading from the public to the private sector.
Last year The Australian Financial Review reported that the Community and Public Sector Union was pushing to extend a government-backed bias in favour of working from home to businesses. Now the campaign has escalated, with the Australian Services Union arguing before the Fair Work Commission that there should be a default working-from-home right for almost two million administrative staff.
The argument for this rests largely on workforce expectations. The ASU released a statement from national secretary Emeline Gaske citing polling that claimed “a significant majority of Australians believe working from home is the new industrial standard”.
“Working from home has become a critical part of managing work, caring and other responsibilities for so many Australians,” Gaske said. “The fact that almost nine in 10 of us support a right to work from home shows that the community has moved on, even if some employer groups are still stuck in the past.”

Then came another reminder in the final caption of that unanswered question: Department of Health, Disability and Ageing secretary Blair Comley has lamented the 22 per cent attendance rate among his 7000 employees. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Still no guidance on whether the Ughmann did his column from home, nor any chance of a survey of reptiles to work out just how many trudged into the office to pound out 1500 words. Was, for example, the Major always keen to leave the golf links to head into the office to toss off a weekly serve of Zionism?

What about Polonius? Did he loyally trot into the lizard Oz office to deliver his prattle, or did he, heresy of heresies, stay in his own office, a form of treachery even worse than staying at home ...as if any office could compete with the hive mind central office...

Never mind, it's time for a bog standard rant about cardigan wearers...

The union goes on to say the polling “challenges the myth promulgated by big business groups that remote work hurts the bottom line”, with two in three workers agreeing that working from home has fewer distractions and makes employees more productive./Users/tj/Desktop/ozcharlie.jpg
Around the globe, workers routinely report higher productivity when working from home and many of their bosses disagree. Anecdotal evidence from public service managers in Canberra suggests the ever-expanding expectation of working from home now stretches to most days of the week. Many complain they have no idea how some staff spend their days, and most believe the workplace has suffered because of it.
All are grappling with how to get some of their staff to work at all, but few dare say so. Working from home has been rendered politically untouchable since the Albanese government forced the Liberal Party to abandon a modest plan to trim the public service and curb remote-work arrangements.
One of the few prepared to speak plainly is Department of Health, Disability and Ageing secretary Blair Comley, who has lamented the 22 per cent attendance rate among his 7000 employees, warning it carries consequences for productivity, workplace culture, and personal and professional development.
Not all change is progress. In what universe does Australia’s overpaid and underworked public service act as a model for the private sector? In a country where productivity has already flatlined, entrenching indulgence in industrial law is a road to ruin.

What a wanker he is, but at least it wasn't about climate science...

And so to end with the immortal Rowe, and this time the pond was completely befuddled by the splendid array of talent, such that there was no detail to excerpt, all was detail ...stuck on the bloody Hume again, with those infernal whale-killing windmills hovering in the distance ...

In which the pond slowly gets around to Our Henry and Killer of the IPA, but has to wade through a bigly amount of beefy boofhead first ...

 

The reptiles were full of it early in the morning this day ...

On and on they blathered in a state of hysteria, aided by hideous AI collages ..

But what was the point of all this fevered, fervid rambling?

It would only be later in the day that the matter would be resolved ...

The pond decided that the only reptile worth brownie points for hysteria was Brownie himself, who elevated the whole affair to an extinction level event...

Commentary by Greg Brown
Hit the ground running to avert Liberal extinction
The Liberal Party’s survival hangs in the balance as Angus Taylor prepares for Friday’s leadership ballot, with supporters warning he must prove personal transformation or face extinction.

Pull yourself and those supporters together man!

So the lettuce scores a win if Ley goes down, but it's not the end of the world. 

Think ahead to the next lettuce challenge, after the beefy boofhead has shown he's a complete nonce and a dropkick ...

The reptiles knew the real state of the game by providing Brownie's piece with a very silly photo ...

After a bigly cackle, the pond decided to ignore them all - the pond even cut "Ned" dead ... 

‘There’s no magic wand for the Liberal Party’ 
Paul Kelly, editor-at-large at The Australian, examines why leadership changes won’t fix the Liberal Party’s woes, and how the rise of One Nation is reshaping the political battlefield.

Be warned, be alert and alarmed, just like the beefy boofhead ...

The horror, the horror ...won't someone think of the children?

The thought of keeping "Ned" company for13 visual minutes was too much for a possum to bear... but the pond did think that Charlie Lewis in Crikey made a substantial contribution ... (sorry, paywall).

Charlie began by celebrating one likely contender ...

As a vote to stick with or switch current leader Sussan Ley gets closer, Senator Jane Hume has offered her assessment of what Taylor is:
"He is a very deep thinker and a great intellect in our party. He’s got incredible experience at a number of portfolios … He’s very good in city seats, but he comes from a country seat himself and is, naturally, a country boy …"
Of course, this is job interview talk: Hume is angling to be Taylor’s deputy, and as such her comments ring with the same clear, bright truth as someone conceding that “perfectionism” is their biggest weakness.

And then he celebrated the beefy prime Angus boofhead from down Goulburn way ...

Put it another way ...

There, the pond's coverage of the existential crisis is compleat, roll on the lettuce's celebrations, as it savours the smell of victory.

Meanwhile, as sure as the sun slowly rises on the end of the week, there was the hole in the bucket man, ready to play his role in the ongoing work of the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

The header: Anti-Israel violence an echo of ’60s radicalism; Modern protests are shaped by the radicalism of the 1960s, amplified by social media and alliances with extremists, turning peaceful demonstrations into a volatile challenge for authorities.

The caption for Our Henry's wander back into the past - sssh don't mention all the gay bashing back in the day: Police lead anti-Vietnam War protesters during the march through Sydney in 1971. Picture: News Ltd

Relax, for once Our Henry's Zionism took a back seat to an exploration of dangerous radicalism, as the hole in bucket spent a bigly five minutes sounding the alarm (and in the process entirely forgot to mention Thucydides) ...

Coming after anti-Israel protesters assaulted police in Melbourne late last year, the ugly scenes at Monday’s demonstration in Sydney point to a deeper crisis. Like many of our current pathologies, its roots lie in the heady days of the 1960s. And if the crisis has proved so hard to contain, it is because the ideas and attitudes forged in that period have continued to command allegiance long after the conditions that gave them plausibility fell away – turning inherited reflexes into instruments of chaos and disorder.
At the heart of the changes that shook Australia towards the close of the Menzies era was the emergence of protest movements incubated within rapidly expanding universities. Although multiple influences were at work, developments overseas were especially important.
That influence was reinforced through several channels. For the first time, youth travel occurred on a mass scale: in the 1960s, cheaper fares and rising incomes lifted overseas departure rates among those aged 20-24 more than six-fold.
Meanwhile, television became a primary source of nightly news, transforming political events – including those overseas – into vivid, broadly shared spectacles. Complementing both developments was the diffusion of a distinct youth culture that celebrated oppositional attitudes. It is consequently unsurprising that the earliest stirrings echoed the US civil rights movement: the “Freedom Rides” of early 1965 captured the nascent mood.
But it was, of course, the Vietnam War that transformed scattered nuclei of activism into a national phenomenon.
As in the US, the campaign against the war entrenched a new radicalism within Australian universities, marked by revolutionary rhetoric sharply at odds with the tone and posture of the peace movement of the 1950s. Dominated by communist fronts, that earlier movement had concentrated on attracting fellow travellers from the unions, the ALP and the churches. It was therefore shaped by a persistent quest for respectability that – although continually undermined by slavish adherence to the Soviet line – left a clear imprint on its leadership style. Consistent with that orientation, its rhetoric during the Vietnam era focused on securing the withdrawal of Australian troops and a negotiated settlement to the war.
By contrast, beginning with the Sydney University ALP Club in 1966, student activists cast the Vietcong as “model revolutionaries” and replaced the traditional peace movement’s imagery – designed to elicit sympathy through photographs of napalmed children and burning villages – with stylised portrayals of heroic guerillas. Rejecting calls for negotiation as “talk into thin air”, they embraced a Manichean worldview in which Australians confronted a stark choice between remaining “an outpost of imperialism” and supporting the forces of “progress” – that is, between their own soldiers and those they were fighting.

At this point, the reptiles introduced some hope, the chance of a distraction from the sight of Our Henry going all tricky Dick/Henry Kissinger, and bombing his way to world peace... Extinction Rebellion at Henley Beach, featuring people dressed as politicians burying their heads in the sand, representing their refusal to take meaningful action on climate change. Picture: Keryn Stevens

Climate change! 

There was reason to stick with the old fuddy duddy, the sort of man who no doubt thought that apartheid was well worth supporting (what with it currently being something the government of Israel has taken to with enthusiasm) ...

Nor were these radicals especially committed to nonviolence at home. On the contrary, Maoist factions treated violence as revolutionary, particularly when directed at the police, and even more so at rival radical groups – producing brawls that culminated in 1978, when Maoists hurled an alleged Trotskyite through a plate-glass window.
Yet these groups remained numerically insignificant. In the tussles for control of the 1970 Moratorium, they were readily outplayed by the traditional peace organisations’ battle-hardened Communist cadres, whose overriding objective was to garner support within the labour movement and across the electorate.
At a time when the ALP Right remained a formidable force – particularly in the pivotal states of NSW and Victoria – and when institutions, including the police, still commanded broad respect on the left, assembling wide-ranging support required that demonstrations remain orderly. The prominence of the “give peace a chance” motif reinforced the insistence on nonviolence. The result was that the extremists were marginalised and restrained – physically so in Brisbane – allowing the massive nationwide demonstrations of May 8, 1970 to proceed almost entirely peacefully. That was less true of the subsequent Vietnam protests and of the highly confrontational attempts to impede the Springboks’ tour in 1971. Yet despite those blemishes, the May 1970 marches conferred on mass demonstrations an enduring legitimacy they had never previously possessed.
A momentous consequence of that legitimacy – and of the subsequent rise to power of the baby boomers, whose worldview had been shaped by the Moratorium – was a far-reaching transformation of the legal framework. Until then, regulations governing street protests had been squarely directed at maintaining public order: statutory offences legislation and municipal by-laws treated permission to occupy public spaces for rallies and marches as a privilege, granted subject to clear duties and constraints.
The report of the South Australian Royal Commission chaired by Justice Charles Hart Bright, and the Public Assemblies Act 1972 (SA) that followed, marked the advent of a different era, in which the authorities had to stringently justify any restrictions. Entrenching that shift was the High Court’s controversial decision in Brown v Tasmania (2017), which – drawing a very long bow from the already contentious implied freedom of political communication – appeared to elevate even highly disruptive protest into a constitutional entitlement.
However, as the Age of Aquarius gave way to the Age of Rage, the conditions that had once kept mass demonstrations peaceful ebbed away. Respect for Australian institutions, including the police, curdled into hostility towards a “settler colonial” state; in an era of political...

Say what, not this again, and what's worse interrupting Our Henry in mid-rant?

It really is deeply weird .... as our Henry returned to his rant ...

...fragmentation and rival echo chambers, the search for a broad base yielded to the imperative of seizing attention; the collapse of the ALP Right and the capture of taxpayer-funded institutions by the far left relaxed the normative and organisational constraints on extremism; and as an apocalyptic mindset – typified by the green left – eclipsed the hopeful, often utopian, spirit of the Vietnam years, violence came to seem not merely permissible but necessary, given the perceived enormity and urgency of the stakes.
As a result, the unrestrained aggressiveness of social media spilled from the screen into the street, its rhetorical assaults readily hardening, once enacted in the public square, into the real thing.
Already evident in Extinction Rebellion’s massively disruptive protests, those currents have, in the recent demonstrations, metastasised. Supercharging their force – and the threat they pose – is the alliance between the far left and radical Muslims whose virulent antisemitism, contempt for liberal democracy and repudiation of Australian institutions imports a jihadist logic that prizes confrontation over coexistence.

The pond seized the chance gratefully, walking past the usual Muslim bashing for a chance to note some recent news on climate science ... including the diligent work by King Donald in bringing the world closer to disaster ...

How he loves himself some coal, and the pond thinks it's passing strange that the reptiles of Oz have been very restrained in their celebrations ... though WaPo took notice:

Trump orders Pentagon to buy coal power as the polluting fuel struggles to survive
President Donald Trump signed an order directing the Defense Department to favor electricity derived from coal, expanding his campaign to prop up the fossil fuel.
By Evan Halper

WaPo also chipped in with ...

Scientists thought they understood global warming. Then the past three years happened.

Some of it evaded the intermittent archive, but the point was plain enough ...

Ah, the land down under, and ready to chunder ...

And again ...

And so on, and while noting that the archived version has some handy links, the pond should at least also note the latest Graudian contribution ...

Point of no return: a hellish ‘hothouse Earth’ getting closer, scientists say
Continued global heating could set irreversible course by triggering climate tipping points, but most people unaware
Damian Carrington Environment editor

There was more bigly, goodly news, and some handy links if you reverted to the original:

The world is closer than thought to a “point of no return” after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said.
Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish “hothouse Earth” climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach. The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilisation developed.
At just 1.3C of global heating in recent years, extreme weather is already taking lives and destroying livelihoods across the globe. At 3-4C, “the economy and society will cease to function as we know it”, scientists said last week, but a hothouse Earth would be even more fiery.
The public and politicians were largely unaware of the risk of passing the point of no return, the researchers said. The group said they were issuing their warning because while rapid and immediate cuts to fossil fuel burning were challenging, reversing course was likely to be impossible once on the path to a hothouse Earth, even if emissions were eventually slashed.
It was difficult to predict when climate tipping points would be triggered, making precaution vital, said Dr Christopher Wolf, a scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates in the US. Wolf is a member of a study team that includes Prof Johan Rockström at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
“Crossing even some of the thresholds could commit the planet to a hothouse trajectory,” said Wolf. “Policymakers and the public remain largely unaware of the risks posed by what would effectively be a point-of-no-return transition.
“It’s likely that global temperatures are [already] as warm as, or warmer than, at any point in the last 125,000 years and that climate change is advancing faster than many scientists predicted.”
It is also likely that carbon dioxide levels are the highest they have been in at least 2m years.
Prof Tim Lenton, an expert on tipping points at the University of Exeter in the UK, said: “We know we are running profound risks on the current climate trajectory, which we can’t rule out could turn into a trajectory towards a much less habitable state of the climate for us. However, we don’t need to be heading towards a hothouse Earth for there to be profound risks to humanity and our societies – these will already be upon us if we continue to 3C global warming.”
The assessment, which was published in the journal One Earth, synthesised recent scientific findings on climate feedback loops and 16 tipping elements. The tipping elements include the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, mountain glaciers, polar sea ice, sub-Arctic forests and permafrost, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), a system of ocean currents that strongly influences the global climate.
Tipping may already be happening in Greenland and west Antarctica, with permafrost, mountain glaciers and the Amazon rainforest appearing to be on the verge, the scientists said

Our Henry ignored all of that, and blithely concluded, in his determinedly pompous, but also pig ignorant, way ...

Caught between that reality, a commitment to an ill-defined, entirely ahistorical “right to protest”, and the High Court’s ever-changing jurisprudence, governments have struggled to respond. Although circumstances are nowhere near as dire, historian Detlev Peukert’s judgment of the Weimar Republic’s failure to master street violence rings shockingly true: “The republic oscillated between impotence and over-reaction: either constitutional scruples paralysed it, or emergency powers hollowed out its legitimacy.”
That is precisely where we now stand – for here too, as with the shibboleths of multiculturalism and of Indigenous “self-determination”, we remain in thrall to the spent inheritance of a vanished age.
In the end, every liberal democracy, if it is to endure, must give its enemies enough rope to hang themselves – but not enough to hang others. Striking that balance demands a cold, hard view of the world as it is. We have adamantly refused to take it. Unless we open our eyes, it is only a matter of time before we are swinging in the wind.

Oh we've got more than enough rope to hang ourselves, and enough coal to make sure the planet turns into a hellish landscape ... all so we can replicate a bizarre kind of AI which allows the reptiles to do wretched collages ...

And so, with that cheery 1950 Addams thought in mind, it's off to Killer of the IPA's outing ...

The header: No one blames the migrants – it’s the pollies who fail us, A surge of temporary immigrants, many from low-income nations, has created a growing underclass in Australia, fuelling competition for jobs, housing and political tensions.

The caption for the cluster of flag waving ratbags, no doubt the sort favoured by Our Henry: Anti-immigration protesters gather outside State Parliament on September 13, 2025 in Melbourne. Australians rallied in multiple cities in a call for unity after right-wing protesters staged marches through Australian CBDs. Picture: Getty Images

Killer spent a bigly four minutes explaining that absurd bit of trolling...

No one blames the migrants

He did it by proceeding to explain the how and why and the wherefore of blaming the migrants ...

In the late 19th century, about 60,000 Pacific islanders, pejoratively called Kanakas, toiled away on cotton and sugar plantations in Queensland. At that time about 10 per cent of the state’s population – rich landowners – fought bitterly to keep them after Federation, when a racist White Australia policy promptly deported most of them.
History doesn’t repeat but often rhymes. About 10 per cent of Australia’s population is once again in an economically highly disadvantaged position after an unprecedented influx of 1.2 million immigrants since 2022 doubled the population on temporary visas to more than two million, up from one million in 2015.
Largely from low-income, non-English-speaking nations, they have come to constitute a “vast underclass”, write Bob Birrell, Katharine Betts and Ernest Healy, from The Australian Population Research Institute, in a new research paper that lays bare the nation’s risky, high-speed socio-economic transformation.
“Their stay in Australia is precarious, with little access to Australia’s welfare benefits and they are vulnerable to exploitation by employers,” the researchers write, noting the vast bulk of them work in low-skilled jobs despite their university and vocational qualifications.
Migrants who didn’t speak English well faced a 28 per cent income penalty and were less than half as likely to report an income “over $20,000”, according to a 2024 research paper published by economists at ANU.
Remarkably, about 60 per cent of the 180,000 permanent residencies awarded last year were to temporary visa holders already in Australia, ensuring a vast and growing pool of hundreds of thousands of mainly student new arrivals who will be compelled to jump from visa to visa as they seek to stay permanently.
The number of bridging visas (which include full work rights), allocated to those waiting for other categories of visas or appealing the rejection of visas has jumped to 400,000 this year from a little over 200,000 in 2019.
Just like the Queensland farmers in the 1900s, high-income Australians benefit from this underclass, enjoying much cheaper transport, cleaners and immigrant-staffed restaurants, for instance, without enduring the social disruption caused by an influx of migrants to outer suburbs, than they otherwise would.

Not this again ...

It didn't halt Killer, always ready to celebrate some dinkum bashing of pesky, uppity furriners ...

It’s been a gold rush for the higher education sector too, selling the increasingly elusive prospect of permanent residency.
For most new and native-born Australian citizens, especially the young, the economic impact of migrants, however, is becoming severe, supercharging rents amid ferocious competition for low-skilled work.
“For others, they are adding to urban congestion and competition for urban services and, for some, a disturbing transformation of the ethnic makeup of the city,” Birrell and his colleagues write.
After three years of steady decline in real incomes, the electorate has woken up to the impact.
Support for One Nation, a party known for its consistent stand arguing for lower immigration, has soared to almost 30 per cent of the primary vote in the latest YouGov Poll, foreshadowing the greatest political realignment since the Labor Party split 70 years ago.
The deafness of the Labor and Liberal parties to the rising anger throughout last year has been extraordinary. According to TAPRI’s survey of more than 3000 people in late 2024, 80 per cent of Australians want lower immigration, and more than half want it to be drastically lower.
Yet not a single, concrete change to immigration settings of any note has been proposed by either party. Despite a brief and modest reduction in 2024 in visas for international students, who already make up about half the total university population, the federal government in August 2025 increased the allocation for 2026 by 25,000 to 295,000 to “provide stability and certainty for the international education sector”.
No doubt the higher education sector is enjoying a gold rush, but many younger Australians are not enjoying the same stability and certainty.
The ABS on Thursday said net permanent and long-term arrivals had increased to 480,520 in 2025 – the highest such calendar year figure on record. A different measure from the most widely quoted “net overseas migration”, to be sure, but it hardly points to a radical reduction in immigration in keeping with community concern.
Yes, the level of net immigration has been falling to a “mere” 305,000 over the 12 months to September last year. But is a level more than three times that permitted during the early 1990s enough to mollify the public?
The left of politics has always been much better at sloganeering than its opponents. But its opponents have finally scored a win with “mass migration”: the phrase has become entrenched, it resonates and, while subtly pejorative, is more or less accurate to any fair-minded observer.

Killer finally got around to explaining that trolling headline, with a sublime amendment...

No one rationally blames immigrants for this situation...

Ah you see, Killer, in his alarmist bigotry, and cultivated hysteria about stranger danger, and wild-eyed agitation about furriners  is just being rational ...

It's rational to be alarmed about being hysterical by an invading horde swamping the ethos of the IPA ...
No one rationally blames immigrants for this situation – they understandably would prefer to stay in this beautiful country for good. If Switzerland had immigration rules like ours, it would be swamped within months, potentially undermining its very high standard of living and social cohesion.
Especially for an island such as Australia, immigration is a choice, as the pandemic illustrated starkly.
In a shameful episode in our history, the Kanakas were forced to come here but many ultimately didn’t want to go home. The racism that drove their expulsion has mercifully dissipated in what self-evidently has become a very welcoming nation.
But if the concerns of ordinary Australians continue to be so flagrantly ignored, we risk an ugly political response.
Only half of the migrants who arrived in Australia between 1951 and 2021 obtained citizenship, Birrell points out, and “for arrivals since then the share obtaining citizenship has contracted sharply”.
Whoever wins the Liberal leadership on Friday should resist the mistaken elite opinion that significant reductions in immigration won’t appeal to voters.
The multimillion-strong temporary immigrant wave has transformed Australian society – but none of them can vote.

The pond checked a couple of times to make sure and so it was - there was no mention of Killer's job at the IPA, no hint that he worked for a braying, barking mad lobbying group that did its best to argue cigarettes were good, coal was great and climate science a mass delusion.

In short, just another day in the hive mind's deadly obfuscation of their grinding away at rationalism... to be replaced by paranoia and a wilful confusing of real extinction events with the triumph of a humble lettuce.

Meanwhile, the band plays on ...

What was that Truffaut film? Tirez sur le pianiste ...

Nah, cancel that thought, it's going to be a great gig, an entirely different level of piano playing...